A Runt’s Rant: Neither Here, Nor There (On Subjectivity)

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Have you ever woken up with the weird sensation that nothing around you made sense?

I have; and there’s nothing deep or profanely philosophical about it.

At times, everything seems to be neither here, nor there.

For instance, I was chatting to a friend the other day and was told that the articles that I wrote for my blog were ‘prescriptive’. Such a comment did not, naturally, mean anything to me mainly because the other option was for them to be ‘descriptive’.

Until yesterday I had never, in fact, considered that a blog or an opinionated article could be anything BUT prescriptive; after all, I WAS sharing my opinion with the readers, was I not?

It would, however, seem that some people had expected a mere account of what I had experienced or learned recently rather than any articles expressing a standpoint.

This could, of course, be due to the fact that the said people might be of the opinion that I am trying to tell people what to do and how to live their lives.

Well…I am; sue me.

What those people fail to appreciate, however, is the fact that I am providing free and somewhat humourous advice, HOPING that the readers will see through my logic and beliefs and adopt them as their own.

I have not (at least not yet) threatened or coerced anyone into adopting my views.

Also, and this might come as a shock to you, EVERYTHING nowadays is prescriptive; Hell, even descriptions are!

Do you want to know why? Because someone is describing something which he sees through his own eyes and perceives through his own senses.

Although I am not a big fan of philosophy, I should like to note that objectivity is most definitely something that I do not believe, if you will, in.

The mainstream reason for that is that people often have a different understanding of the same concept.

Here are several examples:

Freedom, Choice, Democracy, Socialism, COOKIES

Prior to my coming to England, that’s what cookies were to me:

I was, however, shocked to find that cookies in England looked more like:

 Yet, I accepted both sides’ premises and came to peace with the idea that there were Bulgarian cookies and English cookies.

Thus, a cookie could be one thing in Bulgaria and another thing in England and that was perfectly acceptable as, through time and use, the cookie- monsters of those two countries had prescriptively described them in different ways, attributing different characteristics to each.

So, unless you want to be neither here, nor there, you’d better accept that the world is a rather subjective place.

Consequently, a good many people around tend to be quite ‘prescriptive’ in their everyday activities.

Especially me.