What's your grand unifying theory of fairies?
my grand unifying theory of fairies is a theory about all of the things humans have typically historically found extremely compelling and infuriatingly impossible to grasp, basically. death is my best example. humans are very good thinkers and we have the ability to understand a lot of things, but as animals we have pretty limited perceptions of the world. the world exists in such a way that our ability to fully perceive it will never like... match up to Reality. does this make sense. we only have a limited number of senses and our cognition is limited as well. there is a ceiling of understanding for us an organisms. but we are thinkers and our survival has typically depended on analyzing and trying to understand the phenomena around us! so the things we cannot fully comprehend become these little planets that we orbit around psychologically.
when I say something is a fairy, what I mean is that fairy is a explanation for the psychological significance of something we as human beings can't really fathom. I made a list (non-exhaustive of course) of them last night but here are some if you missed it: death, grief, childhood/adolescence, the Self, romance/attraction of any sort, sex, reproduction, violence, natural disasters, illness/disease, trauma, alien encounters, missing persons cases, etc etc. Conrad wisely observed that the concept of "fairies" as I define them here is ITSELF a fairy. Which is both true and very satisfying to think about imo.
some of these things are like, arguably explicable (we can for example intellectually understand why a given illness happens,) but between that theoretical intellectual knowledge and the impact that it has on us to experience it, there is a gap. and that gap is a fairy!
humans typically come up with psychological scaffolding to explain fairies away such that we can comfortably pack them into a box in our heads and not be utterly existentially overwhelmed by them all of the time. this is why e.g. religion/spirituality is evolutionarily adaptive, I think.
I think that BECAUSE we cannot fully comprehend or explain these things, the only way we can communicate about them is to just say what encountering them feels like. and that! gap! is the fairy. the gap between the reality that we cannot comprehend, and the description of the experience of encountering it.
my theory is that a lot of the realities of existing as an alive organism are so inherently traumatic that comprehension, or even acceptance of our lack of comprehension, would be detrimental to our ability to stay alive in a day to day moment to moment way. one of the reasons I think this is because the people who think about this sort of thing a lot (me) tend to be VERY BAD at participating in expected human social structures, lmao. I think probably we all exist on a spectrum of Obsessed With Fairies and I am definitely on the very far end of it. some people are just obsessed with finding ways to describe the experience of grappling with the unknowable, or obsessed with finding models to communicate phenomena we do not have an immediate understanding of. that's why you get Thinkers, I think. philosophers and stuff.
the society I live in (and probably most of not all of you as well) is one that is particularly intent to deny the existence of or flatten/simplify fairies. I think this is bad for us because I think we need social support structures for grappling with these things because they're scary. things we cannot fully understand are scary. we need to admit that the fairies are real and be able to talk about them like they're important and not be treated like we are crazy and isolated socially for it.
there is probably some phrase for this in specific academic philosophy fields but I don't have access to that stuff so I made my own out of dirt and sticks.
ok I have to go to the doctor now
