But this kind of truth is only helpful if you also know the distinction between a good and a rotten board. You’d have to know that, characteristically, rotten wood isn’t all the same, as its discoloration can vary widely. It can appear cracked, warped, shrunk, or peeling. It can give off a musty, earthy, mushroom-like odor and, when tapped, sound dull or hollow rather than dense or solid. And it may or may not have visible mold or fungal growth.

Finding a good board to work with can be a challenge if you don’t know what to look for.

And even as simple as that sounds, even a keen eye can sometimes be deceived. We may sometimes mistake a board’s unique qualities of age, stress, or wear for something rotten, when really they’re just blemishes reflecting the board’s circumstances.

People are, by nature, more complex than wooden boards, and telling the difference between good and bad (rotten) character isn’t always easy. I don’t profess to be any kind of expert either. I have been deceived and misled many times. And that’s not simply the fault of the other person. It is also mine, and my own ignorance or naivety or carelessness that allowed me to be taken in by appearances easily in a world of people who often are never on the outside who they appear on the inside.

Culture, too, plays a role here—especially popular culture—which, whether deliberately or accidentally, serves as a tool of acculturation: a means of setting norms and expectations for people, regardless of how accurate or true-to-life those norms and expectations really are. And mass media, along with social interaction, are critical to that acculturation.

Popular culture through media, especially through visual and social media, circulates not what someone needs, but what captures attention. It offers spectacle. And when people consume the shallowness of spectacle, we sometimes also trade our own natural curiosity and need for critical reasoning because the image of a norm or standard they are offered is easier to consume than having to investigate for ourselves. And when we surrender our faculties, no matter how developed they may be, we trade our own natural needs and desires for the projection. In so doing, the projection, then, becomes a mirror.

There are consequences for this. Ideals acquired from an environment like ours that optimizes for attention, comfort, and immediate pleasure—capture. There’s no care there for the well-being of the person consuming it, mimicking it, or living it. And in our consumption of these norms and standards, however nice and attractive they may appear, we also consume the rot within them, smuggled in right before our very eyes. Yet, generation after generation, people keep looking past the catastrophes of these manufactured projections and revere them as the greatest examples of good living — enviable and thus worthy of imitation.

Having wants and desires isn’t the problem. That is part of the human condition. The problem is the source of the desire. There are some desires that are manufactured for us, not to help us by helping us with our basic needs or live better lives, but to convince us that an unrealistic external ideal is implicitly better than whatever our own experiences have shown us or proven.

Conversely, those desires grown from experience with and in the world rather than through media are better suited to guiding us to a better life and contentment since they’ve been tested by encounters and revised by missteps and failure. Those experiences are the best teachers because they show us how no amount of varnish can fix or fully hide the rot inside. At some point, the truth comes out.

We see this when we misplace our faith and trust in appearances rather than character, and later invariably experience: Disappointment. Anger. Insecurity. Cognitive dissonance. Exhaustion. Worry. Fear. The hollowness of someone who should be there but isn’t. Masks, however clever, can never fully hide the rot that lies beneath. And the contractions are more than just inconveniences; they’re toxic realities — hard and painful — that no mask, however joyful and pleasurable, can compensate.

The rot beneath the beauty doesn’t care about you, your desires, or your well-being, no matter the layers of varnish.

#Excultio

By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

#Philology

Philology concerns the reading, transmission, interpretation, and afterlife of texts. It gathers notes on words, names, translations, fragments, documents, variant readings, inherited traditions, and the unstable histories through which meaning survives or changes, including mythic or cryptic texts.

#Anomalology

Anomalology is the careful study of anomalous experience: experiences that resist easy explanation, and the evidence, language, memory, cultural context, and competing interpretations through which they are understood.

#Intermundia

Intermundia is testimony from a life between worlds: reflections on liminality as it is lived rather than solved. It gathers accounts of estrangement, grief, memory, wonder, spiritual dislocation, ordinary endurance, and the persistent work of making meaning in an unresolved place.

#Excultio

Excultio is commentary on the world and its affairs: reflections on things in and of the world — culture, currents, customs, institutions, the day's matters — examined in my own way. It is critique and observation of the ordinary order of things: its spectacles and scripts, its appetites and ideals, its manners and markets, its functions and failures, and whatever else under the sun invites weighing.