How Oedipus Rex reveals the invisible stories that become reality
The Life Available to Everyone Else
There seems to be a singular idea that I have carried for most of my life.
It has driven so much of how I have shown up in relationships, whether romantic or strictly platonic, and what I have pursued in business or academics, I can even see it present below the horizon of my consciousness as I walk in the world.
I have always believed that true love, that deeply soul-pulsating love, was possible, or that success, whether expressed in financial terms or some other measurement, was completely within reach, and that whatever dream that lives within anyone, that longs to be lived, can be and should be lived.
I always believed that all of this, and the infinite totality of life in all its expressions, was possible, for other people and not me.
How many of my friends have found true and lasting relationships, or have published acclaimed books and earned coveted tenure positions, or built wildly successful businesses with just a dream and some grit?
I have so many examples in my life of this, not some influencer dream of a rented supercar and a model that washes away like a sandcastle at high tide, here and then gone, but I mean the type of hard evidence that I can touch and feel.
And yet the only person who seemed excluded from all this evidence was me.
I do not walk around the world with the conscious thought held in my head that “I am not good enough,” because then I could just change the thought and change my life.
How much of life is truly that easy?
The persistence of the illusion that “I am not good enough” lives below the horizon of my life.
It is in the way the very world appears to me, the way reality becomes organized around me.
What that creates is that every time I’ll see some success, there’ll be a sense that it’s not enough or it’ll be discounted, while every failure becomes a confirmation and proof of the invisible conclusion that other people can have the life they want, while I can’t.
Because this assumption organizes the way the world appeared, and therefore I couldn’t see it, I’ve spent years trying to solve the wrong problem.
For a number of years when I was younger, it looked like I needed more confidence, so I’d hit the gym and try to place myself in situations where I could feel exposed.
I had a card that I read for years every morning that said “Today, I will never squander an opportunity to look like an idiot,” as some form of behaviorist conditioning, where repeated exposures would create a sense of feeling calm in those situations and conditions.
I was also driven by this idea that accomplishment and achievement could create the feeling of self I felt like I was missing, but what ended up happening was that no amount of achievement could touch the thing that was structuring the way reality was appearing to me, and the assumption simply remained.
This assumption was a way of seeing the world, like looking through a pair of glasses that was shaping reality before I knew I was wearing them.
The Lens Disappears
One of the fascinating things about our visual perception is that we perceive the world as if we were looking through a camera recording reality, when in fact the brain is actually filling in gaps and making predictions about what it expects to find.
Our experience of the world is that we meet raw and bare reality first, and then cast our assumptions over it, when the evidence actually suggests that interpretation is involved from the very beginning, at the level of sight.
This is why it is so difficult to see our interpretations or assumptions as active forces because we simply experience them as how the world is.
If I believe, which I did for a long time, that people are judging me then I don’t simply walk around constantly thinking that as an active thought, I just walk into a room and feel judged.
The assumption disappears and only the evidence remains.
How much of life can just appear as facts rather than appearing as an interpretation of events?
That’s why those assumptions can be carried for decades, influencing every relationship and circumstance, and even limiting the very possibility of seeing anything new, distinct, or different from what has always been known.
There’s a flawed model that we often use to navigate the world that an event happens in the world, and then we think about it and decide what it means.
However, lived experience is closer to meaning as already decided, and then the event is structured through it, and then after that, we call this appearance reality.
This is why two people can experience the same event and inhabit entirely different worlds.
You and a friend can go to the same new Marvel movie, and one finds it this immersive, fascinating, joyous experience, and the other finds it a snooze fest, and the only difference is the assumptions you and your friend brought into the movie theater with you.
The insidious nature of the assumption is that it rarely jumps out and hails you like a police officer would: “Hey, you, stop there!”
It is something that is just ever-present because when an idea becomes repeated enough, it rarely sounds like an idea and just becomes the atmosphere through which life is experienced.
The lens of the glasses we’ve been wearing disappears, and only reality remains.
Long before modern neuroscience and our self-help publishing boom, the Greeks were already exploring this same problem of blindness and our inability to recognize the assumptions through which we are perceiving the world.
Why This Keeps Happening to You
The same patterns repeat when we cannot see the assumptions organizing them. Why This Keeps Happening to You is a short course on perception, meaning-making, and the hidden structures that shape reality.
What Oedipus Couldn’t See
This is precisely the problem Sophocles explores in perhaps the greatest Greek tragedy, Oedipus Rex.
The play is often read by critics as a tragedy about fatalism or destiny and the unavoidable consequences of prophecy, and it certainly is all those things, and also the desperate search for a truth that one is beyond blind to.
Oedipus must discover the truth because his city of Thebes is suffering under a plague which exists because the murderer of the former king, Laius, has never been punished.
He pursues the truth with a mythical and relentless determination that most of us could only dream of having, and with the blind seer Tiresias, a dichotomy is created where the blind can see and the sighted cannot.
Over the course of the play, witnesses are questioned, and fragments of evidence begin to emerge, and slowly piece by piece, the truth reveals itself, but what is tragic about the play is that as Oedipus pursues the clues, every clue points back to Oedipus himself.
The answer is present for the audience and the characters around him, and yet he remains incapable of seeing what is directly before him.
Everything is being interpreted through the underlying assumption that it couldn’t be him, so even the possibilities inherent in reality become limited.
Eventually, we see that the truth is allowed to exist everywhere, in the audience, in the characters, except in the place where it must reside, himself.
What then are the assumptions that are governing our own lives, which we like Oedipus are blind to?
How often do we search for evidence for conclusions about ourselves or the world while still remaining blinded to the thing organizing that very search?
How often do we ask why our relationships keep failing while never examining what is underneath?
Certainly, we then are Oedipus in our search for the answers everywhere except in the place where we might actually find them, ourselves.
Oedipus, thus, becomes the archetype for the man who believes he can see when he simply cannot, or the man who believes he is free and yet everything is already determined and written.
His absolute certainty that he is seeing clearly becomes the most insidious form of blindness; he becomes closed off to anything apart from his own certainty of sight.
Once we ourselves become convinced that reality is simply the way things are, the very assumptions which have constructed reality become impossible to see.
The Blindness We Call Reality
As with anything from the Ancients, it is tempting to leave it with them, to imagine that Oedipus and his blindness belong to another age and another world.
He is alive in all of us.
He is in the jealous partner who sees every text message or comment or look as a threat to their self, or the socially anxious person who sees every social interaction as dangerous, or the person who feels voiceless and collects evidence as they move through the world that reinforces it.
The structure of the assumption determining reality remains the same, even if the assumptions themselves differ.
If I assume that other people can have the life that they want while I somehow cannot, then I will see that everywhere I look, just as if I assume rejection or criticism, I will find it.
Like Oedipus, we are blind to it, to such an extent that reality actively constructs itself around it and attention begins to seek evidence to support that structure, and eventually the assumption simply becomes reality.
What began as a way of seeing becomes the nature of reality itself.
What assumption about yourself has become so familiar that it now feels like reality?
Oedipus searched everywhere for the answer except the one place it could be found, and most of us do the same. We change circumstances, relationships, careers, habits, and goals while remaining blind to the assumptions through which we experience them. Why This Keeps Happening to You is a short course on perception, meaning-making, and the hidden structures that quietly organize reality.
Dr. Samuel Gilpin is a poet and essayist working at the point where language meets experience, where words are not used to explain life, but to enter it more honestly. At samuelgilpin.com, he writes for those who feel the quiet pressure to fix themselves, offering a different approach: not optimization, but a return to what has been covered over or pushed aside. He holds a PhD in English Literature, but his work moves away from analysis toward something more direct, reading and writing as a way of loosening what has become too tight. When he’s not writing, he’s returning to Four Quartets, rewatching The Wire, or lifting weights.