# Concrete Abstractions

**Published by:** [jer979](https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/)
**Published on:** 2025-06-04
**URL:** https://paragraph.com/@jer979-2/concrete-abstractions

## Content

The “Government” feels real, doesn’t it? Marriage. The company. The university. All of these things feel as real as the screen in front of you or the phone in your hand or the keyboard at which you sit. But they’re not. They are collections of people and processes. That’s pretty much it. Yet, when people say, “oh, the Government should regulate it” or “the company needs to do better,” there’s a feeling of concrete-ness (if that’s a world) that is akin to saying “Joe will do it” or “it’s on the table.” Diving deep, recently, into the world of quantum mechanics through self-study and books like the Rigor of Angels and the Dancing Wu Li Masters, I’ve started to appreciate that the world isn’t really as it seems. It feels like, some days, the only certainty is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. And while that refers to specifically about knowing the location or velocity of a sub-atomic particle, it feels like it can be applied more broadly, to ourselves and the abstractions we think of as concrete. We either know where they are or we know where they are headed, but we can’t really know both with 100% certainty. The same can be said of our own lives. The challenge, which is both exciting and terrifying at the same time (a sort of superposition, if you will) is to learn and love that feeling within our hearts, minds, stomachs, and souls that things that seem real may not be and those that are not real may be. Of course, we each have to figure out what is real. And that’s really difficult. Which may be the only real thing we have.

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