Wonderful essay Desiree... as an engineer and scientist I struggle with how we know things, quantify them and make decisions. On a smal-scale and local level that ability to quantify and decide/act works incredibly well (bridges, planes, medical devices, covid-beating vaccines, etc). On a large-scale and global level, that has gotten us into the sh!t we're in now. When we measure small-scale things like life-span, quality of life, percent of violent deaths, etc... we see that our lives are quantitatively and significantly better now than 100, 200, 1000 years ago (not necessarily than 10 or 20 years ago - it's an up-n-down path upwards). When we measure global temperature or amount of pollutants and plastics in our environment, we see a sometimes very different story. So the reality of our situation depends on how we measure and the scale of our measure, which depends on the questions we ask... and depends on the questionable assumption that a rational dissection of our local or global world will yield us actionable information. Practically, we have to believe that. But even the ancients understood that there is a world of difference between intelligence and wisdom. Thanks for helping to dissect that difference. SD