No Monopoly On Truth (#37)
What I learned in the Ivy League about writing and being human
At the time of writing this article, my eyes have been glazed over for 90 minutes, and my mind has wandered everywhere except to the point my professor is trying to make.
I’m taking an online class at an Ivy League university. It’s part of a graduate program I decided to undertake to prove something to myself. And, I think I’ve found something different than I sought: Truth doesn’t belong to anyone.
But it belongs to all of us.
Let me explain.
A Tale of Two Brothers
When we graduated high school, my best friend and I parted ways. He went to Harvard to study economics, and I went to a small Christian school in Texas to run track and study the Bible. He found a home in prestigious Cambridge, and I chased around tumbleweeds in the Wild West.
Secretly, I resented the split in our paths — not because I didn’t want my friend to succeed at an acclaimed university, but because I doubted my ability to succeed in the same way. I wondered if I could do it, too. And I was terrified that I couldn’t.
As time went on, it became obvious that my friend made the right decision for himself. He won a plethora of academic awards and became deeply involved in the Harvard community, which connected him to unique (and lucrative) professional opportunities post-graduation. I was happy for him.
However, clarity never came that I had made the right decision for myself. In fact, things got hard. My life during and after college was difficult, fraught with relational and financial struggles. I reconsidered my path many times and felt deeply insecure that I had made a wrong choice somewhere along the line.
So, in the fall of 2024, I decided to do it. I applied to and enrolled in a graduate program at an Ivy League. I wanted to know whether I could do what my friend had done, but more importantly, whether I had chosen the right path.
Almost two years have passed. In that time, I’ve written research papers, taken midterms, and collaborated with peers on all kinds of projects. And I’ve succeeded. To date, I’ve maintained a high GPA and earned the respect of my teachers.
But the experience hasn’t been what I thought it would be.
Waking Up
To be clear, my colleagues and professors are wonderful people. Indeed, many of them are experts in their fields and have stories that deserve to be told. I deeply respect them.
Even still, when I entered class for the first time two years ago, I reckoned I would receive some kind of theophany. I fully expected the clouds to split, light to shine down from the heavens, and the voice of God to announce the secrets of existence to us, such divine inspiration being reserved only for those seated in the East coast’s greatest institutions.
Instead, I saw the disembodied faces of a dozen people pop up on Zoom, and a man who looked like my neighbor announced the syllabus.
Yes – we had excellent conversations in that class, but it wasn’t because of the institution, per se. It was because of the people who had joined it, willing to discuss openly and critically.
I’ve relived this experience over several semesters now:
Expecting divine knowledge
Receiving human information
Sharing human conversations
It’s like I’ve been caught in some kind of karmic cycle. Every few months I’m reborn into the idea that “something else” lies just beyond me.
As it turns out, the “something else” has never been beyond me at all.
Reevaluating
My relative success in the Ivy League has been the proof I initially sought: I am, in fact, able to walk that path.
However, the humanity of the Ivy League has been the proof that I really needed: My decision to walk a different path out of high school was not wasted.
Humanity is the answer.
There is no secret arbiter of truth in this world. Information is a collective resource that we excavate together. In every field – technology, science, philosophy, the arts – we participate in an ongoing conversation that has echoed through generations of humans who asked questions like us.
No doubt, there are minds who are uniquely gifted. But even the Einsteins of the world exist within a community, and it’s that community which gives our Einsteins a society to change.
In other words, whether we live in Cambridge, Texas, or anywhere else, we’re all people.
Humanity and Writing
I know. At this point, you must be gawking at the lack of my prophetic insight.
“Wow, Gabe. This is really not deep stuff. People are just people. So what?”
This realization is transforming my personal epistemology.
In an academic context, I once expected truth only to come from some impossibly educated, credentialed demi-god who lives in the library’s special collection. What I found were normal people who were passionate about a subject and tried to teach it. They didn’t know everything, and they didn’t always explain it well. But they cared, and that was enough.
In a professional context, I once expected truth only to come from a product manager who knew all the technical specs of her project, the value it offered in the market, and its future vision. What I found were regular humans being pulled in different directions, learning on-the-job, and failing quite often.
In fact, the volume of mistakes actually terrified me at first, until it freed me. I was allowed to be human, to try, and to fail like everyone else. And most importantly, I was allowed to care.
Epistemologically, this tells me that truth has more to do with pursuit than perfection. As technical writers, we are juggling docs for products that are continually evolving. For most of us, there is no way to stay on top of everything.
We aren’t “perfect” writers, locked away in solitary chambers void of distraction or confusion. We’re on the ground in organizations that don’t have their shit together, and as a result, we probably don’t either!
In these situations, our humanness is actually our greatest asset. Our ability to care about the process allows us to convey truth to those who want it.
When we care to ask questions, explore the feature, and consider its ramifications, we do the same work as Harvard scholars. We exercise our humanness to piece together the truth, which is still being revealed to us.
Truth is not a perfect pursuit. It is messy, variable, and fluctuating. But it can be a pursuit of love.
Bringing It Together
Class has ended since I started writing this piece. My professor never really did win my attention tonight, and that’s okay. He’s a person, after all.
Now, at the risk of losing your attention, I’ll pull things together.
No one has a monopoly on truth. It doesn’t belong to professors, nor to product managers, nor to engineers. It’s something that emerges when all of us come together and figure it out. This is partly why the truth is beautiful — because it involves all of us.
So, the next time you write a doc, I hope you can strip yourself of the illusion that the answer to your question is somewhere else. Between you and the people around you, I believe you can find it.