what exactly am i supposed to do with a body?

I find having a body mildly embarrassing. Not mine specifically, bodies generally. They require an unreasonable amount of maintenance for something I don’t remember agreeing to inhabit. Every few hours, mine interrupts whatever I am doing to announce that it would like food. Every night, without fail, it demands that I become unconscious for several hours or it will start sabotaging me. It gets cold, tired, uncomfortable, dehydrated. It can develop a headache because I forgot to drink water, which feels less like biology and more like living with an incredibly passive-aggressive roommate.

Most of the time I don’t think about any of this. I treat my body like infrastructure. My hands type what I think. My legs move me between rooms. My eyes are cameras. My ears are microphones. Food is fuel. Sleep is maintenance. The brain gets to be me; the rest is transportation. Obviously, this is a terrible biological model. It is also, embarrassingly, how I think.

Then every once in a while, I become suddenly aware of having a body in a way that makes the whole arrangement unbearable. I’ll be typing and look down at my hands and realize there are ten jointed things attached to me that I am controlling without consciously issuing instructions. I’ll notice my heartbeat and remember that there is a muscle inside my chest that has been contracting thousands of times a day since before I even knew what a heart was. I don’t tell it to do this. I couldn’t do its job for it if I tried. It just keeps going in the background while I answer messages, lose hair ties, read about consciousness, and wonder whether intelligence can be reduced to computation. It feels rude for something so existential to happen so quietly.

The brain makes all of this stranger. You can spend your entire life thinking about enormous abstract things like justice, love, mathematics, memory, God, consciousness, and all of it is happening inside a few pounds of very complicated biological tissue. Every person you have ever loved is, from one angle, also a pattern of activity inside your nervous system. Every embarrassing thought too. Intellectually, I understand this. Neurons fire, chemicals move, networks interact, somehow a person appears. But there is something intimate and almost offensive about realizing the machinery is not merely supporting the person. The machinery is involved in producing the person.

Change the machinery and you can change memory, attention, language, personality, perception. Suddenly the border between the body and the self starts to look less like a wall and more like something biology negotiated. And that creates an annoying question: where exactly am I? You can point to my body easily enough, but if I say no, I mean me, everyone gets philosophical.

Maybe that is why humans have spent so much time inventing ways to separate themselves from their bodies. Souls, spirits, minds, ghosts in machines. The alternative is deeply weird. The alternative is that the thing asking what it means to exist is itself a biological event. I do not experience myself as a biological event. I experience myself as a little observer somewhere behind my eyes, watching reality arrive. Except there probably isn’t a little observer in there. There is no tiny version of me sitting inside my skull watching a screen labelled WORLD. The seeing is happening. The thinking is happening. The feeling is happening. And somehow all of this comes with the incredibly persistent impression that there is a separate person to whom everything is happening.

Photographs make this worse. Someone shows you a picture and says, that’s you. And you have to accept that apparently this is what you look like from the outside, even though you have never actually seen your own face directly. Mirrors reverse it. Cameras translate it. Everyone else knows your face in a way you never can, while you know things about yourself that nobody else can access. You know what an idea feels like just before it becomes words. You know the exact texture of embarrassment before you have decided why you are embarrassed. You know what red looks like to you, which becomes a very irritating sentence if you think about it for too long.

So there seem to be two versions of us walking around: the body everyone else encounters and the experience nobody else can enter. We spend our entire lives treating these as obviously the same thing. Maybe they are. Maybe that is the joke. The mistake might be asking what I am supposed to do with a body, as though I have been assigned one, as though there is a clean little “me” somewhere behind all of this operating the controls. The body is not packaging around my life. It is participating in the life. My thinking changes when I haven’t slept. Smells summon memories. Fear can arrive in a racing heart before I have constructed a thought about what I’m afraid of. Music can give me chills before I have any intelligent explanation for why I like it. The body keeps leaking into all the supposedly higher parts of being a person.

Maybe that isn’t an inconvenience. Maybe that is the entire arrangement.

I still find it strange. I probably always will. Tomorrow morning I’ll wake up, feed this thing, move it around, eventually let it sleep, and spend most of the day forgetting about it again. Which is probably necessary, because if I remained fully conscious all the time of the fact that I am a self-aware biological organism piloting absolutely nothing from inside absolutely nowhere, I would never get any work done.