Achenia
n.
the maddening sense that the world is too complex to even begin to understand, that whenever you try to answer even the most trivial question, it quickly tangles into a thicket of complications and melts into a quicksand of nuance, leaving you flailing for something solid to hold on to, struggling to come up with anything you could say that is definitively 100 percent true.
From achene, the fruit that contains the seed of a flowering plant, which is often confused for the seed itself. Whenever you think you’ve arrived at the heart of something, it only ends up hidden away inside some other more complicated structure. Pronounced “uh-kee-nee-uh.”
