Context: Your social life, or lack thereof, can affect your health
There may be something tragically inevitable in the procedural hollowing-out of social lives in an era of accelerating and technologically-mediated hyper-connectivity. The mischievous psychological trick that individuation and subjectivity classically play has always been to posit (and project, hologram-like) a substantive and separate internal content and isolated persona, independent of the world. It is of course a fantasy, a fiction to assert such an island identity when almost every thought or concept (beyond pure animal reflex or blind physiological impulse) is always already begged, borrowed or stolen from an external world and every meaning or notion of context and significance is only ever intelligible (and plausible) as a node in an extended and circularly self-referential archipelago of so very many Others. The focal point of “I” finds itself unable to navigate a dissonance incurred by a profound experience and awareness of discontinuity between that Self it must be (or become) to continue to exist and that vast and yawning abyss of emptiness that this corncucopia of information and commodity promises to resolve but only ever amplifies in its excess, its overwhelming superficiality and pointlessness.
Daedelus Kite 