Necessary Alienation and Anxiety

Some days I feel so out of place, so different and separate from the world. It is a paradox, of course: the essential and irreducible dissonance of life is precisely that unwitting method by and through which the world as a whole most optimally self-propagates and obtains patterned, sustainable continuity or environmental tenure; to maintain persistence, resilience and adaptive flexibility this world seeds upon itself discontinuity, non-linearity and randomness – in us, as us, through us. We are that discontinuous presence in reality, amplified.

This discontinuous presence also falls upon us (all) as a burden of alienation and even while we might only ever understand it as negative or destructive, the underlying truth is that this dissonant experience of human being is actually a direct indication of the underlying logic the world requires to evolve and engage with its own essential and endless metamorphosis. We are the necessary copying errors of this distributed self-encoding mechanism and even our emotional discomfort must ultimately represent a window upon wisdom, peace, or ontological certainty in and as the indefinitely-extensible logic of a reality that only ever manifests in any one of us as an enigmatic experience of broken or breaking self-identity.

An existential problem for us here is that the self by and through which we reflexively define this world is not in any fundamental sense separate from it. The discontinuity of the world is the discontinuity of ourselves. Where that world grows and hyper-inflates through technological and socioeconomic complexity, it suffocates us in a freedom of choice and combinatorial complexity we are not naturally or cognitively well-equipped to negotiate. This generates psychological (as much as cultural or political) pathologies of insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. The discontinuity by and through which the world evolves is simultaneously a profound hole in each and all of our souls.