Life: Outside the Comfort Zone

I believe it was Paul Verlaine who once opined that “l’application c’est le plupart de l’intelligence” but without struggle, without the broken, breaking symmetries and dissociative, alienating furnace of experience and entropy, nothing is learned, nothing is gained and intelligence (as much as life) uselessly dissipates into all oblivion and forgetting. What, then, to say of an entire (emerging) technological, planetary civilisation in and for which the perennial discomfort of relentlessly accelerating metamorphosis and competition as conflict is the only certainty any of us might ever embrace? We can, in short, not be clever without a challenge and it is in any case this challenge as existential threat and (unacknowledged) mortal fear upon and around which we build our selves, our Others and this technical adversarialism that compels us all forwards. It is the challenge that provides the direction, arc and trajectory of a purpose that once no longer threatened with failure, ceases to exist. This is our shared enigma and there is no closure, no solution – only complexity, confusion and rare moments of flaring, transcendent insight to light our way in the darkness. The world makes me uncomfortable and quite concretely makes me feel isolated, as though I do not belong but without this dissonant sensation and discontinuous affect, I would quite simply wither and fade.