Categories
life

Trauma

I have seen what trauma does. It can take good people and bend them backwards against their will, leading into all manner of despair and hardship. I have seen the ways that people self-define through the things they know and the suffering that has shaped them. I have witnessed as their lonely lives lead them […]

Categories
Philosophy

No Bravery Without Fear

Bravery is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to act in spite of fear. Only a fool knows no fear and were it not that we demonise emotional experience in the ways we all do and as a function of the constructive paranoia that binds us all into one writhing mass of […]

Categories
life

All the pieces…

We spend a lot of our lives hoping for a day, a moment when all the disparate influences and troubles we face just melt away and reveal a singular resolution and shining light of clarity. We invest our feelings, our beliefs and our personal livelihoods in the dream of a better life, of a commitment […]

Categories
Psychology

Shame

You should see (or intuitively feel) how shame is a trap, a labyrinth of pure abstraction and emotionally-infused imagination or half-blind fear that no rational or intelligent person should ever become ensnared by and yet we just can’t help ourselves and so easily and serially drift through regret into pity and – often enough – […]

Categories
Philosophy

Freedom

How often we despair as though all our paths to freedom and happiness are limited to a singularly impossible, indeterminate and unknown road that we fear to even believe that we might ever find, much less take the first few hesitant steps upon. Even less do we ever acknowledge that there can never be only […]

Categories
culture history politics

Leadership

People want to be led (just as they want to be deceived). It is a herding instinct and we all surrender to it at times. Even leaders are led – not by others, necessarily, but by the constraints and active self-surveillance that an awareness of the fragility of their tenure as leaders entails. To be […]

Categories
Philosophy

Social Media and the Need to Feel Loved

You might think it’s about being loved for how you look. But what you truly need is to be loved for who you are—beneath the image, before the performance, outside the frame. Only one of these forms of love endures. And only you can sense which one matters. This isn’t something you understand by reading […]

Categories
Philosophy

The words that break us also make us

It’s not easy to accept that we might all be implicitly, irreducibly and intractably broken and regardless  that such an assertion forms the basis of rationalising exactly why the human world is in many ways such a shambling mess of confusion and fear, the possibility remains that even while we find acknowledging our limitations to […]

Categories
culture

Forever Frozen Moments

The seduction of stasis and the illusion of control; an image or any other moment frozen in time is never really still or quiet and fully vaccinated against the burbling confusion and quintessence of chaos as complexity and change. Even beauty as that celebrated existential pivot of aesthetic value is never really frozen or delimited […]

Categories
Philosophy

Meaning

We should not be surprised that our collective and individual search for meaning in life is difficult to resolve. The tools of language by which we attempt to plumb the depths of life and existence are unfit for defining or comprehending ultimate meanings in either ourselves or the worlds we inhabit. The language and logic […]

Categories
politics

Democracy

We are never going to find, define or unambiguously inhabit a “perfect” ideological, socioeconomic or political system. None of us – never. What we are able to do is to cultivate open, adaptive, complex networks and communities that most accurately approximate to modelling the natural world from which we emerged. Once we accept the implicit […]

Categories
Philosophy

On things we can never know…

Context: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, The Inherent Limitation Of Mathematics The discontinuous boundary condition at the edge of (as much as being that around which we built) logic, physics and mathematics is a global property, distributed across and as the complex hypersurface of a self-propagating, soliton-like hybrid matter/energy/information system. It is as though a logical vacuum, […]