Your anxieties are borrowed, acquired, entrained, but the texture of feeling them is yours alone. These signals arise through culture, history, and language, yet the awareness they ignite forms at a singular point no one else can enter or confirm. Much of what feels personal is relationally field-borne and stabilised through repetition, but the immediate […]
Bad vibes are sticky, contagious in precisely the way good vibes are but they have a tendency to persist (as memory) much longer than the experiences that invoke them. There is no doubt that evolution has predisposed us to bias negativity over positivity as a function of survival in what was once a much more […]
Context: New words – 17 May 2021 These new words and phrases possess little aesthetic merit and less etymological grace but in novel conceptual juxtaposition capture something else that sits quite naturally in a blindspot that lexicographical taxonomies can not, arguably, identify. Observe that this kind of word and word grouping (or abbreviated compression) represents […]
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 […]
The ways that fear and stress shape cultures and nations may have corollary systems, symptoms and processes to those that haunt individual brains, personal experiences and memory. The amygdala hijack is in some places and at some times a distributed cultural phenomenon. Microcosm/macrocosm explanations are useful in this context but can be (and often are) […]
No one is in control of life anywhere near so much as we might choose to believe. At some level we all know this but we also rarely choose to acknowledge it; it frightens us. Our endless fascination with pattern and order, with declarations of certainty and knowledge – these are at least in part […]
A few weeks (is it two, or three, now?) into isolation and social distancing, it is all starting to get a bit depressing. Never being anything much of a social butterfly at the best of times, I still feel a visceral burden of dread and anxiety mounting, an overwhelming sense of dread and emptiness. There […]
Bureaucracy Simulator 2.0, in stores near you soon…
Having successfully equipped myself with precisely the wrong set of mental tools and concepts to survive in this particular hyper-commercial and aggressively competitive world…
There exists a certain and specific (yet unbounded) freedom in our perception of the flight of birds…
…why farm people’s identities when they quite happily, enthusiastically, farm themselves for you…
A Conservative fear of identity dissolution underlies a significant proportion of humanity’s political, social and interpersonal pathologies…
Daedelus Kite 