Categories
life

On feeling small…

…it may be true to say that a person never feels quite as small and insignificant as when they are confronted by the grand historical ebb and flow within which they quite accidentally find themselves. I am watching developments in Europe and Ukraine and with an almost desperate sense of powerlessness and inability to effect […]

Categories
Philosophy

Depression

Depression is such a fickle thing. Some days everything seems fine, you build yourself up and seem so full of joy and purpose and then one look, one word or callous gesture just brings it all crashing back down. The seduction of emotional isolation, alienation and catastrophic disengagement with the world is at these times […]

Categories
Philosophy

Peace is Freedom from Self

There seems to be something of a plausible inevitability to depression and psychological suffering. Being that our minds have been sculpted by long-term evolutionary biases towards survivability in a probabilistically uncertain and materially dangerous world, there is something of a hard-coded orientation towards pessimism (or at the very least – pragmatism) within us all. Culture […]

Categories
life

Desolation

There is a deep and disconsolate desolation I feel at times, a profound and overwhelming sense of futility and pointlessness that is impermeable to light and is also and quite equally unassailable by any rationale of emotional transience, by appeals to the generally temporary nature of such a darkening and empty inundation. I doubt very […]

Categories
Philosophy

Emptiness

Everything begins as nothing and eventually returns there again. There is no real loss or sorrow, just the transience and self-inflected emptiness that pervades everything in life and to which we all must eventually return. A hollow, haunting experience of these facts can be overwhelming but it is worth remembering that if you are sensitive, […]

Categories
Philosophy

An Anatomy of Melancholy

In what ways might melancholy and a gradual (or rapid, accelerating) slide into sadness or feelings of hopelessness be the natural heir of organic experience in a material world that is always and already dissonant with energy diffusion and the endemic thermodynamic burden of what amounts to irremediable emotional and corporeal loss and decay?  All […]

Categories
life

Diary of a Sad Man

It is all (a) dream; neither good nor bad – just a hyper-inflating referential labyrinth of recursively self-gravitating emptiness. The mental abstractions and grammatical rules upon which we have built an entire Global civilisation (such as it is) are really nothing much more that the self-inflected introspection through which our own diverse ways of life […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Coronavirus Blues

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 […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Storm is upon us all…

There is a deepening feeling of doom (and gloom) as coronavirus begins to take hold across our community. We see the numbers growing daily; accelerating, exponentiating. At some point this will no longer be “someone else’s” illness, it will be upon us; a tidal surge of trillions of sinister nano-scale biological robots, wicked ribonucleic algorithms […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

COVID19 and Global Economic Devastation

Beyond the self-evident inadequacies of our integrated bureaucratic hierarchies, the labyrinth of systemic biases which have funneled wealth into corporate welfare and monopolistic hegemonies are now revealing their utter ineptitude at providing adequate socioeconomic resilience. You could ask why no one saw this coming. Many people did, they just did not know what shape or […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Monday mornings…

…a vast and yawning abyss of commuter futility only partially masked by the endless distraction of engorging ourselves on information artefacts, channels, opinions, fiction and repetition. It is as though we can not even savour our loneliness and feelings of dispossession or pointlessness at all of this cyclical and directionless repetition. The cognitive landscape of […]

Categories
culture Psychology

Social Media and a Self-Curated Spiral of Depression

Does social media only really exploit us and invoke reflexive psychological and emotional dependency?