Categories
life

Trapped by Choice

Ever noticed that the more connected we all are, the more isolated we become? The more we are compelled to anchor our identities, experience and memory upon an external world, the lonelier and less certain this inner self becomes? Having once passed over the event horizon of self-accelerating sociotechnical metamorphosis we are each and all […]

Categories
Philosophy

All Philosophy, Futile…

All philosophy is futile; all language, deception and were it not that we find ourselves lashed to the mast of this listless human endeavour in knowledge and technology, we should hardly know or be anything much at all. Philosophy seeks to explain with words that which must remain constitutively inexplicable. There falling inevitably backwards upon, […]

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
culture

On unwritten words…

I have, it seems, made something of a life in words and the variously disambiguating compositional artefacts of language or thought (and other such conceptual melodies) with which we each and all make our ways and narrative meanings in or as this world, but I have not found happiness. There is an irremediable darkness here […]

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
life

I always felt a need to fill the silence with words.

I always felt a need to fill the silence with words without ever once realising that they were as much the source of my sorrows as of my joys. I still cling to them at times and as though pale driftwood rafts in all this alienating darkness, they take me where they will; at times […]

Categories
life

Someone, somewhere…

It is kind of hard to believe that there’s someone out there for all of us, somewhere. It’s a nice idea and I even think I know who my “someone” is, regardless that I will for many diverse and complicated reasons never meet her. Perhaps the necessary condition for there to even be the possibility […]

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

Meaningless Existence

Today’s brief reflection on the state of humanity is brought to you by a feeling of overwhelming futility and an acute awareness of the pointless, vacuous and utterly narcissistic bullshit that consumes us all. Finding ourselves inhabiting whichever time and place we transiently occupy, and encountering the limiting cognitive language and behavioural repertoire of a […]

Categories
life Philosophy

Loneliness in Love

Have you ever noticed the ways in which love has a tendency to empty and hollow out our world every bit as much as it inflates it with meaning and purpose? I find myself dreaming, desiring, longing and imagining the effective fictive fantasy of Other, of closure and reflexive psychological completion, of unity and hope […]

Categories
Philosophy

A Lonely Philosopher

As I get older and, reluctantly, more mature – my social life has become dominated by sitting in cafes by myself, wistfully scribbling obscure observations on the nature of mind and systems theory into personal notebooks. It is very lonely and in very many ways. Something which occurred to me, mid-scribble, today was more generally […]

Categories
life

Soulmates

Soulmates are two sides of one life. It is in the difference and distance between us that we might identify both our selves and each other as though two ends of some silvered, higher-dimensional thread but it is in the binding identity of entangled energy, information and experience that we discover the unity of which […]