Categories
culture

Sorrow is endemic: depression is not failure

Depression exposes something inverted about social logic. It is treated as a personal weakness, yet the condition of not fitting in is the very pressure that gives the idea of “fitting in” its force. The loops of belonging expand endlessly, always moving the target, ensuring that nobody ever quite succeeds. In practice, exclusion is the […]

Categories
cybernetics

Having Trouble Making Friends?

It’s easy to think the difficulty lies in you, but more often than not, the problem is structural. Friendship itself has been hollowed out by the systems in which it now has to exist. Communication has shifted into commercial frameworks where attention, presence, and even intimacy are reduced to tokens of exchange. Whether or not […]

Categories
Philosophy

Luddite

Luddites, yes, and just as blindness might take many forms, there are so many ways to inhibit the progress of civilisation or work against those creatively seeking collaborative solutions to humanity’s shared existential problems. For some, it becomes a professional if not also political vocation of ignorant bluster and destructive blundering. Analysis is interesting but […]

Categories
technology

Loneliness

Technologically-mediated communication is creating the global epidemic of loneliness. Alienation and emptiness is a signal amplified by our ubiquitous and omnipresent sense and experience of contemporary connectivity, an inward-turning inflection of systemic extensibility for which we are quite poorly prepared by the majority of our evolutionary history. Kindness fades in these moments as everyone struggles […]

Categories
Philosophy

Bad Vibes

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 […]

Categories
Philosophy

Rejection Reflection

Rejection is an empty room. Is the hollow hell of fear we feel the clear and present absence as much and in or of ourselves as that of any Other? We each and all in turn eventually reject that Other self and in dusty, mirrored isolation turn once more towards our own essential emptiness and […]

Categories
life

At times, a broken heart…

The sting in the tail (or tale?) of unhappy relationships is that we sometimes opt for unhappy companionship over loneliness, and even as we eagerly drink from a renewed cup of emotional freedom and sorrow or isolation and living solitude we rarely acknowledge that this certain subtle sense of hollow anticipation and insecurity is the […]

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
life

History

Jim Morrison, singer of the 60’s band The Doors, put into his poetry a precise summary of a modern life: “every day is a drive thru history”. A friend asks me how I am doing and I pause a moment to reflect, “how, in fact, is my life going?” The truth is: I find myself […]

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

Instagram Influencers

Human beings copy each other, it provides a modest respite from implicit psychological insecurities. They copy each other copying each other because they are tribal creatures and for all this aspirational social or cultural identity construction – they are all so easily led, swept away by trends and peer pressure or commercial desperation. After a […]

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 […]