To be fair, I have lost my mind decades ago and it’s an ongoing struggle to claw bits of it back while other pieces slip away again, often to dread of the world as it presents itself.
It’s not a pretty picture. After 9/11 and the aughts, here in the states we learned to stop hoping for anything. If nothing else, the climate crisis continues to accelerate while plutocrats pressure nations to do fuck all about it. In our lifetime, we expect a population correction (mostly a lot of famine) and societies everywhere will just fall apart. And every day is realizing that the people who raised us and taught us and baptized us all betrayed us, telling us that their system is the one that works, that is worth defending, even as it heads towards inevitable collapse.
The same kind of existential dread informed Albert Camus, who watched WWII play out, which informed his own existential outlook, that we seek to find meaning in a meaningless existence. Imagine Sisyphus, happy he suggests. Whether we’re lugging a rock, or seeking some kind of higher purpose, or fighting the ideological menace of hatred, we might as well get good at it. Curiously, this means by waking up every day, you’re doing the thing. You’re taking on the challenges of the absurd and not losing. And to be fair, many people choose not to take this route, if not killing themselves, then commuting philosophical suicide – that is taking a leap of faith, whether in Jesus’ heaven, the shiny and chrome Valhalla of V8 or seeking to evade the torments of Roko’s Basilisk.
To be fair, I have lost my mind decades ago and it’s an ongoing struggle to claw bits of it back while other pieces slip away again, often to dread of the world as it presents itself.
It’s not a pretty picture. After 9/11 and the aughts, here in the states we learned to stop hoping for anything. If nothing else, the climate crisis continues to accelerate while plutocrats pressure nations to do fuck all about it. In our lifetime, we expect a population correction (mostly a lot of famine) and societies everywhere will just fall apart. And every day is realizing that the people who raised us and taught us and baptized us all betrayed us, telling us that their system is the one that works, that is worth defending, even as it heads towards inevitable collapse.
The same kind of existential dread informed Albert Camus, who watched WWII play out, which informed his own existential outlook, that we seek to find meaning in a meaningless existence. Imagine Sisyphus, happy he suggests. Whether we’re lugging a rock, or seeking some kind of higher purpose, or fighting the ideological menace of hatred, we might as well get good at it. Curiously, this means by waking up every day, you’re doing the thing. You’re taking on the challenges of the absurd and not losing. And to be fair, many people choose not to take this route, if not killing themselves, then commuting philosophical suicide – that is taking a leap of faith, whether in Jesus’ heaven, the shiny and chrome Valhalla of V8 or seeking to evade the torments of Roko’s Basilisk.