Our way back in

What’s up gamers, and welcome back to Abigail’s favorite writing exercise: allowing aspects of her worldview to crystallize like the honey in cold sandwich bread. 

Look, if I had the answers, I’d probably be fasting on a mountaintop in 100% breathable cotton. I’d never sweat again. 

As it happens, I don’t, and I’m sweaty all the time. That’s why we’re here. Speaking of conjecture as a tool, let’s get into this thang! 

The postmodern values crisis

We all know what the problem is, but let’s walk a story map. 

The 21st century is marked by the loss of a driving narrative. Or rather, the loss of a shared, cohesive driving narrative. We’re info-sick, we know too much. The dogmatic stories of childhood are caught out: propagandist moralism, marketing, for-profit-after-all cults of personality. We’ve seen behind the curtain and we know your game. 

What comes after the rejection of objective truth? Nihilistic relativism; fragmentation, pluralism. We begin to feel: everything is true, so nothing is. Anything goes. That’s fine on its face. 

Next comes disillusionment. Culturally, we pass into pastiche. Irony, post-irony, parody - a loopingly meta, self-referential meme language. Everything is known - is lit to the fucking gills. Everything has been said, done, made, worn, seen, copied, pasted, and blended into gazpacho. A meaninglessness settles deeply into our every (in)action. 

Reeling identity loss causes us to crave the guardrails of the past. When the “right thing to do” was defined and prescribed by masters and gods. Overwhelmed by the paradoxical labyrinth, many of us outsource the responsibility of our souls to ideological extremes. The alternative is a sleepless fringe state. We’re frozen, stuck, reacting from our backs like little turtles. 

Conditions like these - lost, with little belief in a worthwhile future - easily drive a sense of inadequacy and worthlessness. Skittering on the ice like this makes us the most ideal marketing targets since the birth of the personal credit card. We got voids to fill, baby! 

Now let’s raise a generation with psychologically invasive communications technology. A general lack of privacy, exposure to the brutality of online anonymity, and the parasocial illusion of infinite access to others. (You can be recorded at any moment; you can face bullying or exploitation; dating apps and comment-section “communities” teach you that other humans are endlessly available and disposable.) 

What can follow? Fear of rejection melds with fear of immortal public humiliation. A paralyzing fear of showing weakness. Fear of intimacy. Estrangement from others and a loss of IRL social stamina. Make a mistake, and you risk semi-permanent alienation. 

On the other hand, you can stay inside. Alone. Scrolling an algorithm that hacks your fear, rage, satisfaction, and pleasure centers. Voyeurism becomes infinitely more safe, comfortable - even apparently rewarding - than living an embodied, first-person existence. 

The message? Risk nothing, say nothing. 

Be nothing. Consume. 

Word soup 

So, okay, everything is meaningless. Many of our best thinkers would add: but you can’t live that way! 

[I could drop some sick aphorisms from Camus, Sartre, or Nietzsche, but you can Google those just as well as I can. Ok, fine, you can have one. Camus: “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”]

Perfect liberation is a terrible responsibility: without truth, what you have is what you believe. 

You are a human being with a rational mind! The power of this fact alone should bring you to your knees. Your brain makes your world: grades, shades, and sugar pills. Nirvana in exile, or misery from on top of the world. 

The ceiling is as tall as your awareness, and as close. This is dangerous, this is limiting, this is monsoon mud in summer tires. The earthly trial of our souls. 

The smoke and mirrors of your postponed self - the one you’ll surely realize, just as soon as the perfect conditions fall like manna from the heavens - is Salvation Sales. The guru a cheap trick. 

In a thousand different modalities, by a thousand names and in a thousand different strings of words, you trace the wounds and patterns that keep you. The path that will deliver you. 

Different vocabularies for the same tension are just that. Use all, some, none. Switch ‘em around like bedroom furniture when things go stale. 

Choose your fighter. Worry less. Stop this madness. [Aldous Huxley: “Lightly, child, lightly.”]

When it comes to the condition of your soul, the state of the universe, et cetera: intuition is wealth, and conjecture is the guru. Speculate, argue, obliterate your argument, speculate, argue. Inch by inch, you have won a better understanding. 

Slowly, green rises from the open sea. Marble melts to the face of David. You have bottled an ounce of desert sand. 

The children yearn for sincerity

We don’t have a “god is dead” problem. We have a deficit of imaginative reason. 

Sure, we’ve seen it all. Does that have to be the end of the line? 

Get ready to walk with me through a long ass metaphor. 

Desire flows from alterity and space. The sense of an “other,” an unknown. While love may be occasionally confused for the sort of attachment that badly mashes the other person into your sense of self, this is not love. Love flows from the knowledge that - like anyone who is not you - the beloved is an infinite mystery in active evolution. 

[Henrik Karlsson: “A person can’t be contained in your ideas about them… You can only ever know another individual if you meet them in an open dialogue - if you treat them as unfinished, as capable of surprise.”]

Where were we going with this? Just kidding. 

What we want is to desire to live! What we want is to love the world. Perhaps those things, too, deserve the lover’s generosity. 

So, then, stop sanitizing the multiplicities, contradictions, and gray areas. Let things be strange, mystical, and hilarious - let them ache. Like sand falling into pattern on the skin of a drum, allow your personal universe to reflect the divine. 

We will never abide a reality where nothing means anything. We love our children too much. The early light rests too beautifully on the face of the hills. 

Still, as we construct our ways of living, we can’t un-know what we know. We’ll never stop prodding this thing, peering over escalating questions. 

Like always, this essay is just me telling me something me needs to hear. 

My love, it’s an easy answer and a hard road. Anchor yourself in wonder. Take a little heart.