nate.club

I am not sure what exactly I want this post to be about, except that I think there is a lot to be said about the death of meaning in our lives. The way that, at least in the West, we seem to have our roots washed away; sometimes for the better, mostly for the worse. (Bear with me, this post will probably be rough in terms of editing (i'm not gonna do any)).

The death (ongoing?) of organized religion is something that I think brings many positives, but it left a vacuum, and the multitude of things that have rushed into it are not much better, especially in the age of social media, which can bring both a nihilism as well as an ever-shifting tides of grifts offering you an answer to the void inside.

People are searching for answers, same as they ever were. But there is a certain type of, almost, psychosis that comes along with the super-reality of the internet (which is becoming even more apparent as AI has come into the scene and taken the place of therapist and friend, sometimes even partner, for some people). Social media, and now AI, thrive off offering you a false or deluded version of reality, feeding off your doubt and pain in order to drive interaction. Both of these platforms live on you remaining unhappy, and on feeding the delusions and ego you come up with to deal with these things.

They are bent on keeping you from touching anything real.

When I think of devils and demons, I tend to think of the sort of metaphorical sense of the word. That the concept of devils and demons is an abstraction of these real forces, and, to me, that's what AI and social media have become. Which really isn't their fault; it is the natural course of things in our capitalist environment. Profit motive will naturally lead things away from any authenticity, any connection with reality or humanity. It will drive things towards dehumanization, dissociation.

Obviously, this is nothing new. It is just the latest iteration, but it is novel in the technology it has available, the proliferation of it, the power behind it. And it is a novel time in the sense that there often seems to be little else to turn to, little else that leads you to a broader view of the world, that leads you to be more connected to the people you love, to your neighbor, to your community.

We are being isolated, and we are being fractured; at a community level and at an individual level.

The things that used to give us meaning and community have died/are dying, for right or wrong. Beyond the death of things that did not evolve with the world and were no longer serving us, like organized religion, cynicism has eaten away at so many other things. It eats away at authenticity, it eats away at earnestness and love, it eats away at our ability to be vulnerable, to be ourselves. It eats away at caring.

We live in a time where our humanity is being taken from us, and we are often unequipped to fight it. Generations are growing up without the slightest idea of how to build a community. Many people are growing up without the slightest idea of how to make a friend or build a relationship; without really knowing how to love anyone else. The world is growing darker.

I remember seeing for the first time, several years ago, the film “Meeting The Man : James Baldwin in Paris”, and the particular clip where he says that the world is held together “by the love and the passion of a very few people.” More and more I see this as true. More and more the act of truly loving others, truly having passion for life, is becoming a radical action. Perhaps it always has been. In fact, I'm sure it always has been.

I'm scared every day of what seems to be a darkening tide. But then I remember that it must have seemed so for anyone who has ever paid attention. Maybe it just seems darker because we have become more powerful, more capable of enacting evil. But opposites are an illusion of sorts, and the more capable one is of feeling pain, the more capable one is of feeling love. The more dark we can see, the more light we are capable of. The only problem is that it won't happen by accident. It takes practice, it takes concerted effort, it takes purpose and action. I think this is the thing lacking so often in this generation, in these new generations. In an age of cynicism, what do you aim yourself towards? when it seems everything has already been tainted. It is sort of cringe to believe in God, or it just lays outside the realm of rational belief that we allow ourselves, which is never really so rational as we believe it to be. But I think the fact of the matter is that our rationales and our concepts will never capture the full reality of life. There is always something ineffable in our experiences, impossible to articulate. I think we see that as something that divides and isolates us, but I think it is the opposite. It is the bridge, it is the universe that we share, that we are all a part of. It is the thing that most connects us, it is the experience we share.

And while our concepts and stories can be useful, the more we get caught up in them, the further we stray from this shared reality, the more we isolate ourselves. We spend so long behind a screen, so long in these super-realities, we become isolated and confused, we become lost, and we seek answers, and we look to these same dissociated realities to give them to us.

So let me just say that there is no perfect concept, no perfect rationale or logical understanding that will lead you to the light, that will make your entire life make sense. There are things that illuminate you, that help you see the reality that is really in front of you, and there are things that can keep you in the dark, and all manner of in between.

The important thing is not accumulating the right concepts or having the right ideas. Concepts and ideas are only sign posts pointing us to elsewhere. If they are not pointing us towards life, towards this shared reality, then they are not useful, and we ought not to hold onto them. It will often happen in your life that you will need to leave a previously useful idea behind because it no longer serves that purpose. It no longer connects you or directs you towards this spiritual thing. And that's okay. Life is constant change. We are constantly changing, and it is often just our conceptualization that is not keeping up.

So I think it pays to remember to not be caught up in this constructed world. There will be no mental image that you can construct to perfectly represent the world and to fully understand it logically. Let go. Engage with the experience before you. Your life is not happening at some future point, it is happening now, all the time, and you shouldn't miss it while looking for answers. The answers are all there, you just have to remember how to listen.

This is the light I look for nowadays. I think it is becoming brighter in my generation. I think more and more people reject the ways that keep us in a sort of subservience. I hope we continue like this. I do have a sort of belief that I cannot, perhaps, logically justify, but it is the belief that things are getting better, on a grand scale. There will always be evil, always be demons. We pretend as if it is us and them, but evil and good have always been a part of us, and we will always be manifesting both. But we also have the power of our consciousness, we have the ability to look at what we are doing, to observe ourselves, and to make our own decisions. I believe we are trending towards more awareness. Hopefully, someday, we will all be a little more wise, and a little more able to steer the ship with the good in us, more able to create conditions to bring out the good in us. I think that is our only hope, in the long run.

But a discussion of utopias and progress, and the ways systems can bring out different features of our multi-faceted nature, is probably a discussion for another time.

I just feel that we need something else in our lives, and I hope more and more that young people can steer themselves towards the present moment, towards the impermanence of things, towards truly cherishing our lives and the people around us. I hope we can steer ourselves more towards light and passion and love. I hope we can find genuine meaning and purpose, and not chase mental constructs, delusion, and success within limited and deluded frameworks of value. I hope we can lay down our masculinity, our capital-based value systems, our beauty standards. I hope we can lay down a lot, and find more than we could ever hope for in our empty hands (shout out Ursula K. Le Guin).