Heirs to the Wreckage

Trying to make sense of reality.

recent posts

  • The Worst of Humanity

    For us it seems rather self-explanatory what Nazis are, what they have come to mean, how they are the symbol for universal evil amidst our species. Yet what history seems to have forgotten is that prior to the liberation of the concentration camps, the Nuremberg trials, and the grisly evidence displayed to the public, the Nazis enjoyed a far more generous position in the global imaginary. During the war and the years after, narratives of the “Honorable Wehrmacht” and “the unknowing majority” persisted, lending the criminal actors of Nazi Germany something suspiciously close to dignity. Fascist sympathies were not exclusively limited to Germany, for one, but even those who disagreed with the regime’s politics were still willing to confer a degree of respect typical of an established European state. It took years of revisionism, holocaust stories, political reform and retribution to entirely rewrite the cultural tale of the Nazi Party. And who could really blame them? The atrocities committed by the regime were simply unthinkable at the time. The symbolic narrative was always caught up in conflicts and counter-points before being humanity’s cautionary tale; holocaust deniers and certain conservatives still contest it. 

    The Epstein Files emerge as another pertinent example of the unthinkable. Anyone with basic intuition could not help but observe the corruption in our government, and infer that several prominent members of congress and popular society would be implicated by the files. Yet, the cannibalism and murder described in the files go far beyond what was expected. Even while remaining outside of the reality-defiant cult that is MAGA, it seems difficult to lend credibility to the worst offenses described. I could certainly conceive of wealthy men raping the underaged and the trafficked- for unfortunately such occurrences are all too common to America. I suppose the determination we must make as private citizens is whether these allegations are an exaggeration of very real and tangible crimes, or if every word is in fact true and we simply haven’t experienced that level of depravity. Again, I refer back to Nazi Germany; it wouldn’t be the first time the unthinkable has happened under the cover of institutional authority and prestige. 

    To this day, I find myself running a constant analysis of why Trump is still supported. Even as I find viable explanations that do deconstruct the appeal of Trump, they do not quell the disbelief of how many gave into his mythos. From the first time I even knew of Donald Trump I understood that nothing good could come of him. I hadn’t lived long enough to understand the context of his rise or his place in public life, I didn’t know anything of his policies (or Obama’s for that matter); but I did not fail to note his bleached hair, his surly expression, or his hyperaggressive and flustered reactions to criticism. Upon first impression and without extensive knowledge of American politics I could already tell that inside and outside this man was violently insecure and self-obsessed, and had little of the interest in public service that ought to define a President. And then came his supporters, emboldened by his disregard for traditions and institutions and reveling in their war against the liberal elite. 

    His win was considered a major upset but looking back we cannot ignore the conditions that were in place. It is true that while Obama was an encouraging step forward for liberalism, but it cannot be denied that he represented many of the same interests that had animated most of the post-Bush neoliberal era of politics. It was ever my impression that there were notable groups of leftists both in and out of the U.S who saw in Trump an opportunity to unmake the American Empire- a sentiment shared by America’s principal rivals of Russia and China. No doubt many of these groups in hindsight, well-intentioned or not, feel they grievously miscalculated. The American neoliberal order has only grown more aggressive and trenchant, it’s simply lost its veneer of respectability. The fact of the matter is, in this 2nd term much of what we have seen would have been unthinkable in 2016. A newly vindicated Trump with the concerted effort of Project 2025 behind him, with the likes of people like Steven Miller and Peter Thiel has spearheaded an entirely different magnitude of democratic erosion. These people are not merely interested in retribution against institutions and indulging megalomaniac impulses; there is an agenda at work, one that Trump is only too happy to advance and center around him. One can even spot the deterioration in his own voter base. There is very little I can say in defense of MAGA, at any point in time; but in 2016 amidst the racism, retributive anti-liberalism, misogyny, and xenophobia, one could identify a drop of genuine populism within their movement. They were oddly enough the party of lower taxes and exposing the elite sex trafficking ring, only to readily discard those ideas down the line. MAGA is a true cult now, and it seems many a Trump supporter has entirely lost sight of what they actually want beyond a vague and vitriolic sense of vindication. 

    We find ourselves in what I believe to be a tipping point. ICE is openly being used as a political tool to pressure Minnesota into surrendering voter registration information to the federal government. Georgia is undergoing its own federal voting intervention. The Administration is desperate, attempting to induce the Insurrection Act, mitigate and pivot from the Epstein files, and cover up the signs of internal panic. Fascism works best when the shit isn’t visible. Even if we all witnessed it occur, it only takes a presidential set of trousers to conceal the incident and a willing press secretary to deny that it ever happened. But lately, the denials seem less effective, the narratives contradictory, the shits are steaming and out in the open. I hope that this is the behavior not of an administration that has brazenly conquered any need for truth, but an administration that is slowly getting caught up in their own lies. If Trump corrupts the midterms, via the Insurrection Act, ICE harassment (this seems extremely likely), voter registration tampering, or any other means available to him- we will truly have passed a point of no return on the road to fascism. But, the worst of humanity, for that is what the Epstein Files allege they are, is sloppy. Perhaps we’ll have it easy, and elect Democrats with integrity who impeach Trump, moderate Democrats will look to Zohran Mamdani’s example, and the poison of partisanship can be broken. Democracy will be saved and updated for a new and challenging era of world history while all in the Epstein network, regardless of political affiliation or social position, are tried and punished. But— this is America—where the unthinkable can happen.

  • The Discomfort of Not-Fantasy

    In the only creative writing course I ever took in college, I found myself in constant conflict with the professor on the nature of writing. He staunchly believed good writing should extract intrigue and thematic value from the benign, quiet moments of life. I, on the other hand, have always been a proponent of fantasy and sci-fi, which expressly seek to test the limits of our everyday reality. Needless to say, we did not get along, and not solely due to this one disagreement. Fantasy, for me, is not only creatively riveting in terms of its imaginative power, but it is capable of communicating very human themes in a manner distinct from any other genre. Through The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins taught teenagers a basic but timeless lesson in digital propaganda and spectacle, and how they serve as a means of control. Everyday I see more quotes from 1984 circulating online, and there can be no doubt as to why that is. The Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games, Divergent, these were my classics- not your Harper Lee.

    Suffice it to say that I was disappointed that Andor was not featured in this year’s Golden Globes, or in any mainstream Hollywood discourse beyond the Emmys. Simply put, Andor is a masterpiece. It is a compelling, dedicated study of revolution and authoritarianism; and it recursively questions how far a tyrannical regime must go in order to spur its subjects to the altar of rebellion. How does fascism manifest within the lives of people such that death and destruction are preferable to the eroding stability within it? And it came from the most unexpected place much as elitist academic institutions produce radical political thinkers: it came from the Disney-owned Star Wars franchise, one of the most corporately managed IPs under one of the most bloated corporations.

    Perhaps it serves to mention that I’ve been a longtime fan of Star Wars. It’s been a constant presence in my life and interests since childhood, and even the most panned lines of the prequel trilogy are appreciated and quoted by me and my ilk. As a Star Wars fan, explaining why Star Wars is popular to those outside of the cult is a convoluted process. Perhaps it’s the novelty of the worldbuilding, the toys and merchandise sold, the filmmaking advances, the charisma of the actors; there is an entire documentary explaining away the process by which George Lucas filmed the original Star Wars and how he handled its unexpected popularity. Regardless, Star Wars has always been somewhat of a mixed bag, despite being a titanic cultural phenomenon. It only has two or three movies that are universally liked, a motley assemblage of games and comics, and the occasional cult TV show here and there. Since Disney acquired the franchise, an overemphasis on marketing and fan-service has produced a train of derivative and creatively lackluster projects. It seemed highly unlikely that it could still produce something remotely as reinventive as I found Andor.

    Andor leads with a relatively simple premise: what if the setting of Star Wars was taken seriously? What if the Empire, far from the pulpy space goons from the movies *cue Han Solo wahooing as he blasts a TIE fighter*, was examined as an actual authoritarian regime? What if revolution was not conducted by heroes in the vein of Luke Skywalker, but by people who lived in constant fear, living precariously day to day, and sacrificing their very humanity and morality to wage war on the Empire? Far removed from figures like Darth Vader, the show commits itself to following people behind the imperial machine. What are the evils perpetuated by elitist bureaucrats implementing unjust laws, by imperial soldiers with too much authority, by intelligence officers who seek to manipulate and divide the populace? And we experience all of this through the eyes of Cassian Andor, who begins relatively uninvested in this galactic conflict despite the traumatic experience of life under Imperial rule. Yet we know that he is destined, from the rudimentary not-yet-fully-formed Rebel insignia that appears on the title screen, to eventually radicalize and fight them.

    And in demonstrating what events could possibly push Cassian Andor over the edge, the show takes us through scenes of the Empire: draining planetary resources to the point of collapse, abducting people at random under the pretense of peacekeeping, sending detainees to secret prisons to perform slave labor, manufacturing propaganda against certain groups, committing genocide, displacing and eroding away at indigenous communities. The depiction of fascism as a standardized and routine process is by far one of the most compelling, and disturbing. For if or when fascism comes to call on the United States, it will not be a single definitive instance that alerts us to its presence. It will be a streamlined encroach into our lives, the dull and enervating constraints of bureaucratic top-down policy, the slow increase of healthcare premiums, the things we see on TV with ICE and foreign countries that we once would have nationally denounced but now almost seem…normal. When AI control rears itself, it won’t be in the form of James Cameron’s Skynet or Terminators, even if that is the message he wanted us to take away from the film. It will come in what already pervades our lives: the data we routinely consent to sell companies, the social media we frequent and express ourselves on, the things we purchase, the hordes of bots that discredit and divide and savage people online.

    So, given the picture that Andor illustrates for us, direct critiques of real-world happenings, one might understand why I find it baffling that The Studio received more attention. Brands such as Star Wars, or anything as “sci-fi” as Star Wars are generally not taken seriously or given critical consideration (much in the vein of the aforementioned college professor). That may very well be the unfortunate reason Andor didn’t win any awards, but I would like to present an alternate hypothesis. I theorize that fantasy works in a couple of ways. Firstly, it is enthralling because of the high stakes and the expansive creative limits in the story. The enhanced world and unique tensions allow for strong narrative payoffs, and themes that will stick with the audience. Yet, at the same time, they hold the veneer of the supernatural which alienates it from us and our reality. The Hunger Games is valued because of its important themes but crucially because its premise is so dystopian that it could never be real… WALL-E is watchable because even if it is a film aimed at environmental awareness, the world of WALL-E is still divorced enough from our world through its sci-fi elements so as to not seriously stir the establishment. Most of all, the heroes in the film confront their supposedly fantastical tension and overcome it, allowing us to leave knowing the heroes won. It is as Mark Fisher asserted, “the film performs our anti-capitalism for us”, excusing us from really confronting that which the film parallels. In short, I question whether Andor was underwritten not only because it’s Star Wars, but because its tensions are too uncomfortably “real”. The moment where Mon Mothma gives her speech to the senate, declaring “what happened is nothing less than genocide!”, feels as if it nudges the 4th wall, as if it’s not only meant to wake the corrupt senate out of its complicity but the audience as well.

    In any case, I highly recommend giving the show a watch. Remarkably, it is one of the only Star Wars products that is open to all audiences rather than a niche collective of fans. Looking ahead to 2026 I’m unsure of what the content of this blog will consist of. I have spent extensive time traveling in Thailand and later on traveling to visit family. Now I have settled back at home, in what seems will be a transitional phase of my life as I decide what to pursue next. I find the process of determining this difficult, perhaps I am making it more difficult for myself. Even if I know this to be untrue, I cannot help but feel as if there is a global calculus hinging on my decision. What sort of person do I wish to be in this world, as beautiful and ugly as it is? What should I become given the opportunity? With my degree, what has a veritable pathway to social mobility and out of a dead-end 9-5 grind? What do I want my relationship with power and institutions to look like given how flawed they are? Do I want to aim for a career that lives adjacent to power or aspires to it directly? Will I advance what I believe to be the greater good? All pertinent questions that are for another entry. My best to everyone going into 2026.

  • Life Happens and Death Lingers

    The most common misconception of Atheism is that we are nihilists. Oftentimes, when conversing with others, my attempts to deny that I am devoid of any spirituality lead to them replying, “Ah, then you’re agnostic, why didn’t you say so?”, as if that remotely changes anything about my beliefs. I never said anything about not believing in a higher power, for I know there is one. Light, heat, conditions so perfectly formed so as to support life, evolution so deliberately and meticulously facilitated to transform an organism. That science has iterated to a point where it can explain such phenomena does not negate the majesty of them. How can one imagine our planet, precariously caught in the grip of gravity amidst a vast darkness, and not see such titanic deliberate forces as divine? The questions of whether these forces constitute a consciousness or entity that mirrors humanity I happily leave to the churchgoers. But in any case, for me it is the sheer unthinkable scale of the universe in all its quiet and blackness, the seemingly limitless light of the sun, and the unreadable but coherent will of nature that signify higher powers. The titanic and subtle forces that stitch together our world, things that we will never fully understand in entirety.

    So if I say I am an atheist, it is a denial of the God of organized religions, the God of Institutions. It is a political disavowal, but also very much a spiritually reasoned one. For it makes no sense to me that the powers at work are ordered by a single being that so closely parallels our species of hairless primates. And even if that were true, it seems doubly uncertain that this being would interest itself in our troubled race much as the deities of religion do. The universe does not need a consciousness or a mind that resembles that of humanity, it is powerful nonetheless. If I had to pick one excellent interpretation of the Divine, it is without a doubt the ineffable (such as the ineffable Dao)- that which exists but cannot be named. Something that we can only pluck at, allude to in a roundabout way, but nobody can name or know its full nature. Divorced from the tyrannies of organized religion, if such people choose to worship “God” or anything else as a proxy or reference point for the unnameable thing, I will not tell them they are wrong.

    The reason I mention this is I’ve recently felt fleeting instances of thanatophobia, an uncanny terror of death. Understand that this fear does not originate from any state of precarity or risk in my life, it assails me in the quiet of my own room. I feel it in the 4 dark walls of my home, in the stillness of the air, in how deathly and inert my environment already seems. For one, it does not seem that it is the actual act of dying that scares people. For from what we understand, death has the potential to be quite peaceful, even euphoric (despite the many traumatic ways to die). No, it is the aftermath that terrifies us. We are petrified when we ask the contradictory question: what does non-existence feel like? What is it like to be nothing, perhaps until the end of time and beyond? It is one of those things that is impossible to think through, perhaps it is unthinkable for the living. All we have ever known is an extant state of being. The secrets of un-being, perhaps, are not for the living to contemplate. After experiencing the horror I think every child goes through when they discover the concept of death for the first time, the way I often comforted myself was by comparing my own existence to a book. The book must end at some point, lest the events become meaningless and the reader is condemned to an eternity of endless reading- a modern Sisyphus-like torture.

    Then, I arrive at the true origin of my fear, the content of the book. Because I know that someday, when I’ve experienced everything that life has to offer, sampled all the tastes I can, and given myself to a worthy project, I’d be at peace with going gently into the good night. But at the moment, I do not feel on-track to reaching that state. I dread a seemingly endless train of unemployment, instability, sporadic paychecks, odd jobs, meaning and purpose denied to me as my time whittles away. Or, I imagine an monotonous grind in a “dead-end” career, one where I forsake all my dreams- as vague and uncoordinated as they are- and watch myself age from 21 to 45 while pumping hour after hour into something that contributes to no greater accomplishment or passion. Arguably, a 21 year old should not be staring down the barrel in this way. But even so, the rhetoric of our society characterizes one’s 20s as if they were on a sloped precipice: once you slide down you snowball into the rest of life, and there is no going back. This is why I also fear the notion that college is the best few years of one’s life; I am, in perhaps thanatophobic fashion, succumbing to the fear that nothing better lies ahead.

    Terry Eagleton wrote a book known as Hope without Optimism, which I’m reading now. The argument I find most compelling is the admonishment against so-called “rational optimism”, framed explicitly in an ecological-marxist context. Rational optimism, is, let’s say, the belief that climate change will eventually work itself out if the status quo remains. Trust in informed consumerism, trust in neoliberal respectability (which is withering away under Trump’s vigil), and all will turn out fine. And it is clear that the cultural dissemination of rational optimism, is in large part accomplished by the reduction of the world to informatics. Violence is banalized so much so that we view it livestream on CNN now, climate change and poverty are neutered by how they appear to us in statistical form. Perhaps rational optimism is so easy to adopt because our forms of data shield us from true political reckoning like a bomb shelter. Eagleton speaks of a hope borne in acknowledgment of risk, of scarcity, of mourning the fantasy-world where life would proceed unhindered by threat. I suppose Eagleton isn’t referring to me here. And the threats I perceive that spur my fear of death are not true threats in the immediate sense, more so the ominous possibility of half-realized ambitions and bleak existences. Death lingers, precarity lingers, the possibility that I will fail, and destruction will always exist; we can’t entertain a fantastical existence where these things do not exist, but they can’t hinder the happening of life.

  • On Play and Childhood

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the phenomenon of childhood recently. I was comfortable in many respects shedding the skin of a child, or at least trying to. I even went so far as to inflate my intellectual side to brush aside the parts of me that are still very much juvenile and inexperienced with the world. A concentrated effort, a personal PR campaign with those at home, to say: look at the new Lucas, look at how he has matured. Once again, the deliberateness of the effort reveals the truth via negation: it is not so much that I desire to be seen as intelligent but rather that my ignorance makes me insecure. The reminder that I am still intertwined with coming-of-age is unwelcome.

    Childhood from an adult perspective is strange. Every so often I’ve asked somebody my own age whether they still view themselves as a natural evolution of their juvenile self, or if they renounced that persona. Much in the vein of Jon Snow, who is told to “kill the boy and let the man be born” by Maester Aemon. My childhood still remains with me in many ways. Songs from my past visit me indiscriminately: a set of Spanish nativity songs, alt rock, beautiful flamenco from god knows which musician. When you’re a kid you’re just a passenger unable to know context, things simply occur and years later you struggle to establish continuity with those occurrences. I’ve invested lots of time poring over the internet for references to my fragmented memories. I recently unmasked a classical music piece that I’ve had playing in my head for 15 years as Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 3 in G-Major, K. 216: I. Allegro. With a name like that, finding it was akin to sifting through sand. It’s nice when you stumble across something like that, something that fixes a harmony between you and your past, your history, reminding you that despite all the turbulence of life and the change in the world there is still something unchangeable and unique to you at the center of time’s passage. When I listen to this piece, I don’t experience a mere nostalgia: I am reminded by all the memories of myself that I still carry with me, the memories of me that I still exist in unity with. I am reminded that I am still intertwined with coming-of-age and childhood, except this time I welcome that sensation. Music is perhaps the place where I have felt most myself, not alienated from my past but unified with it.

    I’ve long resisted the urge to consider adulthood a draining of childhood fancies, or to cede all childlike elements of myself to adult life. Even though I’m still relatively young, such an attitude makes me gaze across the weathered temporality of what would be the rest of my life, and realize death would approach far quicker than I expect as time’s passage accelerates. But that is the meticulous planning-culture of our society, everything is prophylactic, everything is fixated on the one zero point that is annihilation. All to keep the future at bay, astronomical insurance premiums for the approaching calamity that looms large. 

    Everybody mellows out to be sure, it’s a necessary part of life, but so are childlike elements such as play. Play is absolutely essential to life- Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens makes this clear. Play is a spontaneous and naturally occurring element in animals and humans, occurring without instruction and without prediction. Crucially, play provides social order, for players voluntarily enter contract with a set of rules; and if the behavior of animals is any indication those rules may not even need to be formally specified. It is something rejected by the white-collar adult world, even though selling a product is as much of a game (in its own way) as a cultural dance. For a class I took titled Games and Culture, our classwork at one point was to play Catan while critically examining the player dynamics in our group. It only took a set of rules to determine our actions, light environmental storytelling to give form to our world, and I watched as a mini society was formed through play. Crucially, I observed that I bonded far more with my peers as a Catan player than I would as a normal student. 

    Imagine if we sponsored a society that was more encouraging of play in adult lives. Imagine if we quite literally had public parks with adult playgrounds. One Gym Membership in the US costs around $60 per month, and typically it is not only the cost that turns people off to the gym but the very public scrutiny we place on the concept of exercise. Adult playgrounds, maintained by a percentage of our tax dollars, would accomplish most fitness goals of the average gym member at a fraction of the mental effort. At least, that is my personal theory, and I admit it does sound a little ridiculous: a herd of salespeople with disheveled collars, untucked shirts, discarded handbags, whooping and monkeying about on slides and whatnot. The gym is its own kind of game, where the score is marked by your PR (personal record)- or the maximum weight you can lift. The point I’m trying to make is that there is much value in our childlike elements, many of which should not be discarded for the mores of adulthood. Many recur again and again in our adult lives even if we distance ourselves from them, play most of all. The reason Game Theory is considered so insightful is the perpetual patterns of play in our lives. 

    In conversation with one of my Ringle Students, I had to coax out of them that they enjoy gaming, and we discussed the Switch 2 and the commercial sins of Nintendo. I took some time trying to signal to them that, yes, despite the professional nature of our meeting it would be appropriate to discuss games, and yes we could do so while mixing passion and sophistication. It’s a curious ritual one has to go through when attempting to connect through the facades of the professional world. 

    Obviously there are limits, parents of the emerging Gen Alpha are right to police their children’s overuse of technology, and no game should wield so much power over a person’s behavior that it becomes a fetish- or a singular route to enjoyment. But even so, why shame yourself over enjoying the pleasure of gaming? The industry, while notorious in many ways, had only produced more and more provocative interventions. Character-pieces like RDR2 with beautiful visuals, ethereal Metroidvanias like Hollow Knight, immersive historical RPGs. The capacity for gaming to reach artistic heights comparable to film and literature grows more potent by the day. 

    One Piece is not my favorite manga, but it’s certainly up there, for a reason that Oda summarized quite well when asked why his manga has achieved such titanic success. He said, “Entering society often means losing freedom. Luffy has a child’s heart, so he does whatever he wants. That aspect is probably what adults already toiling in society, and children about to enter society, find so appealing.” Indeed, what makes Luffy so attractive as a character are his themes of freedom and pursuing his own desires as a pirate. The central tension is made explicitly political by the overarching presence of the authoritarian World Government, for whom Luffy embodies everything that they seek to suppress (the label pirate is morally ambiguous, and merely refers to anyone in defiance of the WG). Granted, he’s helped by his supernatural abilities and his meta-status of being a main character in a manga; but isn’t the resonance of this theme illustrated by the, not one, but 5 different political movements in 5 different countries all flying the One Piece flag? Isn’t the political potential of holding onto one’s childhood, not capitulating to society and its rejection of ones dreams, proudly and promisingly displayed here? My point is not that we should all remain children and reject all notion of adulthood, but perhaps becoming a good adult means preserving and honoring the child within. 

  • A little Self-Analysis

    I haven’t been posting much recently. Perhaps I’m running out of steam. Or I’m just going through a period of my life where I wonder if I’m sure of anything, or whether I truly have anything to say on a weekly basis. But then again, that’s the paradox of anybody who writes. We all want to be original when everything is derivative. Worse, because originality and authenticity become social goods, commodities. A cute photo of a person isn’t cute in the way we think; cuteness is a state achieved by a particular pursing of the lips, a certain head tilt, a delicate hold of the wine glass. What we truly admire about a cute photo is the supreme bodily discipline and facial control on display. I sometimes think on whether writing is basically the literary form of a cute photo. Are we being authentic, or rather trying to be authentic by fooling our audience with prose? In typical metaphysical fashion, the answer lies somewhere between the two. In any case: “words will only flow once castration—inadequacy—is acknowledged. They will always flow imperfectly. But at least they will flow.” (Ruti, 2018) 

    It’s fair to say that I’ve lapsed into the unsavory position of The Cynic. The Cynic is a dismal character composed of toxic self-pity and narcissism. They feel as if they have been wronged by the world, yet they feel uniquely enlightened in their perspective on the world’s wretchedness. “I alone observe that everything is fucked, that you people are fucked, everyone else is beneath me for not seeing the shit sliding down the walls” (a college professor once humorously observed that we literally live with shit in our walls- sewage pipes extending from our bathrooms into the ground). Lacanians are fond of saying “les non dupes errant” (those who are not duped err most); this saying describes perfectly the position of the Cynic. Nevertheless, this week I’m going to conduct a little self-analysis, and tell you a story about myself.

    Sometime in Mid-October:

    I am sitting across from a man named Chak. Over the past few weeks, he’s become something of a mentor figure to me, as he is the only one who speaks English. We are in Thailand, sitting on wooden floorboards. Never could I have imagined I’d find myself here.

    Chak is an interesting character, he has a very severe facial expression, his face wrinkled and weathered like a topographical map. Yet- he also erupts in childlike laughter at the most spontaneous of times. With the haze of cannabis in the air, I find myself more intently studying the geography of his face rather than listening to his words- but he is telling me something important, something about my future. Smoking has never been my pastime, but here, without being familiar with the language, it’s the most natural way for me to connect with people. He tells me— in a gravelly voice that matches his face— about local knowledge, about human-natural relationships, about how balance can be found between the modern and the traditional. He tells me that no matter what I want to do there is a way to achieve it, to find balance between freedom and constraint, between security and harmony. He tells me all of this, and deep down I feel a twinge of some obscure emotion as I wonder if any of his sayings will actually matter to me in the long run.

    You see, despite coming to Thailand to work with the NGO Chak represents and speaking often of climate change to those around me, I am not sure I actually identify as an environmentalist. I don’t merely mean that I lack the obvious synergy with nature that Chak has, cultivated by years of experience and local knowledge, I mean that I have never even been a fake environmentalist- preaching greenwashing and “green innovative solutions”. Moreover, while I sought to develop my understanding of nature as a non-anthropocentric concept, I enjoy nature just as much as the average individual and not much more. Climate change is a problem of culture and environmental relations, one of changing our value-system to appreciate trees and animals, but it can never be reduced to just that. For me, the issue is inherently political. So, I cannot help but feel people have missed the mark when I speak of my views to those around me and they wish me luck defending the animals, as if I also do not have their interests in mind. Plus, the tree-defender characterization in our culture is typically played with a patronizing bent, many still regard environmental causes as trivial. No, the genesis of my interest in climate change was that I saw it as the clearest symptomatic expression of everything that was wrong with the world. Climate change is a byproduct of the same pathological process that produces wealth inequality, a politics of polarization, unregulated technological advancement that destabilizes livelihoods. Moreover, I simply saw it as a byproduct of the same forces that taint the concept of freedom.

    Through studying climate change, I hoped to grasp that the problem was not only the anthropocentric domination of nature by cultural and economic means: but also the lack of a political/social project at the center of our economy, the protracted erosion of an informed working class, the persistence of post-colonial world orders, and perhaps even a grievous mystification of the human condition. In short, it is modernity, so caught up in itself that it cannot imagine any other future for its subjects, even as its own future grows more dismal by the day. Through tackling climate change as a political problem, my hope was to have a basis to understand and rectify the other defects of our world. But I do not tell this to Chak, he already knows that my experience with nature is pitifully minimal, he knows I have come here to develop that experience. There are many things I do not tell him, or when I do, I disclose it in far milder form than how it manifests in my mind. I do not disclose to him for instance, that despite the time I have spent living with him, I still feel the need to run to the nearest MiniC once a week and stock up on snacks, despite the locally sourced alternatives he has taught me how to cook. I feel guilty for this, then I feel the deception is the greater sin, and I feel guilty for actively not telling him…I then start feeling guilty for feeling guilty and conclude that the whole affair isn’t worth further reflection. I don’t tell him that I’m still quite inexperienced in the use of a bong, but I see him crack small smirks at my fits of coughing in-between.

    I also do not tell him about my mixed feelings regarding China, despite us speaking extensively about the time I spent there studying. I don’t tell him that despite marveling at their technological progress and the social safety net they’ve built- plus the fact that at this point I trust their judgement on global policy more than I do the American government- I found myself unnerved by how intensely pressurized life is there. You see, in order to arrive at their illiberal socialism, the Chinese have embraced a government-controlled hypercapitalism; accompanied by its inherent problems of surplus production, a massive wealth gap, and little in the way of worker protection. And despite the facetious promises of the conservatives back home, the American economy will never truly stay ahead of China because our government lacks the centralized authority and popular support to push labor to the same brutal extremes as China does. With wise old men, I find it sacrilegious to disturb their train of thought with my juvenile conflicts and confusions, even if I still do it.

    Watching the sparks leap from the bowl as Chak solemnly puffs out the last one of the night, I ask him about my career again, about how to find that balance when it seems so difficult to find in the working world. And he simply replies “You can, you can find balance if you spend less time worrying about how to find it and simply look for it. The propaganda makes us worry about focusing on one thing, on advancement and paycheck. There is always room for life.” And with that, I receive the cue that our night has concluded by his packing up the bong and retreating to his room, and I walk out into the night listening to the choral ambiance of the insects. It’s simple…too simple for me, I think. It’s an answer that I would expect from him, nothing revolutionary. But then I realize the difference between a line like that when it’s uttered as a cliché in a TV show, and when it’s delivered with conviction by someone who’s spent decades practicing it. Decades spent in that mindset while being a climate activist even. Then I realize just how far the gap is between me and that man. I don’t think I’m at the point where I can be fully sure of myself, maybe it’ll take years of living for me to do so and finally be comfortable with my position in life. Maybe that’s just being in your 20s. But clearly, there is a way to reckon with the politics and demons of the world while finding that peace (or at least come close to it). Maybe it is as simple as not giving into anxiety and just doing things. I can’t help but feel as if I’m hamstringing an ending here, but that’s all I have for this week.

  • Attempting to Touch the Otherness

    There’s something so alluring about fiction, because it integrates that fundamentally human instinct to narrate. Every day that we live we’re simultaneously and retroactively telling ourselves a narrative. It’s necessary, because in order for life to make sense we need to cognitively micromanage it. Our memories are selective, our biases are always operative, and more than anything we need to fulfill our sense of meaning. That means that, in any scenario, fiction and storytelling is always at work. A wind is just a wind, but if the wind is a sign of God- a gratifying sign that the universe has its benevolent eye on you- it becomes something completely different.

    This is why I loved stories as a child (and still do). I daydreamed not just because I was bored, but because I found my fantasies more interesting than the flavorless slop that was school life. I loved stories in all their forms, books, movies, even the kind that respectable society deplores (video games, comics). Because what makes those mediums proper art forms, is that they parallel the way actual life experiences work. Again, the wind is purely a wind, unless the subject invokes the divine. From the perspective of secularized science, childbirth is just a process by which a blot of cells multiplies until it takes human form. This reading doesn’t acknowledge (and doesn’t change the fact) that childbirth is a miracle, romanticism is needed to appreciate that dimension. If you remember that a game is just code with inputs and outputs, or that books are really just ink shapes on paper, the fiction dissolves. But no, I take those forms, and I complement them with my own fantasy. I don’t simply play a game to watch pixels react to my moving of a joystick, I play because in that instant I am willing to partially entertain the belief that I really within the game’s “world”. Same as when I read a book, I treat the plot’s consequences as if they are actually happening.

    In any case (at least in western society) I’ve observed that our authority figures actively play on this tendency of ours. I grew up hearing of glorious futures of potential, of impact, of opportunities. Of how, if we played the game correctly, got good grades, networked with the right people, Success would follow. And what is Success? Of course what they likely meant is for us to wind up in an office, performing quotidian tasks for high pay. One locates here another instance of human self-narration, romanticizing the milquetoast of our world. Children do not associate consultants with greatness, they imagine superheroes (another sort of fantasy). Or, later on in life as I frequented more politically inclined circles, the mythmaking took a different bent. Leadership programs, impact seminars, mock trial, sermons on how we the new generation had to eclipse our forebears to save the world from its own demons. “You guys will be better, you’ll be the ones to deliver us to salvation, so let us tell you how to do it.” If you learn how to communicate with “Stakeholders”, attend more leadership programs, demonstrate your “initiative”, you’ll save the world. This was a fantasy of its own, as most of those pipelines ironically just end up propelling you into that same office. Public Policy (supposedly the academic pipeline to change) suffers from a similar condition- for most of us just end up working for the Rand Corporation.

    Yet, the sobering truth is that life simply goes on. You complete your degrees, and by some miracle (in our economy) come to possess all the signifiers of success. You wind up at the job (or more frequently you don’t) you believed was synonymous with those vague promises of greatness, and life simply goes on. They march you in with bright smiles and congratulations and fanfare all around until you reach your cubicle, bought and paid for with college tuition and years of your time, and then you’re just there. The romanticism, the moment, the event, those things become quite rare in our daily experience. This is not to say they cannot happen: being promoted, hitting a milestone, experiencing a rare and unexpected achievement, these are all remote but not infinitesimal possibilities in the 21st century. But even so, the fictions we are sold by institutions, popular society, authority figures, rarely come to fruition. Even without the propaganda, that’s simply how it is with human minds, life inevitably falls short without neurotic embellishment on our part. Even if one experiences the thrilling high of an Event, of destiny writ true, that moment is always temporary, and life simply goes on.

    And now in 2025, I find myself wondering, where exactly is the event for us? What ought we actually do with our lives? Should we as Gen Z’s simply do as society tells us to do, work to preserve ourselves while maintaining an acceptably liberal awareness of current events? Should we endanger ourselves and our stability to provocatively push the boundaries of what is politically possible? Is it one grand deceit to regard our stability as true stability, given how much we sacrifice to uphold it? Is all of this beyond me and am I transposing my personal trivial dissatisfactions onto the political (even if these categories overlap)? God, one has to deplore the way western society corrupts the temporal experience of one’s life. Your time on this earth is sorted and micromanaged anachronistically as if on a calendar, do this during these years, then work X amount of time on this, all the way until you retire and die. Yet, it’s easy to prove that capitalism cannot predict the future. Financial speculation is just that- speculation- and the only predictable trend is how quickly people give weight to that speculation (and render it into fact). In this same way, it projects a fantasy of an infinite existence for itself: the modern world is set in stone at the end of our evolution and that is how it shall be until the sun consumes the earth. Yet, every legible indicator suggests that either the system will change or burn itself out in the near future. And eco-capitalism is somewhat of its own destructive fantasy. No matter how many elegant modifiers (green energy, AI, etc.) you introduce into the formula, capitalism still needs to be changed in such a way that it would no longer be the capitalism we know. So, with the advent of the digital age, real-time information, and an enhanced awareness of the world, what ought we do? How do we reckon with (as Žižek put it) this topsy-turvy world? There is little cognitive or political mapping for this era. Climate change, the rise of neo-fascism, technocratic control, posthuman AI accelerationism, these terms come close to the mark but even then it doesn’t feel as if they encompass the full scope of what’s happening. I feel that the burden on me, on everyone who feels the weight of these issues, is to make different choices. I cannot help but feel the solution of how to reckon with the topsy-turvy world, to answer the question of what we ought to do and where the Event should lie- exists outside the scope of our knowledge. The modern world has seemingly colonized all the thinkable, that is by design.

    But this is an easy thing to say. It makes for better performative rhetoric than it does an actual point. There are other ways of knowing, of relating to the universe, of relating to self and to the world, of which a great deal can be observed and learned, but ultimately they are never quite the solution. For one, I am the first to critique the modern world order and its antagonisms, yet it’s senseless for me to ignore that the modern world and its antagonisms made me who I am. The world in its financial inequality has gifted me a comfortable existence. The culture that I’m from is imperfect, yet it’s a culture that I love still. I look at the destructive impacts of colonialism, that which shattered and stitched back together the world we know today, and I realize I can’t fully critique it, because I am explicitly a product of the post-colonial world. I will never live as sustainably or think as ecocentrically as some people. There are excessive tastes of mine, precorporated and supported by the status quo, that I find pleasure in. This does not mean we should not critique these things, nor should we get lost in penitent guilt and self-examination, but it just means the problem of solving them and extricating ourselves from the system becomes that much more difficult. I live by leave of the world I wish to change, I live still affectively and materially linked to the object of my critique, the modern fantasy is so dangerous to me because I still find it incredibly appealing (even as the evidence against it mounts). So here I am, trying to touch that otherness which lies beyond the known, trying to find the right path and the right way of thinking for our circumstances. Of course, there is no right path, it’s all subjective; but my self-narration demands I characterize it as the “right path”. I mean, surely talking about it and questioning it has to be a productive first step, right? Perhaps what my self-narration most fears is that the Event that will affect reality will not involve me at all.

  • The Best Kind of Boycott

    The main tool we use to regulate the misdeeds of corporations is the boycott. It sometimes works to great effect, there is no example more illustrative of this than the recent reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel (after Disney lost $3.8 billion from canceled subscriptions). It works, but grows less effective everyday: there are less products that people can afford to boycott and unions are no longer as provocative or as popular. Yet, we ignore the most impactful thing we could boycott, because it’s the most precious commodity of all, jobs. Corporations sustain themselves by purchasing our labor power. It never occurs to us that denying them this, boycotting the jobs and wages they sell in exchange for our labor, would be infinitely more effective than boycotting their products.

    We are experiencing a precipitous slide into corporate neo-feudalism, where mass consumption is not only motivated by pleasure but by need. The greatest trick a corporation can perform is to make a product so necessary, so integral, that society restructures itself around it. We talk of boycotting products from Amazon, or from Pepsi, but it’s never that simple. In the modern economy, the increased time demands of the workplace make the convenience of Amazon indispensable. Jobs gradually reorient productivity demands around the speed of ChatGPT, making ChatGPT necessary for timely work completion. The cycle continues in this way for every new product and every new innovation, until we forget the distinction between necessity and convenience. As the they like to put it, not using ChatGPT puts one at a “competitive disadvantage”. Jobs are very much the same, we sell corporations our labor (though of course we rarely have a hand in the negotiations). In exchange, big corporations sell goods that go far beyond employment: they sell identity, security, prestige, the promise of wealth, healthcare benefits, even a distorted conception of freedom. What we tend to forget is that because the corporation is so successfully etched into our culture, a job ceases to be purely a means of accumulating wealth- it becomes a social identity. The culture, public image, and instrumental logic of working a lucrative job become equally as marketable as the wage itself. LinkedIn privileges the Performative over the Real, that much should be clear to everyone. One sees it in the same bland politically correct announcements (“I’m so thrilled to announce that I will be working at so and so…”), the insufferably bureaucratic process of networking, and job descriptions that throw in a surplus of “keywords” at the expense of real information. But, the performative quickly becomes the real, and that drastically strengthens the affective/emotional links between an individual and the corporate world.

    So jobs, like any commodity that is rendered “necessary” by late-stage capitalism, are incredibly hard to boycott. People all over the world do not have the financial or social luxury to boycott any product, jobs least of all. But jobs are diverse, we don’t need to work for Meta: startups exist, smaller organizations exist, the market only grows more stagnant if we all work for Big Tech. Blackstone and Lockheed Martin are basically countries at this point, both in terms of valuation and political power. I see so many Gen Zs, supposedly the generation most educated in the excesses of the market and the need for social reform, all getting snapped up by this culture. Granted, we work because we have to, but it goes beyond that. The performative is becoming real for us and the number of Gen Zs I see just embracing hierarchical corporate culture at the expense of awareness (people who were literal kids just a few years ago) is appalling. Eating Sweetgreen instead of McDonald’s and purchasing less Amazon packages are not enough. If you want to stop Bezos from buying out another city then don’t fucking work for him. I’m not arguing for complete divestment, but your labor is not worth these organizations that are slowly but surely locking us into purgatory. The image, the corporate identity, so marketable and so promotable on social media, is not worth your faith. I hear stories of GenZs taking out loans to appear as if they possess this image of wealth. Is this not another proof that all the privileges promised by corporate life will only become more unattainable as the cycle continues (most Gen Zs can’t afford housing)? Find startups, find diversity, find organizations with missions. We can’t solve all the world’s problems, we can’t constantly remind ourselves that every sentence of ChatGPT costs a spoonful of water, doing that breaks the spirit. But we can diversify our options, we can try and practice just an iota more of self-reflection. Labor is the most important tool we have, the most potent boycott weapon. Without people to man their warehouses, perform all their bureaucratic tasks, manufacture their PR, their products and influences would become irrelevant. The impact it would have on them would be exponentially greater than the one it would have on our technocratized lives.

  • The 100-Year Journey

    The Columbia River Basin has long been host to an array of dams that infringe upon the way of life of the Indigenous Tribes that depend on the river. Such dams, constructed through government or private contract, produce a host of effects that typically go unnoticed by government forces. Unique in certain contexts, but it also seems as if this story repeats itself globally over and over again. We are familiar with it by now, the banishment of Indigenous politics and problems to the periphery of cultural thought. Even to some of the most “liberal” of “liberals” in the First World, such a case as this might easily be brushed off as another unfortunate instance of a people meeting the harsh but inevitable march of modernity (this sentiment is often played with a utilitarian bent: “most will eventually be better off for it”). So when food and water contamination, erratic water flows, and habitat destruction lead a group of people to decades-long litigation with the US Government, an outside observer might assume that this is happening all over the world, and might conclude its a futile struggle.

    And yet…they won. In 2024, the Kwoneesum Dam, blocking approximately 7 miles of stream and fish habitats, was deconstructed. The deconstruction finished last month, can you imagine the sensation? This thing which stood for decades, impeding people’s lives, seemingly immovable despite generations of litigation against its presence, gone completely. It is insane to think the generations that came before must have tirelessly worked to bring that dam down, every single day feeling the impacts of its pretense but still litigating, still advocating, still functioning despite the utter contempt and indifference the world seemed to show their cause at times. And here’s the real mindfuck, can you imagine the psychology of a person who struggles every day for a future they know they won’t see? (Andor touches on this beautifully, albeit in very different contexts). There were decades of struggle, which means people in the past, got up and worked years all without seeing the dam budge an inch, but continuing anyway.

    Strictly speaking, one might conclude this isn’t my struggle. But perhaps this mentality of “strictly speaking” needs to change, not for me to fulfill my libidinal demand for moral validation, but because I live on this earth, I breathe the same air, and through roundabout ecological processes actually drink the same water. What modern problems reveal, not just climate change but conflicting national identities, marginalization of people, culture wars, genocides, is perhaps that countries are an outdated cultural model to combat them. The separation of our people into countries impede the emergence of a larger collective, the UN (a half-baked collective) is the best living example of this. Legacy is typically thought of as an individual thing: “What will people have to remember me when I die?” Many people in this situation would despair at their legacy being reduced to a dam that has not fallen, because it says little of them individually by the metrics of achievement that our society so elevates. But it’s not just about one person, it never is. Legacy is always collective and it’s always entrusted to a larger community- your legacy only persists because your descendants and loved ones bear it into the future.

    Let me be clear, Kwoneesum is one dam among many others that remain erected. But that’s ok, because the communities involved are on a journey of over 100 years. A decades long journey of litigation and toil that goes far beyond any single person’s life, indeed a journey that goes beyond most peoples’ lifespans. Perhaps similarly, we’re all on a 100-year journey, even a 1000-year voyage as Yukimura Makoto put it in his Vinland Saga. A journey towards a collective destination that persists even after death, one that’s not guaranteed to succeed but will endure if we entrust it to others. And what does the removal of Kwoneesum prove if not that the 100-year journey eventually does lead somewhere?

    There’s this moment I keep coming back to in James Gunn’s Peacemaker (spoilers ahead). In the first season, our titular character (played by John Cena) has to overcome the abusive influences of his white supremacist father (played by Robert Patrick), and is forced to kill him in the penultimate episode. Season 2 introduces an interdimensional portal through which Peacemaker stumbles upon an alternate world, where not only are his father and brother still alive but live together as a loving family. Yet, in what is intended as sharp political commentary, Peacemaker is oblivious to the signals that this utopia is in fact, a Nazi dimension. When the deception is revealed (for Peacemaker chooses to permanently replace and masquerade as his doppelgänger), we are shown that this world is a reversal in more ways than one. In contrast to his original father, his alternate father is actually opposed to Nazi values and clandestinely works against them. And James Gunn has Robert Patrick give this phenomenal monologue at the moment of disclosure, where he says:

    “I didn’t create the problems in my world, and I don’t agree with them. I applaud you if your world is perfect and you fight every injustice you ever see. Unfortunately I haven’t got the strength for that. I fight the madmen, murderers and monsters in front of me because that’s all I can control. And at the end of my life when I stand in judgement before God, I hope that he knows that I did the best I could, and I left this world a better place than when I came.”

    Sadly this revelation comes too late for Peacemaker’s allies, who kill the alt-father under the belief that he remains as evil as the original, if not worse in the Nazi Dimension; leaving the distraught Peacemaker only a few moments to mourn his father a second time, this time mourning him as the good man he might’ve been. But like this monologue expresses, maybe that’s all we can do within this 100-year journey: work on what we can control, do what we can, hope that at the end we have contributed in some small way, and know that we will not make these gestures alone in our struggle to be better human beings. Perhaps this means accepting that whatever choices I make are unlikely to immediately shift the pillars of the world, but certainly does not mean recusing myself from the process and entrusting it to the next generation.

  • Freedom’s Paradox

    Freedom can only be truly realized through constraint, which means it is one of the most elusive and incomprehensive phenomena we can encounter. In its purest form, we all desire it, feel its absence and cherish the rare moments when it is present. Perhaps even our most impulsive and instinctual actions channel freedom in its purest form. Yet that does not obscure the simple reality that people are overwhelmed by an abundance of choice, true unbounded freedom typically leads to an existential stalemate.

    When first learning about transgender people, there was one thing I kept coming back to, something that didn’t entirely make sense to me within the context of queerness: namely that (some) transpeople changed their names. If the objective is to be free, to be more true to oneself without the oppression of societal norms, why is this freedom only realized by aggressively conforming to another norm (such as changing one’s name from “Luke” to “Luna”)? Certain transitions involve dressing up, acting, empathizing, and doing as much as possible to escape one normative prison only to fall into the arms of another normative prison. The younger me asked: “Why not be who you truly are, why adopt this mask?”. Surely “Luna” is not ‘the real you’, but an amalgamation of norms regarding womanhood, and you seek to inhabit her.” This is a reduction of what’s actually happening, but the question remains interesting for me. This is also why I don’t find the “trans-women are/are not women” debate to be entirely unreasonable, even as it fills up with toxic actors and ideological distortions. My personal theory is that, well if you want to transition (leave your birth identity), you need to transition into something, go somewhere. The domains of man and woman are rigid, but their rigidity-their concrete societal mapping- is what makes them guideposts. Like the beacon of Alexandria guiding people to safe harbor, even if another gender identity is not necessarily more “free” than one’s birth identity, it serves as a dependable space of retreat. To find out who you truly are, perhaps you need to experience it through another mask, through the constraints of “Luna”. Of course many queer people opt for non-binary labels, but I imagine this is confusing in its own way, for to be non-binary is to be in “societally uncharted waters”. Plus there is the conundrum of society never having enough labels, there are only so many ways in which you can express your identity through language. Subsequently, each label- if too integrated into the mainstream understanding of gender- risks becoming its own sort of binary. If anything, language charts the waters and draws up the categories, and those categories can only manage so much complexity when defining any kind of identity (including gender). So, perhaps freedom for certain trans-women can only be realized through the constraint of womanhood, vice versa for certain trans-men.

    True freedom, unbounded, is more like saying “I no longer wish to be this”, and then asking “what do I become now?” only for the abyss to remain silent. We all rely on some external structure, some cultural norm to guide our actions in this world. Oftentimes the decisions we make are not necessarily our own, but are informed or directly decided by this external structure. A parochial way of putting it would be that people oftentimes do not want to think for themselves. Capitalism is so alluring in this sense because it feeds on this ontological condition of ours, it is a heightened and universalized external structure, so almost every decision we make is made easier by its norms. “Get good grades in school”, “study the topics that are most marketable”, “attend this college”, “get this job”, “fill this 401k”, “have a suburban family”, then continue to hit all the right milestones until you die. Who is to say that we ourselves choose these pursuits, when they are mandated by an outside or collective influence? But on the other hand, what would we choose if that influence were not there, how would we know what to choose? Freedom perhaps challenges us to transcend that structure, to make decisions that are not obvious, and abridged from the structure. That’s what makes routine so appealing and so hard to discard. Because even if we did not choose it, and even if all those milestones are in service of staving off the not-so-subtle threat of poverty: with those milestones come the promise of identity, of purpose, of happiness, of standing, of safety both cultural and material- things that would be very hard to find on our own if they were not flashed in front of us by the structure.

    Note- I am not sure where biological functions (i.e hunger) fit into this discussion, for surely those are involuntary but not external to us (even if they are conditioned by external structures).

    The experience of ADHD is difficult to explain, and the modern understanding is limited and does not account for all its manifestations. But it is my personal belief that ADHD enhances the paradox of freedom. There is firstly the well-known psychological phenomenon of “ADHD paralysis”, where a subject feels intense anxiety or apathy when confronted by how many things one could pursue. Conversely, there is also the occurrence of pursuing as much as possible, being relentlessly stimulated by everything that attracts interest. To be ADHD, or to be neurodivergent, is to be someone out of lockstep with reality (well let’s be honest isn’t everyone?): we act on how we feel, on what interests us, we quite literally act out until something cues us to shut in- which has been called “impulsivity” by many. Yet, when we are told to do something or asked to engage in a task that does not arouse our interest, our attention wanders, we fail to follow instructions, we struggle to see or derive any meaning in what is being asked of us. In post-juvenile Gen Z life this takes on a different form. Firstly, there’s the emergence of widespread internet access, the short-term dopamine machine. I opine that no mind craves this bulwark against boredom and the existential stalemate more than the neurodivergent mind. Secondly, there’s the widespread usage of CNS stimulants, adderall, methylphenidate, to condition the ADHD mind to engage in unwanted tasks via an artificial supply of dopamine. The unwanted tasks, of course, typically being the tasks of the external structure: getting good grades, imposing bureaucratic organizational structure on your time, meeting deadlines, applying to jobs, slogging through the most boring and uninspired assignments, etc. When asked to meet the impossible standard of “the way the practical world works”, it is these medications that help us overcome the deficit. Yet a curious thing happens when we become addicted to these prescription pills, the minute we stop taking them we don’t feel any urge to do anything, not even the things we liked and “acted out” for as children. Similarly we find it difficult to be off our phones, for they interrupt the void/existential stalemate with the endless array of amusements they offer. Where dopamine used to flow naturally for specific and “impulsive” things, it now barely flows at all when we disconnect ourselves from the mandates of the structure, quite literally when we disconnect from our phones and our drugs. Because quiet, and the space to make our own decisions, untethered freedom, is unbearable once introduced to the reliability of drug-enhanced productivity and endless distraction. Is this not a sort of complete picture of freedom and how hard it is to grasp? The neurodivergent perhaps experience freedom acutely in the sense that our spontaneous impulses and our most “authentic” behaviors are not conditioned by structure, yet once introduced to structure we are the ones who most suffer without it. We cannot abide ennui, or a lack of purpose, yet we lapse into depressive anhedonia when faced with all the things we could do. Freedom is perhaps the neurodivergent child screaming joyfully in the classroom even if it is disruptive and forbidden; or perhaps it’s the neurodivergent sitting in his bed staring at the ceiling, wondering what the hell he should do with his life, or if that answer eludes him- what should he do in this very moment. Oh well, the phone is right there to subjugate him to the mind circus of social media, games, and YouTube, and avoid the difficult contemplation of freedom.

    Georges Bataille had a theory of depense, where a state should expend the energy and resources of its citizens to keep them from encountering the conscience de soi. In the context of this post the conscience de soi is closest to what I have termed the existential stalemate. A good state that put its resources to use would allow the citizens to ignore the existential stalemate and simply live their lives. But modern governments cannot be trusted, we see that more and more now. A modern state that could constrain my freedom in such a way that it is realized without me having to constantly reevaluate those constraints, would be ideal. How to fix that, I have no clue, but let’s not conclude it’s out of our reach just yet.

    Announcement: I’ll be dual running this page and a Substack, entries will be posted onto both. I’ll put the link in the About Me page if you’re interested.

  • On the West, the “Third World”, and Africa

    I absolutely despise the phrase “There are children in Africa”, or “There are starving children in Africa”. It’s a tired out cliche at this point, “there are people in Africa dying so eat your food”, “people in Africa would die to be where you are right now”. Does this not seem a rather offensive characterization of Africa to begin with? Is it not common amongst westerners to cast Africa in this character of the “impoverished, Third World bushland between Casablanca and Johannesburg”. Facts are irrelevant here, whether or not this characterization contains any truth to the state of Africa is meaningless, for the mythology takes on a life of its own. I imagine the struggle for post-colonialists is to transcend the recurring fiction of “the wretched of Africa”, and to find a more nuanced and dignified history to champion. Is it also not a gross reduction of Africa’s material conditions? The saying reflects that western, anarchic techno-capitalist narrative, where Africa happens to be this undeveloped part of the world that simply hasn’t mastered the economic arts of self-enrichment. The only thing keeping Africa from the same prosperity is allegedly more First World innovations and the freeing of capital flows- of which the World Bank has made a century-long project.

    Is it not the case that that the very existence of the developed world produces Africa’s antagonisms? Capitalism, the commodities we purchase all come out of what we deem the “Third World”. The relations between an (over)developed country and an “underdeveloped” country are never as independent or straightforward as they seem. Developed superpowers require, floating pools of cheap labor, raw materials, external fields to internalize, and the outsourcing of industries. The relation is such that the world economy (or rather the needs of the developed) are discriminatory, which means they directly shape the character of the developing state’s economy. The market is never apolitical, the “neutral” mechanisms of the economy are typically synonymous with political soft power. When Matthew Perry first attempted to open trade relations with Tokugawa Japan, he was refused… until he demonstrated the power of the cannons mounted on his frigate. As the saying goes, “speak softly and carry a big stick”.

    In any case, when it comes to being a developed country, I imagine there isn’t much choice in which sectors are fostered, for the correlated reasons of competing with the larger world economy and maintaining political relations with the developed world. As such the superpower may encourage the growth of certain industries (in Africa’s case, diamonds, tourism, exotic animals, alloys), but the relationship is such that the developing countries can rarely outgrow the (this is a tasteless way of putting it) First World demand for Third World services. In a relationship identified by scholars of Dependency Theory, nations of the so-called “third world” are subordinated to popular economic demand, for what revenue they do get is from meeting said demand. This relationship, of course, can run contrary to the state’s social needs or its mechanisms for wealth redistribution. This is precisely what occurred in Nigeria where the externally funded growth of oil industries gave rise to corrupt oil barons; and in post-soviet Russia where American businesses- welcomed to the newly christened non-communist Russia with open arms- caused an unprecedented spike in organized crime. To put it in marxist terms, an underdeveloped country has comparatively more use-value to a developed country, and their whims are not independent from Third World poverty. And of course, we are all quite well-educated on the role of colonialism, that theft of people and resources that produced the original split between developed and underdeveloped, First and Third world.

    Hence, I tend to be very skeptical of First-World narratives of charity, or the “there are children from Africa” saying. The saying typically implies, “there are children starving so be grateful you aren’t and finish your peas” when it really should be “there are children starving so that you could eat your peas“. And even then, it reflects a much deeper ontological sentiment: wealth is only valuable in scarcity, and can only be affirmed by referencing poverty. I am skeptical of because it all too often reflects back as self-valorization and fulfills that libidinal demand for moral validation, but I am also skeptical because it validates the worldview that neoliberalism works for the “Third World”: if enough successful people simply give back and feed the children, then it suggests the larger system is equitable enough to excuse its antagonisms? And I’m not one to idealize pre-modernity, but I’m not so sure neoliberalism does work. Can economic development be labeled a success if the shiniest building in a town is the Shell gas station? Sometimes it seems as if modernity is literally super-imposed, with skyscrapers and gas stations towering above more rudimentary homes and neighborhoods.