How solutions are always in the future? It's kind of obvious that they should be in the future, right, but it's quite funny when you think about it. The constantly thinking self is never satisfied, but never realizes this simple observation. It thinks that if it only solves a few problems here and there, then and only then can it stop, take a deep breath and finally relax! But it never happens.
At the company I work in, the office follows an open space design, such that there is no closed wall between employees, supposedly to favor cooperation and communication between people. In reality, it's mainly because no one has their own personal desk, it's the flex desk principle, which incidentally fits in the whole idea of making employees as replaceable as possible.
Anyway, one of the higher-ups has a personal office, a small room which is closed off from the rest and which requires a special badge to open, because obviously the nobility doesn't mix in with the peasants.
It made me think about what would happen during a power outage though, because the door to that room is dependent on the electrical system being on. From what I've heard, those doors are supposed to open in case they don't receive any power, but as everyone who works with complex technology knows, 'supposed to' is not always what happens in practice, and it made me think of the irony of a higher-up being trapped in their own office if the power went out. Something about someone wishing to isolate themselves from the pleb, and getting exactly what they desired, but not in the way they wanted, and dying because of it during a fire.
Last week of January where I live features a week-long strike in public transportation. What I find 'funny' about those strikes is that the trade unionists always make it seem like they are really sticking it to the state and their reforms, standing up for all of us, but in practice they are mainly screwing the average person, in fact the poorer amongst us since wealthier people don't take public transport.
I understand that they don't have much more of a choice to make the government listen to them, but it's truly unfortunate that the casualty is and always will be the average person, not the ones on the benefiting end of the outrageous inequality.
It's the same thing with basically everything else isn't it? Warfare leads to atrocious outcomes for the soldiers, the brave people fighting for their country, but the ones in power get off scot-free from their decisions. Same thing with business malpractice, like exposure to toxic chemicals in manufacturing industries, or medical malpractice, such as how in France there was a scandal with contaminated blood which ended up infecting people with HIV.
Perhaps this is why so many stories feature some sort of revenge against this horrendous state of affairs, so that we may feel some sort of closure for the victims and the abusers, because real life doesn't give it to us.
If the main thought you have when you look at proposed changes or political events is "this won't solve anything important or long-term" then first of all, I would totally agree with you, but second of all, it's worth keeping in mind that it's not the point at all.
Why would anyone in power want to solve problems? This is what thriving societies do, but in a declining society, people are far more concerned with keeping their power, reassuring the population so that they can keep working at their job, rather than ensuring long-term stability. Solving problems is not the point, keeping the status quo long enough to ensure that they can keep their power as long as possible is the point, the same way that people on a sinking ship are looking for a lifeboat for themselves first, and maybe if they have the time and empathy, help others second. Similarly, no one is paid to provide answers.
Following up on the age of Aquarius, the only sensible phase shift of humanity I can think of is if we learned how to build collectives that can smoothly die off, instead of the currents one which try to grow and remain in power as long as they can. The latter lead to the zombie economy we have today, only propped up by cheap fossil fuels and coercive labor, but which are ultimately not sustainable at all.
Just like a healthy body is constantly regenerating itself, a healthy collective needs a way to allow things to die, or at least follow some sort of up and down cycle akin to the change of the seasons. As much as the coming decades of decline will be painful in the West, this will be a necessary stepping stone for wiser people in my opinion. I don't know how long it will take, but I think human beings are intelligent enough to eventually allow death and decline into how we view collective life, because that is how hunter gatherers used to view their own, as part of a broader cycle of transformations.
The image on this article highlights the difference between various types of glass when they break. The standard glass (annealed) breaks into sharp fragments, which is why it's such a bad idea to punch a window. Tempered glass breaks into nodules which aren't as sharp, though this video indicates to me that perhaps they aren't all that different from the annealed fragments, and laminated glass tends to remain whole, like when the front window of your car receives a shock.
There is an interesting analogy to the way that systems may break: most things look similar when they are functioning properly, but as soon as things start breaking down, the things which are resilient will clearly stand out from those which are fragile. By and large, the direction of our system has privileged efficiency and power, (as an emerging property, not a conscious decision) not resilience, but the coming decades of decline will reveal the limitations of those tradeoffs.
All the cheap cement will start breaking down, our reliance on digital technologies will be exposed, our electrical grid will experience shutdowns, our decades-old plumbery will malfunction, etc.
In the most recent Darren Allen journal entry, he describes some of the ideas he used to have which he no longer believes in, and it made me think about my own journey.
§1. I think the biggest shift for me is realizing that a worldview could never settle into a final form. I drifted between the cult of self-help, which many people with anxiety and procrastination issues converge towards, with a bit of meditation sprinkled here and there, which opens the gateway to (Westernized) "spirituality", which in my case involved a lot of narcissism because my entry point for this was the channel Actualized.Org (which I might write about at some point), and then thinking that the modern world in general was pretty dreadful as I came across writers who critiqued it, thinking that settling into either Christianity or some form of occultism would be my final "step", and then realizing that those two would be dead ends, because attaching myself to them would come from a desire to tether myself to dead forms, rather than a pure desire to live consciously and embody love.
§2. I studied mathematics at university, because I was good at it in high school. Little did I know that the two have nothing to do with one another, not just in terms of difficulty, but even in what is the focus and approach to begin with. High school doesn't teach maths, it teaches computation, applying methods and formulas without much thought to them, whereas in mathematics you actually to think through arguments, definitions and their consequences, and learn to abstract and generalize. Mathematics is kind of an inane activity (again, I might write about this) but there was a period where I fancied myself going down that path, maybe becoming an academic and dedicating the rest of my life to this.
In hindsight that would have been an atrocious mistake. Academics are miserable, narrow people, and studying only one narrow subfield of an already abstract subject, secluded from everyday people and their experiences, would have just kept me in what I frankly consider to be a cult, the cult of academia. It would have been the kind of decision that people make early on in their life and then spend the rest of it regretting, living the deluded fantasies of a clueless 18 year old.
The funny thing is that the main aspect of maths I enjoyed wasn't so much the reasoning, which is what you spent most of your time doing, but the aesthetics of the symbols on the black board, and playing around with diagrams and visualization. I liked how you could reframe a problem into something you could tangibly visualize, which is probably why a channel such as 3Blue1Brown became so popular. All in all, art was definitely my calling ever since I was a kid, I used to love drawing, but then stopped for some reason, and now that I'm getting back to it, I realize just how little I used to know myself.
§3. I had a small phase where I thought about how to work as little as possible, had the ethos of retiring early and all of that. In hindsight, what I hated was meaningless, coercive and bureaucratic work, not work itself. As much as some people might scoff at the idea, work can be sort of divine when you feel aligned with something bigger than yourself, when you are actually contributing to something lasting and beautiful, something analogous to a cathedral. (which I acknowledge required a lot of back-breaking work, destruction of natural environments and no doubt a lot of coercion, but which are nonetheless gorgeous, a glimpse of the eternal for us finite mortal people)
So now I want my work to honor what it is to be human in our times, instead of avoiding work at all costs. In general, trying to avoid difficulty as much as possible is the road for a miserable life, because it makes you avoid anything which you, more precisely your self, does not like, which will poison your love life, your health, and much more.
§4. Having grown up around some Muslim people, I used to be more sympathetic towards Islam, but now I think that whatever goodness is in the people from that religion, which definitely is there for the record, exists despite their religion, not because of it. I have found that the women in Muslim communities tend to be quite nice to be around, warm and friendly when you get to know them, and here and there you find a gentle, sensitive man, but those people exist despite what their worldly religion tells them, because funnily enough, most theists don't know their religion all that well do they?
I am not saying that Muslims are terrorists, or anything as crude as that, I am saying that Islam perpetrates the same disconnect from consciousness which plagues Judaism, and most of Christianity (everything which doesn't come from Christ basically), and then tries to impose some form of "morality" and order through an iron fist, top-down onto its people. This is why the Abrahamic religions are so obsessed with following rules, because the consciousness from which love emerges is missing, and this is why their followers tend to be so keen on pursuing power and justifying it as valid spirituality, and why so many of them are afflicted with problems which they are not interested in resolving, such as sexual problems, drinking problems, mood problems, etc.
§4b. Muslims, and African people in general, also do not have much respect for the country they migrate in. My parents have migrated to Europe, and always made it an important point to adapt and integrate to the country we live in, and after witnessing the way in which migrants have a way of forming their own parallel societies, I have come to appreciate the mindset of my parents. They keep to themselves, even and especially at early ages, use words that only they understand, make fun of the locals who tend to be far more respectful towards them than they are respectful towards locals, have no interest in local history or culture, on and on.
I have witnessed all of this firsthand as a kid, and you could say that this is a biased outlook because people are very different when they are young, which is fair, but how could you expect such behavior to correct itself as people age? If anything, I expect the self-segregation to get even worse as the years go by, as they live more and more in their own parallel society, develop habits and sub-networks in the economy. I'm actually surprised at how much it took for right-wing sentiments with regards to immigration to take over in Europe, because public schools are already made of a majority of immigrants.
§5. I used to think that the Zettelkasten, or some way of writing atomic notes and linking them to one another, was the key to collect notes and be good at thinking. Now I realize how naive it is, because real intelligence is not about having good atomized ideas which you link up together, it's about a unity in perception which allows you to see a situation with clarity, which allows you to be one with your insight, which is then expressed clearly and beautifully in your writing.
An atomized intellect, such as produced by the Zettelkasten, might be correct in some narrow fashion, might come up with novel ideas, but those qualities by themselves are not enough to produce a truly great mind, which is rooted in unity, because discernment does not come from an amalgam of parts, but one consciousness being in tune with the situation.
This is why I have transitioned towards writing those pieces instead of adding notes to a system, because the process of fleshing out an entire text is part of the thinking. It's not just a matter of having good ideas and adding filler text to connect those, no, every part is a reflection of the whole.
Good writing is not just about having good ideas, it's also about the rhythm, the coherence, the metaphors, the composition of all of those, and focusing on taking atomized notes ultimately makes your writing very poor.
Just like people used to think that the fascia in the body was merely "connective" tissue, but then realized that it was fundamental to the stability of our body, and deeply intertwined with our psychological and emotional integration, I used to think that writing full texts only differed from my notes in how much "connective writing" was added, but this metaphor is utterly wrong. What I did was more like taking a few snapshots of a place I liked, and thinking that I could reconstruct the landscape from those, when in reality, the whole which I painted felt disconnected, incoherent, discordant, and ultimately ugly to read.
There is much more to say, because here I described intellectual mistakes. There are of course artistic mistakes I have made and still keep making, and broader errors in how I live day to day. For instance, I have found myself closing my heart to people over the past years, which I think is kind of the inevitable consequence of going through a school and work system which have no use whatsoever for human empathy, and put obedience and efficiency above all else, but no matter what the excuse is, the consequence is the same: I am not a very loving person, and I want to change that.
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2026-01-30