Everything is Existential Now
Each decision is life or death
Tuesday, June 17th
17/30
From the meditations of The Pale Metaphysician
Warning: I discuss some pretty existential stuff here that may trigger anxiety. Reader discretion is advised.
More people are anxious than ever, especially the young, and I don’t think it takes a team of psychologists to figure out why. The world is increasingly VUCA: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Anyone reading this recalls hearing the phrase “unprecedented times” during COVID, and indeed that never stopped — everything is unprecedented now!1 We’ve seen more “unprecedented” in the past five years, hell, in the past six months, than people have seen in decades. Climate change, geopolitical pressure, soft-fascism; the risks have never been greater. But we all know this, we all feel it to some degree or another, it simply exists in the background like some ever present nudge in the back of your head screaming that everything is not OK, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: what we’re seeing is not OK.
This carries a unique burden for every decision insofar that the ramifications are deadly serious and resonate beyond the current moment. Career decisions, for example, used to be somewhat a matter of preference and had a lot of flexibility; now, everyone just wants to get rich — no, must get rich, and will take the career most likely to get them there. Not a bad idea considering the alternatives. Whereas before being wealthy got you a nicer house, nicer car, nicer dinners, it now gets you an entirely different symbolic reality to play around in. The rich metaphysically do not exist on the same plane as mere mortals and heaven forbid what happens if you fall through the gaps and are left bereft of housing, medicine, food, etc. Even where we live has become existential; I know people considering moving to places like Minnesota in the hopes that it stays cooler as the rest of the world heats up,2 and finding “climate proof” locations has become an entire industry. And don’t get me started on doomsday preppers. What used to be a niche hobby has turned into a nationwide trend with, naturally, the bourgeoisie getting in on it too.
Of course, the issue with all this is that our choices have always held significance and that each historical moment is, well, historical. The world is always ending! Each epoch brings with it its own anxieties and fears and catastrophes, though it would be folly to deny the sensitivity of our current moment what with the interconnectedness of it all;3 however, the point remains that things always kind of suck to some degree or another. Does that mean that everything will just turn out ok? Of course not! It also doesn’t mean giving up, either. Nihilism is the bane of existence — literally. It’s an auto-annihilating system of thought that collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. What we can trust is that the People generally have a desire to care for one another for that is how we are conditioned. Love is as natural as breathing. It just happens. There are strong countervailing forces that are conditioning a natural state of hatred within people in order to sow division and reap the reward, namely, personal enrichment, but these are neither inevitable nor complete, for how could they be? Embedded rhizomatically within dynamic couplings and stratifications as we are, it would be impossible to completely sever those connections — as I’ve said before, there is no out, over, or above, just through, and the act of through, the coming-up-against, is itself an act of love, of trusting one another in order to act, its natural prerequisite. Like I said at the start: everything is existential now.
I personally actually dislike this phrase as it assumes a degree of normality that’s ever existed. Normal compared to what? Normal to whom?
Ironically, as climate change creates more and more volatility in the, well, climate, we may see that things get colder in the short term all while steadily the average temperature ticks upwards.
Though this is strictly from a digital communications perspective. Metaphysically everything has always been connected via processes coupling, decoupling, and recoupling.