culture

Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.

Money and health are nothing more than the means by which we build a meaningful existence. Yet, in the grip of a neoliberal culture, these means have become ends. Money and health, instead of supporting a life of purpose, have become the ultimate purposes of life.

How many of us actually identify the public good with our own good? For most of us, the outside world exists for our income and our enjoyment. We have a using-based relationship with the world, not a caring one. Again, this is not entirely our fault.

So the loss of autonomy, of self-reliance, is the primary driver of the meaning crisis. Work itself is not the problem, it’s 'wage' work: work we don’t care about, work we’re forced to do for the majority of our lives. Everything else follows from this. When we are alienated from our labor—when our best creative energies are spent on meaningless pr... See more

The internet-ification of our lives is not a response to the hostility of the built environment to communal life but a continuation and intensification of that hostility.

I ultimately think that the people who are histrionic about safety in San Francisco—they just hate cities! They hate the fact that they have to interact with other people, people who are visibly poorer than them and different from them, when they go out into the world. They hate the fact that homeless people exist and that they have to see them, in... See more

A lot has been written about how the internet radicalizes people. But the same dynamics that turn a slightly lonely young man into a seething misogynist—recommendation algorithms; social contexts that concentrate and intensify discourse—are also the dynamics that turn a young person who “likes reading” into someone who spends a year reading Proust,... See more

Here’s some extremely obvious advice for anyone living in San Francisco (or any city, really) that feels lonely: go outside, strike up conversations with strangers, and accept every invitation someone extends to you until you become BFFs and/or your social calendar is full for the next 3 months.

The meaning of OXI we should fight for is the belief in politics itself. OXI is the belief that we can throw off the demands of a supposedly ‘impartial’ economy that serves only the few, that we can reject the fallacy that ‘economic necessity’ demands something we consider socially unacceptable, and instead begin to make decisions about our own col... See more