Long posts

2023 was the year of feeling depleted.

I think, for a lot of us, the buzz of modern life both encourages us to be participants in our daily existence, pursuing the future, while also distancing us from meaningful answers to its growing complexity. Sure, we can pick up a book, watch the news, or have a conversation with a familiar to parse things out.

But these can often make us feel depleted rather than revived. 2020 was a similiar vibe, the difference being that statistics did most of the talking and answering. Many of us were stuck in a cone of silence which wrapped around our inner turmoil.

And so 2024 begins, the embers of yesteryear still smoldering: the wars in Ukraine and Palestine, a world economy that seems to have an identity crisis (blistering hot in many sectors but also lacking real confidence), democracy teetering on the edge of a knife while mass media encourages rage or worse, amnesia and ignorance.

Depletion could be seen as a symptom or a cause. Perhaps being exhausted, or having one's choices exhausted, may be the root of a larger problem: a world without engaged and honorable leadership. It could also be the symptom: a mass recognizance that common trust, and other values once commonly shared are no longer answers we look towards.

The BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis, made himself a career studying twentieth century mass depletions in culture, economy and politics. Many of his takeaways on developments during that time go something like this: "It was a horrible event and nobody knew why it happened, so reasons were invented and disbursed and the public behaved as if it believed even though it probably didn't".

What Curtis then offers is that modern answers, and intelligent and trustworthy leadership to conceive of and deliver them, are about as believe-able concepts as their false counterparts e.g. the world has always been rudderless and chaotic.

2024 appears to be no different than the subject of Curtis films, with its meandering towards certain oblivion. The abyss of last year certainly continues this year, so rather than feel depleted, I'm opting to embrace the meaningless of it all. I'm letting go of the measures of striving against the tide and accepting the chaos.

Perhaps any order and logic inside the chaos will reveal itself this year.