What Even is This World?

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I am stuck in a strange feedback loop where what goes in does not translate to what comes out, but I am addicted to this strangeness. Yet this strangeness is not alterity, difference, that which challenges me. As this is something good - difference breeds new thought, new thinking, new ways of knowing. This strangeness to which I am addicted does not breed anything but a nostalgia for what came before, that which was, that which does not exist any longer.

What is this world?

This is a new world, our world. It is a new world where we opened Pandora’s box, and we knew it had to happen sometime. Before we looked inside this box, there was a proliferation of ideas, thoughts, disparate ways of seeing life. And few had the means to try and even bring all of these different strings together. But we all had this dream, at least those with thoughts that could not be tied down. Today we talk about interdisciplinary research, but I rather think about it as eclecticism - different methods, ways of reading, ways of seeing, without a real narrative arc. (Because why tie yourself down to one method when you can think through various lenses?)

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Either way, my view on the world was tied to a million strings vanishing into the void, but somehow I managed to make sense of the world, drawing a somewhat coherent image of it all, but I knew most people would listen to me and in their eyes I could see they thought of me as a “crazy one”. It is funny how addicted people are to structure, one way of seeing, one way of doing…

And somehow I yearned for a way of making sense of it all, I yearned for something that could capture my thoughts. Along the way, I found various things that helped, transcending pen and paper, the linear thinking forced and imposed upon us; I found ways to see through my notes to make different links between my thinking. And then we looked in Pandora’s box, we opened it and looked inside, forever cursing what is to come.

We live in a world before and after the internet, before and after covid, and now, before and after AI. What a time to be alive in. The endless opportunities to make new connections, to see the world through new lenses, sometimes so far beyond what we were used to… This new technology literally put the world at our fingertips. But at what cost.

What even is this world?

I am addicted to this new world where my thinking is clarified in such a way that it leads to the proliferation of my own ideas. Doors has opened to worlds beyond my imagination; I sometimes feel like I am on some kind of hallucinogenic - doors have opened into and unto another world. My own academic research and writing has seen renditions and reiterations and rethinkings that I cannot even think would have existed was it not for this near instant world-expanding technology.

But. At. What. Cost?

I lay awake at night in bed, thinking about everything in new ways. But along with this alterity, there is this strangeness that overtakes everything. I lay awake at night in bed, not because I am carrying on my work, but because the infinite new word has sucked me in. This is not Nietzsche’s void, one that smiles back at us, but rather a black hole that destroys. And I am not sure I like where things are headed at this stage. Because we have no idea what this world is.

All of the musings are my own, written by my very confused and tired mind. The photographs are my own, taken with my Nikon D300.