Posted on May 23, 2021 Leave a Comment
You’ve made a point of avoiding it. You consciously avert your gaze. Walking past it one morning, your attention slips, and you come face to face with your reflection in the mirror. The crooked smile, the crippled finger, the attenuated eyebrows. You’ve put on weight, you don’t look happy, your smile doesn’t have the exuberance […]
Posted on May 19, 2021 Leave a Comment
The modern world is, in many ways (and with little energy required to find examples), quite ugly. It is not that someone has attempted to make something beautiful but through lack of imagination or lack of will, mutilated the task. Rather, we live in a world that is seemingly unconcerned with beauty altogether. On the […]
Posted on May 11, 2021 Leave a Comment
Silence is more than a phenomenon marked by the absence of sound. Silence is an ideal. It manifests in at least two forms. The first is what we may call ‘imposed silence’. Imposed silence stems from an inability to speak up. It is the disempowered silence of the listener who is denied access to a […]
Posted on May 4, 2021 Leave a Comment
Kairosclerosis is the moment when you realise you are experiencing joy, but consciously try to hold on to it, prompting you to identify with it, break it down trying to understand it, and pick it apart until the delicate experience becomes the dust of an afterthought. Essentially, you can’t just be happy, you need to […]
Posted on April 28, 2021 Leave a Comment
There is no shortage of people, books, movies, and advertisements around to remind us that we live exceedingly boring and unfulfilling lives. The model you follow on Instagram taking snapshots of them lounging on a balcony in Ibiza, the author extolling you to travel to every major European city to become more interesting, the Mercedes […]
Posted on April 27, 2021 Leave a Comment
In our society, nothing is quite as it seems. This is not nihilistic philosophy or conspiratorial thinking, but rather simple acceptance of the fact that there is so much pretence everywhere we look. The fake smiles of service industry employees, the public relations of large corporations promising us that they really care, the businesspeople hurrying […]
Posted on April 8, 2021 Leave a Comment
In one sense, we eat too much. We eat so much food that people are more likely to get sick from issues related to over-eating than under-eating. In the 2017-2018 financial year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released a report finding 67% of adults were overweight or obese, a figure likely greater today than when […]
Posted on April 6, 2021 Leave a Comment
As children we are showered with love and affection. We receive sweet words of encouragement as we learn a new skill, kind glances as we fumble with complicated items; plenty of kisses, and of course, lots of hugs. From the cradling of a new born baby to the long hug goodbye on the first day […]
Posted on March 24, 2021 Leave a Comment
One of the most debilitating and inadvertently narcissistic beliefs we have is that people generally care about us. I am referring here to everyday life. Of course, if you were drowning at the beach, or bleeding on the street, someone would certainly come to help you. But even then, they do not help because they […]
Posted on March 23, 2021 Leave a Comment
‘Not everything is useless’, writes Josef Pieper in his counter-cultural work Leisure, The Basis of Culture. ‘which cannot be brought under the definition of the useful’. Yet, in our pragmatic society we seem to disagree, only finding value in that which can be tied to productivity or efficiency. Underfunding arts while increasing funding for economics […]
