Days of plenty

Today we live in the world of plenty, yet we never have enough. 

Plenty of food, plenty of entertainment, plenty of opportunities and plenty of wasted time. So much so that we hardly find a few minutes to look into ourselves and see what we have become while being pulled under the manic tides of social norms. 

Nowadays, in developed societies, even the poor live lives that a few centuries ago were available only to a privileged few. However, the standard of poverty is always defined by what wealth is considered in that culture. If the standard of wealth was to be measured in one's capacity to achieve a lot with as little as possible, then poverty would be just as abundant as in our culture.

To supply the plenty for a part of the world, other parts of the world are exploited and crippled into underdevelopment. As the population rises dismally, even extreme poverty is enjoyed by plenty of people around the world, but at least there’s plenty of apathy to safeguard our plenty of comforts against their growing numbers. 

We are ever more inclined towards material pursuits, yet immaterial influences drive us. What we cannot grasp, in a literal sense, we don’t bother ourselves too much with. For this reason, we never give too much mind to the quality of the intellectual goods that we mentally consume and, as a result, we never give too much to our mind. We are more inclined to seek comforting validations through such goods rather than confront ourselves with critical thought. 

This culture of excess, that we hardly think of as such, leads to plenty of problems, plenty of pollution, plenty of waste, plenty of illnesses, and plenty of stress that never seems to be placed pragmatically but rather ends up dissipating into meaningless conflicts, either with ourselves or those around us that, to some degree, almost becomes indistinguishable. A sort of an existential handicap we encourage through our media and celebrity culture as to feel spiritually comforted with our destructive tendencies.

Plenty of issues pile up, overlooked with plenty of distractions. The more the issues grow, the more violent our distractions become. The more distracted we are, the less we are inclined to look into ourselves and see how we have grown foreign to our own nature. The more we look the more painful it becomes. 

Fearful of what we might find further within our neglected self, we feel compelled to return to our distractions, to plenty of dreams where we could dream of plenty other things. But, these are not our dreams, they are not the dreams of the self, but wishes. The dreams of the self we dispense with as soon as we can, hoping that with them also our growing frustrations and anxieties will go. Dreams that cryptically hold plenty of answers to our relationship with ourselves and our surrounding world, answers that conflict with our wishes and the many ideals we strongly believe.

Behind the plenty of selfish beliefs that makes us live apart from the world, sits hidden the self that is a part of the world. 

Toxic Relationship

The city speaks if you learn to listen with your eyes. 

It tells you the story of the people that live there. A story of yesterday and the day before, of the anxious now and the ever grinding wait for tomorrow. 

A long walk through the tangled mess of car infested streets, passed the architectural cacophony complemented by the social extremities found in very close quarters, there’s a silent story. Poverty blended with wealth, old with new, beauty with ugliness, an awfully confusing mix that would not let you draw a definite conclusion. Such, I learned that there is no coincidence in how cities look, but that there’s a profound link between habitation aesthetics and the general mentality of its inhabitants that, to some extent, works in a feedback loop.

In this relationship, one thing that fascinated and inspired me, ever since I moved to Bucharest in the mid 90’s, was the people that were somehow innately interlinked with their surroundings. 

Back then I was only seven years old and I felt like I'd entered an alien world. One where people passed by like fleeting ghosts, some locked in metal cages on wheels that bellowed noxious fumes, others caged up in mental solitary confinement that bellowed out noxious thoughts.  

Almost immediately I started noticing some people that exhibited very unusual behavior. Whenever I asked someone about them, I always got the same vague answers: they’re crazy, they’re stupid. Of course, these sorts of answers deeply irritated me and only fed my curiosity. The past few troubled years, before I got to the city,  pushed many into a mental minefield that left them psychologically maimed to various degrees and dragged on through time, life and their surrounding social environment like emotional tornados.

As a child you don’t know much about anything and you become engulfed by raw, abstract feelings that instinctually drive you to ask essential questions like: what is wrong with them? How did they end up like this? Can they recover? Is it temporary or permanent? and most importantly how can I protect myself from ending up in this condition. Gradually, I discovered psychology which seemed to answer some of the questions, but only a few, as the most important questions kept their answers hidden in a hazy mist from which all manner of beliefs usually come out. 

Bucharest is unlike any other city I’ve seen. To some extent, every city is different in its own way, as the people that live there are different, but Bucharest is an exception amongst exceptions that practices a sort of functional chaos where nothing is fixed, there’s a deficiency of certainty spiritually transposed in the surroundings by the sum of its inhabitants and it can never settle on a clear path. A selfish reluctance to actively participate where critical voices of reason are drowned out by echoes of dismal lamentations. Life there is not great but it’s not terrible either. There’s a lot of opportunities and just as many failures, and achievements are more likely to be met with bitterness. Romance and the joy of life pops out in the most unusual of places, like a dandelion that springs from the cracks in the pavement, having a glorious short-lived existence only to be crushed under the foot of a jealous and angry pedestrian, thinking that beauty is unacceptable in a dreaded place like this where only existential misery can grow.  

One other specimen that attracted my attention were homeless people, exotic invisible creatures that went against all basic principles you were taught or felt to be wrong. They were unwashed, ate from the trashcan and sleept on the garbage infested sidewalks. They too had a toxic relationship with the city, one that consumed and almost destroyed them. Sometimes I would go and talk to some of them and discover that behind the foul appearance sat hidden a vulnerable soul that, although reduced to a garbage-level existence, struggled to retain some of its humanity. They were broken by the system and failed by their fellow human beings. They refused to give in and they were spat out but kept around like a chewing gum stuck to the shoe. In such a place, the ones that thrive are usually those that exchanged most of their humanity for the toxic love of the city. Those that spiritually manifested and were driven by the most wretched and destructive of human emotions. In-between were those that often found a way out of the city, even for a couple of days, or in their dreams that maybe, one day, they would leave for good.
When I was in college I used to half-joke with newcomers and would laughingly tell them “Be careful! this city eats people and shit’s monsters.”, not the kind of monsters that populate your nightmares, but the pathetic kind.

I’m speaking in general terms but, naturally, there’s also the exceptions and, in a place like this, exceptions are truly exceptional. You learn to really value kindness, courtesy and compassion where there’s very little to be found, they stand out like the a beacon shining a piercing light through a sea of darkness.

Like with any toxic relationship, it comes a time when you have to move on or collapse into a crippled state of existence. So I did, almost a decade ago with no hard feelings. Nowadays, I occasionally revisit the city with the same eager curiosity I did when I first set foot on its streets. Only now, I realise that I’m the alien that always rejected the city's cold embrace.  

Follow your dreams

…or so the popular saying goes and yet dreams follow you. 

Actual dreams with which we are intimately tangled throughout our lives yet we barely notice them and when we do, we have little to no idea of what they’re all about. We often forget them as our heads get filled with the day ahead and, when we can’t put them out of our minds, we reach for hasty explanations with which we might feel comfortable. 

We are more likely to attribute them some alternate meaning, to think that we are communicating with higher forces or dismiss them as random outbursts and meaningless spam, which is the most common belief regarding dreams. 

Dreams are still widely disregarded as having some important function or that they are useful in any way. For this reason, dreams are still seen by some as a childish preoccupation and, for some researchers, the thought that dreams might have a coherent meaning is a nightmare in itself. 

Dreams still evade an accurate and straightforward definition because they cover many facets of ourselves and our relation with our surroundings. We are accustomed to thinking of dreams as we think of ourselves, as being individually disconnected from the world around us, yet, our dreams make no such harsh distinctions. In fact, dreams often describe us blended into our surroundings.  We make ourselves the measure of all things, and dreams make all things the measure of ourselves. 

What dreams mean exactly is intimately tied to the dreamer. Dream dictionaries and other similar materials are most likely to lead astray a person looking for an explanation, mainly because they propose meanings that are not consistent with the hyperconcepts we encounter in our dreams. Even more elaborate models, like those proposed by Freud or Jung, although pioneering in untangling some psychological phenomenon, are flawed to varied degrees. Their conclusions regarding the subject of dreams are not generally applicable but can be only in some remote cases and this error can often produce misinterpretations. 

When we talk about beliefs, be it ideological, religious or mundane, we unknowingly employ the language of dreams. Dreams are a raw form of language made entirely out of hyperconcepts. They describe our interaction with reality in a very profound way that largely makes use of abstractions and sometimes go beyond what can be accurately described in formal language. Unlike written or spoken language that is partly formed from concepts, of notions that developed in agreement between two parties, dream language forms autonomously without any preestablished conventions. For this reason, sometimes, dreams can come off as awfully confusing, as we reach to decipher them by conventional means we omit their highly unconventional structure. The hyperconcepts we encounter in our dreams might have little to nothing to do with the external cues from which it takes its resources. 

Many years ago, as these thoughts started forming in my head, I found myself immensely fascinated with the subject. Understanding the mechanics behind the language of dreams came parallel to developing my artworks. Visual language was very useful in exploring dream language and so, the two complemented each other. 

When I finally reached more polished thoughts, I wrote the Hyperconcept book that, beyond the various topics it travels, it looks towards the language of dreams and how hyperconcepts make their way into describing the fringes of our reality.

In our market driven popular culture, through savvy marketing and crafty advertising campaigns, you are called to “follow your dreams”, to “dream that you can be whatever you want to be” and many other such catchy phrases. To follow false dreams and look away from your actual dreams as we might get a glimpse of our true self. Only when you can see yourself as you are and not how you want to be, or how others want you to be, only then you can start to bring about a meaningful change.

There’s a lot to be said about dreams and how they play a crucial role in shaping our lives but, if you were to truly follow your dreams and not your designer wishes, they would probably lead you somewhere else entirely. Somewhere you have never thought of going.

Honest madness

Honesty starts in the self and ends in the other. 

To be honest, is not to hide anything from the other person and to share your thoughts entirely. Although this ideal is seldom obtainable because we first must learn how to be honest with ourselves. The criterion of honesty is always held by the other person. Your honesty is verified not through your own sense of truth, but through the other person's appreciation of truth. You're considered honest only when you say what the other wants to hear from you.

If you truly tell the truth, you're not honest, you're just mad. 

There is no coincidence that lies are seen as sins in all great religions of the world. In order for a lie to be credible we first need to convince ourselves of it and then share it with others. We need to keep telling that lie to ourselves so we won’t forget it and, with time, we become conditioned to believe our own lies. We form a habit of impulsively lying to ourselves until we can no longer distinguish true from false, and our truths become consistent with our established lies rather than an objective truth. Through the lies we’ve become comfortably accustomed to telling ourselves we ruin our capacity to accurately draw a truth and we step further away from reality and into the murky depths of a dreamy existence. Thus, we can no longer see ourselves as we are, we can’t see others as they are and, we can hardly bare the pain and pressure of living in a world that doesn’t follow our ideal expectations.

This honesty is a figment of our desires and beliefs and not a cold assessment of reality because we say only those truths that we are expected to tell. You are considered honest by another only when you say what they want to hear from you, not when you attempt to step closer to the truth. You are considered honest and agreeable only when you guess what the other wants to hear from you, and if you do otherwise and attempt to tell the truth as honestly, coldly and as accurately as you can tell it to yourself, then you are mad or ridiculous. 

True honesty is a bitter luxury we all seek but only few can afford. Its bitterness brings much suffering to which not everybody is accustomed or ready to deal with, but a luxury because it reveals to us what we deeply yearn to know, although, sometimes we can hardly endure. Yet, with our transgression in the pursuit of truth, we move away from established expectation and closer to our alienation.

It’s weird how much we fear being alone or being pushed away for trying to be and experience ourselves externally in the delusion of a moment of self-honesty when we might think others will accept us for our naked self. We want people to be honest with us so we can reassure ourselves that we are not alone, that we are in a familiar and safe place where we can openly express ourselves, to feel that we are amongst friends and that we are loved. To quench our eternal thirst for being noticed and agreed with, so we can verify and justify our existence.

We go on like this until we reach the wall of despair within ourselves that we’ve built between our true self and the idol of expectations. 

A wall only true honesty can climb, and an idol only freedom can take apparat.  

In friendship, like with honesty, you are loved not for who you are but because of what your friends see and believe in you. Like in honesty, in friendship, you can’t be yourself. You are not loved for your genuine self but for how well you can imitate the hyperconceptual character that the other person has formed in your likeness. You, the true self, are always sacrificed over the imitation of yourself, and you have to bear witness to this sacrifice every time you give in to expectation. But, you cannot lament over this because you do the same, everybody does the same. 

What is truly sad in some friendships is that each other sacrifices the freedom of the other for the comforting illusion of being accepted, of belonging. You are loved because your friends got used to seeing your around, visiting the same places, meeting their expectations, liking what they like, agreeing with what they agree and sharing similar beliefs and ideals. So where are you in their cornucopia of feelings? You are caged in conformity, disintegrated, torn to bits, passed around and absorbed following their needs. 

And you do the same.

The day you step away from your designated role, when you no longer play according to prescribed expectations. The day you burn the idol others have built four you to follow and worship. The day you yearn to seek, experience and know yourself in the pursuit of your deepest needs, to mend yourself an to grow, is the day you step out of bounds. The day you dare to reclaim your freedom and be honest with yourself and do the same to those around you, to scrutinize their beliefs and to tell them that they are fooling themselves for wasting their time with petty and meaningless pursuits, that they are lying to themselves into a dead end. That day you are no longer a friend. That day you become a stranger. That day you become an unrecognisable agent of anxieties. 

That day you are no longer worthy of their love.   

That day you went mad.

True love is the momentary bypassing of the idol and of the self in order to temporarily transcend into the other, an act of dissolution in the pursuit of liberation of the empoisoned true self. Such an experience, although widely sought after and often short lived, can seem like madness only to a third person. A true friendship can be verified only by the amount of freedom you can give to the other person to be themselves and to pursue their own destiny. Not to transgress your friends freedom, not to judge them through your point of view, that can be fair and reasonable, but omits the others personal complexity and needs. Not to cherish them through how well they meet your needs but through what they are to themselves, what they must accomplish within themselves to grow and develop as a human being and not to recede into a dummy frozen in the likeness of their expected idol.

Nobody asks you for all of these, just as nobody asks you for your true honesty, but only that honesty they wish to hear from you. 

In a friendship is not important only what we take but mostly what we give, and freedom given is freedom received. You can never be truly free if those around you are not free to be themselves. 

To reconquer your freedom is to be a good friend to yourself. To be a good friend to yourself is to be honest to yourself and be free of your own opinions. To reclaim the honesty to yourself is to condemn yourself to an existence of solitude and to be content only with the very few genuine friendships that cherish their own freedom and self-honesty and truly take delight in experiencing your ridiculous honest madness.

Here just a minute ago.

A butterfly just flew by and I'll never see it again. 

I stopped my thoughts and witnessed as it flew into eternity. 

Today we are very much attached to the illusion that time is only what our clocks show us, concepts developed and generally agreed upon that follow astral events for an accurate systematization of our society. However, this might be only one side of a much more complex phenomenon. In his famous theory of relativity, Einstein outlines that time conforms to space and its influenced by the factors that exist within that space. In contrast, in our internal psychological environment of boundless space, time becomes non-linear. This constantly affects how we interact with the outer, linear time. 

The chronological illusion of permanence that one might fall into and naively start aspiring to immortality is one of the side effects that grew out of extended incubation in an artificial or virtual space. Prolonged open contact with a natural space always reminds us of the impermanence and transience of life, a fundamental characteristic of our living world. The passing of seasons, of flowers and creatures with a far shorter lifespan than ours but also of quaint interactions that unfold in just a moment. However, spending much time in artificial spaces, surrounded by lifeless things that hardly change makes us insensible to our own nature and pushes us to think that things are there forever. That state of postponement holds up until we are reminded that this is not so, after which we plunge into existential despair and countless buckets of ice cream.

A childish mentality of a person that never learned to let go of something that was never theirs to keep. 

Nowadays there’s a lot of pitiful characters that pour vast resources in a futile pursuit of immortality. Here’s one that chugs all manner of foods, pills and beverages to stay forever young. There, another one is investing in technology to translate the contents of his mind in digital format, and the list just goes on into absurdity. Meanwhile life goes on by them unnoticed.

Although nothing new, the tendency where some start to see themselves above the natural order of things and starts foolishly aspiring to immortality is a deluded outpouring of a mind that has become trapped within itself in an artificial dreamy detachment and can no longer bare its own nature, let alone bare to be around reminders of a similar nature.

Probably one of the most compelling cases of this delusion found in the annals of history is that of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, who, after amassing vast wealth and power, thought that he was somehow entitled to immortality, and in return he received a hasty demise by foolishly consuming mercury pills at the advice of his trusted counselor.

The truth is that, caught in all manner of dreams, we forgot how to live, how to grow old and how to die. A gross disrespect for life and other living things around us, always prioritising artificial dead things to strengthen our obsession with permanence. We want to be androids, we want to go to cyber-heaven stuck on a hard-drive somewhere, we want to be overlook by A.I. God that we can turn on-off to our liking, or in other words, we crave a dead, artificial existence.

A mind that is predisposed to life is not afraid of death, but doesn’t crave it either. The mind that developed an obsession with death, is afraid of death and always looks for it. 

The temporary awareness of this fundamental truth of existence might fuel our anxieties, as everything we acquire in life stands to crumble. However, beyond our arrogant despair, there's a beauty to it all that urges us to be more present, patient and considerate with those around us and to be more engaged in genuinely living our life in the presence of life and not just waste away locked off somewhere in an artificial space.

The beauty of life is that it is temporary and fleeting, it’s here for a moment and nevermore. This fact presses an urgency to live and appreciate what it is given to us in that moment and not before, because it can just as easily be taken away at any time. A friend, a parent, a pet or someone you’ve never met is here today and gone tomorrow. This though alone drives me to look towards a persons qualities instead of nitpicking at their flaws, to at least try and be kind and enjoy their presence because before you know it, you’ll never get a chance to spend time in their company again.

Like anything else,
One day I’ll just fade away and maybe there’s gonna be someone, somewhere, that’s gonna say: 

“Oh! But he was here just a minute ago.” 

Anti-social media

For a bit over five years now I’ve gradually slipped away from social media. I barely noticed at first being all caught up with my work and I found less time for this side of the internet throughout the day. This break from social media gave me a fresh new perspective on what I had before my eyes and for a while I kept asking myself: “Is it just me, have I become too pretentious or has something changed?” 

Maybe it’s a bit of both. 

Social media platforms create a virtual space where almost everyone can feel like a celebrity of sorts, in their own mind that is, where they continuously feed content to enforce a social position through meaningless validations. A lot of hunt for attention and fame for nothing practical in particular, but to selfishly feed one's ingrowing psychological issues.

Beyond the narcissists playground, it seems like some social media platforms have became like a go-to virtual space to vent and look for hyperconceptual characters embodied by some random users account on which to place all manner of festering frustrations that have little to do with the actual person, but mostly with the pressures that build up in the mind after it’s been left to forage and feed through the dumpsters of the internet, pedaling through piles of trash information teaming with sponsored or suggested content. 

When it doesn’t come to this, there’s the hunt for idols to supplement the vacuum of belief. The good, the bad, and the ugly idols of celebrity culture. Overly popularised earthly idols that people endow with all manner of characteristics beyond their actual capacities. If they’re not selling you some garbage they'll come around to tell you how to think, either in a movie or on some shitty podcast. It no longer has anything to do with the act of being social or informed but to cradle anxieties and feelings of apathy and angst that permeate in societies that have grown broadly anti-social. 

Looking around through the comment threads nowadays you can barely find any signs of users being social to each other. Where the most successful threads are largely filled with cheers, cynicism and rigid opinions. If you don’t participate, you don’t exist. The reaction media. This virtual “social” space where the system of likes or followers that creates the false impression of value and quality. Influencers that bring almost no social contribution through their content but largely pray on the vulnerabilities of the wasted audience are placed on a pedestal over people that put their time and energy into something truly useful but are often left in the wasteland of anonymity to which they belong. This is a clear sign of the mediocrity of the content that can easily grab a lot of attention only on mere emotionally uplifting outpourings. As this sort of detached behavior perpetuates itself on social media it naturally spills out in the actual social space, influencing some people to imitate the values of the virtual space with which they’ve become more familiar through the extensive time spent there.

A space where the superfluous and mediocre is valued over the truly exceptional. This effect can be noticed in all fields of vital social importance like music, art, politics, journalism and others where they are more likely to be seen as a form of entertainment rather than sought after for intellectual and social growth. Where characters are more likely to be cheered for acting the part but not being the part. This is the curse of outdated postmodernism. 

Probably one of the saddest effects of the social media staple is that a lot of intellectually gifted and talented people, in a struggle to become successful, succumb to the social media standards of mediocrity, unknowingly dumbing themselves and what they produce to the liking of their numbed out audience. There’s also lot of good and useful content floating around the internet, but usually it's hard to find being often pulled down under the furious tides of meaningless garbage content that the platforms often promote.

This is what I called homogeneous mediocratisation. Out of this mess there’s a looming spiritual poverty of desperately consuming all manner of beliefs expressed through a plethora of hyperconcepts that pass as knowledge or truth, leaving the consumers mentally anemic and incapable of critical judgement. The wasted consumer is more likely to choose an ever repeating passive familiarity over novel active thinking, leading a society in stale stagnation. 

From the earliest days of human civilisations and the many teachings of history we have accumulated, one of the biggest lessons that often evaders us is that where a civilization loses social cohesiveness, when they lose the ability to work together and start competing against each other, they enter into a process of social decay. Where people can no longer look to each other’s needs and sensibilities, they recede in a state of dysfunctional aggressive competitiveness that is very much praised and romanticised in our age. Throughout history, societies where most of the citizens commune and collaborate become more productive and successful but most importantly, such societies becomes sustainable as this is close to our natural condition as a species but also as part of a complex ecosystem to which we are built for.

Grand delusions

There is a grand delusion as old as civilization that claims a position of superiority of the human mind.

That we are somehow special because we can construct and destroy complex systems. At least the most intelligent amongst us are given to make such silly claims. Whereas, objectively, we are not that special, we are a part of a complex system that preceded our existence as a conscious species. If there is any validity to the claim that we are special, we make little effort to show it.

I think this becomes noticeable today more than ever as we’re filling our surrounding habitat with filth of many kinds to a very dangerous degree.

For the past century and a half, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, we became increasingly stuck in our ever-expanding artificial habitats and away from naturally occurring organic habitats in which we are designed to exist as another organic element. This was even noticed and signalled by some of the intellectuals of the day, philosophers, poets and artists that centred their thoughts around the loss of some vital feature. However, the sensation they were pursuing was too abstract at the time, often addressed hyperconceptually, evading any considerate collective actions to straighten things out.

Most of our problems today, personal, social and environmental, can be traced back to this linch-pin moment in the history of civilization, and the issues that have developed since then are intimately intertwined in the foundation and framework of how our society reshaped itself but also the values it pursues and promotes.

Pollution of the soil, water and air are critical issues that our superiority can't seem to handle that well, in fact they seem to be getting worse. They are elementary for keeping any living thing healthy and functioning. Yet, our big brains fail to recognise this as a major priority, always tricking itself that what it needs is those new fancy shoes or another vacation, more money and a brand new car. But what are they all good for if we go on and eat, drink and breath garbage?

Can this be considered superior behavior? Far from it.
The animal that senselessly destroys its habitat and creates spaces where it can hide from the rest of the living creatures in order to retreat in the confines of its mind is not a superior animal, it’s a broken animal.

Of course, there are always claims of conspiracies and malicious intent behind such reckless behavior that goes against an innate impulse of self-preservation of ourselves and other members of our species. However, I think the issue is rather psychological in nature. Where the shape of our intellect, that has developed in and conditioned to artificial spaces, is incapable to recognise and preserve an objective good over its pressing subjective ideals. These are the results of a mind that has become trapped inwards in a state of dreamy detachment that omits itself as a part of a complex natural ecosystem, and what it cannot unconsciously associate with, it will destructively repress.

All of this might sound like some preachy angry hippie rant, and it could very well be if it was just another opinionated belief and not a mere cold assessment. Can we make the claim that we are superior if we can hardly recognise and keep what its made to function autonomously? Nowadays, in our artificially minded control-obsessed society, we can barely conceive of letting an apple tree grow apples on its own without our superiority intervening to spray the shit out of any living organism around it, hardly ever thinking as to what is the purpose of that living being in that complex system.

I keep looking for signs of superiority, it might take a while.