The 37s: No Fate

“The wind howls; the sun rises alone…”

The whole world has lost itself in the smoldering haze. The global pandemic, as such as it exists in the form of keyboard-pounding blowhards, moral-panicking bureaucrats, and a boorish reverence for ineptitude, has simply illuminated and made tangible the fissures once manageable through ignorance but now seemingly inevitable in their mortality.

Humans are a social creature, but for the past year the bonds of society have been legally, technologically, and physically snapped, leaving billions of scared, atomized individuals to navigate aimlessly, forming superficial relationships for the sheer need of structure. The resulting toxicity of this disembodied cultural façade is the means to its own end: there is no right, no wrong, only passion screaming out into the zoom-filtered void, desperate for any reaction, any revulsion, any reminder of what it means to be connected. After all, it is always more comforting to hate thy neighbor than love thy enemy.

The echoed voices, no longer filtered through the common sense of society, have determined for us that everything is existential, filling our minds with irrelevant minutiae and flattening the dynamic beauty of the world to a dystopic binary. Through the imposition of manufactured insecurity, we have been systematically stripped of our most valuable and unique assets: wisdom and understanding. The depth of culture is ones and zeroes: we have no desire for complexity or nuance; we are now simply a mechanism being endlessly fed raw knowledge for knowledge’s sake. There is no purpose, no product, no power, no point to any of it. Mankind has never been more advanced and yet humanity is stagnant.

History has no turning points, it simply continues — one long story that began before and will end after. Humanity will go on, despite ourselves, our fears, and our failings. The only question remaining is the only one that matters.

March 18, 2021