Morning Comrades.
Welcome back to your first of two patreon-only dispatches for this week. First off, thank you to everyone that reached out since Monday to check in on me, whilst my admission of exhaustion wasn’t a cry for help it was truly appreciated and felt good. On that situation, reality bit everyone at work in the proverbial ass on Monday and we all decided to take a few days off, until Thursday in any case, so that everyone can catch a little breath. I’ve slept most of Monday and most of Tuesday day which has been grand and I am starting to feel a little more of myself.
With that, we are going to take an introductory philosophical deep dive today. Touching on the concept and reality of the absurdity mentioned on Monday, this newsletter will talk a little about existentialism, absurdism and obviously marxism - again, an introduction.
As always, let’s tackle why because I get it, why on earth would anyone read about some European philosophical concepts when the world that we know increasingly feels like an insane asylum on fire. This I can only answer for myself but I hope my reasoning will help you understand why and why these topics are important, to me at the very least.
There isn’t a day when I don’t feel like being stuck in the just mentioned burning psych ward. Couple that with material stresses ( being broke, overworked ) and metaphysical ones ( feeling of alienation, lack of control etc. ) it is beyond explainable why we are feeling the way we are. Therapy, that doesn’t address and at the very acknowledge structural oppression at the very least, can only help so much, as well as the other well-intended but ultimately counterproductive feel good life coach industry
Hey- I know there’s neo-nazi’s running wild randomly shooting people but have you considered doing yoga and buying a planer?
During these times I personally revert back to reading philosophy. Predominately, because it soothes my mind, knowing that whatever questions I have about the purpose of if all, have been tackled, at least tried, by people before me and reading about them helps me put my reality into a structure, a construct, in which I can analyse my feelings and more importantly, occasionally find ways out of my own mental funk. This is the point of today’s newsletter as well as so many other before and probably to come.
The world feels beyond absurd. To relate it to History, it feels like we dialled the clocks back 100 years but rather than whatever the roaring 20s were have skipped right to absurdism, fascism, totalitarianism just with wifi. Absurdism as a philosophical construct always has to be talked about in the context of existentialism because that is the train of thought from which it comes, and since I am deeply embedded in marxism, I figured, let’s have a comparative chat about all this because the absurdity of our reality requires not only a narrative construct but the acknowledgement that we have been here before and some very smart people gave their best finding answers and purpose in an absurd world.
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