Out There: On Not Finishing - Longreads
Devin Kelly:
What happens if what you once used to make sense of things no longer helps you make sense of things? What happens if the patterns and habits and metaphors we lean on do not serve us in the moments we need them? What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? What then?
Tokyo Walk, TBOT Cover, Aloneness — Roden Newsletter Archive
Craig Mod:
Well, I’ve been thinking about it my whole life. It’s difficult to remember a time where I didn’t feel alone or apart or “on my own.”
Aloneness sucks. It’s insidious and becomes habitual. It’s rapacious. It saps the spirit. It twists a peaceful dude all truculent and paranoid. It renders decision making oddly cumbersome. It’s more difficult to feel elevated as a human when swaddled in aloneness. Self-worth plummets as aloneness rises.
Aloneness is not just individual, of course. Entire communities can and do feel abandoned, alone, cut off from the world.
I was shocked by how easy it was for me to do this, to “do therapy.” Like I had been waiting my entire life for a patient, true listener. And here he was, a floating head on a screen.
I’ve found that the honesty I embody (“perform”) during those therapy sessions has spilled into the day to day. Honesty imbricated, a suit of honest. The proof is in life itself: I’ve had more emotionally resonant experiences of non-aloneness in the last five years than my entire life prior.
That’s the real joy of subverting aloneness — luxuriating in solitude. A wholly different, generative beast, apart from aloneness. Solitude is where you cash in on your non-aloneness savings. Retreating into solitude for the day in your backyard shed with no internet connection and a nice keyboard and laptop is one of the greatest feelings in the world, but only because you know you’re emerging at the end of it into a hug, a goofy animal bounding with nincompoop love, a curious kid, cooking dinner — something, anything, that will passively envelop you in non-aloneness, that will make you feel valuable.
I suspect I’ll be battling aloneness and depression for the rest of my life. But today, at 43, I’ve cobbled together my outré toolkit. And tomorrow today, when TOKIO TŌKYŌ TOKYO³ kicks off (the walking starts tomorrow, but the meditations on the walk begin tonight) I’ll be activating one of my most potent tools: days of walking strung together, using the body up, looking closely at the world, photographing, taking notes, greeting people with alacrity like some village idiot, thinking about what was, what is, and what could be in this strange, fleeting, often painful — but just as often breathtaking — world of ours.
[TI-09] the internet is one big video game
Spencer Chang:
I like newsletters that feel more like dispatches than editorialized posts.
The world manages to find a way to strike you with the most indescribable beauty when you need it most.
How do we make websites feel more like embodied objects? What does a website that can become well-worn or passed down feel like? How does a website become a living gathering space, one that evolves with the activity of its participants?
Spencer Chang e Kristoffer Tjalve:
we think, that our “internet” comprises the same 10 apps, some flooded with ads and spyware, others with people yelling about everything and nothing. We accept that the only way to get anything useful out of the internet is by trading our privacy for accounts and our self-expression for conformity. Everything is always somehow broken and when social spaces die, we believe that it is how it has always been and that nothing will ever be different.
The Internet is so much vaster than a single worldview. It is a sprawling galaxy of archipelagos, filled with more humanity and personal gestures than any man-made archive.