The irony: my brain won’t shut up lately, and each word just floated away as if I didn’t read it. I had to read this piece a couple times before the words stayed. Thanks for the overthinking of completely unrelated things, brain!!
There’s an experience that occasionally happens on psychedelics called ego death, where it feels like the entire construct of self that you’ve gripped onto tightly your whole life, the floorboards and walls and ceilings of the house that is you, suddenly splinters apart. For a glorious half an hour or so you’re totally free from yourself. It’s hard to sustain that experience or recreate it, but moments of blankness—of not thinking—are the closest most of us can get to an ego-less state. Running and love and frisbee: we’ll do anything to recreate that primal animal openness.
The desire to escape has certainly been amplified by the anxiety of the past decade (the anxiety of modernity, if you want to be dramatic), but I think it’s always been something we’ve longed for. It’s funny to me that a lot of negation culture revolves around a desire to return to a simpler time, because as far as I can tell there was never a simpler time: back when we were working in fields we just had a different set of problems. We were probably more stressed out, honestly. Even the Greeks were obsessed with “exercise as exorcism.” Humans were always looking for ways to blank out.
The irony: my brain won’t shut up lately, and each word just floated away as if I didn’t read it. I had to read this piece a couple times before the words stayed. Thanks for the overthinking of completely unrelated things, brain!!
Wonderful quick read. Breezy, but deep.
I’m so on the Ava train.
🆙