In trying to predict what the post-pandemic world will look like, it seems pretty clear that things will never be the same. What exactly won’t be the same might be too abstract to dig our teeth into now, but what we do know is that in transitioning from normal life into a kind of routine-less twilight, and in going from perceiving our physical health as something peripheral to something that is disturbingly with us at every turn, a powerful insecurity now pervades the world that almost feels as unprecedented as the pandemic itself is.
Now feeling insecure at a time…
25 years after the monumental book’s release, I reflect on what makes its protagonist so polarizing and yet so universal at the same time
Chris McCandless was a young explorer who died in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992 and whose life and death happens to be documented in one of the most monumental books of the past 30 years: Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.
Now if we temporarily set aside the cultural impact that we now know Into the Wild has had, it might seem surprising that a story like this would gain so much traction. After all, as sad as Chris’s fate may have been, how many other thousands of cases have there been of young travellers falling victim to the unforgiving depths…
My experience struggling with the possibility that what I love to do is purposeless…. but maybe that’s okay
“Oh… What do you hope to do with that?”
As any philosophy student knows, there is no question more soul-crushing than that one.
Maybe it was a concerned friend wondering how you were going to make any money when you were out of school or someone you met at a party who was not-so-subtly judging you for taking an interest in something so impractical. But whatever the context is, the question always rears its ugly head at some point. And as someone who has experienced it many times firsthand, let me tell you that man, it hurts. …
When a drunken man falls from a cart, he may be hurt but he will not be killed. His bones and joints are no different from those of other men, but the degree of harm done by the fall differs radically, for the spiritual in him forms one intact whole. Having been unaware that he was riding, he is now unaware that he is falling.
For every inspirational speech I’ve heard, every pithy Instagram caption I’ve stumbled upon and every grandiose solution to the meaning of life I’ve come across, nothing quite hits me like the quote above.
For one…
After seeing Rolling Stone’s newly released list for the 500 best albums of all time, I found myself yelling at them from my computer screen for a while for not including some of my favourite projects in it. Thinking that my energy could be better spent somewhere else, I figured that it might be a good idea to create a list of my own.
Now I should make something clear from the get go: I am in no way some music criticism savant who just knows every album ever made and can make some authoritative list about which ones are…
The Miserable Genius Hypothesis
Whenever I come across a brilliant thinker, it’s hard not to feel a little insecure.
I mean, just imagine being able to write with the same kind of dark prose of a Kafka or having even just a speck of the creativity of a van Gogh. All the while, the rest of us have to make do here on planet earth.
But usually before I drown in my own self-pity, a somewhat counter-intuitive fact jumps out at me: that the greatest minds in history have often not been able to enjoy their achievements because they otherwise had miserable lives.
Kafka…
How a movie about skateboarders thoughtfully tackles one of Philosophy’s most frustrating debates.
Free Will or Determinism: The Pandora’s Box of Philosophical Questions
Do we have free will or are our lives just an amalgamation of forces beyond our control pushing us around like billiard balls?
The question seems straightforward enough, but it’s actually the Pandora’s box of philosophical questions.
This might be because each side of the debate seems perfectly plausible and implausible at the same time.
- It certainly feels like I’ve gotten to where I am through choices that I’ve freely made, but how can I be so sure? …
The rise and fall of emo rap happened so fast it was easy to miss. Embracing melody over intricate lyricism and adopting potently dark themes for its subject matter, the genre exploded onto the mainstream in the mid-2010s when even the most established hip-hop artists at the time were getting tired of the rugged standoffishness that had been fashionable in the medium up until then. But even if the hip-hop world was hungry for more emotional honesty, that’s not to say that it was necessarily ready for what it was in for. When someone like Lil Peep started getting recognition…
“And we hate po-po/Wanna kill us dead in the street fo-sho”
“This is why I say that hip-hop has done more damage to young African- Americans than racism in recent years. This is exactly the wrong message.”
The relationship between art and politics has for a long time been a volatile one. Recall, for example, Plato’s paranoid fixation on expelling all poets from his ideal society and the justification he uses for taking such drastic measures:
Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind is…
It’s hard to overstate how central the particular language we speak is to the way we think. In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, thoughts accumulate and are informed by observations, moods and conversations, all of which are broken down and made sense of by the words we attach to them. …
Dylan Skurka
Just someone who likes writing about the philosophy of music and the music of philosophy.
