THE EXISTENTIAL FLU — Diagnosing how we lose awareness and get back on track.
I had a crushing existential crisis recently… Don’t worry, I managed to dig myself out of it. Not only that, but I think I can reduce its occurrence in future. This experience is not just ‘feeling down’ — it’s a completely undocumented illness that plagues the modern world called the Existential Flu. What’s the Existential Flu? When your thinking is invaded by negative questions, self-doubt, low self-belief, a sense of meaninglessness, fuzzy-thinking, frustration for life and… well, that feeling of being hopelessly lost. These thoughts are not accurate, they don’t reflect your reality or progress in life — they are an invasion.
The Train Station
Everyone wants it to be like a Train Station. They want to come in in a mob, punch a ticket, and then go on through. To every problem, they want a train ticket solution. The Afterlife. The train to the afterlife. To catch it, do you simply have to show up to your temple once a week? Does your hypocrisy outside the temple not matter? Do you believe that if you show up, hold out your ticket, you get to go onboard? Can you catch the train instead of living by true values? Success. The train to success. Do you just show up in the crowd with all the others,
The Monk who Burned Himself to Death
On 11th June 1963, a Buddhist Monk by the name of Thich Quang Duc did some awe-defying in protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese Government. Outside the Cambodian Embassy, he took out a cushion and placed it on the ground. He sat on it and prayed. Several of his colleagues covered him in gasoline, and then when he was done praying, he lit himself ablaze. The crowd screamed in shock and horror, looking on helplessly. Pandemonium erupted from all but one person. Duc himself. He did not shriek, nor gasp, nor offer as much as a shudder. He hardly moved a muscle
The Glass Prison
What you don’t know is that you were born inside a glass prison. The way you look at the world appears clear to you, it appears that you see what is, but you do not. You cannot. Your vision appears clear, but you are looking through glass. If the glass is tinted red, you think the whole world is red, and if the glass is tinted green, you will see the world as green. You think that the green you see is the same as the green that others around you see, that you are having the same experience. But what if you are
Continuums, Spectrums and Scales, not Absolutes or Binaries
You are used to looking at some people as disabled and others, maybe you, as ‘abled’. You are used to looking at these people as black, and these people as white. You are used to thinking that you are not good at sports, but are good at reading books. You are used to thinking that he is a failure, and that she is a success. You are used to thinking of people from Africa as poor, and people from Western countries as rich. You are used to thinking of the world in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and that you are either good at things,
The Apocalypse Test
How does one run an Apocalypse Test? One simply imagines that tomorrow the apocalypse begins - this is an event of catastrophic destruction which interrupts most or all social systems. We run the hypothetical Apocalypse Test to ask ourselves what still matters when everything we’ve taken for granted is threatened and interrupted. Things that do not pass the Apocalypse Test. Social media followers no longer matter, because our digital systems have fallen. The stock market no longer exists. Your ownership of your assets is now contestable - you will struggle to defend your claim to a single deed of land, as the deeds you signed