irsinkast

When The School Of Life, which I absolutely love, asks me to fill out a survey, I fill out the survey. One of their questions was whether I had any feedback for them. Here’s what I had to say to that: “No feedback, only questions from my troubled mind. How can we use our power as consumers to effectuate change and put real pressure on the elite that organises and benefits from our consumption? How can we, as consumers and fans, truly motivate our popular linchpin figures to actually use their position to influence both producers and consumers towards social fairness and ecological awareness? The tools for influencing these mechanisms seem to be in place but there is no one with a working plan to move people away from their personal profiling needs and direct them towards a unified response to the ruling economic and political mayhem. I believe that TSOL could be one of those linchpins and formulate...

I could say I am shocked but all of this did not come unexpected at all. Depressed as I may be, it was no surprise. To most, the closer to home it hits the clearer the sound of the turmoil and the greater the need to express outrage. I do not want to downgrade any of the recent events but I sure as hell won’t let you do that to any of the others by cutting the line to get retribution  for your personal pain. For our collective pain. If we truly believe in peace for all then there can be no favourites nor hierarchy. I have always aimed not to let myself be overly influenced by the laws of proximity in judging the morality and the atrocity of man. But I must admit that especially now, this is proving very hard indeed. I am affected, as a human and as a friend of those that are even closer to the core. I am looking at our small world and hoping that we can transform these feelings of outrage and disgu...

I am no altruist. And I would not take pride in being one either. Humans have a natural state that makes us all savvy individuals as much as a mindless herd. An ambiguity I lovingly embrace.  But the things I would like to see happen for humanity and the planet in general might have an altruistic ring to them. I wish humans would become more aware of each other and actively work at a balanced planet. Because even if you are a total bastard you have to realise that none of us can eventually survive without it. And in the most obscured regions  of your consciousness and on your clearest of days, you must also recognise that every decision you make, every day, has an impact on that balance. As inconsiderable as that impact may be to you, its bearing is quite real and present. Some and maybe most people, on a global scale, are unquestionably in a position so precarious that they can not afford to spend time, energy, money or whatever on meditating these decisions. When yo...

I’m not doing anything. And I could be. You pointed out correctly that the options are legion. I could subscribe to any of those thousands of good and worthy causes that lie scattered across the globe. I could be picketing. I could stop finding excuses. I could stop holding back. And stop pretending it all has to be on my terms in order to work. Just as much as the masses have proven to be a senseless blob that doesn’t want to adapt to our changing circumstances, those smalls stabs at charity have proven remedial at best, especially and specifically because of their distributed nature. There is nothing that genuinely unifies. And while I will raise my contribution to one or more of the earnest causes and launch my drop into the parched soil, hoping for an ocean, I will remain unsatisfied in that larger expanse of meaning and fulfilment that should help us truly understand and know each other better and deeper. This naïve illusion that we call spiri...

Or in full: “You are winning where you are at, but you are not moving forward.” It’s time. You can feel it. The minds are shifting. I had always hoped it would be a shift towards a more peaceful and harmonious state. But far from it.  It seems there is a growing divide. A precipice as astronomical as the heavens. A yawning abyss as bottomless as hell. A gap as wide as time itself. And people scattered on either side of it, and at the top, and the bottom of it. Living right next to each other. All the while, impossibly far apart. A seething and concealed kind of intense hatred. An invisible divide with the power to separate neighbours, split emotions in half and dismember extremities. A sharp rise in schizophrenia and self-mutilation with all the stabbing side-effects. All this progress has been fake. We have regressed into something atrocious whilst constantly changing attires and changing the face of our lives to look ever more sophisticated. We have not advanced but we have fabr...