When I got home from work yesterday, I was exhausted. I had wanted to write, do a little Duolingo — improve myself in other words — but all I had the energy for was making a quick dinner and falling asleep. Fate defeated will. The pretense of self-improvement, self-determination, was comically defeated.

Circumstances. “Geworfen” in Heidegger’s parlance. Thrownness. We’re thrown into the world, with nothing but our raw biological instincts to help us swim. The very American idea of freedom is a lie, pure and simple. We are not free — at least, we’re not very free; not American free. We’re constrained. And it hurts to be constrained. Our phenomenology is Promethean — we’re knowledgeable, but chained to the rock of our circumstances. Our place of birth, our economic status, our bodies, our parents — and so on down the line.

Commuting to and from work in the morning I can’t help but think of these kinds of analogies: chained, being chained, tied down; ultimately — enslavement. What are phones but chains, iron chains — that shackle us to information (information which dominates our thoughts and behaviors)? We’re thrown into passive slavery. Economic, social, moral. What is really ours? What internal state can’t be linked to some external control mechanism?

Humanism — the belief in the dignity and purposiveness of the human being — is under immense pressure — has been for at least a century — and the pressure is only growing. The pressure comes from reality: it is the pressure of reality — the reality that the human is a broken, bedraggled, overdetermined thing.