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Everything produces anxiety because we exist in a quantitive matrix in which none of our human qualities have any value: we are anxious because we are not good enough, when measured by the impossible standards of corporate productivity. The subway, which I spend at least 90 minute every day riding, refracts this painful truth: that we are all scurrying about, trying to meet the demands of our employer, or, if we are employers ourselves, trying to whip our employees into fantastically productive machines.
The great question, the only question, the nagging, relentless, destructive, critical question, the question which undermines the foundations of our identity — if we let it — is: is my sense of freedom, my instinct for it, my belief in it, part of what makes me so unfree? Does my belief in freedom lubricate the grinding gears of The System?
I always want to start over, start again, find new words for the same old thing: my intuition that everything real is just over there, on the other side of things-as-I-perceive them, on the side of things-as they-are.
