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What gives me hope is how irritated and exhausted I get from frequently having to work on the computer: there’s a part of me which still resists total immersion in the two-dimension world, which I’m grateful for. There are layers of despair: there’s the despair of knowing your in purgatory, but there’s the even deeper despair of being lost — floating through a series of automatic behaviors, sinking into the mechanism of modern life. We think of consciousness as a switch, on or off; consciousness, however, I think, emerges on a very subtle gradient: there is consciousness, consciousness of something, consciousness of that something’s something, and so on. We are narratives woven from a hundred billion stories interacting at a single point, a single moment: we can never stop being more conscious, there is never a limit. I open my laptop on the subway: the most basic question is why? — but that question can lead you somewhere: out of a vague sense of dissatisfaction into philosophy.
