• The slow diminishment of life on a dying planet and its implications for social theory

• I was convinced there was another sort of life waiting for me

• The beginnings have already begun

• So I stayed in the darkness with you

• People’s pets are going to start dying due to the heat

• The disavowal of the Covid-19 pandemic

• The murdering of possibility to regulate our suffering

• Melancholia and creativity

• Mari Ruti on the (psychoanalytically informed) art of living well

• Nietzsche and Nick Cave

• F. Scott Fitzgerald on the metaphysical horror of insomnia

• Psychological wellbeing as choosing your own symptom

• Life asks us to mourn each passing incarnation of the self

• Why do we want what we want?

• Who we are arises from how we have been hurt

• The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries

• Follow me into the sun

• Is a sense of existential fullness always a fantasy?

• To work and to build, to connect, and create

• The absence of God becomes the silence between two notes, the empty space that gave resonance to the music

• Growing the world we want is like the slow tending of a garden

• Stop looking so hard, give up the effort to see direct evidence of the meaning of being

• We must move, must grow, from apocalypse to dialectic

• to drag it out and to make it echo and to get involved and to fall in love

• A precarious sense of clarity about what work matters (and what doesn’t) as I get older

• Winter is coming

• LLMs and a general ambivalence about platform capitalism

• Murakami on the reflexive imperative as you age

• Calm creation that in opening closes, often ceases by starting

• Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: the essence of running, and a metaphor for life

• The inevitability and irreversibility of loss

• The Covid-19 pandemic as a social mechanism driving biographical change

• Black Pill Claude’s bleak vision of the coming future: the peaceful extinction of human agency

• How would workplace learning work if there’s an LLM driven removal of entry level jobs?

• Are digital elites literally trying to establish a new species?

• The millions of instances of (accidental) torture which Ray Kurzweil believes will precede the Singularity

• Plants and animals don’t fight the winter

• If we only concentrate on putting out the blaze, we’ll eventually burn out

• The growing popularity of cults in a transient, fragmented state of contemporary society

• Digital elites and reactionary modernism

• Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up

• Hope is essential to our survival and our flourishing

• Rebecca Solnit on the politics of hope

• “If H5 is ever going to be a pandemic, it’s going to be now”

• How much time does Elon Musk spend tweeting each day?

• What is Elon Musk’s end game?

• The fantasy of knowledge as attempt to foreclose otherness

• The social imaginary of middle class 90s kids

• A sociological rather than psychological notion of susceptibility to being drawn into cults

• Some thoughts about Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism

• Epidemiological self-consciousness and the suddenly countercultural status of the sovereign individual

• Atomised society has stitched itself back together and it’s pretty awful really

• Was Tony Blair the first effective accelerationist?

• Each time we don’t say what we wanna say, we’re dying

• Sam Altman: the billionaire prepper who believes he has achieved enlightenment

• There is only a single, urgent task: to reach out with joy

• On respect for what exists

• All trauma is preverbal

• One has only learnt to get the better of words for the things one no longer has to say

• We must be still and still moving, into another intensity

• Seeing my response under the new description allows me to experience it in a new way

• What will the next stage of capitalism look like? Two possibilities from Cedric Durand responding to Brett Christophers

• The liquidation of significance and symbolic misery

• And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts

• On getting what you want

• The moral force of attention and its psychic foundations

• “Dear Self, I know you’re crying out for help”

• Gillian Rose on the satisfaction of writing and the joyful agony of loving

• “The demons in your head are real and you can kill them”

• In dark times will there also be singing?

• Playing in the ruins of your past expectations

• Pandemic trauma as a driver of far-right radicalisation

• We don’t have to be unequal, it doesn’t have to be unfair, poverty isn’t inevitable

• Live the questions now

• Eudaimonic Bubbles as a normative rather than analytical concept

• Technosolutionism meets anomie

• Contemporary fascism mobilises passions which are a (fleeting) escape from the paralysis borne of a dying civilization

• I want the joy of simple colours

• What need do conspiracy theories serve?

• The political economy of hopelessness

• One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for

• Hatred, even of meanness, makes you ugly

• A relational theory of existential challenge

• The street art I saw and the street art which was really there

• Nick Cave on becoming a person

• Learning to enjoy your enjoyment

• What is sexual attraction? Some Lacanian thoughts on asexuality studies

• We are not whole and we never will be

• Not giving up on your own desire

• Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

• Current mood in (not) AI generated images #88

• On finding the words that work

• “I’m behind with everything I’ve got to do before dying and I’m finding it difficult to make progress”

• The interaction between climate change and antimicrobial resistance

• The beautiful problem of the value of life

• The enjoyment of turmoil

• The Nietzschean Midday: Lacanian thoughts on the continual moment of possibility

• Molecules of fascism”: the ‘Red Pill’ as Antidepressant

• Why I find the Lacanian concept of desire so fascinating

• I do not refute ideals, I merely put on gloves before them