Slowly getting back to enjoying life.

I guess what i’ve been thru counts as a kind of spiritual death? I just remember losing perception. Intuition – null and void. In a sense, death is not just a material before and after, but also ontologically processual. I’m not talking about bodily post-mortem, but a gradual un-becoming, becoming spiritually dead, which we participate in.

In the most common sense, death is a distinctive moment which definitely separates us from being alive. Whatever happens after the bodily death (if anything), we’re usually not able to reverse it. We are gone. Heidegger put it as Sein-zum-Tode. Death is the ultimate horizon which we organize our entire lives around. Thus, our free will is narrowed down to whatever we find to be most useful for our time in the flesh. Perhaps someone will, but i sure won’t waste my time doing something i hate.

But in another sense, death is also process of our soul, which we participate in. We can gradually kill parts of ourselves, those parts that enables hope, joy, peace, happiness and empathy in us. Perhaps we kill those parts for perfectly valid reasons: In a world such as ours, some dreams aren’t reasonable to entertain. We’re divided by class, race and borders. Only a privileged few can afford to entertain dreams without being disregarded as escapists. So we kill what ends up being fruitless and pricey yearning. It gives me nothing and it makes me suffer. We may hit our head and end up in a emergency, in a power-saving mode. But when we shut down what we perceive as expenses – we also shut down other faculties of life in us, which we do not understand are related. We are eventually shut out of what sustains us. In our effort to save power, we turn off sources of power that seems to be wasteful, but unknowingly shut off the main light-switch of our soul. We pull down the blinders on a sunny day. 

In looking for company, i search the forums. The anonymous reddit user @dizzizzystegasaurus explains that ”I need the longing. I need forbidden love.” Knowingly or unknowingly, we are both backed by Big Yearn (God). I find us both longing for what’s good. We are not alone in letting out long sighs of wanting something better than whatever we are thrown into. None of us are really able to accept the Geworfenheit, the thrownness into the situation at hand.¹

We won’t suck dick for kibble. Even though the yearn for a better tomorrow seems a little naive, the act of wanting sustains the force of life in us. It still hurts to watch my life go by, go to waste, knowing there is a whole lot i cannot control. But the alternative isn’t any better.

I’ve managed to find joy again. Particularly for writing & photography. Below, you’ll find my latest catch.

Footnotes:

1. Wrathall, Mark, ”Martin Heidegger”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2025), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2025/entries/heidegger/>. ↩︎