Breaking system

I feel angry, and sad.

I want to say that I am also very privileged, and when I complain about anything I try to remain aware of that. Pain is pain and it is valid, but there are also floods and fires and human rights atrocities happening all around us, which kind of brings me to the whole point of this angst.

This is a simulation.  But scarier than the sci-fi, digital alternative movie world you might imagine, this simulation is real.  It's been created to keep us peasants distracted, and I am actively participating in and endorsing it.

The act of living, surviving, has become increasingly more difficult.  Yeah we have Netflix and cell phones now.  But guess what? Your parents didn't pay for 25 different subscription services, they didn't pay for data plans and ever-filing storage space for each individual human. They didn't go into unimaginable debt just to get an education. With all these "conveniences" come the weight of a thousand passwords you can't remember, the threat of identity theft, and the overwhelming amount of money due on various dates means you have no choice but to put it all on auto-pilot, thereby giving up your privacy and even awareness most of the time.  It now takes additional, extra effort to make sure you're not being screwed over every single day. There are even subscription services you can pay for to make sure you're not getting screwed over by subscription services!

Every day we sludge through fields of thick tar to take a single step forward, and if we don't keep trying we fall behind and can never catch up. So we buy dumb shit because we need any drop of joy we can squeeze out, even though we know it hurts the planet. We live inside the little box on the screen in our hand, we get lost in it.  I'm not trying to be all Matrix-y about life, but if we were actually being conscious about everything happening to us and our fellow humans, we psychologically and physically couldn't handle it.

I read this article about brain activity when we die.  It's based on relatively small studies, because it turns out there isn't much recorded data for this in the moment of death.  But across the world, across cultures, people seem to experience very similar things - a flood of memories, seeing one's life "flash before your eyes." The theory that has developed that our brains have a "breaking system," which allows your consciousness to filter out things you don't need access to all the time.  For instance, you don't need access to every single memory stored in your brain, and you don't need to consciously think about how to breathe or take a step or move your hand.  These braking systems are in place to make you aware of only what you really need to know in the moment.  And the theory is, when we die these brakes pull away, and everything comes flooding in all at once.  We can't spend our lives operating this way because it would be literally too much.  Many people reported an overwhelming sense of “global comprehension of their behavior throughout life where they can no longer deceive themselves,” a sort of ethical and moral big picture that we aren't able to access normally.

So yeah I don't know, ignorance is bliss maybe.

These are more shots from my Paris trip I hadn't shared yet.  He shot on a few different cameras, including film, with different lighting.  Believe it or not I still have stacks and piles of photos you have never seen haha.

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