Conversation

was talking with girl today about how the finitude of life hits you hard when it hits you at more than an intellectual level, and i said in my mind it's part of what I tend to think of as "the hard problems". I have a division between easy and hard problems. easy problems include:

- global warming
- white supremacy
- return of fascism
- the patriarchy
- the State
- ecological polycrisis

and other such inconveniences. like I don't have any practical actionable way of solving these problems, but they are *solvable*. the solutions to them are difficult to implement but they're easy to imagine. (in many cases my solution involves "give me a 100 good girls and as many AK-47s.")

the hard problems don't have solutions. they include things like:

- The inevitability of illness, age, and death
- The fact that every relationship is temporary, so for example me eventually abandoning my kids to live the rest of their lives without me is the *good* ending, because the alternative is worse
- No save stages or chances to undo mistakes
- Existing means wanting things, but not everything that you want is possible
- And when you can actually satisfy your want, it quickly becomes unsatisfying (the hedonic treadmill)
- Too many wants are incompatible (I want to live in Japan again *and* be back to Brazil *and* stay with all my darlings in Germany *and* go to Rojava shoot at fascists *and* live in Africa etc. and I can only pick one)
- Memory easily fades and gets overwritten and you're constantly losing everything even when you're still alive, like a million little deaths every day

and so on and so forth. things that are inherent to the structure human existence. it all sounds trite when put into words, probably because the enormity of it is so overwhelming that you need to think of it as trite and shelf it away. but every so often these things become acutely clear to you at a visceral level somehow, either randomly or because of an impactful event or trigger.

I can go face nazis and crash their tiktoks to troll them and punch them when they assault me. I can't punch the fact that I can't be with my children forever, or that I have to live with my regrets for the rest of my life. even if we had global anarcho-indigenous revolution and solved the ecological polycrisis forever and lived in biopunk utopia (which we 100% should do), we will still suffer over the hard problems.

with the hard problems, you can only cope. sometimes we cope by distraction and not thinking and I do not blame anyone for that, least of all myself. but sometimes the only way that I can cope is to stare at it right on the face. therefore my interest in doing zazen again.