While the thrust of the question is profound, I can't help but think: We are material beings. We could express outselves through images, but even those channels are "corrupted". Sounds to me like the terms of the debate are the problem.

Oh yeah totally, words are essentially hollow. They vary in meaning and the extent that their charged so much from person to person. But when you say "we are material beings," what are you basing that on? Everything that has happened since the industrial revolution? Certainly our priorities were vastly different before all that. And to this day there are still societies and cultures that prize familial connection far more than material wealth. "We are material beings" is a very first world statement. And the actual question goes beyond material goods. Why is it so important for us to express ourselves at all? It goes pretty deep when you look at it.

Sorry, I opted for brevity just because we haven't spoken before, By material beings, I mean that we are ultimately made of matter and exist in a world of matter, so everything we do is mediated through physical objects etc. There is no outside, from where we would enunciate. You can't eat "food" without it being rice, or beans or caviar for that matter. And this extends to clothing, shelter, relationships. From what you say I get the sense of yearning for a more authentic past. Mark Fisher once said that this desire itself is a part of the capitalist libidinal infrastructure. We're at stage where we need to think beyond the neat opposition of idyllic past vs. decadent modernity.

It's interesting you are projecting a sense of yearning from what I've said. Maybe that's so to an extent but primarily here I was attempting to deal in facts based on my misunderstanding of your response. But again, why do we use the things we have accepted as necessities - food, these bodies, the clothing that covers them, as vehicles for expression? At the root of self expression is desire. Desire leads to misery every single time. And that's not liberation. If I'm yearning or desiring for anything right now, it's unfiltered, unadulterated liberation. Im curious to know more about Mark Fisher's statement. I'm gonna look that up. Thanks for sharing!

To be more concrete though: I think the problem with consumerism has more to do with the way it never delivers on its promise. They know they're lying and you know they're lying but somehow the exchange still happens. In an ideal world, I wouldn't exclude people from a playful and pleasure prone relationship to self-invention. It would hopefully just be done in a more intentional way. People owning less stuff, more collective ways to recycle and exchange stuff like they do at Goodwill. We would have something like a "collective management of alienation" rather than any pretense of doing away with it. When we say we want to be less superficial and more accepting, it's truly a hard problem because it has its limit point at a kind of disinterested love of everything. A question I have is how to deal with certain socially constructed hierarchies such as intelligence or beauty because once destroyed what do we have in its place thats more equitable? IDK

Gooood point re: consumerism. It's all a farce, an illusion. It's hard to remain concrete when so much of our society relies on lies!! Like, there currently isn't enough money produced and accounted for to balance out the amount banks continue to loan out. So we're literally paying interest on total freaking bogusness. That's enough to drive a person nutty if they focus on it long enough. Im all for trades. I want to start a school eventually that relies primarily on trade of services and other goods. As little money exchanging hands as possible. But I don't delude myself in thinking that this is the optimal way to live, it just distances our organization from involvement in the whole big charade. Another way of putting "disinterested love of everything" is just to observe things as they are, without applying condemnation or justification to it all. It's a dispassionate view, one that at first to me seemed like an insane view of life. But i was just guarding my passions, because what else can I claim? The fear of the unknown, or the fact that essentially it all boils down to nothing is enough to keep us clutching and clinging to the illusions. And the corporatocracy knows this and they play into it.

Clutching and clinging to the lies we tell ourselves. Like the established notions on hierarchy or beauty or intelligence. Based on whose standards? It all means nothing ultimately, but we engage in full on wars over who's perspective is the best. It's never about authenticity, it's about pushing all the idiots off the hill and staying on top no matter what.

That way of looking at it is interesting and seems difficult to cultivate. I have a course I got on mindfulness that may help me with that. When looking at things dispassionately, how do you navigate for example the fact that you are inevitably drawn to some things? I sometimes feel guilt at for example being attracted to someone's appearance since I know they receive unjust preferential treatment for it but also are probably disadvantaged in other ways (such as people clinging to them often or shallowly interested in them etc or harassment if feelings toward them is unreciprocated). I know some people say that paradoxically you should also accept those feelings without judgment, but at the end of the day when it's time to make a choice about action this all seems paralyzing.

We make it incredibly complicated with all the determinations and conclusions we have established about the world. Clinging to a thing or hating it yield the same expenditure of unnecessary energy - they both FIX the thing into a concrete concept. From there, we have to calibrate our lives, our variables, in order to sustain the concrete sense of the thing we have established. It's a conclusion. It's a closed door. It's a death. There is LIFE in inquiry, in never being satisfied with the automatic assumptions and declarations we and those around us make. Can we approach each new thing as if we've never seen it before? With fresh eyes? And therefore develop, carefully and responsibly, an unlimited potential for world view and expansion of consciousness? It is extremely difficult to cultivate this when we keep our filters for the world fixed in place. But true liberation comes when we are able to "die to each moment" as they say. Not let things leave their deep harmful impressions. Not dig our heels in and claim anything and subsequently limiting it. Everything is limitless. Otherwise it's easy to fall into nihilism trying. That happens especially when we subscribe to any formula, even if there is any formula within the words I'm typing. If that formula is accepted blindly without individuals questioning it we run the risk of turning into automatons and perpetuating so much ignorance. Ugh - so hard to type this all out on a phone. It's all words and ultimately they are hollow and meaningless. I'm just looking at all this too, right along side you. I don't have any answers. I don't want them. I want to see what's in front of me just as it is. Not as I would have it otherwise or prefer it.

[@noort](/user/profile/noort) oops forgot to tag you above... really curious what your thoughts are...