Hi. I’m Jake. I’m 22, Aussie, and on a crusade to restore narrative coherence in the midst of societal decay. I write about narrative collapse and the implications of the resulting void. I know I'm meant to keep this page short, so you can stop here if that's all you want to know.
What I do
You’ll stop looking for reasons to live or die, because you’ll realise that none of your reasoning ever changed whether you lived or died, and living doesn’t really need a justification anyway. You’ll start to do ridiculous things, like write pretentious essays in the language of academia to dismantle academic sophistry, just because it pisses you off so much that it drives people into pointless neurotic thought loops about gender and utilitarianism and AI superintelligence instead of worrying about actual issues like climate change. You’ll rationalise that it’s a necessary conflagration, that we need to restore narrative coherence to mitigate psychic entropy as we descend into utter chaos. And besides, the people making fun of you will be proving your point.
— Me, Anti-Agency
Everything is collapsing. Nothing makes any sense. I’m here to restore a temporary enclave of coherence. First, I diagnose modern pathologies. Here’s an example from my short piece Controlled Chaos:
As the world becomes more complex and we become more psychologically stunted, we lose our capacity to let go of control, and we seek refuge from the chaos through excess rigidity and safetyism. Relationships are scripted and filled with impossible expectations. Sex turns into contractual sadomasochism, where risk is simulated in a perfectly controlled and consensual fashion. Morality is turned into a sterile, transactional calculus. Obviously, this makes us miserable, and does nothing but accelerate chaos. When we believe long-term stability is impossible, we often gravitate towards hollow short-term domination, and our emotional circuitry is not adapted for modernity.
Then I show how this leads to dysfunctional narratives and behaviours. Here’s an example from Embodied Ethics:
Of course, hitting or yelling at children, or sending them away to preschool or boarding school is a terrible idea, but modern parents grow up themselves not trusting kindness, and are too stupid to realise that they can create a different world now, so we get an even more narcissistic culture in the next generation…Funnily enough, it is this technocratic logic of turning everything into a dispassionate management problem that is leading our civilisation to the brink, because it turns out that having no one be able to connect or communicate with each other, and treating everything in terms of narrow, superficial measurements like “GDP growth” and “net utility” is actually suicidal in the long run, and only temporarily functional because we have such a massive surplus to bail us out. It means we ignore most of the consequences that are actually relevant, like environmental destruction and overpopulation, and also just assume that someone else will figure it out, since no one is talking to each other.
Often, people talk past each other on certain issues, not realising they’re both missing things about the other side that they cannot symbolise. In these instances, I collapse the discourse, letting reality irrupt, like in Birth, Death, Meaning:
The debate over reproduction, abortion, antinatalism, natalism and everything in between is a stupid one. It is true that no one chooses to be born, that it is impossible to guarantee a tolerable life, that creating a child is a terrifying gamble that in the best case forces someone to sit through the absurd heartbreak of mortality. I can also empathise with the perspective that life is precious and must be preserved; I can understand why I might find abortion distasteful if I too believed that the foetus constitutes valuable human life; and I too find (some) children completely adorable, and have nothing but love for them. But through exponential population growth, we are rapidly destroying the conditions necessary for human life…Despite my rather dark view of human nature, I am not a misanthrope. There are many humans I am quite fond of. But reproducing now, fully aware of the polycrisis we find ourselves in, is hardly defensible. It is only through accepting our limitations that we can learn to live, and to nurture all that is wonderful, no matter how temporary.
Of course, letting one’s dysfunctional narrative structures collapse causes a lot of short-term discomfort. This is called a Dark Night of the Soul. There is no way out but through. I do, however, provide stabilising scaffolds, like in Embodied Ethics:
We all have a different vision of the way we want the world to be. That’s not a bad thing. A world where everyone is the same is a dead world. All we can do is trust that most of us have some common ground—some shared kernel of real desire that we can negotiate around—and fight for what we feel is beautiful. We do this in spite of criticism, even if no one else seems to agree, and even when there seems to be nothing but infinite ugliness, because it is better to stand up for something stupid than to live an entire life following rules you do not believe in.
I spend a lot of time replacing the fantasy of “pure reason” with a mix of logic and emotional rhetoric. I dismantle rigid categories and prioritise fluid, embodied cognition. This is initially terrifying, as “rationality” is usually an attempt to mitigate short-term uncertainty, but feels much better in the long run, kind of like how exercising can initially suck. Here’s an example in Epistemic Telos:
We segment away our fear, apprehension, guilt, shame, love, elation, excitement—in short, all that makes us human—as “irrational forces”, all in service of our secular God of “objectivity”, as if a suppression of intense affect must necessarily lead to some higher sublimation. The Cartesian separation of “mind” and “body”, “feeling” and “rationality” is an attempt to deny vulnerability, uncertainty and powerlessness. We pretend in the virtue of “precise language”, as if there is a clear difference between a “vector” and a “function”, or a “field” is concretely defined, or “entropy” is not contextual, or “Hausdorff space” is somehow more precise than “separated space”. We do not consider that feeling can be rational, and that rationality is a feeling—or that affect can encode salience far better than dull speech, as explored by António Damásio in Descartes’ Error.
I dismantle vague metaphysical/transcendent notions like “meaning” and “happiness” by noting that they all hover around a vague set of feelings and patterns, and that they remain nebulous so that the definitions can be moved around to serve an emotional purpose. For instance, “meaning” generally refers to an emotional association, and when people say they want meaning in life, they usually mean they want a reliable positive association, like the thought of loved ones or acts of kindness. In Birth, Death, Meaning, I write:
[W]hen people say that life is “meaningless”, what they really mean is that they can’t find any permanent and reliable positive emotional association. “Meaning” in this context refers to a stable source of optimism. When people say they want life to “mean something”, they are expressing a longing for some kind of transcendent optimism or wholeness.
And I also spend a lot of time arguing against the obsession with positivity and enjoyment. This is the sadistic superego talking! Having to keep track of endless rules about minor things disrupts the flow of life and creates unnecessary attachment, frustration and shame. In Birth, Death, Meaning, I write:
Acceptance of death does not mean you cling tightly to experience, frantically struggling to squeeze out and bottle as much joy as you can manage. “Carpe diem!” “Live now!” “Enjoy!”—this would still be bargaining, and all it does is stress you out, time slipping through your hands like lovelorn grains of sand. And acceptance of death is not a final destination to be reached; it is only asymptotically approached, with the mercurial fluctuations of heartbreak integrating themselves into the daily rhythm of your life.
And I endorse fully embracing your terrifying fear of rejection. Rejection hurts a lot less when you are sure of what you want, as you have an unshakeable faith in the motivation behind what you are presenting, even if it’s wrong. I provide tips on how to be okay with the pain, like in Anti-Agency:
Realistically you’ll know that you won’t ever meaningfully change anything, but you’ll find beauty and joy in the act of rebellion, and soon you’ll forget to meditate while masturbating to the sound of an old guy whispering in your ear. This will be done completely without irony, and you’ll begin wearing your heart on your sleeve for all the pain and heartbreak it brings you, because it’ll feel better than deadening yourself. You’ll finally accept that your dad leaving will always hurt, but you won’t have to resist it anymore. You’ll keep making fun of your own futility so you don’t accidentally hurt yourself. You’ll realise that being miserable just because other people are miserable just makes more people miserable. You’ll finally escape your impostor syndrome when you finally grasp that everyone is retarded, and you’ll begin to feel comfortable pretending to know things while not actually knowing anything.
The academic stuff
To shut one’s eyes to contemporary scientific knowledge, as, alas, some philosophy in some European countries has done, is in my opinion simply ignorant. Even worse is the attitude of those currents in philosophy that consider scientific knowledge to be “inauthentic,” or of a lower order—or regard it as an arbitrary organization of thought that is no more effective than others…
…Our knowledge is incomplete, but it is organic: it is constantly growing, and every part of it has influence over every other part. A science that closes its ears to philosophy fades into superficiality; a philosophy that pays no attention to the scientific knowledge of its time is obtuse and sterile.
— Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness
Some of my essays are quite academically dense. I try to make them readable, but if you don’t like them, they’re perfectly fine to ignore! I write them to dismantle academic sophistry by using the language of academia; they also provide more rigorous scaffolding for my other works. In this sense, they are at the same time perfectly sincere and something of a self-parody: academic language when used well can be more conceptually solid, even if it’s a little harder to understand. For instance, Panpsychosis dismantles the notion that we can ever really “understand” consciousness, and rebukes the idea that anything can really persist after we die. It also exposes solipsism and most theories of metaphysics as linguistic confusion. This allows one stuck in existential panic to let go of trying to make sense of things, and to find solace in the end of all suffering. However, this does require one to relinquish fantasies of immortality and persistence, which is initially terrifying. Of course, the punchline is that this would be incredibly obvious if not for academic language games, and I would never be forced to write confusing paragraphs disproving ergodicity and Poincaré recurrence. But really, if I can save one person from torturing themself over metaphysical fairytales, I can rest somewhat satisfied!
Particularly in my more academic essays, I often loosely repurpose scientific terms in order to generalise the intuition they convey. I should make it clear that when I use terms like epistemic entropy, or reference Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to rebuke the idea of complete systems, I am not trying to be mathematically formal. I am very careful to differentiate between formalisms and rhetorical flourishes like edge of chaos and ethical entropy.
Beyond Lacan and Buddha
I’m a Lacanian Buddhist with Stoic influences. That means I spend a lot of time trying to dismantle dysfunctional fantasies, and helping to instead face the void with equanimity. I help dissolve common neurotic attachments and reveal the motivating fear beneath. Where possible, I alleviate some of this fear, but in general the point is that nothing will ever really make sense, and nothing will ever last or make you whole. Resisting this state of affairs generates massive amounts of suffering, and contributes to harmful ideas and behaviours. In Meta-Patterns, I write:
There is an unassailable kernel of the Real that resists both symbolisation and mutation. It is this kernel around which all good works coalesce, why all good writing is rewriting, why it seems like after you’ve read your first hundred books, it often feels like you’ve read them all, just in slightly different configurations. If you keep chasing a totalising masculine symbolisation, a complete framework, an understanding of every meta-pattern that structures our phenomenology, you will forever feel frustrated and inadequate. Your narrative scaffolds will be rigid and brittle, and you will be perennially vulnerable to extended Dark Nights that refuse palliation. This is the consternation, the void at the core of our being. It is only through accepting the non-totalising feminine position—that most phenomena will not fit into a coherent pattern—that we reconstitute an incomplete security. Lyricism, musicality and rhetoric surpass sterile intellectualisation for this reason, for writing is simply the impossible art of decorating the void more virtuosically.
It’s impossible to keep track of everything. If everything could be known, there would be no meaningful progression of time nor reason for consciousness to exist, as the entire world would already be computed. The best we can do is fix things up a little when we notice they need fixing, without getting caught up on the little things, and recognising the absurd futility of it all, beyond Camus and Sartre. In End-Stage Economics, I write:
There is no reason to face what is coming in misery just because you know that there will be turmoil; you could be hit by a bus tomorrow for all you know, and it would not change how you act now…
…If you constantly obsess over potential future scenarios, you will spend your entire life in neurotic paranoia for a marginally higher chance of a longer life, and you may not even get this given that it is very difficult to adapt to a scenario that is neither known nor realised. I am reminded of certain formerly homeless people who have developed a scarcity mindset and avoid sleeping in beds when they have them again, as they are afraid of being poorly adjusted for a hypothetical future where they are once again homeless. And so what if they will be? Why not sleep in the bed anyway, and perhaps make some functional preparations without letting it poison the moment? Gramsci espoused a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will. The world is a horrific place, but we can fight to preserve little enclaves of beauty until the light goes out, until we decide it no longer makes sense, even if only in our own heads.
Humanising myself
In resistance to algorithmic flattening, I will make it clear I am just a boy yelling into the void, just like anyone else:
No narcissistic distortions or filters, just the way it should be. There is something terrifying about exposing yourself like this, physically and emotionally—and without any reciprocation—for everyone to see! Our nervous systems weren’t made for these disembodied online interactions where you can't see anyone's responses. But hopefully this humanises me enough to make it clear I’m just some kid trying to make sense of things, since I sometimes come off as very serious and combative in text. I’m not trying to start fights, I swear!
