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We wander. Our hand reaches for a paper cup filled with coffee. Tired. Sepia people, nicotine stories, wrinkled suits for important days and those jeans, that sweatshirt, for everything else. Despair*, with its gaudy airs, is banal in practice. There is no romance in despair, no baroque liasons of substance or meaning. The theater's despair is an invocation to, if not enjoyment, at least a tenuous satisfaction for something. Despair presented as spectacle does not (is not intended to) induce despair but instead vicariously satiates a hunger for an extreme.
The experience of despair is a stranger. All choices become equally undesireable, all actions become meaningless. A person in despair no longer moves of their own accord, but is instead moved by the world. It is not necessary to be conscious to navigate our society: Think about what we call small talk. People pass premade phrases back and forth without thought or evaluation. The exchanges are not shallow from a functional standpoint! The intonation and body language are as intricate as any interaction, but what we think of as consciousness(point of view, discrete process, narrator, sequentialness) can be completely disengaged. Complex human behavior is not dependent on ego. Our world of countries, cultures, art, and technology could exist without a single conscious mind.
*this may need a different word
The experience of despair is a stranger. All choices become equally undesireable, all actions become meaningless. A person in despair no longer moves of their own accord, but is instead moved by the world. It is not necessary to be conscious to navigate our society: Think about what we call small talk. People pass premade phrases back and forth without thought or evaluation. The exchanges are not shallow from a functional standpoint! The intonation and body language are as intricate as any interaction, but what we think of as consciousness(point of view, discrete process, narrator, sequentialness) can be completely disengaged. Complex human behavior is not dependent on ego. Our world of countries, cultures, art, and technology could exist without a single conscious mind.
*this may need a different word