Rejuvenation & Disorientation
We inhabit a moment when old rhythms dissolve and new tempos outpace the frameworks we inherited.
These essays explore how fragility, disorientation, and acceleration can become sources of renewal rather than signs of decline.
Rejuvenation—the ability to remain young as we age
Our time feels deeply stuck, deeply repetitive. I wish to find a way through it.
Perhaps I am trying to find a new way of writing about the present? Explanation, criticism, and apologias for liberalism all seem like so much pleading. I’m sympathetic, but to whom are these pleas issued? They feel like so many attempts at persuading the already persuaded. The same signals; the same noise; the same groupings. Everyone is habituated into their familiar lanes.
I want to rejuvenate the Enlightenment’s possibility of human progress. This has seemed impossible when I stare into the repetitive impasse created by our party politics.
Even in an impasse, time passes: we will all age just as everything in our universe ages. The moral question is how to compose the passage of time so that we can age peacefully and prosperously, even if clearly defining these aspirations eludes our grasp, and even if composing history as progress has never been without violence.
It starts with orientation without a known destination.
If our political parties’ abdication of a better future will one day turn around, where will the necessary rejuvenation come from? All I can do is demonstrate my own attempts.
Essential Essays in this Series
Disorientation in Time as a Source of Rejuvenation
Ressentiment and Rejuvenation
Chronology
