Faith in Nothingness

The Future Wrought by the Hubris of "No Religion"

We persist in asserting, in various forms, the fact that the world is shaped by instability; yet, perhaps we are fundamentally astray in our grasp of this premise. That is to say, despite standing in a place that is perpetually “somewhere not peaceful,” we dream of a tranquility yet unseen, thereby demoting the reality before our eyes to a mere waiting room where we simply endure. This dream has endured for centuries as the dream of modernity, but the truth is not that such a thing never existed, but rather that humanity has already arrived at the dream of modernity. Despite standing at the terminus of a dream already realized and passed, our discourse, for some reason, remains unable to shift even slightly from the foundations of the modern.

If we examine history, it is self-evident: while we can explore history, it is extremely difficult to examine the era in which we ourselves live in real-time. In the past, that world was at the level of the village; since the modern era, it became the scale of the nation; and since the 1990s, it has become planetary. Therefore, it is impossible to discuss such dimensions centrally and concisely, and to imagine that one can clarify the full picture of the era is nothing short of sheer fantasy. Even if one were to discuss the nature of the era somewhere, there is always the absolute regulation of “place.”

All existence is created from place. Thus, discussion without place is empty theory. No matter how limitlessly one produces and reproduces this empty theory, it amounts to nothing more than a waste of time—humanity’s greatest asset. The situation does not advance a single step, and we fall into a state of exhaustion on a human scale.

Try, for a moment, to calmly imagine how your own habits of thought are corroding your spirit. Then ask yourself again whether those habits of thought truly originate from your essential self. If you are a modern person, nine times out of ten, almost all of them do not originate from you. At this moment, a “margin of speculation” is opened within your internal world, and within that space, an active yet tranquil eye opens to truly gaze upon the world. This is one form of modern enlightenment.

To begin with, given that the majority of our day consists of unexpected events and friction with others, perceiving life itself as noise is synonymous with denying the majority of life. Whether or not we believe the lesson that maturity lies in eliminating trouble, keeping emotions flat, and proceeding efficiently, this is merely a norm of modern society. In such cases, there is a rampant vice of shaming emotional undulations as if they were system errors, pretending not to see them and sealing them away. Consequently, revealing emotion is socially perceived as immature and problematic; in the present day, many are exhausted by how to handle this, falling into a state of unmanageability and losing their mental equilibrium. This is because the technique of sealing away emotion to get by is deemed the mark of the social “model student,” while those who do not conform are posited as having problems. Until now, being this model student was directly linked to income, but with the tides of automation and AI, the situation has begun to reverse rapidly. The stronger this era becomes, the more those who were previously ignored by society as “problematic” will stand on the side of creating new history. Culture is not born from model students.

First, no matter how much one tries to seal it away or pretend it never happened, such undigested emotion possesses the nature of constantly sedimenting at the bottom of one’s heart. And the more one tries to suppress emotion, the higher the concentration of this sediment becomes. Before one knows it, it links instantly with past accumulated emotions in response to completely unrelated events in daily life, erupting excessively as a reaction. This creates a vicious cycle that drives both body and mind further into an abyss of instability.

Irritation transforms into impatience, sadness into a sense of void, eventually inviting a state of paralysis where one no longer even knows what one is feeling. This is the true nature of the insomnia peculiar to the modern age and reasonless anxiety, and it is the greatest characteristic possessed by modern society: namely, self-domestication into the system.

Self-domestication into the system, though varying in degree, has now reached a dimension that no one can avoid. If we do not stand on the premise of admitting that the old method of escaping outside the system is now completely invalid, we lose sight of the essence of things.