Paradox

Office anthropology™ Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Paradox Metaphysics Cosmology The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

The world is not a rational place. If it were, the middle management layer would long since have solved the universe, reduced it to atoms, reconstructed it into an entirely binary model, devised the algorithm that will handle the known knowns for the single causal chain that definitively stretches from now to the finite hereafter — it is a consequence of reductionism being true that there is an ultimate fate of the universe — and therefore have done away with we cantankerous sacks of mortal flesh, allowing us the leisure time technological unemployment always promised us, so we could contemplate in richl specific detail the exact unfolding of the onrushing apocalypse, into whose loving maw we are categorically and unavoidably hurtling.

But — alas: reductionism is nonsense; the universe cannot be solved; we are stuck with these persistently irrational artefacts in every day life. I can’t even figure out what to have for lunch.

Now, if the price for metaphysical freedom is having to deal with stupid things like non-fungible tokens, rehypothecation and performance appraisal, then dammit, I’m buying, since the same ticket also grants us each a permanent, irrevocable licence to redesign our own private narratives to take ourselves wherever we damn well please. This is mine; readers. You can take it or leave it.

So it is with fondness and gratitude that we catalogue just a few of the potty things with which we must deal on any day — see the boxes on the right. These things may drive us insane, they may make no sense at all, but since they vouchsafe our individuality and our belief in personal freedom and they’re cheaper than a snakeskin jacket, they will do for me.

See also

• Reductionism