Notes from Running on Emptiness John Zerzan

Why do modern societies have such a hard time producing adults capable of intimacy, work, enjoyment, and ethical living? Signs of damaged life are so prevalent. Chronic pain and depression, often linked and occasionally regarded as a single disorder, constitute an immense crises in postmodern life.

Freud predicted that the fullness of civilization would mean universal neurotic unhappiness.

Contemporary society exerts a ban on living in favour of its representations; images now in the saddle, riding life.

Symbolic culture inhibits human communication by blocking and otherwise suppressing channels of sensory awareness. An increasingly technological existence compels us to tune out most of what we could experience.

A "future primitive" is called for, where a living involvement with the world, and fluid intimate participation in nature will replace the thingified reign of symbolic civilisation.

1623 William Drummond, "what sweet contentments doth the soul enjoy by the senses. They are the gates and windows of its knowledge, the organs of its delight."

Emotional desolation comes from a severe restriction of the sensual.

Rainer Rilke: Now from America empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life. Meanwhile the whole natural world has become an object."

Tommy cried out in the Who's rock opera, "see me, feel me, touch me, heal me.."
The senses have come to be isolated and subdued.

Aristotle once declared, "each sense has its proper sphere." An alienated counter-world driven to estrangement by ever-greater division of labour, humbles one's own somatic sensations and fundamentally distracts from the basic rhythm's of one's life.