Full Moon Edition July 2025
Ennui. A remarkable word. A term for our times, perhaps. Some would say all times, but for our purposes in this current era of errata never posted and the unrelenting barrage of images coming our way it is particular where so much is vague. It’s about response to the conditional experience of living and how it makes us feel. Definitions too often default to boredom and dissatisfaction, but a keener meaning is the root in Old French enui meaning annoyance or from Late Latin inodiō meaning hated.
Ask any writer their favorite word and a number will be forthcoming. I remember years ago a gathering of linguists of some sort or another determined that cellardoor was its choice, which immediately incited no less a ranter than Norman Mailer to ruminate on its allusion to the rectum and what that had to say about our literary mindset. Be that as it may, ennui always will be among the words that writers cite, but philosophers and poets, too. It’s essential to the existential state of being, which now is purely apropos.
The question of what’s wrong with kids today revisits every generation. Their parents are tortured as the breed always is by fear of failure in this exercise for which there is no guidebook. “Why are my kids so weird and is it just their contrary nature or am I doing something wrong?” Technology is a likely suspect because their phones are welded to their eyeballs and their counselors tell us they’re deeply depressed (HERE). Those devices are today’s rock ‘n’ roll: corruptor of youth and bane of parental aspirations. Can’t we just be rid of them and would it be a better world if we were?
Have we become too lazy to think? Has our ravenous appetite for eye bombs, brief blasts of images for the eyeballs, moments of sensuous input absorbed with keen pleasure and immediately forgotten, has the relentless assault on our faculties dulled our ability to use our brain for anything other than a dumping ground? Are parents any better at dealing with this vacuity than their kids? (HERE)
Sometimes the thought comes to me that a logical progression of the technology we employ is leading us to a vacuous place of being where we absorb and react without ever thinking. Is it paranoid to suspect we are being purposely maneuvered? That the water temperature is raised slowly until unnoticed we are cooked?
Will Autocorrect become Autoexist, a function that draws on a vast database to move us where we need to be for maximum value to the forces moving us? Those tech bros, that is, who profit so magnificently from this quintessential advertising medium they so cleverly constructed and sold to us as something that would empower us. Do you feel empowered, perhaps just entertained, or rather do you feel manipulated?
Artificial Intelligence is certainly artificial. Whether it is intelligent or merely calculated gives pause. It is very quickly replacing people in all sorts of enterprises not because it is better than humans but because it is faster and cheaper. Amoral, too, which is a bonus if you run a corporate commercial enterprise. People can be problematic.
It has commercial value, of that we can’t deny. But what about political value? Is it a threat to erode our democratic ways? If it depends on who we elect, the early results are in. If recent elections matter, there’s already abundant evidence that what you see is what you’ll get if you are willing to trust your eyes more than your brain (HERE).
But then too there is that dissatisfaction we noted in a previous newsletter of the thirty-six percent of eligible voters who do NOT vote. And we might add to that the diminished engagement and addictive behavior of young people to their devices that so worries their parents. And the fact their parents are becoming more like their kids in that worrisome way. Wither the withdrawal? Perhaps they all are similarly annoyed and even hateful of the paucity of opportunity to stem the tide washing over them. Ennui indeed.