“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” – Kierkegaard 

Increased life expectancy has confused our ancestral clock inviting a sense of impending demise prematurely. This has given way to the phenomena of the midlife crisis, an omniscient doom that has emerged and continues to expand as lives prolong. Entering into a sustained low-grade fever dream of mild dread as the horizon of our end begins to blur and extend, the hour and minute hands of the noontime of our soul quiver uncertainly. Life becomes an existential crisis, midway between what was and will be. In the not-so-distant past, death came generously and more indiscriminately, sometimes at the midnight of a much-lived life, but more often than not, at all times, half past any hour.

Modern bodies fueled by multivitamins and light bulbs. The crisis is not at a hinge of time or a fast-approaching inevitability but a hovering doubt, prompting actions in timeline extension. We scramble as the science and culture and acceptance of aging and death are shifting baselines. Having pedestalled the individual to replace tribal, group, or community identity, we induce an acute affliction of self-preservation. This though, is an opportunity to channel the urgent impulse for reinvention into fluid and uncertain growth. All futures are fiction.

All pasts are fiction. Historically accurate brain cinema is complete with period costuming and dialect. However, the credit roll reveals only a fleeting reenactment, corrupted by our emotions and an unreliable narrator. It is okay to forget. Tradition, ritual, and storytelling have been lost to the ever-present bombardment of more and new, our memories now tangled up in things. This stuff is the stuff of static storytelling, and often the object takes on more value than the story it was meant to carry.

Our stories are replaced by billboards of potential consumption, broadcasting this sophistic narrative. We attempt to replicate the feeling we associate with our objects by buying more and newer versions of them, muddling into a vague sensation and losing any concrete meaning or purpose, abstracting until it no longer represents something real but rather an empty signifier, like art or money. Our stuff is preventing us from the possibility of an ancient and new practice of memory, the one and only now, a now of…