The State of Nats #5: The afternoon existentialism pill
[Week of June 11, 2025]
Recommendation for the background is My baby (Got Nothing At All) from The Materialists
Data
Yoga: 3
Dineout sites: 13
Chorizo and poee: 2
Highest steps: 9026 Lowest steps: 2760
The 2 PM pill bottle
Like clockwork my existentialism comes. The mornings are kind and I make through with discipline and non-outcomes driven mindset. Reassurances aren't needed. A simple routine persists. But at 2PM, which is an indicative time of when my lunch is over, I am in mental peril. It feels as though after my meal I walk through a mind closet and pop the wrong pill. Existentialism is a demon on my shoulder, that snuffed out the other voices and only speaks despondent. It is an ice cream that is melting in my hands as I hold it. It is a changeling1 that has replaced me.
Existentialism is a sobering experience in learning that any meaning I inject in life is inherently meaningless. It is a devastation. If everything is meaningless, having meaning is pointless. However, it also shows that it is only a matter of choice to assign any meaning to life. It doesn't have to stick, it doesn't have to make much sense. If everything is pointless, then pick your pointless poison.
The last sentence has t-shirt potential.
To host when you're going meh at best and eh at worst
A friend is visiting. Smr is here to have a small holiday in Goa, and mainly to spend some time with me. With this I have actively stopped the pursuit of self-dom and am on the journey of friend-dom. Everything is a shared experience, is a way to nurture, and a pause on the timeline of showing up for myself on a desk, typing away, everyday. It is a welcome excuse.
Am I changing or revealing?
The scary bit is, I could be turning into my sister. For years I have condemned (perhaps enviably) Rh for being on a perpetual quest of solitude. Yet to see that urgency in myself now, to want silence and coffees with pens and keyboards to tingle is perhaps the only way I wish to spend my time. My decision making is aligned to "group goals". I suffer from the elder daughter syndrome, the good wife malady, the feminine care virus.
Over three decades, my environment has uplifted the group mindset in me. In last few years though, in my sights is a new environment. Time is an available currency, to me, a surprise and a discovery. And so when I wish to simply be in my home and read on my Kindle, I stress about becoming this new being, of who I am revealing to me.
An additional burden of that knowledge is that I know for thirty years I have denied myself, my environment has denied me, meaningful solitude.
My environment has changed from parental units to partner. It brings me back to this exert from Rilke, one I used to wish for and now I could be living in.
“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
This was all very introspective. I am visibly exhausted.
Culture consumption
I watched John Wick: Ballerina, and enjoyed all the blood and deaths by ice skates. I am finally reading Death's End the third book in the Remembrance of Earth's Past (Three Body Problem) series. I am not ready to part with Cixin Liu's world. Ru is so excited2 by me stepping into this world for the final chapter that he is reading the same book again. But Ru is such an fast reader that he will speed has sped ahead of me already. I rewatched The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring while Ru experienced it for the first time. And finally after nearly a decade since its release, I made the time and stopped the "it has to be the right moment" drama and watched Hidden Figures, a movie based on real African-American women working in NASA. I could see two rivers flowing in this movie. One is the plot that we see, and we hear it in the dialogue. It is the setting of a goal, and the character's journey through its progression. The other is the scent of oppression. It is perpetual, in every interaction, very dialogue. It is unkind and harsh, more so when you think that in some ways our world has changed and in many, it has not.
May your fellowship never break apart,
Nats