Desire as an energetic drumbeat when nothing else makes sense
Finding a heading amidst the cracks spidering across the facade of reality
Digesting an avalanche of bad vibes
Orange Man 2.0 has been testing the limits of my sanity over the past couple of weeks. I’m sure you can relate. It feels like The Empire is taking the gloves off… and yet, I remind myself that they’ve never been on.
Feels like a bunch of billionaires are ripping the copper wires out of the walls of this country before it collapses, reads a Tweet.
I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers, reads a headline in the Guardian.
For many of us who live and work in the Global North, it feels like the cracks in the facade of reality are rapidly spreading. I think many of us can feel the sense of acceleration and the “death of the familiar,” as climate psychologist Steffi Bednarek puts it.
For those further from the imperial core, the way the new administration has started to say the quiet part out loud at least might seem a little bit more honest – I can only speculate.
Paddling onwards amidst the churn
My parents host a wonderful but often infuriating gathering at their house every Sunday morning called “coffee church.” The vibe: a bunch of mildly cantankerous old Marxists arguing about how the world is going to end and whether or not we have even a smidge of free will.
I honestly find these conversations exhausting, not because the questions are not worth exploring, but because they seem to get stuck in debates over competing worldviews or end in an agreement that there’s nothing that can be done. I am far more interested in co-enquiry about what the fuck to do with our lives within and around a system that is hollowing out and collapsing under its weight the same time.
For someone who’d like to think they’ve managed to get a reasonable handle on their anxiety over the course of my rapidly fading 20s, I’ve been a mess lately. The following thoughts are my best attempt to gesture at some things I (we) can do to find anchors and headings amidst profound disequilibrium.
Attempting to become the eye of the storm
Gautama Buddha taught that clinging to and resisting against our experience makes up our daily suffering. For me, this psychic pendulum feels like carrying a bag full of rocks around at all times. Occasionally I wake up for a moment and realize that I’m carrying that bag of rocks, and then almost involuntarily put it down for a bit… before inevitably picking it back up again when I slip back into autopilot.
Agonizing, analyzing, and all the other forms of intellectualized hyper-vigilance that show up when I try to get a bearing on our civilizations’ trajectory of descent are kind of like that bag of rocks. I find myself indulging in them far more than I would like to, and certainly far more than is useful. Sometimes it feels like a wildfire is burning in my mind.
From my limited experience learning how to meditate, having an anchor such as the breath or the sensation of gravity rooting my ass to the ground has been the key to slowly increasing my capacity for presence and lengthening the amount of time I spend free of that bag of rocks.
I’ve heard that the eventual goal of meditation is to transcend these anchors and stabilize a sense of embodied oneness, but for where I’m at in this life, just coming back into my bodily allotment of meat and bone feels like a huge W.
Finding our heading by following the flow of desire
My family rewatched Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest over the holidays and I was really taken with Captain Jack Sparrow’s compass – a magical artifact that always points to what the holder most desires. Throughout the film, the compass swings wildly whenever Jack holds it. Conflicting desires make it impossible for him to find his heading. Relatable.
Untangling the truth and generative energy contained in desire feels more urgent than ever.
In a simplistic interpretation of the Four Noble Truths, desire is to be let go of and transcended in order to attain true freedom. One of my teachers, Will Kabat-Zinn, cautioned against the rejection of desire as just another form of suffering – resisting what is. Disconnection from desire leads to depression. What we want helps tell us who we are.
May we find the subtlety to listen to and honor our desire and intuition without clinging or aversion. May that listening and following open up new channels of energy and new forms of care that we provide ourselves and the other living beings around us.
Resisting the capture of desire
Deleuze and Guattari highlight the ways desire is captured and domesticated by capitalism – which seeks to define it as lack, manipulating our needs for material security and belonging to yoke our bodies into regimes of production and consumption. “The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class.”
Just think about the “horny economy,” as my friend Jackson likes to call it. Sexuality (mostly male) is converted into immense profit flows, online and in person across a wide range of sex work, pornography, dating apps, and even monetized online misogyny movements spearheaded by clowns like Andrew Tate.
Our desires are older and deeper than the systems that pervert them to serve the interests of any state, corporation, or billionaire.
Desire is a flow of energy that produces reality. It builds relationships, ideas, and social structures. Desire is not about reaching a fixed goal or identity but about "becoming"—a process of continuous transformation and experimentation. Desire is not an individualized phenomenon. It flows through the bonds of interdependence and in some ways is indistinguishable from love. It is the animating force behind flow states, friendships, protest movements, and ecosystems.
Let us ask ourselves, how do we contact the truth of our desires? How do we liberate desire from fear at a time when the systems designed to capture it are simultaneously breaking down and attempting to reassert their dominance over our bodies, minds, and time in increasingly ruthless ways?
Think and act rhizomatically
Drawing inspiration from plant root systems and fungal networks, Deleuze and Guattari believed that to resist oppressive systems and live joyful lives, we must think and act rhizomatically.
Rhizomes are decentralized networks that grow in multiple, interconnected directions. They are non-linear, non-hierarchical, animated by interdependence, and emerge experimentally by responding to environmental conditions. Their resilience derives from relationships, not from the properties of individual nodes. The flows of desire that breathe life into our relationships are a force that might be our only hope to manifest new possibilities in our lives.
So what does it mean to act rhizomatically? How can we follow the flow of desire across the rhizomatic connections that make up our lives?
Weave yourself into the fabric of the universe.
My paternal ancestors were weavers in what is now County Tyrone in Northern Ireland. In the 1790s, their looms were broken by British settlers and they became refugees who travelled south and settled on poor land on the border of Leitrim and Cavan, before joining the 1798 rebellion against British rule. I’ve been thinking about them a lot recently.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve had the following phrase internally on repeat… “weave yourself into the fabric of the universe.” How the hell am I supposed to do that?
What I do know is that I feel most myself when I am weaving people I love together in community, weaving stories, and weaving myself into my surroundings. I vow to follow that thread as best as I can.
Fuck around and find out?
I’m starting to believe that the best advice we receive from others or find within ourselves is hard to interpret and even harder to follow if we strain too much trying to understand it. I can’t tell you what following the flow of desire or acting rhizomatically might look like for you, but I can give you a few examples of ways that I hope people will put those ethics into action:
Slow down. Cook dinner for your friends. Take the time to really listen to somebody’s story. Hide your neighbors from ICE. Go to that protest. Teach somebody something without expecting anything in return. Shoot your shot with someone cute. Grow vegetables. Help someone access reproductive care. Make sure your loved ones are getting enough hugs. Make sure you are getting enough hugs.
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” – Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Acknowledgements:
I would like to acknowledge Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé, who first introduced me to Deleuze and Guattari, adding his own beautifully articulated synthesis of their work.
I also used ~a certain non-American open source AI chatbot~ to help further my own understanding of these philosophers, which has been immensely helpful, particularly given the density of novel concepts they weave into their prose, which has been translated from the original French. Even reading them in English can feel like trying to learn a foreign language.
Further reading and listening:
I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers — Rebecca Shaw (The Guardian)
Climate, Psychology, and Change: Reimagining Psychotherapy in an Era of Global Disruption and Climate Anxiety — Steffi Bednarek
We Were Made for These Times — Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia — Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari