I think a lot of existential crisis moments (the whole ‘life feels meaningless I want to be a fantasy hero on an adventure in middle earth’ thing) comes from capitalism.
It comes from people feeling on an instinctive non-rational level that they live in a violently unequal world but they do not have access (yet) to the language to know that it is happening or the answers to change it. So they just have this undirected restlessness instead.
People who see the full injustice of the world do, in my experience, rarely have those self-absorbed ‘what is my purpose in life’ moments anymore. But having an existential crisis does not mean you will get all the answers. We constantly fall into new illusions. So when a random person is in an existential crisis, I kinda take a step back, because as much as I recognize their search I can’t know yet if they’re going to find anarchism or if they’re going to find yoga.
I think the disconnect can also come from the separation between the way we conduct our lives in this society and the actual biological imperatives of life. You spend at least 18 years amassing specific types of knowledge so that one day your labor will be worthy of enough money to trade for your existence. But to survive we need: food, water, shelter, companionship, and reproduction (as a species). Choosing a career and networking and marketing yourself and plotting your livelihood for when you can no longer produce labor – it’s so far removed from the actual purposes of these things, buried hundreds of layers of meaning deep. For all our talk of “bringing home the bacon”, surviving in this society just feels like monotonous role-playing because to translate the majority of our time into activities that sustain our lives requires mind-bending mental acrobatics. You think, “I have to do all these things”, but you don’t actually remember why. So it makes sense that a lot of people wake up and think, “What AM I doing? And why?”. The shit we do doesn’t make any sense until you realize you’re meant to be a circus elephant doing tricks for peanuts.
Yup, exactly.
QueerAnarchism 