Why "meaning"?
My goal for 2026 is to make meaning for myself. I think this is important because so many forces in the world right now are working to make our lives flat and empty. Companies manufacture that emptiness so that they can sell us stuff to fill it with, and yet that stuff turns out to be laden with the wrong kind of meaning, a sort of meaninglessness that becomes a burden that we then have to contend with: sorting, donating, throwing out, recycling. Our lives become an endless flat series of repeated purchases and expurgations. Add to this that the world seems to be getting continuously worse. Politics are a shitshow; the news and social media are daily full of fresh horrors. Especially since COVID, there has been a palpable juxtaposition of the exploding catastrophe in the world and the imperative that we all just hunker down and continue on working as if nothing is wrong. The parallel juxtaposition of police bodycam videos or images of genocide and cute cat memes in one social media fe...