Living in the age of convenience

taiwanese grass jelly herb (3.1/5)

(cooling, bitter mint sensation that feels light but has an intense climate. apparently, when steeped with agar agar or gelatin, it can thicken into a jelly. however, i would prefer to drink the herb as is.)

"And surely you have seen, in the darkness of the most innermost rooms of these huge buildings, to which sunlight never penetrates, how the gold lead of a sliding door or screen will pick up a distant glimmer from the garden, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow, a faint golden light cast into the enveloping darkness. How in such a dark place, gold draws so much light to itself is a mystery to me. Modern man, in his well-lit house, knows nothing of the beauty of gold, but those who lived in the dark houses of the past were not merely captivated by its beauty, they also knew its practical value, for gold in these dim rooms, must have served the function of a reflector. Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty." Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows was steeped in pessimism upon first read to me. The main tension of his essay exists between a desire to preserve the past and his unwillingness to completely disregard the present. He defines Japanese culture as being one of shadows and able to convey the fragile beauty of feeble light. Opposed to Western culture based on intensity of light and architecture "thrust up and up so as to place the pinnacle as high in the heavens as possible", shadows turn the garish into dignified. They offer moments of mystery trance in everyday routine and a simple shadow is an artform unto itself: its mere existence relies on invisible details that are carefully planned beforehand. 

As I write this on the eve of Daylight Savings, if space reaches from us to construe the world, is light a way to repay borrowed time? Existence of light, similar to the stucco angel whose extremities meet in a curved mirror, comes back, almost by necessity, to a state of radicality and silence. The ideal existence is the one that lasts long enough to come back to this point of origin. Those who forge straight ahead will never know where they have come from. To think about the dangerously similar parallels in Japanese light aesthetics and economic agendas, in Kohei Saito's Degrowth Manifesto he preaches of the current externalization society that has rendered sacrifice invisible in the face of ecological disaster. He urges us that growth must end to avoid further environmental disaster.

Degrowth is commonly dismissed by accelerationists as mere "folk politics" because I think a common misconception is that its prime conception of "degrowth" is to reduce GDP. Despite Japan's long-term stagnation, it must not be confused with a steady-state or successful degrowth economy. Despite decades of near-zero GDP growth, Japan's real wages have declined by over 5% since 1997 and non-regular employment now accounts for nearly 40% of the workforce. Degrowth, as Saito argues, is not about embracing stagnation but about restructuring the economy to prioritize human well-being and ecological sustainability over profit accumulation. A shrinking GDP under capitalism means crisis when under degrowth, it could mean liberation from a system that equates economic health with endless expansion. Saito’s vision is not completely voluntaristic and bottom-up and explicitly rejects anarchism to acknowledge the continued need for national governments to provide policy guidance and coordination. But his preference is to maximize local control in decision-making and his faith lies in the belief that when freed from the shackles of artificial capitalist scarcity, people will choose social solidarity and ecological sanity. 

"achieving degrowth is through four futures:

1. climate fascism: continuing without change will bring enormous disaster to the majority of people who will be unable to afford even the most basic lifestyle while the superrich elite will benefit from disaster capitalism and see the crisis as an opportunity to enable their wealth even further

2. barbarism: rebellion of the masses due to climate change, Hobbesian state of nature

3. climate maoism: instituting top-down policies that jettison the free market and create a centralized authoritarian dictatorship to bring more "efficient" ways to combat climate change.

4. unknown: a way to resist both a slide into barbarism and autocratic nationalism. a just, sustainable society that does not need a centralized authority to implement democratic forms of mutual aid that can be achieved through (currently) unknown ways."

We live in a mysterious world that does not fully explain itself. We occupy a time and a light that seemingly lies between two eternities, but nevertheless, through some unfathomable benediction beyond the known self, we have the power to create a life both within and beyond ourselves. There is an element of mystery to light's origins, but there must also be a revelatory source of knowledge to enlighten Tanizaki's shadows that surround us and there should be a corresponding means of Saito's perfection as the true path to fulfillment. Tanizaki’s gold leaf absorbs and refracts dim light into something more luminous and Saito’s fourth unknown future takes what is hidden to be visibly externalized. It is not enough to simply resist catastrophe, a new ethic of mutual care and collective abundance must emerge, one that does not take scarcity as a given but an imposition.