Hipsters Ruin Everything

Jenova Project - Datsik

I’ve just started poking around in the dubstep genre and this is one of my favorite tracks so far. If I’m ever tripping on e, I hope it’s while I’m listening to this.

“Here, in an essay titled “The Unnatural Selection of Consciousness,” Tallis took on what he regards as the overconfident assumptions of some evolutionists, who argue that the problem of the evolution of consciousness will be solved the same way the problems of the evolution of the Panda’s thumb or the beak of the finch had been.

Neither Tallis, an atheist, nor I, an agnostic, are anti-evolutionists. I hope science will one day offer an explanation for the emergence of awareness from unconscious matter. I’d like to know how consciousness is preserved, coded, and expressed by the genes, and whether we should then start worrying that consciousness is genetically determined, which therefore implies the impossibility of free will. Not to mention the answer to even more fundamental questions about consciousness, or more accurately awareness: What is it? That is, is it made up of the same elementary particles, the quarks that make up the rest of the universe? If not, what sort of material is it? Where does it exist? If it exists in the mind, is the mind contained in the brain? Does the mind differ from the brain? Is it determined by the brain and thus functionally nonindependent?”

-Ron Rosenbaum, Slate

All specific personal history aside, I was one of those kids who grew up taking the city bus and playing hide and seek in alleys behind trash cans. A big city girl at heart, essentially. My college town was fairly large and industrial, but it couldn’t compare with my childhood home. Still, it’s a step up from the eerily quiet suburb I’m hanging out in these days.  It’s strange the way residing among countless other people makes you feel so connected yet lonely. When I go back to Chicago, every traffic noise, puff of exhaust, and shout creates a pulsating sensation under my feet, as if the town is alive. In a place where so many people live their lives in their singular, contrived worlds, everything becomes part of everything else through the rumbling sounds and industrial smells. Consider a sidewalk downtown: so many individual human beings going about their separate lives, but they all add up to the same pace and flood when they cross the street. Even so, I’ve always found palpable loneliness in this sort of situation. It makes me wonder whether we make the city or if the city makes us.

Now I’m back in the burbs, and what strikes me is the vastness of it all. It’s such an incredible amount of empty space that seems to be begging to be filled up. The wind seems to take on a life of its own out here because there aren’t enough buildings to break it up, and everything is terribly clean and grey. Suburbs are grey, but cities are gray. There’s a difference. I’ve realized that as much as I can enjoy a place that’s quiet and clean, I need the grayness of a city. I love the grime, I love the noise. For some reason, hearing trash blowing in the gutters satisfies me almost as much as the sound of leaves scuttling over the sidewalk. In the winter when the streets and sidewalks turn black and wet from the snow, I can connect with the other people waiting at the bus stop. Everyone in the whole sprawling metropolis seems like a family when they’re stomping their feet to get warm or sweltering in tiny apartments without air conditioning.

When I walk outside my ecru-colored townhouse in the evening, and all I hear is the silence and it feels like I’m a hundred miles away from any human contact, it’s easy to forget that I’m living in the world. I need a reminder, know what I mean?