Abbi is a musician and vocalist living in New York City, you can follow her on twitter.
What is the importance of space exploration in our society?
Space exploration is vastly important for infinite reasons, reasons we haven’t even imagined yet, and reasons that our little brains can’t collectively compute. One of the biggest reasons is that our planet is becoming increasingly smaller and resources are depleting faster than our population is increasing. Yes, McDonald’s may have gotten a formula down to pump out tons of empty nourishment to feed the masses and Monsanto may have patents on all the food in your next lifetime, but I feel like at the exponential rate of population growth we will outrun ourselves in the not too distant future and there simply won’t be enough room for all of us. Space! That’s what we need! And luckily the universe has plenty of it beyond the haze of orbiting space junk. We just need to explore and have technology advance quickly enough so that we can get to these other eutopia/europa planets where other life may exist. Oh yeah, and space exploration is important ‘cause other life might exist. Or hey, let’s forget about that other life existing thing and make a reality show about our species colonizing Mars, another planet where we can put all our shit!
How do you create meaningful experience in your life?
I create music; art.
What is time? What is Macaroni Time?
Time is a relative warp of reality. Shifting before our eyes in and out of nondescript wormholes that surround us. Time is and time is not. Time is whatever you make it. Time is fast and slow. Time is a gift and time is a curse. Time is past and future. Time becomes a pattern. This pattern has become hourglass shapes on a ticky tacky calendar we hang above our heads. Time defines and time demolishes fact. Time is life and time is death. Macaroni time is when there’s fresh outta the oven mac & cheese you can’t wait to eat and time slows down and your pupils get real wide with hunger. Chief Keef knows what I’m talking about. Chef Keef
In Albert Camus’ famous novel ‘The Stranger’ the central character, Mersault, is able to tolerate life in prison fairly well because of his general detachment. Is it fair to say that many people in our society “detach” as a way of coping with the violent unjust system that has been thrust upon us by history?
I think that detachment is a necessary function and something that people should exercise more. ‘Unplug’ is probably a more apt word to relate to the ingestion of information in our current society. Every day there are countless senseless acts of violence all around the world and the truth is that most of us can’t do anything about them. This doesn’t mean that we should be ignorant of the current state of affairs or idle from political awareness and help oppose these injustices, but I think in order to have sanity and enjoy life there has to be a certain level of detachment from those evils. There are people who sit in front of FOX news for hours on end watching talking heads regurgitate factless information and seemingly buy into the violence – vigorously/vigilantly consuming the information, but still accomplishing nothing other than additive societal fear and confusion. This is probably in many ways an act of detachment as well because these people are safe behind their TV screens sitting on their couches thinking that the violence could never cross over into their daily routine.
Mersault has the notion that nothing has any meaning, much as Nietsche believes that everything is given meaning and everything is meaningless without the given property of meaning. However, Nietsche gives a solution of the Ubermensch – a higher being who gives meaning to their life by being the best possible human who strives to enhance humanity. So although I think detachment is a necessary function and an apt way to cope with the enormity of violence and the irrationality of the universe, I think if we all tried to enhance humanity with a self-overcoming goodness maybe there would be less violence in the world and people like Mersault would find more purpose in life.
