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the artist is portraying the emptiness that is the human condition juxtaposed with the banality of our day-to-day lives which arises out of our need to justify the struggle for donuts
Epicurus Was Never About Hedonism
For two thousand years, Epicurus was accused of preaching indulgence. In reality, he taught freedom from pain and peace of mind. His philosophy of pleasure is the most misunderstood idea in Western thought.
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September 21, 2025 at 09:30PM
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30th birthday setting :) Tags: #existential, #existentialist, #existentialism, #existence, #life, #meaningoflife, #spontaneous, #tranquilo, #tranquility, #tranqui, #tranquil, #divine, #being, #beinghuman, #humanbeing, #photography, #poolside, #romantic, #love, #ambient, #ambiente, #calm, #peace, #peaceful, #quiet, #alone, #silent.. Check out this post on Instagram! ift.tt/2ouURoV.
Not everything that shapes a life enters dramatically. Some things are never chosen with emphasis. They are not embraced with ceremony, defended with conviction, or even noticed at first as decisive. They remain because they are permitted to remain. They linger because they are not interrupted. What begins as delay becomes pattern. What appears temporary becomes atmospheric. What one tolerates without fully consenting to it eventually acquires the weight of familiarity, and familiarity is one of the most powerful architects of identity. This image turns toward that slow and nearly invisible process. The laundromat is not chaotic. It is not ruined. Nothing catastrophic has occurred. The space is simply unattended in small, revealing ways. A finished cycle remains unopened. A basket waits without urgency. Minor disorder accumulates without resistance. The man sits among these signs, not struggling, not correcting, not collapsing. He has allowed the condition of the place to continue, and in that continuation the image discovers its meaning.
This belongs deeply to the lived-world of Confessions to the Empty Chair. The book understands that human beings are not formed only by great decisions, public declarations, and decisive turning points. They are also formed by what they cease to resist, what they normalize, what they allow to remain in the background long enough to become part of the foreground. The soul does not deteriorate only by rebellion. It can also be shaped by passivity, by deferred clarity, by tolerated incoherence, by repeated coexistence with what should have been addressed earlier. The most consequential transformations are not always acts of direct self-authorship. Sometimes they are acts of omission that gradually harden into character.
Phenomenologically, this matters because the lived environment is never neutral. Spaces bear witness to the rhythms of the selves inhabiting them. An untended place is not merely a container of scattered objects. It is a visible expression of relation—or failed relation—between person and world. In this image, the laundromat becomes more than a public utility. It becomes a structure of repetition. The machines continue their cycles whether attended or ignored. Their motion is indifferent, regular, procedural. That repetition mirrors the logic of tolerated habits. What is left alone does not remain static. It continues. It turns again. It incorporates delay into its normal operation. The man seated there appears calm, but the calm is not peace. It is the stillness of cohabitation with what has gone unchallenged for too long.
That distinction matters in the world of the book. Confessions to the Empty Chair repeatedly shows that not every quiet state is innocent. Silence can hide evasion. Stability can conceal resignation. Familiarity can mask disorder so thoroughly that the self no longer experiences it as disorder at all. One of the most sobering insights the book opens is that the human person adapts downward as easily as upward. We become capable of living beside what once would have unsettled us. We learn to make room for contradictions, compromises, false comforts, and lingering distortions—not always because we affirm them in principle, but because endurance without judgment slowly changes our measure of what feels normal.
Psychologically, this is one of the most important truths the image addresses. Identity is not built only through what we love explicitly. It is also built through what we repeatedly allow to structure our days. Tolerance is not just intellectual permission. It is existential accommodation. A habit, atmosphere, resentment, indulgence, or form of neglect remains near us long enough that our nervous system stops announcing its presence as unusual. The self then begins to inhabit that tolerated condition as though it were simply the weather of life. Over time, the tolerated thing is no longer experienced as external intrusion. It is folded into one’s sense of reality. This is what the title means. “It Became Part of Me” does not name a sudden fusion. It names gradual incorporation by unresisted proximity.
There is also a theological seriousness here. Much of spiritual formation turns on attention, not merely intention. A person may sincerely endorse the good in principle while permitting rival patterns to sediment beneath that endorsement. The soul may profess one order while living inside another. In that sense, tolerated disorder is not morally trivial simply because it lacks spectacle. What is left unexamined can become formative. What is left uninterpreted can become authoritative. The danger is not only that one does wrong. It is that one becomes the kind of person for whom the wrong no longer feels out of place. The book’s world understands this tension well. It does not reduce moral struggle to headline transgressions. It attends to the quieter architecture by which character is shaped through endurance of what should not have been welcomed.
The laundromat setting intensifies the point because it is impersonal, repetitive, and transitional. People enter such spaces to restore order to what has been used, dirtied, and worn. That symbolic dimension matters. Laundry is ordinarily associated with maintenance, renewal, and care. Yet here even that process has stalled into passivity. The cycle has finished, but nothing has been retrieved. The means of correction are present, but correction has not been undertaken. That suspended state reveals something painful about the self: sometimes the problem is not lack of opportunity, but failure of response. One can sit within reach of restoration and still remain unmoved.
In Confessions to the Empty Chair, the self is never portrayed as a sealed interior unaffected by environment, repetition, or tolerated patterns. It is porous, shaped through what it consents to live among. That is why this image does not need overt despair. Its force comes from something quieter and, in many ways, more unsettling. The man does not look ruined. He looks acclimated. And acclimation is often the deeper crisis. Catastrophe alarms. Accommodation settles in. Catastrophe demands response. Accommodation teaches the soul to stop expecting one.
“It Became Part of Me” therefore names a truth many lives know too well: we are not formed only by the things we choose decisively, but by the things we stop challenging. The tolerated enters slowly. It remains without fanfare. It stays past the moment we meant to address it. Then one day the boundary between self and condition is no longer easy to find. What was once near us has entered us. What we permitted to remain has begun, quietly and effectively, to tell us who we are.
What is spirituality to you? Originally asked by an anthropologist friend, as part of her research for a master's thesis. Your answers would be valuable to her! For more, follow The Existentialist on Facebook. #existentialist, #existential, #existentialism, #life, #meaningoflife, #purpose, #light, #spiritual, #spirituality, #spiritualism, #spirituals, #spiritualseeker, #seeker, #truth, #truthseeker, #lightworker, #warrioroflight, #warriorsoflight, #metaphysical, #metaphysics, #questions, #question, #meaning, #lifemeaning, #whatislife, #meditation, #religion, #philosophyoflife, #questionoftheday, #mystical.. Check out this post on Instagram! ift.tt/2mNcjjW.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and family are also from Concord and buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Like the Emerson's Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Concord's old Manse.
In the stillness of the inanimate, truth breathes without distortion.
A silent object becomes the deepest mirror of reality —
where meaning exists before language.
Here lies the grave of Daniel Chester French. The American sculptor successful in the competition for the statue of Abraham Lincoln for the Lincoln Memorial. Henry Bacon, architect of the Lincoln Memorial, is also buried here. Both lived in Concord
Existential Inspiration, Spring 2016
Existentialism in Paris
This is our professor Dr. McReynolds deep in thought (or perhaps watching television but I like to think he was contemplating) and on the other side of the table, we gathered here daily at Au Perroquet, a local cafe in Paris, to discuss existentialism. So much was learned here but our
discussions changed me. I now walk with purpose, speak with intention and live for today.
An empty street appears twice—once as itself, and once reversed, as if reality were looking back at its own reflection. With no human presence, the space becomes a meditation on absence, time, and perception.
Perhaps the street is not empty at all; perhaps it is simply waiting for the memories of those who once passed through it.
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SSS Debates Simone de Beauvoir Passed Away on 14 April, 1986..
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Remembering Simone in the Month of Her Death anniversary.
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invites you to The Legacy of.
Simone de Beauvoir.
A Talk.
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speaker.
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Prof. Satya P..
.
Gautam.
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28 April Today Kaveri Mess 9.30pm.
.
"There is a good principle which created order, light and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness and.
woman"-Pythagoras.
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Woman, the other of man has been historically and socially viewed as the darkness as this quote depicts. The identity of.
female is marked by the absence. The qualities which are attributed on man like virility, intellect, courage etc, female is.
defined by the absence of them. It is an originary absence in the sense that the encounter with one's own self is always.
mediated through the dominant-hegemonic social structures. Simone writes in the Second Sex, "Man thinks himself.
without the body of the woman, whereas the woman's body seems devoid of meaning without reference to the male...she.
is nothing other than what man decides. She determines and differentiates herself in relation to man...She is the Other.".
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The alterity which is ascribed to female brings about a different conception of the self which is not absolute or abstract.
but which is very much embedded in the concrete and subtle social forces. As a feminist, the question before Simone is.
the analyses of this `situated self' of the female. She analyses it through unfolding the social forces which mark the body.
of female into the dominant patriarchal social order. She therefore is `not born but made' as woman. The objectification.
of female through patriarchy converts her into an entity where the meaning and values of her existence are derived by.
the norms and ideals of patriarchal order. The images of Seeta and savitri and other chaste women in Indian society.
which remains encoded in the patriarchal framework and ingrained in the psyche of girls through various institutional.
mediums like family, religion becomes the sort of "Superego" for the females. So female has to assume the role models.
provided by the patriarchal set up otherwise it results in the guilt, a loss of the sense of the self. Simone points out at.
this predicament when she says, "she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as.
Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever.
transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness.".
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The present talk will discuss the various issues which remains crucial even after her demise..
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1- The life as acknowledged by her in autobiography, interviews and letters and the life as lived by her which she.
has not acknowledged yet we can delve into it through other sources..
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2- The dialectics of engagement with Jean Paul Sartre, her life partner. Whether she is the thinker who is influenced.
by Sartre as she herself acknowledged or she is an independent thinker from whom Sartre has taken the many.
insights and later appropriated them?.
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3- Feminism as existentialism or otherwise?.
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"There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost.
my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me..
A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time.
understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to.
those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself.
anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous.".
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Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed.
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14 April this year commemorated the 26th death anniversary of French feminist and existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. She.
expounded major existential themes in her novels and writings, demonstrating her conception of the writer's commitment.
to the time: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and.
our reasons for living." SSS Debates invites you to a Talk tonight at 9.30 pm by Prof. Satya P. Gautam of Centre for.
Philosophy, to discuss Simone's legacy and the implications of her work..
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Akbar, Minakshi , Omprasad, Shivani.
Councillors, SSS, JNUSU.
..
There are moments in life when judgment does not come from outside us as accusation, argument, or public sentence. It arrives earlier than speech. It is present before defense. It settles into the interior world before any formal naming occurs. This image turns toward that hidden tribunal. The figure stands alone at center court, yet the court itself functions less as a place of competition than as a place of inward reckoning. The painted lines, the overhead lights, the empty bleachers, and the disciplined geometry of the room all suggest order without requiring any visible authority. No jury appears. No accuser speaks. No verdict is announced aloud. Still, something has already been decided.
That structure belongs deeply to the lived-world of Confessions to the Empty Chair. The book does not treat conscience as a borrowed social script or as a mere inheritance of external rules. Again and again, its world shows that the human being encounters moral knowledge first as an event of exposure. One is not merely told that something is true, wrong, disordered, or binding. One finds oneself already standing within the truth of it. By the time language catches up, the soul has often already registered the weight of the matter. The self knows before it explains. It resists what it already perceives. It constructs arguments after the deeper recognition has occurred.
That is why the image matters in its sparseness. The empty gymnasium refuses distraction. It offers no comforting domestic textures, no clutter of memory objects, no sentimental cues. It presents structure, measure, boundary, and placement. In existential-phenomenological terms, this scene reveals that judgment does not first arise as a proposition but as a mode of disclosedness. The world becomes configured in such a way that one’s own position within it is clarified. The center line beneath the figure does more than organize the floor. It quietly symbolizes the way a life can be divided, weighed, and seen. The body stands where the inward life has already been brought to account.
This is also theological. Conscience, in the deeper sense, is not merely private preference intensified by guilt. It is the place where moral reality becomes intimate. It is where transcendence presses inwardly without spectacle. In Confessions to the Empty Chair, this inwardness is never treated as soft subjectivity. It is often severe, even when no outward severity is present. The soul discovers that there is no need for a public courtroom when truth has already taken its seat within. One can stand alone and still not be solitary. One can hear no voice and still be addressed. One can receive no sentence from another person and still know that a sentence, in essence, has already begun to form.
Psychologically, the image also points to the experience of self-appraisal before self-justification. There are moments when a person senses the meaning of his own motives before he arranges them into a flattering narrative. He knows the drift of his heart before he edits it for presentation. He senses where he has consented, where he has excused, where he has delayed, where he has tolerated what should not have remained. This is not merely guilt in the shallow sense. It is a more originary recognition: the self meeting itself under a light it did not manufacture. That is why the overhead illumination matters here. It does not flatter. It does not romanticize. It reveals through exposure rather than comfort.
The book’s larger world makes such a moment intelligible because it understands that human beings do not live only among events. They live among meanings that arrive unevenly, and among judgments that are often interior long before they become expressible. Experience is not neutral. Desire is not neutral. Memory is not neutral. Neither is conscience. The self is always already involved, always already implicated, always already answering something. This image captures that condition by refusing spectacle and letting form itself carry the insight.
“The Verdict Was Already There” names a reality many people recognize but rarely articulate well. Before the apology, before the confession, before the argument, before the explanation, something in us has often already decided. The deepest tribunal is not postponed until others speak. It begins when the soul finds itself unable to unknow what it has already seen.
Comics Exhibition: "From TELEOS to the Beyond”
Dithers Humor with the Existential and the Mundane
SILVER SPRING, MD— DWIGHTMESS Cartooning & Comic Arts, a new gallery devoted to experimental and cutting-edge independent comics and illustration, is proud to announce its next exhibition, From Telos to the Beyond, a conceptual group show exploring material spirituality and existentialism through comics, featuring the original comics art of Sam Sharpe, Everett Bass, Bob Kubbers and Peach S. Goodrich.
Combining the uncanny and the profane, the arcane and the contemporary, From Telos to Beyond represents a cartoonists' inclination for testing out possible habitable cosmic systems through the particularized and unshared realities of their art. Humanity's inclination to obsessively name its purpose through art is a feature of popular Western cosmogony, and is put into illuminatingly weird action by these artists through the language of sequential storytelling.
Sam Sharpe and Peach S. Goodrich are collaborators on Viewotron, an anthology of recurring stories that match comedic riffs with philosophical narrative rhymes that could only happen in comics. Populated with talking animal college students, goal-less explorers, space monsters, debunked deities, and unexamined consciences, the publication's weird humor reminds us that no one is safe from the stresses in our lives that can embolden one to self-sabotage.
Combined with Sharpe and Goodrich, the perfect draftsmanship and storytelling of comics artist Bob Lubbers (1922-2017) reveals a mastery of and seamless relationship to the comics medium that would seem, to contemporary eyes, eerie to maintain and distinctive in its compositions. His bold creativity, on display in comic strips such as 'Lil Abner, Tarzan, The Saint, and Secret Agent X9 should have afforded him more recognition. According to comics journalist Paul Gravett, Lubbers is 'not the celebrated cartoonist he should be.' Additionally, in these strange & obscure, possibly unpublished comic strips titled Buck Danes, Everett Bass, an artist surmised to have worked in the 1940's, engages a singular, running commentary about making ends meet through its characters that mirrors the political realism of Harold Gray's renowned and long-running comic strip, Little Orphan Annie. That the comic may well represent a failed attempt to capitalize on Gray's success by featuring familiar working-class themes and a relatable drawing style, it ultimately still succeeds at replicating Gray's comic universe, but for purposes too fascinatingly odd to be understood.
made using markers and colored pencils.
this piece depicts my view of humans in the future. I think that we will have devices implanted under our skin that we can choose our emotions, get food, water, and sleep (our necessities) which will eradicate any future need for them. This of course will get rid of the need for our economy, but we will have to pay a life tax to the government that keeps our bodily systems going and still balances the economy to where it needs to be.
In this piece, I wanted to invent an entire new development for the future and also add a personal element to it. That element because the search for an identity and the turmoil one faces over finding one. (ie. existentialism, which is one of my favorite elements of philosophy)
I think I would have used gouache or acrylic insead of colored pencil to create this piece. also may have collaged it if I had a second chance to make this piece. I am very happy with my idea though! I think it's cool to think about what technology we will have in the future.