Treadmill

Growing up in small-town Kalmar on the east coast of Sweden, running meant following the shoreline and the seasons. These days, in twenty-million-strong Seoul, I run in an air-conditioned basement on a treadmill. If I raise my head, I can see a golden plaque commemorating the visit to Hankuk University of Foreign Studies by Barack Obama and, in the mirror, Korean students struggling to impose discipline on their bodies. You do not have to be Slavoj Žižek to sense that there is something fundamentally unnatural about this environment.

Call it a “temporary dive”, but today was worse than usual. I struggled to sustain my motivation, to make it last through those six kilometres and thirty minutes – my mind flickering like a television screen between channels, from morning windows high above Lower Manhattan to Türkenschanzpark in Vienna’s eighteenth district. Fifteen minutes in, it all turned black. Not miserable noir melancholy black, but simple emptiness – void.

Yet I am too much of a hobby psychologist not to be at least somewhat fascinated by my own emotions, by the fact that I do not normally feel like this. So I kept running. The meter reached six kilometres and I stepped down. The void had lifted, but it made me think again about social ontology – about how the world appears to other people, and to what extent it is only “broken” in an epistemological sense. Perhaps I should go to church tomorrow, if only to renew my faith in one possible set of answers.