Purpose

Diving into the pool for the first time since I fell when running Höga Kusten 43k, I was expecting the worst but it seems like the injury in my chest has almost healed. Still I limited myself to 1,000 meters this time around.

Being all alone in the water, my imagination quickly drifted off to post-flights swims that used to blur Budapest with Berlin or Delhi with Dallas, how the world was not that long ago. Sadly and predictable, we now keep stumbling towards the future with old conflicts flaring up, most recently between Armenia and Azerbaijan, rather than accelerating towards an integrated world of universal humanism. In academia, the centre is collapsing under the simultaneous onslaught of neoliberal nihilism and malthusian misanthropy, and all that is left is the apolitical managerialism of "Agenda 2030" etc. To make progress, I think it is long overdue that we bring back a notion of purpose to our politics.