But what surviving really is, the past year has taught me, is an experience contingent on accepting a kind of death. Just as building muscle is feeling weak and building knowledge is feeling dumb, fighting to exist is allowing yourself to fall apart.
This is the part of the post that made do a double take and I spent some time unpacking what’s going on here. Athletes train for their whole career; people typically build knowledge their whole life. Wouldn’t that suggest you should always be falling apart?
Yunjin apparently has been reading Rilke. He’s an existentialist in that he’s dealing with the meaninglessness problems caused by the collapse of the Enlightenment with WWI and WWII and draws on Nietzsche at least.
I think there’s 3 problems with how pop culture digests existentialism (Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, others):
- Too negative; too edgelord. Nihilism; the abyss; hell is other people; man is condemned to be free; etc.
- Too positive; too cheesy. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger; you must make your own meaning; we must imagine Sisyphus happy.
- Their writing is damn near incomprehensible because they’re trying to write about a lack of something. Yunjin is doing that too — using a dialectic to say well it’s hard to imagine surviving but it’s easy to imagine falling apart.
Existentialists like Camus were writing in the middle of WWII while living under Nzi occupation*. I think it’s important to remember they’re not just inventing meaningnlessness; it was there around them already.
Yunjin’s letter is an important moment because you’re actually watching someone do existentialism while in the middle of the crisis. She is actually sorta writing incomprehensibly because that’s the only way to get at topics like this. All that positive stuff is only there as a solution to all that negative stuff. You can imagine what she was going through when she felt life was meaningless and she was “just surviving,” and it can be hard to imagine that for people who were writing 80 years ago.
You get to this part of Yunjin’s letter
The answer was in my refusal of apathy. It was in the dinners I had with my members. In the calls with my family. In the small talk, which was never truly small, with our staff. In the letters from those who love me, their pensive pen and colored paper. It was at TeamLab, it was at Weverse Con. It was the sweat on the dance studio floor. It lived in the music I saved. Even the tear-stained pages of my diary, they all had the claw marks of my love persevering.
and I think basically every existentialist concludes this in some form. Camus takes it the furthest. He says, yes, you should always be falling apart, as is Sisyphus rolling up that boulder and having it roll back down for eternity. “Just surviving” is great and rejecting apathy is a great way to do it. Camus is a big fucking fan of surviving and he spends his whole “Myth of Sisyphus” essay writing about how surviving is a good use of time.
TY for reading. Just to add my own thoughts. All hate trained groups pretty much all want to write this letter but don’t or can’t for any reason. Yunjin is trying to speak up; we should listen.
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