Finding a niche

At last it seems blogs have made dreams and passion valuable for the masses, and to the masses. According to Six Pixels of Separation, to leverage it to make a living you need only write about your most passionate interests, no matter how obscure. Passion, at the end of the day, is what we all crave and gathering a large following from pure passion will lead to profits by numbers. But to hit the spot you need to find a niche, a voice. After the last century of oppression by mass production, the individual is raising its head and heart again, paradoxically through the internet.

(Just look what Twitter is doing for Chinese democracy.)

So what’s my niche? Architecture, design and environment is my working beat, but philosophy is my secret love. Maybe I can combine the two. There are crossovers in how the philosophies of our built environments reflect what we think and how we make sense of ourselves in the world.

My first philosophical thought about architecture and design is this: we should build from the inside out.

Notes from the abyss

Why do I associate existentialism with the abyss? Here's something of an explanation. It was a philosophy developed at the turn of the century, in reaction to the breakdown of religion as the thing that gave human life meaning. Having no meaning is like staring off the edge of a cliff, into a neverending darkness. The chaos of freedom breeds madness. Why did people always need the external authority of god and religion? Because it allows us not to look at the madness, and live like it doesn't exist. But existentialism is based on that abyss, on facing up to its entirety. The victory lies in overcoming the hopelessness of our lonely race, and to create something from the absurd. Instead of finding meaning in a meaningless universe, we create it when nature never meant it to exist.

And on this issue of 'becoming' - particuarly appeals to me. It's not simply making yourself who you want to be, but it says, there's no one way you are supposed to be. No one way you'll always be. It frees me from destiny.

Quotes and more from the abyss

Well I started this blog partly to indulge my obsessions with certain dusty, dead, dark and nihilistic, turn of the century philosophers. Actually I never had the guts to do the useless philosophy degree that I desperately wanted (instead I did engineering), so really, maybe, I actually know fuck all about existentialism. But I have read about it, went to some evening courses, and the guy I was obsessed with at 18 for the next 4 years was one. So that's the sum total of my great knowledge on this subject.

But I figure actually, the less the better. What I know I strongly identify with, and what I don't know I'll recreate to be my own brand of philosophy, which, after all, is the point of life.

So I have, over the years, come across a few quotes that hit me in the guts and took my breath away. Perfect prose and love are the only two things that can do that to me. So I'll be sharing some of this with you, but treating you to it little by little, in a controlled release.

This is the one for today:

"There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He." Neitzche