Intro: Essays

Quite often, frustration comes in flashes.

Whether I'm watching the news, listening to the radio, overhearing conversations or even having conversations with friends and family sometimes I turn my mind to our current state of affairs and it comes to me. It starts imperceptibly like the flicking ON of an old-school television before BRRZT I am talking myself hoarse, waving my arms around and babbling incoherently about the state of humanity in general.

Anyway.

I think I need some way to organise my thoughts and, perhaps, in writing these posts, wrangle these concepts and share my struggles. It's a coping mechanism.

So look for posts that have been tagged with "essays", I'll be experimenting with long form writing to investigate a fairly mixed bag of ideas or questions. However, I stress (and perhaps this is unnecessary) that while I'll be striving for balanced, well-researched writing (HA!), I won't be objective. In fact, as many great commentators, academics and even former High Court Justices state: subjective opinion pretending to be objective truth is incredibly dangerous. Think about people who don't immunise their children. Climate change denial. Ideas about racial cleansing. All that kind of stuff.

We are never completely objective – the way we see the world is shaped by a range of factors such as our social, cultural, religious, economic and historical contexts. It is almost impossible, and I'd argue undesirable (and quite boring), to write in a way that tries to present an idea free from the perspective of the person who wrote it (in this case, me). I enjoy reading from someone's point of view – I like to think we bring something special to the table and objectivity can be so dry and boring to read. Something that appears to be objective could wield a lot of power – when we say that something is an objective truth you better be damned if people don't start believing it. Just look at the significance of religion!

And see? It came again. Flash frustration. I'm actually smiling to myself as I finish what I now know is the last paragraph of this post. I've caught it in a jar of words and it's buzzing around – begging to be tweaked and begging to be rewritten.

Frustrating, isn't it?