Reflections – Page 2 – Centre of the Web

THE hegemony is getting me down.

If you’re on the right side of theirstory, you know which hegemony I’m talking about.

It makes me want to go all out for…nothing. Because it seems that anything I go ‘all out’ for has to be either totally for profit –which I couldn’t bring myself to do– or totally anti-capitalist, totally anti-hegemony. Anything in-between only supports the hegemony in various insidious ways. This is what we all have to live with. (Better, perhaps, to go all out for profit, and then make some kind of big break from the hegemony to spend the winnings on counter-hegemonic initiatives, further down the line.)

This is what I have been led to believe. Yet I know that I cannot live my whole life in a totally anti-capitalist way (even if I were to ‘drop out’ entirely). No-one can.

Apparently, all (or most?) activists have to separate their lives between acceptance of the hegemony (including, ‘making a living’ or ‘earning a wage’) and educating / acting against the hegemony. Apparently, we have to compartmentalise counter-hegemony into a corner, small or large, of our lives. Otherwise, the argument goes, we convince ourselves that the half-measures or ‘relatively good’ or charitable initiatives (if we’re lucky) or wage labour we get involved with or are subject to, for much of our time, could somehow, somewhere be revolutionary i.e. deeply necessary.

This is indeed, what a respected teacher of mine seemed to say recently. But isn’t this nonsense? Doesn’t dividing off our counter-hegemonic work from the rest of our lives amount to accepting the divide-and-conquer, atomising, compartmentalising tactics and effects of the capitalist hegemony? And is true compartmentalisation of counter-hegemony even possible, when the hegemony is supposed to be so all-pervasive, even in our most intimate of thoughts?

Wouldn’t it be better to understand ourselves as holistic beings, always carrying both hegemony and seeds of counter-hegemony within us, wherever we are? (Even those, I might add, who claim to be out-and-out capitalists). Isn’t that closer to the truth? And if us counter-hegemonists –perhaps a nicer and fresher term than the crude-sounding ‘anti-capitalist’–are walking, talking dialectical conversations between hegemony and counter-hegemony, then doesn’t there open up the possibility, in every moment, for the nuanced growth or construction of STRATEGY for defeating hegemony, not just in counter-hegemonic spaces, but in ALL spaces, and at all times?

The hegemony is everywhere, even in our most private thoughts, but so is counter-hegemony. We simply cannot afford to relegate counter-hegemony to the ‘radical’ corners of our lives. We can instead go all out for strategising to manifest this dialectic in increasingly liberatory ways, whatever moment or space we are in.

Originally published in the Schemattic digital garden

Collapse chats & diaries, Ecology of the absurd, Reflections

Learning To Live Slowly

May 21, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

By Robin Boardman, co-founder of the global Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement; originally published on April 7 2026 on Robin’s website here. Republished with his permission.

This week, I let go of the last small thread of work I’d been holding onto with Revolution in the 21st Century. A few hours here and there — just enough to feel like I was still the person I used to be. Still contributing. Still part of something I’d spent years building.

But my brain has shut down to that kind of work now. So I wrote a gentle goodbye email to the team, and a farewell on social media. I’m hoping that by shrinking my world — and my worries — I might give my body the space it needs to recover.

Now I’m lying down with a migraine, dictating these thoughts into my phone. Speaking, in a strange way, both into the void and into the world’s largest language machine.

Chronic illness takes things from you slowly, and then sometimes all at once. Work — that identity of doing and producing — was one of the last things I was still quietly clutching. Letting it go feels significant. Not just practical, but existential.

Who am I, if not someone who does? What do I do when I see climate collapse unfolding across our gorgeous blue-green earth, yet live bound by these four walls?

I’m still working that out. My values are the same. My love and motivation undimmed. Yet physically, I can give a lot less. So meaning has gotten smaller. More specific.

I’ve started sewing again — patches, small art projects, techniques I haven’t touched since school. I bake for my housemates and neighbours. I keep the common spaces clean because I’ve noticed how much it changes the feeling of coming home to something cared for.

It’s not the life I imagined for my twenties. It looks, in some ways, closer to that of a retiree. But there’s an honest craft in it. A kind of housebound purposefulness — stripped of the stereotype associations of age or gender. Just a person who happens to be home a lot, trying to make that mean something for the people around them.

I hold it lightly. Some days it feels like a silver lining. Other days, it just feels like what’s left.

The hardest part, most days, isn’t the physical limitation. It’s the relational cost.

Illness makes you unpredictable. Unavailable. Hard to reach.

People you love have their own rhythms — their own crises, their own windows of openness. And when your body doesn’t run on a schedule, you miss each other. You fall out of sync.

So you find other ways.

Letters. Voice notes. Small things made with care. Slower, more asynchronous forms of love.

It’s an adjustment. And it’s ongoing.

Not everyone understands. Some are drifting away. That’s okay. I’m taking it one day at a time.

I’m still doing EMDR therapy. Still trying to bring my nervous system somewhere closer to rest — films, audiobooks, sitting in the garden, whatever works on a given day. Still watching for those small windows of recovery, and trying not to measure my life only by their absence.

Six years in, I’m not the person I was before.

But I’m still here. Still finding small ways to nourish the life I actually have. Still trying to keep despair at a distance with purpose, however quiet.

That feels like enough, for now.

Reflections

Capitalism is…

May 19, 2026May 22, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

…the weed with roots 6 feet deep, that looks so attractive on the surface, but eventually blocks out the sun, as well as the neighbours. The most wholesome apple pie you have ever tasted, with pharmaceutical ingredients. The sexiest person you have ever seen, naked, that turns out to be a hologram when you get too close. Poorly designed obsolescence. The spiritual shopping mall open late on Sundays. The thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of exhausting moderate pain you are expected to suffer before your insides can be fixed, or if you live in a poor country, the thousands of dollars you yearn after but will never have, and the worsening pain you will suffer because of it, until you die. The millions of air miles spent on observing rare flowers, which therefore become rarer. The illusion of YouTube greatness. The fact that you cannot remember the important things and cannot forget the trash. The way we, of whichever gender, find some kind of cool way of subverting the patriarchy, only to be commercialized to support the patriarchy. The fact that most people still perceive anarchism as about chaos and throwing bombs, though it has been over one hundred years since the 1890s. That the internet did not truly democratize publishing, despite appearances. The seemingly infinite ways we could get rich if only we learnt the right strategy (on YouTube) and learnt the right way of obfuscating the existence of suicidal sweatshops. The way that companies are trying really hard to audit their supply chains, so that they can begin to work out which parts of those chains are too immoral to be effectively spun on Netflix. The way you think she / he / they looked at you, when actually, your wallet / purse or those of your parents, are always the prime concern, whether consciously or not. The fact that things are pretty good, for most of the time, for enough of the people who are supposed to matter and the people who validate those people by wanting to matter in exactly the same way.

AI Tomorrows, DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, FLASH!, Many feminisms, Reflections, South Korea

The Woman Not on Any List

May 14, 2026May 18, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

by Jo Eunyoung (South Korea, poet)

“Noblesse Matchmaking — we find you the partner you deserve.“

A temporary but urgent call to action! Centre of the Web partner Versy Talks is kindly running a free public online debate about the publishing industry from 21st to 31st May 2026. It does not take long to take part in the debate and state your opinion, and everyone is welcome! Sharing your voice will help boost both COTW and Versy Talks. Please help us grow, so that we can platform diverse and underrepresented voices from around the world. More information can be found here.

Even past forty, matchmaking agencies still send me messages. Maybe I’m still on their list of women who haven’t — or couldn’t — marry. Maybe it’s just an automated system firing into the void. Either way, I feel two things at once: a small admiration for their persistence, and a faint irritation at still being considered a target. I never delete the messages immediately. I leave them there for hours, as if one day even this might begin to feel urgent.

One day, a younger colleague leaned in close, as if sharing classified information. “Unni, I actually met my husband through a matchmaking agency (gyeolhon jeongbo hoesa: Korea’s paid marriage brokerage service that scores and ranks members by age, education, income, and appearance). You should try it too — I worked really hard at it.” She believed she was doing me a favor. The story of their fated, romantic meeting had apparently been constructed overnight — a tidy narrative designed to erase the fact that it had started with a checklist.

It’s not that I never tried. I dated steadily, loved recklessly. I was a bitch to some and an angel to others, just as certain exes were to me. I broke up and started over, again and again, and somewhere in that repetition, time slipped away — “hulsseok”(the sound Koreans make while swallowing tears).

People offered what they called gentle advice. You studied too long. You were too focused on work. They followed this with their own marriage success stories. A question rose in my throat — so are you actually happy?— but I swallowed it every time. I didn’t want to come across as the bitter unmarried woman, sneering at other people’s choices.

What they said always sounded less like advice and more like self-reassurance: that raising children is nobler than any career, that some men feel burdened by women who think too much, that love is fine but marriage is reality. I listened and nodded. You’re doing so well. I’m honestly envious. It was the kindest thing I could offer.

They say marriage is a choice now. But most people I know — born, like me, in the 1980s — didn’t quite choose it or reject it. They simply married, the way you do things when that’s just what’s done. A small number of us didn’t. Not entirely by choice, but not entirely by accident either. I live in the gap between those two worlds, and sometimes it’s hard to breathe.

I had actually joined that agency years earlier. Even then, in my mid-thirties, I was categorized as high-risk — too old for safe childbirth, too educated to be appealing. My PhD was a liability, they said; men worried I might correct them. They suggested I list only my bachelor’s degree. Still, they found reasons for optimism: I looked younger than my age, I wasn’t overweight, and my voice was soft and pleasant.

Suddenly I was a product approaching its expiration date. A new agency promised AI-based matching, as if intimacy were a logistics problem. When I saw the ad, I thought: I’ve walked into the wrong place entirely.

This isn’t where I belong. Run.

An unmarried woman in her forties. Neither young nor old. Studying literature. On television, forty-something single women are always successful — corner offices and sleek apartments. The term gold miss (a glamorous, financially independent single woman) comes from that image.

But I can’t claim the gold. My degree didn’t translate into salary. I spend my nights revising poems, asking myself: will I ever publish a collection? Will I become the poet I want to be? I am, by most measures, badly out of step with this era.

I can’t join my friends’ conversations about stocks, real estate, their children’s tutoring costs, the latest housing policy. I’ve grown a little strange, just as they predicted. The future still frightens me, but I’ve stopped chasing someone to make that fear quieter. That’s left me lonelier in some ways.

I’ve also stopped obsessing over my weight. I prefer streets with trees to streets with people. I’ve started to understand why middle-aged people photograph flowers. I have no children, but I tend my writing with the same careful attention — softly, gently — and I love it deeply. I take care of myself. I protect my small world.

Then I heard that younger Koreans had coined a term for people like me: yeong-poti (Young Forty: started as a compliment for energetic forty-somethings, now a slur for those who refuse to act their age). I checked myself against the criteria. I don’t wear streetwear brands. I have no money to spend chasing younger company. I didn’t buy property cheaply and profit from rising prices. I wasn’t even pretending to be young. I’ve just never quite grown up, if I’m honest.

In the marriage market: not on the list. Among the targets of generational contempt: not on that list either. Nowhere do I fit neatly into the available categories. For a while, I shrank under the weight of that. The world says it has changed — women’s rights, feminism, marriage as personal choice. In some ways, yes. But I still have one foot in a world that sees my life as a problem, and one foot in a world that has no name for what I am. Too hot, too cold. I move between them, belonging fully to neither.

I live alone. I cook for myself. I write. I handle each poem the way you’d handle something you love — carefully, then carelessly, fighting with it, making up with it, coming back to it again. Sometimes someone looks me in the eyes first, and there is warmth. Not fire, but warmth. Somewhere between the cold bath and the hot one, in that lukewarm in-between place — that’s where I am.

Reflections, South Korea

“Walking Is My Strength” / (poet, Sa Yoon-su)

May 13, 2026May 18, 2026 !Epic Tomorrows

A temporary but urgent call to action! Centre of the Web partner Versy Talks is kindly running a free public online debate about the publishing industry from 21st to 31st May 2026. It does not take long to take part in the debate and state your opinion, and everyone is welcome! Sharing your voice will help boost both COTW and Versy Talks. Please help us grow, so that we can platform diverse and underrepresented voices from around the world. More information can be found here.

Walking is a primordial and exceedingly simple human act. Yet it is not merely a means of survival; it also carries a special significance as a way of exploring and expanding the horizons of existence. As I confront the confusion within myself and this ambiguous world, walking becomes the most economical and effective remedy to quench the nomadic instinct of Homo erectus. Is there any mode of being more essential and urgent than strolling slowly around one’s humble dwelling in light attire, seeking a forest in retreat, or walking for a long time across a vast and distant land? While it is already something to be grateful for that many bodily functions operate smoothly, the ability to walk is among the greatest blessings of all.

Walking does not simply move us through space; it also pioneers the territory of thought. The wealth gained through walking endures, and such riches are worth accumulating. Walking is an intangible analgesic. Was it not by walking, and walking again, that I escaped the floods of sorrow and the valleys of life heated like a
burning grill? When mental impurities accumulate, or when a quiet joy wells up and warms the heart, I put on my sneakers and step outside. Even if I were to lose many things, as long as I could walk, I believe I could endure anything. When the time comes to conclude my living hours, though it may be an excessive wish, I hope to walk once more along a narrow path before closing my eyes. Someone once said that even the gods converse while walking. There are precious scenes hidden in this world that can only be encountered and seen by walking.