The Machine

There is another way the existential can feel like it takes over. Not through the weight of meaninglessness, but through the erasure of what makes us human in the first place. When living exclusively outside of the abstract, we become biological machines. When we lose ourselves too far in the abstract, we stop seeing people and start only seeing systems, patterns, mechanisms. The human nuance disappears. And when that happens, so does the point of everything. It makes us feel mechanical.

Henri Bergson saw this as well and the exact concern was the dehumanizing effect of mechanization. He argues that we find comedy in the moment a person stops adapting and acting with the nuance we expect of people when they start running on autopilot, especially when they are unaware of it. This he called "the mechanical encrusted on the living." Laughter, he suggests, is society's corrective, a snapping back to reality.

In my work mechanical systems play a huge role in influencing characters or the world around them. It is not always, however, a flaw to be corrected, but sometimes the only way that a character knows how to survive.