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31
Ice climbing seems so extreme that it can only be understood as a compulsion to overcome oneself, again and again. Every new route is like a demented death ritual to attain some higher consciousness in an accelerationist samsara. Imagine a climber hacking into a frozen waterfall for a hold. At what point will the ice yield and shatter into a million pieces, and when will extreme tendencies like this drive global warming to the point of iceless winters?
The angel number 31 is said to symbolize inspiration and the courage to make new beginnings. But more often than not, supposed new beginnings are only an escape from an end that we don't want to face. The desire for new beginnings is a symptom of the search for something authentic in a boring dystopia. Every new beginning suggests a tabula rasa, a chance to make it better, but in reality the past is a moldy palimpsest that can never be fully purged.
In a godless world, we look for signs, meanings and synchronicity in the most mundane of coincidences. Angel numbers are another evidence of our desperate search for an organizing principle where possibly none exists, of our illusions of a higher guidance in a world that is in reality ruled by the deep drone of absurdity.
The Sisyphean compulsion perpetually leads our struggle from phases of inspiration to phases of disillusionment. This isn’t such a bleak outlook, for the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill one’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy and so on. We die a million little deaths, all to be alive.
Tobias Bärtsch, April 2024