根無し草の時代を生きるLiving as Weeds Without Roots

We, living in the modern age, continue to tremble in body and soul like floating weeds, severed from our roots. At times gently, at other times with terrifying velocity, we drift through a current that refuses to settle. The optimal path in this liquefied world may indeed lie in the very act of drifting; yet, even within this life of drift, a nameless anxiety constantly presses upon our daily existence. Whether the movement is physical or spiritual—whether driven by work, family, or one’s own volition—the portrait of the modern individual is one of living in a perpetual transition, craving, in the deep strata of the heart, to arrive somewhere. To explore this nameless locus—this "somewhere" our hearts truly seek—may bring a measure of salvation.

Why is it that in this "drifting life," the obscure anxiety never dissolves, but feels as though it is constantly sedimenting in the depths of the heart? One might assume that choosing drift over sedentary immobility would alleviate anxiety. Furthermore, to survive in an era as precarious as ours, it is clearly more realistic to hone one's adaptability to change through drift. However, humanity, unfortunately, does not necessarily find resonance with a solution simply because it is rationally optimal. This sensation of things "not sitting right" intensifies with each passing year of life, eventually becoming a reckoning that everyone must face. At that moment, how will you comport yourself? With what resolve will you decide to live?

To ponder not merely the cause of this sedimented anxiety, but why it arises in the first place and feels as if it is corroding you from deep within, becomes an unavoidable issue for everyone, given a world situation where drift is gradually becoming the norm. Those who have already experienced the drifting life are, in a sense, models who are attempting to live powerfully today while carrying this anticipatory burden. The problem lies in each individual pinpointing exactly where that anxiety originates.

Anxiety is a curious thing; it is not a simple discomfort. It holds a hidden inversion: by identifying its writhing location, the heart is significantly unburdened, and vitality returns to life. Conversely, those who feel anxiety in their daily existence actually possess the latent potential to survive life with vitality. At first glance, this may seem contrary to the modern view, but a way of living that feels no anxiety is, after all, merely a performance of concealment. In the context of human life, that is profoundly unnatural. Anxiety is not something to be loathed and excluded; it is, in fact, the catalyst that awakens vitality in our lives.

That is to say, feeling anxiety is itself natural and nothing to be denied. Because anxiety derives from the depths of a fundamental problem, if one can locate that depth and devise a countermeasure, there is no more potent weapon for the life that still lies ahead. When in your life will you confront this anxiety? This confrontation will become the greatest partner for living out the rest of your long journey.

As I see it, the "location of anxiety" invariably lurks within the sedimentation of the subject’s cognitive misalignments. In other words, anxiety does not lurk within life itself, but within your perception of it.

Furthermore, by identifying the location of this anxiety and practicing solutions in your daily life, you extend a possibility of salvation not only to yourself but to many others who harbor a shared anguish. Therefore, I cannot help but feel that those with the capacity for introspection need a strong resolve to face the anxiety they hold daily, no matter how painful or arduous it may be. For while the world only deteriorates under superficial humanism, the existence of those who have faced their anxiety thoroughly and carved a path to resolution through their own experience—however few they may be—can save people far more deeply and truly than any humanistic rescue.

Considering this, there is a clear point where modern people are significantly confused regarding the location of anxiety. It is the tendency to seek problem resolution by carelessly relying on the word "identity." One need only look at the pandemic of the "identity crisis" in developed nations to see that, as a matter of fact, the problem remains unsolved. This is because the standpoint of the inquiry itself—the identification of the anxiety’s location—was promoted erroneously. As a result, even healthy people who did not originally harbor the pathology of an identity crisis were infected, and it surged into a global tide. At this moment, the true location of anxiety vanished from the view of the masses. One must see through this.

The truth is, what we ought to question is not identity as a self-definition. Rather, identity is a peculiar worry harbored by those who are sedentary, whose living environments are fixed; for those who drift, it is merely a somewhat unreliable concept. Moreover, there is a major premise here: the problem of identity is largely limited to those leading a sedentary life since the dawn of the modern era. On the other hand, I believe that what we must truly gaze upon is something far deeper and weightier than identity: the origin.

Identity, in the first place, is a fragile concept that transitions with the times. Therefore, no matter how much one sets the location of anxiety within identity and seeks measures to resolve it, the problem will never be solved; rather, it is destined to result in extremism. The discovery of identity is highly addictive; it is an intoxicant that, once ingested, is difficult to quit. I use the phrase "discovery of identity" here, but this literally means that identity can be discovered in any number of ways—which is to say, it can also be fabricated. The reason the identity crisis became rampant is that this concept can be infinitely manufactured and reproduced.

However, on the other hand, no matter how the times shift, no matter how one’s dwelling changes or social standing transforms, there is a primordial source of the soul that can never be rewritten by words. That is the origin.

The more people project their lives onto the "drifting life," the more I feel they possess a true tenderness within their hearts. This is because, due to the turbulence of life’s vicissitudes, they yearn for the "unchangeable thing" inside themselves—the origin as an absolute nucleus. For such people, identity is not the issue because, having experienced the flux of life physically and spiritually, they understand that identity always "shifts" when one moves. However, this does not mean the origin is instantly visible. Here lies the root source of the anguish for those who practice drift as a way of life.

Why is the origin not instantly visible? Because, from the perspective of the singular, monolithic management system of the modern era, the more people face the problem of origin and ponder solutions for it, the more the inevitable brittleness of the system itself is exposed. Thus, the modern system stripped people of the problem of origin, disguised it as a problem of identity—which is merely an accretion that manifests only within the system—and prepared the way for people to inevitably arrive there. In this way, over the years, people were shifted from the problem of origin to the problem of identity, eventually coming to misrecognize the loss of origin as the loss of identity. As this misrecognition continued to be reproduced, the tide known as the identity crisis was born. At this time, distracted by identity, everyone forgot the fact that the true source of anxiety lay in the origin itself, and no one could question it. For it is nothing more than play within the system.

However, we must also consider that a significant premise exists here. When we take the modern era as our axis, there is a decisive difference in layers between the drift of the pre-modern and the drift of the post-modern. I view the location of the nameless anxiety faced by drifting people as being invariably in the origin. Conversely, the strong tendency to have this surreptitiously replaced by the location of identity lies rather with the sedentary people. Yet, as mentioned before, even for these sedentary dwellers, the layers differ between the pre-modern and the modern. When you recognize this misalignment, you should find the element that obstructs you from approaching the self that harbors anxiety. Everything begins with pinpointing this through introspection. Usually, that impediment derives from a misrecognition of something.

This difference in layers is grave. Even if it is the same place where ancestors lived and connected their lives, that place does not exist in our time. For a "place" is not merely geographical land. Therefore, I can assert that in the pre-modern era, there was no problem of identity. What existed there was the intensely visceral problem of origin in a world without identity. In fact, in the pre-modern era, whether sedentary or drifting, people harbored the same quality of problem at a deep, shared dimension. origin is not equal to identity.

Many of us in the present day, for various reasons, have left our physical hometowns, or live in an unstable era where having no hometown at all is becoming general. Yet, humans still wish to live calmly and quietly, no matter where they are. But in the modern age, this is difficult to realize. In Japan, in the history leading up to the pre-modern Edo period, there was a custom known as Inkyo (seclusion/retirement) for those who surpassed a certain age or when a successor attained the skill to fulfill their duties. Inkyo was a custom of introspection, ending the period of activity outside (in society) to spend the remainder of life in quiet seclusion. However, Inkyo was often chosen by one's own will, a practice typically seen among monks and artists.

But for us living today, physical Inkyo is not the real; nor can we simply rehash the counterculture movements of the 1960s. In a world where humanity exceeds 8 billion and every corner is cacophonous, I feel we have entered a stage where we must realize this custom of Inkyo within our own internal worlds.

Where, exactly, is the location of the anxiety you hold? Whether you view it as identity or view it as origin—your life henceforth will likely bifurcate significantly depending on this distinction.