Until today, I wasn’t sure I’d continue this project. Here’s why.

Humans sit on top of the food chain because, in the last hundred years or so, we have managed to overcome most of nature’s primary dangers. Yeah, that got real damn deep real fast, didn’t it? Anyway… without the constant threat of death from the world, our minds are free to create the perils we’ve been avoiding the last hundred thousand years — because now we are our own biggest threat.

Without any real strife, we imagine it. And now that we are free to pursue them, every unfulfilled expectation is a grievance.

None of this is new. We’ve felt pain for as long as humans could conceptualize. The only difference is now the source of our anguish is mostly trivial, and a lot of us don’t realize it.

But, our new safety is also a blessing because it gives us the opportunity to better understand ourselves, if we wish.

I can hear you asking, “yeah, but what the hell does any of this have to do with the project?” Well, I’m getting to that.

You see, we each lead two lives. One of them is suppressed by our fear of rejection. Lies, manipulation and art wounds are the kind of hostilities that rob our naivety, and we learn from them to harden ourselves. We become jaded; we emotionally isolate ourselves; we squash our creativity. I’m sure you’ve been here, I have (with this project).

The other life we lead is simple — it’s the one we live outwardly, the image we decide to project to the other humans. It embodies what we want our life to be. Our problems (including mine with this project) are rooted in the divergence of these two lives.

Before we lost our original innocence both lives were the same, but they diverged as we reacted to negative emotions by repressing our intentions. Eventually the life we projected to others was only a fraction of our experience, and everything that wasn’t appropriated by our exterior, intentional persona become a mishmash of thoughts and latent emotion seeping into our being. And rest assured, the subconscious part of our personality is unstoppable — our thinking mind only tries to suppress it when it does not align with the person we want the outside world to see.

In our new safety we have more time for emotional sensitivity, causing us to repress even more. And, combined with more available information, our easy lives are turning our culture into emotional wrecks because now — since we can be — we are offended by everything.

Anyway, the project. I didn’t start this — Myesha did in late 2016 and I kept it going. Since then I’ve been working within the context of her original idea, but clearly it’s time to stop that.

But in a way, without me fully realizing it, 52Weeks was already evolving under my stewardship; I just needed some time to contemplate its seemingly independent trajectory. More important than my late awareness of this is to understand that I generate my own strife just like you, so I should remain receptive to the information arriving from below the surface, and I’ll do that by continuing the project to see where it goes.

As for the bigger cultural issue, who knows. We can’t just turn back the clock and return to antiquity. Honesty and isolation are the only ways to close the disparity between our suppressed life and our intentional one — and excluding the outside world is the only way to learn about yourself. Whether we are each willing to face what’s inside is not up to me.