Hey everyone, my name is Chris. More than likely, you don’t know me from anywhere. My origins are humble. I was born/raised in and around NYC in a middle class Italian immigrant community with awesome food but a culture I struggled to identify with. My early and late teen years were very difficult and I had a lot of anger at the world. I struggled with the pointlessness of life. I wanted to connect with the world, but was not able to do it. To no one’s surprise, in college where I earned a BA in philosophy and literature, and later earned a PhD in philosophy (from UConn in 2002). Why not.
While at UConn, I met my (then future) wife on a summer co-ed softball team, and we both got academic jobs in the same city in the Midwest. Here we are now, twenty two years later, same jobs and now getting closer to retirement. We have two teenage daughters, one in college and one in high school, two cats, one sweet one not, and a dog with no personality. All of that is great. But I’m still disconnected, same as when I was younger. Only one thing has changed - I’m a lot older now, so feeling separated from the world has taken on an even more desperate hue.
So why not lean into it and write about disconnection in its various guises.
I suspect some posts will be on running, which helps me to connect to an aging body that I feel more and more separated from. Others will be on politics, as I attempt to grasp a world that increasing looks foreign to me. Some will be on philosophy, to reflect on and commiserate with thinkers who also struggled with disconnection, and with the challenge of finding meaning in the world. I’m also hoping to write on disconnection in others, the shapes it can take and how it might be resisted.
I hope you stick around. For a long time I thought my state of disconnection was a pathology unique to me. As I get older I tend to see it everywhere. Maybe it’s the human condition to feel disconnected. Maybe you feel it too. Hopefullyt some things I write with resonate with you.
(If you’d like, you can also follow me on Strava (under Chris Panza) and on Twitter, under @chrispanza (under the screen name “Philosopher Always Running”.)
