He was always just himself.

It is sometimes said that we live in an age of forgetting, or forgetfulness. The world is (supposedly) changing so quickly that we don't know whether we're coming or going; technology and skills and jobs are changing so furiously that what we once knew is hardly worth knowing any more; in any case, we can just off-load all that know-how on to some unsuspecting digital cloud (haven't we always been embedding and storing knowledge like that?).

What was I saying? 

Yeah, travel light, grasshopper. The age of 'bookishness' is drawing to an end. The text and the university: that 800 year-old alliance is falling apart. Watch this space/screen. 

Why read the classics? (Calvino). No more canons, standards, norms. Nature, if we talk about it at all, is free-floating, random. Human nature? Do me a favour, pal.

I wasn't myself.
I haven't been feeling like myself lately.

Is there still an 'I' to talk of/to? The political apparatus, the blind bureaucratic machine, is nothing but the production of the empty will, de-subjectification, the creation and valorization of a lonely freedom. Art for art's sake-and we're all free! 

The administration of things. Or, in other words: the management of bare life. To talk of a way of life is already to imagine too much order, consistency, stability. Accept you are nothing but a broken fragment with no determinate nature in a world in which there is no substantive good (C.S. Lewis: The Abolition of Man). I can be who I want to be, matey! But that's because of the ideological determination that creates the illusion that there is no ideology (or, rather, that the ideological belongs exclusively to the political-and to political oppression at that, too).

It's the economy, stupid. 

You are free to do whatever you want as long as it involves shopping.
(Zizek). 

This is all far too serious. Lighten up, dude. Or: let's just have fun. Or: it's those bloody immigrants/foreigners/refugees Muslims who don't understand our values.