🌊 What is cast into the sea will always return—Microplastics and the backflow of structural ethics

Humans have turned the ocean into a "trash can."

Because it is transparent, vast, and swallows everything.

Dirty things, things we want to forget, even formless emotions,
we have cast everything into a "place where it becomes invisible."

But—they never disappeared.

They have become fragments of just a few millimeters,
drifting through the sea, entering the bodies of fish, and returning to our dining tables.

Microplastics.

They are the final form of the "meaningless things" created by humanity.

But that meaninglessness is now invading our bodies as meaning.

1 | The backflow of "meaninglessness"

Plastic is a symbol of consumption and convenience.

Convenience store bags, packaging cushions, straws, cups, spoons.

Made for "just one time,"
and discarded for "just one person."

The end result is a backflow structure where it returns to the human body.

This is not a coincidence.

Rather, it is inevitable. It was a structure.

We are now bearing the "consequences" of what we discarded within our own bodies.

This is not "retribution."

It is not "punishment" either.

It is a form of "structural responsibility."

2 | Invisible invasion—The collapse of boundaries

Microplastics are invisible.

That foreign substance, which cannot be confirmed by the naked eye,
enters deep into the body and accumulates.

We spend our time pretending not to notice
that the boundary between the external and the internal is slowly being eroded.

But we should be aware.

This invasion is not a "problem of foreign substances,"
but an event that shakes the very "definition of the body."

3 | Are humans "beings that harbor meaninglessness"?

Originally, there was no malice in plastic.
There was no meaning either.

It was just convenient, easy to use, and cheap.

But—the end result of indulging in meaninglessness
was a "body that harbors meaningless things."

Isn't this the very image of modern people?

SNS noise, expressions of emotion, trivial articles,
words like air, exhausted memories—

We are now living while accumulating meaningless things.

And what's more, we are eating them.

4 | Even so, the sea remains silent

No matter how much it is polluted,
no matter how much it is treated as "having never happened,"

the sea simply remains silent.

It swallows, harbors, and drifts everything.

—But that silence is not powerless.

It wasthe time for "returning."

What was cast into the sea
will always return someday, having changed its form.

Humans thought they had discarded meaningless things.

But the world has "returned them as meaning."

That was microplastics.

Conclusion | What remains as a question

• Are we beings who bear the responsibility for what we have discarded within our bodies?

• What will we become, having eaten meaningless things?

• Are humans beings who continue to exist while being invaded by the "foreign substances" they themselves emitted?

And—

What am I made of right now?
Is it me, or is it something I once discarded?