gratuitous life updates
so usually i draft substack posts in obsidian or vim or vscode and try my best to place every word and punctuation in its proper place. writing is a craft, and deserves to be treated like so. but tonight’s not the night for that.
i stew on life and try to find something Good and Interesting to write about. but there’s nothing particularly good or interesting happening. or rather, there’s maybe too many good and interesting things happening, and too many people writing about it all.
in 2019, when i started writing on substack, the platform had the tinge of pre-2010 internet to it. the quality of writing was okay. but the real reason you visited anyone who wrote on here was because there was just so much substance. mediocre writing was okay — even loved — because what you had to say was so compelling that mediocrity in execution was excusable. who cared if you had that New-York-Times-Modern-Love-essay tone when you had that 80-year-old-belly-full-life-lived content.
there was the kind of whiny tumblr or twitter tween writers (e.g. me) who just hit young adulthood and wanted to take writing and publishing on the internet more seriously ™. there were niche, incredibly deep experts writing here because it was easier to set up than a personal site or wordpress, and it didn’t have all the spammy, attention sucking features of platforms like facebook. there was actually quite little, and most of it just okay. but the things that you would find were special in that one-of-a-kind shiny rock kind of way. nothing’s particularly special about a rock, but if you slipped it into your pocket and took it home, now it was yours.
i suppose it sounds like im yearning for more authenticity or connection or something like that. don’t get me wrong, i do. who doesn’t?
but i don’t actually think we need more authenticity on the internet. it’s quite abundant. too abundant.
we’ve spent the last 30 years graffitiing the digital wall with our inner thoughts. you can find blog posts and craigslist ads and porn (so much porn) revealing things about our collective inner lives that maybe we shouldn’t have exposed and catalogued. we fed it all to something people are calling artificial intelligence and it became schizophrenic.
Calculating Sunflower Oil Production (openai.com)
nowadays i am spending too much time on twitter making stupid jokes and memes about software engineering and advancements in ai. in a half-hearted attempt to engage more with life ive deleted most social and messaging apps from my phone (with the exception of reddit, discord, and signal (although reddit and discord are soon to go too)).
i flip between tabs that have manga, the twitter timeline, and several articles about math or statistics or coding. it’s painfully obvious which tabs i visit most.
i go to therapy once a week and have been doing so for a few months now. it helps, but only marginally so. i find writing and journaling more useful. i am contemplating my exit and figuring out when i should stop scheduling appointments.
the only time i feel like a normal person is when i climb at a bouldering gym near my apartment. i make small talk with the people who are working on the same problems as me. sometimes i exchange numbers and ask them if they’ll be at the gym whenever i go. the chit-chat is fun, but i’m mostly there to be precariously balanced 10 feet off the ground. my banged up knees and elbows ache, scraped from reaching too fast and too hard for a far away hold. i feel much more alive near the top, knowing that a bad fall will leave me with a sprained ankle or twisted shoulder.
this is all a way of saying that: life is a continuos project of figuring out ways to feel whole. despair, anger, nihilism — much of these emotions come from feeling disconnected from wholeness.
i am clumsily trying to fit all the pieces together. i am trying to make it all make sense. embracing the complexity of life has never been easy, but i am trying to see the kindness and beauty of it all anyway. most nights i spend staring at the ceiling in a melatonin-induced stupor, wondering if it’ll ever come together. and then i remember:
