2025-05-02 Journal Entry

It is indeed the morning time, and I am indeed writing. I’m currently staying at Thorne’s house, and that’s been fun hanging around with the kids. I’m very much still waking up at this point in time, so I’m mostly just trying to get my fingers to work as they go over this keyboard ad for my mind to think some kind of thoughts. Really anything at all. I feel empty, like one of those old Roman vases. Decorations on the outside, stories seemingly, but hollow inside. I don’t really even know if that means anything, but it’s something that I just thought of. Me in the morning is probably what the inside of an LLM is like, this non-specific cloud of associations and words and things happen to come out when prompted. I say that’s “me in the morning” but it in theory could just be me all the time.

Words words words words I really want these words to come out. I feel too focused on wanting to write, but I also do actualy feel like I’m getting better at this sort of sparse, dispersed thinking that’s simultaneously concentrated that’s conducive to creativity. It’s not daydreaming because it’s on specific subjects. A smarter person would probably just call that “thinking.” I have discovered what it’s like to think. Sigh.

I say sigh because sometimes it feels like it’s incumbent upon me to just rediscover things over and over again throughout life. I know what thinking is, of course, but there’s a certain quality of thinking that comes with actually being able to hold the mind on the subject at hand and being at once strict with its subject but also loose enough to let the mind make new associations, even from far-flung places. This is especially true for fiction – what I want most is for a novel that engulfs the whole world, or at least the whole self (what’s the difference idk) – where the associations in mind are essentially the source of any and all action in the world.

I wish I could type faster. Thinking and typing at the same time means I generally type with poor form, but when I type in a speed tester type of thing, I generally become much more proficient much faster.

Anyways, I was thinking about this because last night I was thinking about how I need to have a looser grip on the realities of the BPYO story in order to let it flourish. The reality of the story happened at such a distance, and what’s worse is that the reality of at least St. George’s story is sufficiently disturbing that I don’t know how much of it I really want to show.

I was thinking anyways about the subject matter of the whole thing. In IJ, The Entertainement is almost a Platonic Ideal of entertainement, a single film that everyone becomes entranced by. The thing I worry more about is the ability for things to be so personalized that we essentially become divorced from reality. What the mind wants is less story and more drama – it wants to see things that are interesting and novel, because those are the things that are most relevant to our survival. And so we live in a world where everything is both novel but also highly normative. It’s a different tiktok dance, but it’s a tiktok dance all the same. And then of course there’s the gradual descent into hell, the way our feeds start with puppy videos and slowly devolve into political extremism. How we get from point A to point B is tragic, but it’s true, and it ends up stripping people of their personal experiences. It means we lose our own sense of responsibility.

There’s the argument to be made for the “real world” being more beautiful, more open, free, more alive and shimmering, but it’s sort of like how the Buddha taught people – in an age where people so far astray, he pushed them to strive, to try their hardest. In our world, we face a bit of a paradox. The striving ideal has been coopted by striving towards economic excellence, towards “hustle porn” in which we feel as if we’re working hard but never do. It’s our mirror neurons essentially being coopted by seeing people who talk about hard work, and yet we never really see what that hard work actually is or looks like.

And so all of this is to say, DFW moved on to the IRS as a subject matter as a place that combines the slow, boring but real work of adult life with a sense of civic duty, of personal responsibility. For me, I think it’s less about civic responsibility – in my mind, civic responsibility goes far beyond complicitly being engaged in standard US politics, which are sufficiently fraught with issues that DFW’s conception of responsibility as just reading about candidates for a few hours isn’t really low-level enough of engagement; we need more – and more about the “informed consent” (to steal Dan’s classic phrase) of the life that we lead. About the work that we do, about the sacrifices we make, about who we associate with and so on. And so the world I want to inhabit is more about uncovering and being aware of one’s implicit and explicit roles in perpetuating systemic problems that may seem out of your control. That much of our suffering is self-hypnosis.

I think there’s this idea of evil which is that some overlord somewhere cackles defiantly and has some special button that kills a person somewhere in the world, and that person sits around all day pressing the button and imagining each death in exquisite detail. The reality of evil is probably more like someone essentially being told that some people on the other side of the world really aren’t people at all, that they’re so imaginary that killing them is almost inconsequential, as inhuman as they are, and thus sending out an email that gets tossed around dozens of layers of command until some poor farm boy from Nebraska who had no other choice but to join the Army, sitting quietly in a military base thousands of miles away, hits a button and initiates a drone strike on people he’s never seen with his own eyes. Or there’s the more subtle evil of engineers working on their little product, their little slice of some gigantic company, and in aggregate this company takes the time and attention of the whole world, stealing millions of lives passively through screens. They kill people not with bombs but with their own minds.

In The Way of Kings, there’s a scene where Jasnah lures thieves into an alleyway and then uses her Soulcaster to obliterate them. She’s infinitely more powerful and smarter than the four of them, and yet she makes the argument that what she did was in fact morally good, that those four were murderers and thieves and that the world should be rid of them. Shallan, her ward, makes the opposite argument: while what she did in the immediate moment, was perhaps “right,” it was not good; Jasnah was in her own way complicit in their murder by using her own intellect to lure them into a trap, that she intended to kill them. I say all this to say that the sort of evil I was describing before is a similar shape of predicament. Stealing time from people through their own minds is a form of self-hypnosis, but I don’t quite think that that’s a complete absolution of blame from the companies and people that perpetuate that sort of thing.

We’ve touted connection as a virtue, but we are connected with chains.

We devolve our relations from acting with others to acting on our impressions of others, and this makes them infinitely easier to dehumanize, because what we’re judging isn’t human – it’s a proxy.

And so I don’t really know where we stand with that. Part of me wonders what the underlying causes here are. We’re hyper-dependent on dopamine, and so we’ve largely just been hijacked. But that call is coming from the inside – we’re doing it to ourselves. Entertaining ourselves to death and so on. That’s a bit of an unoriginal hypothesis. I think it’s partially about learning how to come up for air. Not like a “dopamine detox” or whatever the hell some influencer is going to sell you, but rather the ability to take a look at one’s life and extrapolate. To “play it through to the end,” so to speak.