2025-12-15 Journal Entry

Blargh. Tomorrow is going-home day. Honestly my biggest concern is whether the kids’ gifts will fit in my bag and hopefully not just get wrecked.

There’s nothing in my mind at the moment. It’s blank, just moving my legs and mouth and getting me from place to place, making decisions I’m not even aware of. I’m trying to start tracking how I spend my time, since I’m convinced it all must just vanish into the void.

(Note to self: coffee shop at noon is packed and this place has floor boards that bend deep. Be warned.) The nice side effect of having incredibly shitty handwriting is that no one will be able to read any of it at a glance.

What else? Always planning, always planning. Life is strange. It seems to drift by; moments not too long ago seem to me a lifetime away. I walked the Camino as a child, seemingly. The immensity of experience almost feels to be too much, and I shya way from it. To feel it all again would be unthinkable, would be entire selves and souls brought again to bear, and I would be lost. The story would be too confusing. So we compact, push them down, leave nothing but traces behind for future selves to find and wander through and think “what marvelous civilizations must ave been here” paying no mind to the greatness of our most fleeting moments. We prize things that last, in memory most especially, because we are selfish. For what is great to us now may not be what is great to us in the future, and with that it is gone. That does not make it worthless, much as our future selves may suggest. There are countless beings who exist before our history, who loved and cried and danced and laid their lives down for forces they could not comprehend and which would no remember them. These are perhaps the greatest ones, for they had no conception in their minds of being remembered, and thus their love, their pain, their hatred, their joy was purest of all.

I repeat something like the above often. I feel there’s a strange quality to our conciousness in which the more we externalize it, the more we explain it and convey its intricacies and dmand something from it, the more I fear we devolve into despair. What would itbe like for this to be different? I inevitably return to the teachings of the Buddha – that the problem is not the first arrow but the second, the shoulds and musts, the judgements and clinging. We do not know life without them and thus “cannot get out of the car” in Scott Alexander’s term.

5:00PM

I’m back and attempting to use writing to recover from the stream of Insta shorts I just needlessly consumed. It’s the downfall of time-tracking: I just had to write “4:20 - 5pm Doomscrolling Insta” which I believe affirms that I will be a member of the permanent underclass.

I’m also writing without rain sounds, so look forward to a rain-free sesh.

Perhaps the main outcome of this sesh will not be writing but just being intensely bored. I got a lot of my lame stuff out earlier and have less juice to squeeze this time around.

I just sat here talking to myself for 10 minutes and realized it may be good to write down. I’ve been circling around this idea of freely-participated social worlds, “chosen family” at scale, etc. Perhaps the thing I admire most about anarchist thought – which transparently I know relatively little about but am starting to dip my toes into – is its emphasis on freely-chosen participation. That is, coercion is not to be used to force one into governance structures, but rather participants are required to join and participate in those structures. It feels more like Finite and Infinite Games applied to society, and I appreciate that. I don’t have enough context on it as an applied practice, but philosophically it makes sense.

This sort of freely-chosen structure feels enticint if only because so many social problems seem to arise from inertia, where generations are born into maladaptive structures that last for longer than anyone wants. I give the TikTok example, where a survey of many students suggested that they clearly dislike it and know it’s bad for them, but that the reason they use it is for cultural awareness with their peers. If nobody used it, there would be no incentive for them to keep doing so since they are aware of its failures, but at its heart is a social coordination issue. This is unknown to students because it’s invisible, and more should be done to make coordination structures explicit.

And to that end, I’m curious about the real fate of the so-called “permanent underclass” of the techno-futurist vision. We’ve generally moved towards a society where individuals are not self-sufficient, so in the world where they get swept into an AI-operated dust bin and are required to work on whatever’s available to them, there’s no alternative. Much of our own freedom is dependent on our ability to action it.