neophobia

So another Saturday passed and nothing necessarily notable, other than the habitual, whether maintaining some idea of studying something, researching something, then scrolling around doing nothing.

It’s nothing to be mad about. It’s not like you have to do something crazy everyday or anything like that. In fact, I’d have to confess, sometimes the monotony becomes addicting in its own way, like a warm suffocation.

And while I scrolled around and noted all of the pain I read through — after all, those who bother to post in the “clear skies” of the dark forest are some siren callers, are some people who leverage the fundamentals to devour unsuspecting others.

[…] if we are surrounded by life, why is the universe silent? Shouldn’t the whole universe be a noisy social media feed, everyone vying for everyone else’s attention? The dark forest theory flips the underlying assumption, explaining that communication, because it reveals our existence to others, is a [risk more than anything else, of some game]. This is not because all alien civilisations are hostile, but because the laws of the universe necessitate mortal conflict among all civilisations that share the same dimension.

I scroll around on neocities and sometimes I come across site updates from those with hundreds of followers and nothing. What did it mean, scrolling through their journal talking about how much they miss their dog? I don’t know, but there’s hundreds of silent eyes. Silent eyes, something I’ll merge into, into another click.

There’s always the 1% rule and when I was younger it irked me, because is it really that difficult to contribute something online? But the same as open source software, I mean, what do you get out of it other than settling some idealisms through your actions at the expense of your survival and wellbeing? Your “users” don’t care about you and will demand more work out of you because of this need to be recognized, maybe.

One can snap back and ask me, well, what’s my tick? Why write here? It seems like you’re building up to the theme of how there is nothing to gain writing here. I could maybe attribute it to a useless action I’m enamored, or me submitting myself to some entity pushing my neurosis on here — it could also just be a boredom, because I ran away from a virtual webbed and harmonious life. Despite it all, even now I’d concede there’s no good reason; I’m just sick enough to bother.

But I will admit this much: revealing this existence here has no serious effects as much as I can tell. It’s like waving a tattered flag half ripped and spat on, but you wave it around because when you were young enough you thought the flag meant something; you thought something funny and magical about these lines burning about and sending this message to your screen to flicker for however long you want your evening. It’s all faded and I’ll wave it but I know the reality of the situation, reconciling by counting my geese: at least counting that I, well, maybe I had some time learning how to type faster, had some time to engender some fringe wikipedia readings, had this as a gateway to cement myself into a sterile room.

Because that’s how I like my Saturdays: I don’t want anything one could sell. Some could worry about this lukewarm local minimum, surely the time could’ve been spent better, think of all the things you could’ve read, or the new lives you could’ve had some red notifications about — but you see, I’m deathly afraid of these things. I don’t want to risk it; I’d rather crush this tick to talk at all because half the talking you very well know probably leads to nothing. It doesn’t make sense. I don’t want to alert the unknown with my existence anything more than a bunch of word dribble.

I don’t want to be wrapped up in these ideating journal owners, because I’d feel so manic about it all scaffolding a gurren lagann redemption that I’d want to have a lobotomy. And I don’t want to hop back into a team fortress two match; not because “video game bad time use” in some sadly smug rendition of what’s a “good life” from someone leafing summaries of Seneca. But because when it ends two weeks after I know the local minimum sinks further, and whatever one could do for a sense of survival, whether of a reasonable level of sanity or a reasonable acquisition of resources to leech — all I know is that the two weeks later I’ll have the monitor reflection gift me an elusive triple chin to spell out how you’re sinking further.

Here’s what I’m getting at: there is infinite novelty, everywhere, all the time, and something magical about this power we got in these machines, but everything scrolls around so dead feeling; that this all seems like an amusement park where you pay in blood drops out of a certainty that you’ll have a different destination but the boarding and exit of the ride is the same and you’re getting anemic. But it can’t be any other way, honestly; may as well avoid the rides with triple the drops as requisite.