Online Connections

In lieu of my last entry, so I started to wonder whether my disposition on internet contact is smart or suicidal. After all, being without any form of contact other than old friends who know my number but are fed up with my ghosting, so I wonder why I ended up this way, and began to doubt my resilience to the ideal.

One famous counterpoint would be Derek Sivers, known for leaving an open inbox and replying to anyone. Who even met his ex-wife through online correspondence. In one of his posts he details about a level of exhaustion, spending hours replying and forgoing physical presence hangout. Is it worth it? One could argue about the salons of the 1800s, many letters since — even our founding fathers, many letters of course.

Earlier today walking around I find myself striking up conversation, which is something I almost never do because I do not want to impose. But I previously advised such things, and it did seem strange to hold to a social codec of never talking to anyone seeing as, more often than not, small conversations are the fabric of America. What type of dog, or what happened to your house (as a fumigation happened days prior), nice weather, whatever. Because I’ve been real restless and I hate staring at a screen honestly.

Of course, the reason I hate staring at a screen is because it is all impersonal and I keep reading about lives I will never interact with on a one-to-one basis and thus has little relevance now, or a year from now. There is little to no shared narrative, because I am not necessarily a part of any group — maybe I am vaguely involved in something on neocities, but that’s a big if, I try not to think about it for it may detonate my urge to evacuate, mimicking a pitiful small soap opera of some delusional sideliner.

All in all, this is my choice. I have been online long enough to viscerally understand how vacuous bonds can be — truly, but I began to doubt that perhaps that’s my fault. That I’m the vacuous one. Because, after all, the other part of reality is that basically everyone everywhere you look below 45 probably has an instant messenger or some discord group of friends from highschool and I am retarded.

The key retort here is that, well, it certainly could be personal. You certainly could have some form of correspondence. You may as well resign yourself as another one plugged in, shouldn’t you? What’s the alternative?

But I’m not sure if I could be Derek Sivers. I could roughly imagine spending time exchanging emails as I once did, though as I entertain this alternative the only thing that eats at me is that, well, maybe the screen turns from dull screen to good screen, but this doesn’t feel like living. But that’s probably because I was always resistant to doing anything else other than rotting, so I doubt myself once more. In any case I am dying, you are dying, why the hell am I typing here? I guess I should fly to Thailand. And then I get down on myself because well, obviously Thailand is a distraction too, that’s a distraction, and then I just want my brain to stop talking. I just don’t want to think about these things.

I guess the insight here is to choose things to prove to yourself that you’re right. It’s just, I feel like I already proved to myself that interacting with others online in some discord chat is soulless. But I might be wrong. Yet it doesn’t feel like living, though how else will interesting developments happen, to get away from the common day? Maybe Thailand will be the same, that I’m just trying to create another distraction from my current barren reality. But I don’t know that yet.

A counter-argument would be, well, even if you made your reality unbarren, well, do you think you’d even enjoy it? Would you honestly want to go out and get some food? Play golf? All I would want to do is shoot the shit for a little bit and then finally feel energized and alive that, wow, I can actually talk to other people and maybe I am not feeding my soul into the economic leviathan for nothing, maybe, and then feel comfortable returning to my work. Because work has been real sparse lately: that is, I’ve been taking a vague break but it hasn’t at all been vacation. As a business owner you get used to being alone, but now I’m not even sure why I am working.

I am starting to feel like the only answer is to become a monk again. But I’d probably detest that too. Back to the main point: is it smart or suicidal?

Well, this stuff isn’t going away unless we have a power grid failure and if that’s happening we can hang up this conversation for the time being. In other countries, people use the existence of an Instagram account as some sort of proxy of the amount of value/status you have. Because it’s status games all the way down. If you hope to navigate, being a ghost on the net makes you a pariah more often than not, but you can at least argue that you probably don’t want to interact with such status validators anyway.

I recently had an LLM agent profile me through all my writings, two entries down. Some of it is spot on, and I think I get a partial feeling of meaning of existence writing stories or whatever else on here. Because, in some ways, it is the main evidence I even exist, as a deteriorating human, not a corporate entity, or at least interact with the world outside of my head. On my terms, not the customer’s. But even this is probably barren.

If I could capture the feeling in a phrase, my current ghostly way of living is catapulting me into social suicide. And though one could romanticize being a hermit, I don’t think I am one.

“I have indeed lived fifteen years in solitude,” said the hermit, “but have no desire that my example should gain any imitators. In my youth I professed arms, and was raised by degrees to the highest military rank. I have traversed wide countries at the head of my troops, and seen many battles and sieges. At last, being disgusted by the preferments of a younger officer, and feeling that my vigour was beginning to decay, I resolved to close my life in peace, having found the world full of snares, discord, and misery. I had once escaped from the pursuit of the enemy by the shelter of this cavern, and therefore chose it for my final residence. I employed artificers to form it into chambers, and stored it with all that I was likely to want.

“For some time after my retreat I rejoiced like a tempest-beaten sailor at his entrance into the harbour, being delighted with the sudden change of the noise and hurry of war to stillness and repose. When the pleasure of novelty went away, I employed my hours in examining the plants which grow in the valley, and the minerals which I collected from the rocks. But that inquiry is now grown tasteless and irksome. I have been for some time unsettled and distracted: my mind is disturbed with a thousand perplexities of doubt and vanities of imagination, which hourly prevail upon me, because I have no opportunities of relaxation or diversion. I am sometimes ashamed to think that I could not secure myself from vice but by retiring from the exercise of virtue, and begin to suspect that I was rather impelled by resentment than led by devotion into solitude. My fancy riots in scenes of folly, and I lament that I have lost so much, and have gained so little. In solitude, if I escape the example of bad men, I want likewise the counsel and conversation of the good. I have been long comparing the evils with the advantages of society, and resolve to return into the world to-morrow. The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout.”

In whatever is left of my youthful vigor I do not want to live like an old man. I do not want to write correspondences the same as Benjamin Franklin who, at the time, was 68 to 72 years old.

I do not want to write stories seeing as I feel as though I have barely lived. And even if I know all of life presents as folly, as it melts right ahead of you, well, I may as well be a shmuck and confirm it.

Online correspondence and connections could perhaps be well and great, but only if you genuinely intend on making the most of them: that is, on actually living. Actually meeting, actually doing sport or surfing.

And my distrust is pinned upon that fact: that rarely anyone is trying to make the most of it. Myself most of all.

Because it’s true. All of my friends did try to make the most of it. I was the only one who didn’t; there is no one to blame other than myself.

I thought I could think my way out of life itself. This, obviously, was one of the stupidest, most dilettantish, and utterly delusional choices you could make.

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man,—you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,—I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.