I’m Also Going to Use Proper Titles Going Forward

And here I am once again wondering to myself, and those of you reading, why I do this little thing that I do. I’ve always come at this topic from the position of trying to define intent, what I should do. I think I understand now that this was a silly way of going about it, that instead of obsessing about plans, the best laid of which often go awry, I should just let the thing live. All these vain declarations of design, of what outmoded model I follow or wish to, all this arrogant self explanation of what tone or message I imagine others could take from what I leave, it’s tiresome. You’ll note the irony in this statement I’m sure, but from here on out I intend to stop this.

I don’t know why I write exactly, I just feel compelled to keep doing it. Even though sometimes it’s as if I’ve been whisked back to my school days, particularly those long weekends spent staring at a blank sheet of paper – or playing vidya, trying to pretend the paper doesn’t exist – with an assignment hanging over my head. I keep writing, week after week, and I savour the moment when I press the “publish” button because it’s often the high point of that day. Through words I can explore my thoughts on anything and everything, and more than that I have the eyes of a small group of people so I know I’m not entirely screaming into the void. I like being heard, however faintly.

I don’t know if most of you are regulars, because none of you actually responded to the poll I made a couple weeks before I went away. I’ll be honest I was disappointed at first, but with the other things on my mind I was quickly distracted. Then of course I was away, and now I’m not that upset or disappointed anymore – well I am a tiny bit, over ten hours in MS Paint on that header image desu – I understand that I’m not owed anything from any of you. The only issue is that I still don’t know what it is that I was hoping to find out from that very poll, which is whether all this new traffic is from return visitors or not. Things have died down a little, I’ve had a few days here and there with few or no visitors, but I’m still getting a lot more than I was before the bump that inspired the poll.

Days with no one are very rare, rather than normal as they were. I should mention that one person did respond, so I can say with a certainty that I have at least one return visitor. I appreciate that, guy, but on reflection maybe it’d have been better for me to truly have had no response at all to that poll. Because it would strengthen my resolve when it comes to what I realise I need to do. Circling back somewhat to how I started this post, I need to stop worrying about what kind of writing I should be doing, what ideas and themes I think people should read into what I write, who I should be writing for, and instead just get on with the bloody thing. Like I’m not doing right now…

The results of the poll, that is the lack of results, seem to suggest that most readers are one time visitors. That for some reason I will never understand, and that could change at any time, these posts I write are showing up more in search engines than they were for the first year and a half of me having this blog. So while these posts that I write now receive more attention than what I was uploading even half a year ago, there’s no reason to assume they’re making any impact on any of the people who do. In fact, if I am being consistently stumbled across by people and am staying at the same average page views roughly then it must mean most of these new people don’t find what I write compelling enough to stick around or I would see consistent growth.

The poll result (or non result) has still taught me something, even if not one of the two things I expected to learn. I understand now that even if I have a reliable following, which I might/ but I very well might not, it’s a ghost following. It will never be anything more than numbers on a page, which represent people and show that I am heard, but tell me nothing about what impact my words have. Do I make people think, or feel? Do I inspire? Do I make people feel less alone? Do I provide comfort for people down on their luck, for the fact that they have found someone even more unlucky? Some mix of those and plenty more I would guess.

I’ve mentioned it already in a few posts, but I’m reading The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa at the moment (or Bernardo Soares perhaps) and I think I might see something of what people see in this blog. The book is much more poetic, and an entirely different beast, but similar in a few key ways. It’s a posthumous collection of notes and scraps of paper which were found in a huge chest nearly lost forever and put together in a way that Pessoa himself never would have wanted. I’m reading just one of several orderings, the one I chose seemingly the most comprehensive as it includes almost everything, and this is only of the translations in English. In the original Portuguese there could be thousands of potential arrangements of these short snippets of inked reflections.

He talks about so much, and I’ll save my specific thoughts on the book’s contents because I think I’ll probably write a whole entry here about the book, but it does remind me a little bit of this blog. I’m really loving the book, I was reading it for almost two hours straight last night. I’m trying to savour it though, I’m mostly reading it for around half an hour a day at most. I’ve been reading other stuff alongside it, I recently finished Dubliners by James Joyce. I really want to read a lot more in 2020 than I did the last few years. Every year since about 2014 actually, the last decade was a lost decade for me. That’s how I see it, not just in regard to reading but in every sense actually. I ruined my education, and I retreated away from the world only to waste that time in petty self pity.

When I came back from my trip to Rome recently, for the first time since dropping out of school during my A-levels, I considered higher education. My conversation with a man who I only know as “Bournemouth” which I talked about in my last post, prompted it I suppose. Though it was more than that, my uncle has been pestering me about when I’ll give uni another chance from the day I renounced that path, it was as much spending time with people who were just like me that are studying. Sure I have a friend who is in uni in England, but I spend very little time with him. The last time I spent as much time with him as I spent with the people I visited while in Rome was back when we were both 15.

I realised that I don’t want to be stuck in this box by the station until I’m old, honestly I’m terrified I’ll still be doing the same job I do now when I’m 30. There’s a guy I work with, he’s in his early 30s (about the same age as my dad when I was born) and he has two children. If I want a stable, lower middle class job, then it’s going to be very difficult without a degree. The traditional career, that of the boomer, is dead. The idea of working your way to a position through experience alone. At least, the barrier for entry has been raised significantly, you need a degree, and so I briefly considered trying to go back to take a year course to qualify and then go to university. I’d probably study English, certainly a humanities subject because it’s the only thing I could stomach, and then after looking into it for a couple weeks I decided I would rather not.

See, the barrier for entry may have been raised in one sense, if you want to be another office worker/ cubicle cuck then you’ll need a degree, but on the other hand the barrier for entry has been lowered in some respect. We as a society have achieved a level of consumerism never before thought possible, and unless Corona-Chan or some other catastrophe arrives to kick off the long awaited boogaloo then the trend will only increase. We are living through the slow bourgeois-fication of the human species, honestly look at the most well developed countries on the planet. Whether it be Norway or Japan, you could categorise them as middle class nations. Where I live, in England, we’re not far off. Even the homeless have smartphones, the other day a gypsy woman showed me a photo of her daughter with hers after I gave her some spare change.

I paid for my plane ticket to Rome (a return ticket, though as I mentioned there were complications) with the money earned in two seven hour shifts at work. I would like a more stable job with reliable hours and slightly more money so I can perhaps one day afford to own a home. Although on other days I wish I was dead, but assuming I “make it” and find someone I love and find a reason to continue with it all and all the usual normalfag faggotry. If I could earn what I earn right now (if averaged, because I do shift work of course) working as a teacher, or a librarian; or I could earn the salary of one of those more reputable professions doing what I do right now; I’d probably go with less money for the more respectable salaried job. More importantly, I think most people would be even more likely to do so. Especially people from a similar background to me.

I’ve never really cared about being wealthy, I have no real ambition in that regard, but I’ve always craved respect. Not that I’ve done anything to earn it. As we near the point where even the poorest among us live better than the kings of old, the idea of the job gradually becomes nothing more than fashion. It’s all posturing, it’s the expansion of the blue collar (trade) vs white collar dichotomy. You might very well be able to earn more as a tradesman of some kind than at a low tier “white collar” profession like middle management, but yet you will always be looked down on by that same white collar worker. You will always be a red faced prole, gammon. Now I see it though, I can’t find it in myself to take part at all. It’s so sickening to see the charade play out.

It’s a crazy world, clownish. This blog is the only real solace I have from it, that and good books. I’d say I should write as if I have no audience, because it would lead to the most pure kind of expression of whatever it is I wish to express, but I’d be trying to maintain a fiction. There are people here reading, and I intend to keep giving you more to read. I am however, going to try my absolute best not to be influenced in any way by what I think said audience may want from me. I recently uploaded something quite unlike anything else I’ve ever posted on here before, a work of prose poetry inspired by the creature Tiktaalik who has been making waves recently on 4channel.org.

I’m pretty sure the first thread was made on /his/, that’s where I saw it first anyway, but either way I really just took the inspiration to talk about determinism in a way that I thought would be more interesting than if I just made a more standard entry on the subject. I mentioned ages ago now, over a year I think, that I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that free will is anything other than a mirage and that I would need to write about it in some depth, but I never could find a way to intelligently share my view. Anything I wrote seemed juvenile, easily dismissible, and useless given there are so many very clear and well reasoned writings out there for you to read on the subject already from people far more educated and knowledgeable than I.

Whatever this new gradually forming worldview of mine ends up looking like, it’ll almost be certainly be determinist/ fatalist, because that’s how I see the world. It’s gradually become a crucial way of seeing the world for me, at this point a day doesn’t go by where I don’t find myself reminded at least once of the fact that we have no real control over anything. I’ve been meaning to write more generally about the idea of constraint as well, the very idea of it, and of course this subject also always leads one to the most oppressive kind of constraint of all. That being the idea, the fact, that we have no kind of freedom of choice in any sense when you really think about it.

There are no choices, whenever you follow through with a process that in your mind you would consider a choice, know that this “choice” was the only outcome that there could have been. You were always going to do what you actually did do, which is why you did it. It’s not something to be upset about though, for a long time I was quite negatively affected by this new understanding, for as I said it’s the truest realisation of constraint imaginable. Now though, I’ve kind of made peace with the idea. I said I didn’t want to push people towards a particular interpretation of my writing, so I won’t labour the point, but that post was kind of about that.

I really find the philosophy of Heraclitus helped with this process, which I wrote about a fair bit in this post. I do intend to get back into that by the way, I have been distracted lately and also reading other things, but I will finish that book and the post responding to it. I’ve also been working a lot lately, I did six days of work one week. It’s an easy job for the most part, and I’m getting paid, so I don’t mean to sound as if I’m complaining, but I’ve had very little time to write. I’m surprised I’ve managed to get a new post out every week since getting home from Rome. Well actually it’s not too surprising, this one I’m writing right now is completely mad and stream of consciousness. It’s easy to just vomit my thoughts out like this. The prose “poem” I was talking about a moment ago was half finished before I left and still ended up being pretty short, less than 1000 words. Last week’s post was substantial though, I hope you liked it.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, I feel like everything is slowly deteriorating around me and I’m very concerned. I don’t even have time for “tfw no gf” anymore… those were the days. I know that I don’t want to study, I would hate the environment, I’d be stuck doing a course for four years at least and I’d probably have to continue living with my dad for that time because I wouldn’t be able to work full time and study. I don’t know what to do, but I know I need to do something or I’ll be in that exact position I fear so much. I can coast through life, barely alive of course but present, and modernity will do it’s best to keep me comfortable while doing it, but in my heart I will grow more and more to hate every waking moment.

I know it’s odd that I was just writing about how free will and choice are an illusion and now I seem to be obsessing over “choices”, but knowing an illusion for what it is doesn’t make it feel any less real. Another example of constraint would be the languages we use, as far as I’m aware all languages are predicated on the idea that we are agents with the power of choice. So it’s impossible to talk or write about doing anything without reinforcing the illusion, every time you say or even simply think about doing something you further strengthen the false idea of choice. If you throw a ball at the ground and it bounces back, you wouldn’t say it chose to do so, but imagine if you were raised in a language that did. You would start to think it did, and of course the presumption probably comes before the language and I understand that our innate belief in free will might be genetic and not cultural.

I’m very tired, I’m going to stop writing now and go to sleep.