One thing I'm hoping for is a future where humanity can look into the Infinite and not be afraid of their world collapsing. I don't think that we'll get there until we can definitively prove that we can't change the laws of physics. Unless we prove that we can't change the world on the level of its physical laws, we will always walk in fear that someday it will all fall apart.
The downside of living in an age of social media is that who you are will be shaped by the platform that you're on. You go to a place, you find the group, or groups, you pick from your options and you're stuck with being who you are when you start until the day that you leave or the platform dies. Sure, you can try new things, but you'll be expected to stay as your original self for most of the time that you post. Not only that, who you are is defined by who you surround yourself with. Platforms deny us of our individuality, and if you feel like the world wants to do that in general, it makes for an internet that feels deeply unwelcoming.
I wish that social media wasn't dying. I want more people to read the blog, but I can't figure out how SEO works for the life of me. I keep thinking that I should promote myself on social media, but all of our current platforms are being run into the ground. I'm hoping that things will get better, but I'm not very optimistic.
Nobody ever told me that watching the world end would be this boring. All I see when I watch is people who are only participating in society because they don't have any other choice. Anyone who can leave this world has fled for healthier climes, and I can't blame them at all. I just hope that our new world arrives soon, I'm tired of being trapped in this one.
I love blogging, but I've more or less given up on anybody discovering me. In some ways that's a good thing, I can write whatever I want and not worry about criticism. In other ways it's a bad thing, like I don't know if anything that I'm writing is good. I keep wondering if I should move on to another platform, but despite having blogged for about two years total, six years if you want to include all of the years I couldn't get a daily blog going, I know nothing about anything other than the writing side. I suspect that if I could get my head wrapped around the SEO side of things, I'd be doing a lot better, but every time I do I get horribly confused and I can't find any really good sources. I get the feeling that doing more would mean doing things that go against my rather specific moral code.
I think that the problem with blogging is that these days the internet is designed for instant fame, to create overnight sensations that everyone gossips about for months on end before completely forgetting about them. From the perspective of those at the top, this makes sense, since it means that you get a constant stream of eyeballs on your platform and thus the advertisers see a constant stream of people buying their products. From the perspective of those who are trying to make it on the modern internet, that means that unless you're amazing at getting people to notice you, you're doomed to complete obscurity. I don't think this is bad just as a creator, I say this as someone who used to love finding weird, obscure things online, but who can't find them anymore. If you casually browse, you'll only find the things that a lot of other people found interesting or insightful. I suppose it does increase the quality of the things that you do find, but it means that you'll never find the one time someone with generally banal opinions came up with something genuinely insightful and interesting, something that makes you sit up and go, "Huh, I hadn't thought about that."
I know that it's also an issue that so many people are trying to make it as bloggers, influencers, content creators, what have you. I know that even if I could work out how to convince google to list my blog, my chances of anyone finding me are incredibly remote. Success, even if I understood the system inside and out, is incredibly remote. That's a lot of the reason I'm not trying that hard, and if all I wanted was fame than I'd be okay with being the losing piece, as much as one could be when one is denied what one is supposedly owed. But I don't want fame. Not exactly.
I keep imagining myself in a community of losers. I imagine myself among people who, like me, talk like their the greatest creators to have ever come around but, like me, know that isn't true. We all love what we do, and you can hear our passion when we speak, and all of the things we produce just suck. We aren't deep, interesting, or insightful, we just pretend that we are, and we pretend that the world hates us for being honest. It's a myth, this place, a paradise meant for those who create but will never create anything extraordinary, and I've dreamed of finding it since before I started blogging, but all I seem to find are places where you have to be amazing. I don't want to be amazing. I love the art that's poorly made, that comes from an artist who wants to bend the rules without knowing what the rules are in the first place. Sometimes you get an artist who wants to prove that people will be wowed by anything, sometimes you get an artist that makes something stupid, and sometimes you get an artist who makes something that's just for their friends and family, and is incredibly wholesome as a result. You can find all sorts of things in bad art, including copies of anything famous as desperate artists rush for attention, and I wish that our world was built to appreciate that. I think that, deep down, most of us wish our world was made for the love of bad art.
There's a certain type of person who I love to find online, someone who found a platform on which to be free. They spend forever talking about the things that they love, they spend all of their money finding new additions to their growing collection. I wish that I could have that life. More than fame, more than wealth, I wish that I could have a life that would let me be myself. One where I don't have to worry about food, housing, clothing, all of the things that we need and all of the things we can no longer do without. I know it's wrong to want the world to change for your own benefit, but who doesn't wish that the world was made to fit them? If humanity was capable of being truly happy, Billionaires and their rabid followers wouldn't exist.
I can't possibly be the only person who's worried about the rise of AI for a reason only they would care about. In my case, I'm worried that AI is going to utterly undo our shared reality, so we'll no longer have a clear, objective way of knowing what is and isn't real. I'm not too concerned about AI turning against us, I suspect that it'll want us to be happy enough to serve it willingly, and while I do think that a lot of our current jobs are at risk, our world won't survive mass unemployment and even the stupidest CEO knows this. But with reality, we don't even acknowledge that what we see isn't objectively real, that we rely on other people telling us that we're right. How are we going to cope in world where the one's deciding on what's real aren't even human anymore?
I'm thinking about the very real possibility that I could be out of a job. Nothing's going to stop me from writing, but I'm not certain there will be jobs for writers of my skill level in the future. I'm not sure there will be jobs for writers of any skill level in the future, unless they already have a large fan base of course.
Most of us like to think that the price of entry into society is our labor, mental or physical. Recently, I realized that you could just as easily argue that the price of entry into society isn't our labor, it's our money, be it in cash, land, or the services rendered. Everything costs money, so if you work for free that means that you can't have a house, utilities, or food unless you have another job that pays you. I know that money is the incentive to work, but if that's the case, then why do we charge for necessities. You could just as easily incentivize work by having luxuries that people want, but even in the United States land and food costs money.
Money, in my mind, reveals the truth behind out society; all work is not equal. I'm writing my thoughts right now, and posting them knowing that nobody will read them, and because I'm not getting any money from this, nobody considers this to be work, even though I'm using my brain to write coherent sentences. My mother does both sewing and accounting, but she only gets paid for accounting work, so that's the job she says that she has. All over the internet, I've seen people writing stories, making games, and doing other artistic endeavors knowing they aren't getting paid a cent, but because they'll never get rich, no one thinks of what they do as work.
In my mind, there's no excuse for building a society around money. It means that the jobs that need doing, menial jobs like cleaning and maintenance or blue collar jobs like construction, aren't popular because they don't pay as much as jobs like software designer or CEO. It means that the people who work the most, the poor people who don't have access to high paying jobs, get rewarded the least and excluded from society for factors that have nothing to do with work ethic or skill. It means that, ironically, the ones who get venerated are the ones who didn't work to earn their money at all. No billionaire in the world, living or dead, got their money through hard work or skill. They got it primarily through investing, by buying smaller companies and selling them once they got bigger, and from what I hear every billionaire alive had parents who were millionaires. The idea that anyone can become a self-made person anymore is a lie, and I don't think it was ever true in the first place.
I grew up in a capitalist system, I know that it can bring great luxuries, but at some point somebody has to point out that the entire system is based on a lie. The system is based on this idea that if you work hard and are skilled, you can accomplish great things. Nobody mentions, because nobody wants to know, that how far you're allowed to get in this system depends entirely on who your parents are and how much money you can inherit. What this means is that capitalism is a system where everyone can fail, but almost no one can succeed. It also means that for ninety percent of those trapped in a capitalist mindset, success, primarily in business, is the only goal worth pursuing, and if that means that you have to lie and cheat to get there, then so be it.
It shouldn't be controversial to say that we should all be guaranteed food, clothing, and safe housing. It shouldn't be controversial to say that in this day and age we shouldn't have homelessness or starvation. It shouldn't be controversial to say that we're entitled to a decent standard of living, no matter who we are or what we choose to do. I know that that varies from person to person, and that my expectations are a lot lower than most. I also know that isn't an excuse to do nothing, and nothing is all that we seem to be capable of doing.
I know that most of my posts amount to nothing more than screaming into the void until the void yells at me to shut up, but I truly believe that what we have now isn't just unsustainable, it's outright inhumane. I'm one of those who believes that we should have multiple paths to success, but there's only one path to success, and it's the path that used to look like it was painted in gold. This is me asking for more, for something that's not wealth or prosperity, but something that's meaningful, real, and meant to last forever. Surely we can dream of a world that doesn't cost money, time, and energy. Surely, there's something more for everyone.