I'm told that for most people, becoming an entirely different person depending on what group of people you're with feels natural and intuitive, but it's never felt natural to me. No matter who I'm with, I feel like I have to cut off parts of myself just to fit in. I know what people expect me to do, but whenever I do it I know that I'm lying just to be accepted, and the moment they find out that I'm not who I say I am, I'll be cast out. They don't care about me. They care about a carefully constructed illusion they live in that says that everyone else is like them. Someone who can only pretend to be them, but who looks perfectly human otherwise, is an affront to that illusion. By existing, I put their world at risk whenever I have to enter it, yet I'm not allowed to not live in it at all. I shouldn't have to lie in order to stay alive.
I think it's safe to say that we're in denial about the state of X. By insisting on calling it Twitter, we're pretending it's still a living breathing organism capable of thought, not an undead zombie that knows nothing but infernal hunger. When we use the word Twitter we claim that Elon Musk cannot destroy Twitter, that he can't kill us and revive us to use for his own twisted ends. But we cannot deny the truth, he is a monster, infecting our world with curses that were never meant to be unleashed on humanity, purely so he can harness our fear and power. He sees us, the humans who use X, as nothing more than slaves, beings without agency, incapable of things like love, joy, or kindness. He claims he did not know the dangers of what he was doing, but he lies. All of us who wish harm upon others think that we'll be spared, until our curses come back to haunt us.
I am officially done with X, the corpse formerly known as Twitter, and I'm writing this publicly for all to see so that I can be held accountable when/if I find myself crawling back in moments of weakness. I realize that for most people it's not that easy, but I figure that if I leave, that might be the catalyst for other people leaving, and if enough people leave, X will either change or get killed off for good. Either way, we'll be safe from the stench of Twitter's maggot infested corpse, and we now know that anything Elon Musk touches becomes infected with the decay of society. We do this right, Twitter, forever known as X, becomes a lesson to all; don't let the infected near what you treasure, or you'll be the one who gets killed.
I wish I knew how to open up the Dreamworld to more people. I feel that if more of us had the ability to tell our stories and find ways to tether ourselves to reality, our world wouldn't be in the state that it's in. I can't help but feel that most conspiracy theorists are born from people who need to believe in something, something not tied to reality in any significant way. Unfortunately, they live in a world where reality is given precedence over all other human needs, like the need for power and control over one's mind and body. We are watching as a battle over reality takes place on a million fronts, and no one knows how to stitch our world back together. We can't know. We thought that the moment we mastered physics, all else would fall into place. We never imagined we would need fiction to give any of this meaning. It sickens me to watch as people keep saying we don't need religion. People aren't turning away from religion because it doesn't work, they're turning away from it because it doesn't feel real to them anymore. We need to reinvent the very concept of reality, and nobody but me seems to know this. Everyone seems to think that all you need to do is connect to society, but that won't work for much longer. We need a new story, or else all we'll have left is Infinitelism.
I'm scared. No. Fear doesn't do what I'm feeling justice. I'm not a libertarian, and I don't particularly want to be, but I've passed the point of no return. I'm officially at the point where I feel that both parties are unacceptably bad. Not even in different ways. Things have gotten so bad that while I know there were good reasons for voting for Biden four years ago, I no longer remember what they were. I feel like I only voted out of blind hope that maybe, just maybe, Biden could turn things around. I never imagined he would make things worse. People keep insisting that the Democrats are better, but that doesn't feel real to me. At all. It feels like a blind statement of belief more than anything. What the heck are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to vote our way out of the feeling that no matter what we say or do, nothing will ever get better? Eternity as we know it is ending, and all we can do is sit back and wait for the moment we don't need to care anymore. How many of us will die? How many will be straight up erased from history, with nothing that even denotes their existence? What will happen when Democracy as we know it crumbles?
We allow the rich to get richer in the hopes that one day they'll build grand halls for the best of us to hang pictures in, as though we're kindergarteners and they're our loving parents. The optimist in me hopes that what we're seeing is the beginning of a change in ethos, a shift from believing that money is given to the inherently deserving to a world that acknowledges that no one is free from flaws, and no one, no matter how good, deserves to run unopposed. I want to believe that we'll grow up, but we're not long past the point when most children died in infancy, indeed many countries haven't gotten to that point yet. I fear that we, just growing past infancy, are doomed to die before our potential is reached. If humans are capable of wielding power independent of the world we live in, we might have a chance, but how will we know before it's too late?
I don't want a large fanbase, but I can't help but wish there was someone to ask about something that's been bugging me. Has anyone else been troubled by the feeling that they're hyper-focusing on small, inconsequential issues that no one else in the world cares about because the big issues are so overwhelming these days?
The problem with writing all of my posts on Monday is you can tell when I start the week in a bad mood. Let's just say that 2024 has not started off promisingly, and I'm not accepting "Not as bad as 2023" as an improvement. I know we've had worse, but I'm not quitting until we've managed to have a year that, for once, doesn't leave the entirety of the United States longing for the sweet release of death. Or the rapture. I'm fairly certain I'm not the only person who feels that hell would be preferable to being alive.
It's not just that we've screwed up. People screw up all the time. It's that no one has the power on the inclination to fix anything. I can understand it being hard to believe in God, especially the Christian incarnation. I can understand not wanting to believe in your fellow humans, lord knows I don't. I don't understand being completely incapable of believing in Reality. We see it every day and are surrounded by people who see it everyday, and all of us know that our actions have consequences. Furthermore, we live in a democracy, and even autocracy runs on the idea that your army decides to shoot your enemies and not you. Our government can't survive if we decide that a world where either path leads to the death of innocents is completely unacceptable, and we act on that by booting the bastards out of office and picking a method of making sure they can't make it back in. Let's prove the libertarians wrong, and create a world where there is a choice between parties and you can make the right choice. If the people in charge won't do it, I guess that we'll just have to do it for them. And don't act like this is impossible. If the Fascists can act without leadership, there's no reason the far smarter left can't do the same thing, given the right incentives.
Do you ever feel that they make your life public as a sort of threat? That they made it so that, without any surveillance, all of us are seen just so that we would police ourselves? But for our leaders incompetence, I would believe that, but the truth is that it does not matter if they intended to trap us in our fears and anxieties. That is what they have done. Perhaps it is time to go back to a world where no one need express themselves for affection, least of all those, like me, who know that the more they say out loud, the less the world will be willing to tolerate them.
Every Monday, I fire up Blogger and pretend that I'm a member of society. I pretend that I don't hate the world as much as I do, that I have anything remotely approaching faith in our government, that I'm at all convinced the world will listen to what I have to say. Every Monday, I pretend that someone will read what I have to write. Why? You and I both know I'd be much happier if no one saw me at all.
You ever think about how most of the people we see aren't real? They look real, they have the faces of people who exist, and they sometimes share the opinions the people who look like them share, but the people we see aren't the people who exist, they're people we created to fit molds we have of the world we live in. Good guys, bad guys, everyone in between, all are made up by us and the people who want to influence us so that our world can stay real. But they're not real, and the people who look like them often have little in common with those we see. We pretend Elon Musk is all powerful, but strip away the fawning adoration, and you have a man who is more pathetic than most of the teens who emulate him. Not that said teens will admit that, of course.
There's a lot of talk about personal growth, things written by people who think the way to make the world a better place is by becoming a better person. I think that we may have gotten it backwards. I think that it's just as important to focus on making the world a better place for everyone. The problem is that nobody knows what that better world really looks like. That doesn't mean that we don't have a vision for what it could look like. I think the problem is that we hold ourselves back, because we know that our perfect world could very easily be somebody else's dumpster fire, but if there's a way to make everyone happy, we won't know what it looks like until we know what everyone wants.