May 7th

Sitting Pretty

CW: gore, depression mentioned. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED TWICE ABOUT CONTENT NOW, IT IS NOT MY FAULT IF YOU READ AHEAD. Not my art

A quote I hear pretty frequently is "The unexamined life is not worth living.", but the examined life is hardly paradise either. I've been sitting down and taking a look over my past, and everyone else's past, and no matter who they are, they have so many misgivings. For a brief time, the chaos I've caused made me really hesitant to act, I'm still pretty paralyzed by it right now, but it feels less like it's because I'm choosing not to act now, and more like I've been passive for so long that I can't get the ball rolling. The examined life is actually fairly hellish, and the examined world even more so.

We're all so vulnerable as people to external influence, like circus mirrors, we transform our experiences into a warped memory, and then that memory acts as a fuel for how we act. I think I might need to read a little philosophy on the concept of free will, because at the moment, I'm not convinced it exists. I see my friends and myself begin to say things as a joke, and in time it changes from a joke into their reality. We're very malleable, and watching everyone getting shaped by the external pressures the world exerts on them is hard. I feel like those external forces are crushing me sometimes, and not in some Sisyphean sense, like I'm Atlas holding up the sky. More like I'm unable to move because the world just has too much gravity. My actions have too much gravity. And I'm barely even the person who makes the decisions behind the actions, just the person who carries the burdens afterwards.

And I'm still thankful. Yes I've been in some bad circumstances, but others have been through worse. I'd probably get really fucking mad if anyone ever pointed that out to me though, let's be honest. As would anyone, it feels like minimization, but foundationally, the statement "someone else does have it worse" is factual. And looking at the people who went through the same stuff I did, maybe I came out lucky in the end. I recognised things weren't right and I was being wronged, and I lashed out at the world, and then I felt remorseful. Now I realise what I did was at least what I thought to be well intentioned. Now I have the choice to do one of four things: nothing, help the people who are being wronged, cause more chaos for wrongdoers, or the last two at the same time. And the choice of just helping the wronged and avoiding transgression is the easy and right choice. Meanwhile, many people I know are still causing chaos. I'm fortunate to have stepped back and really examined what was unravelling before me. I hope they get that chance too, I believe something that people who love to argue fail to notice is that a cold, hard statistic or a logical statement rarely ever changes someone's mind. I can't just bring people around to acting well. I can only be one of those millions of external forces affecting them. Maybe I can be one of those little positive pushes in the right direction though. I'd like that.

Right now, there's a lot of anger at people who took the wrong path. I want to be more forgiving and lenient with them. In the past I was incredibly harsh when I was critical of somebody. In part, because I grew up in a place where it was the standard to just be a massive cunt to everyone. I'm quite sour about it now, because I'm incredibly desensitized to a lot of awful acts. That's certainly something people took for granted about having the internet at a young age, I think I might have been the only guy in my year at my high school who *didn't* have a gore whore phase. There's where I'm fortunate. I might be into extreme music and humour, but hey, I'm the only guy my age from my town who hasn't seen someone shove a glass jar up their ass. I still see a therapist for the shock content I did see, but at least I never saw the worst of it. Read that and tell me the examined life is any better than the unexamined one.

On a comfier note, I'm going to my Dad's tomorrow, so I won't be posting for a while because there's no internet connection out there. I will probably try to go camping soon. I don't really get to work on my projects here, for reasons I won't delineate. I can't wait to be alone at uni again. My birthday is also coming up, so I might buy some cherry jam and some retro hardware. A couple of other things to mention is that this post might seem a little all over the place, as in I start a thought, then there's some rambling in the middle, then I finish the thought. My mind has been really hyperactive but I think my medication is helping me stay on track a bit better. I still drift off, but I'm coming back and finishing the thought in a logical fashion. There's progress. Also I've been thinking of working on decrypting cyphers in my spare time. I'd probably stick to old codexs though, fuck helping some intelligence agency out on their work. I just want to have some fun, not help war criminals seek war criminals. This one might be kind of dark, but I've been enjoying doing these blogposts. They've been really therapeutic, and I've always wanted to keep a diary of sorts where I can get out my thoughts. I certainly used to use social media for this but there's always something left wanting from the atmosphere and the fact that people have to see it. I like the way anyone can just passover this site and forget about it, it's transient and ephemeral in the reader's mind, yet it still stands as an archive. Maybe it's just the freedom to customize it in a million different ways. I don't know, really. All I know is that I've been finding it really nice to work on during a hard time.