The hardest thing about writing isn’t the act of writing. It is opening the document. I find the mechanical act of writing words comes to me organically after I got used to using a keyboard everyday for work. When I look at other people’s writing I see they all approach ideas from different angles. Some people like to create stories where they can act out fantasies in exactly the way they want, whether that is to experience kindness to themselves or to exact comeuppance on who ever wronged them, or for whatever reason their heart desires! Other people like to write essays so they can get to the bottom of an idea, a bit like me. Sometimes I like my writing to take on a more fluid quality, so it shifts between genres, sometimes in a stream-of-conscious. When I write I want the process to be organic, I don’t want to worry about getting to the bottom of a specific idea. Anything goes in the process of writing, really. I felt recently I was being bottled up because I wasn’t talking to myself, like I am now, where the words I am having are transcribed into a physical manifestation such as a word document. I was either talking to myself where the words would evaporate. I can’t grasp them like this. Or I would be talking to people online, where I don’t know how much of myself to share with other people. I want to talk to people, but when it comes to interfacing with other humans how close or far do you stay? A lot has happened in my life internally, though in many ways I find it difficult to really pin down in my mind because the person I have been talking to the most has preferred indirect communication and so have I and how do you establish common knowledge when everything you have been saying and hearing can be interpreted in many different ways, plus there is the audience (as there may well for this text) who will be perceiving these words and signs and signals. So really, I don’t know. But I like where I am now. Things are better in my life and I’m beginning to hit my stride, though I keep looking around and seeing things change. Things change, it happens all the time, even when the change is invisible to you. I like the degree of public anonymity I have currently. I have a face and name in many places, but also not enough of a following in any of those fields for people to approach me, though I probably wouldn’t mind that on a small scale. I don’t talk about my work, but I realise that I have a very real impact on people, and that’s all I will say on that. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel the words I have are ones anyone could have, though also at the same time I know that people who write down thoughts in a candid manner are rare, and that is part of the reason why Ulysses is such a unique text because in many regards it is an exactly normal day and on a microscopic level nothing in the novel in unique exactly to it, but in many ways the aggregate of all those thoughts and unremarked quotations are unique. To people crossing the street who see me: I’m just a guy who’s trying to get a handle on his life, and for the most part is getting it together, but in many ways doesn’t have it together, though in many ways few of us actually do. I just think that I had it less together than most without the wheels falling completely off. Honestly, I want to thank all the authors who gave me books to guide me through my though times because without novels I probably wouldn’t have been able to see a way through and be in a position today where I can write my thoughts down in a big paragraph. I feel I have expressed a small part of myself and now I don’t want to talk too much more since I have laid bare some thing from the inside. I wonder do you read me? It doesn’t matter, honestly. I would like to feel heard. In the end aren’t these words on the wind, to be blown away by the winds of eternity. I often come back to the topic of meaninglessness and the absurd because as soon as I examine it everything loses meaning. As in, I feel purpose in the moment, I want to write, I want to feel love, I want success, but then when I pick up the idea in my mind, it turns to quicksilver and melts away leaving just a void where the idea was. I find things meaningless easily, and I don’t think there is inherent meaning in anything. But I think feelings are real. I exist and am a being whether if anything else is, is a matter of perception. But outside of this eternal moment is anything real? Does time happen all in a simultaneous now? Science tells us facts about the world, but it struggles to prove the existential facts of being and nothingness. I need to read that: Being and Nothingness. This is just the direction my brain goes when it tries to grapple with its own existence, and I think these thoughts are very logical, but we live in a post-AI-mathematics world where we are getting proofs for things that human mathematicians are unable to prove. It doesn’t mean than either people or machines are wrong, just logic has diverged from where human understanding ends. I don’t even thing AI is that smart, just emergent behaviours are much more complex that the sum of their parts. It is the reason why humans can make nuclear reactors and bridges and engineer yummy foods all without a single mind masterminding all the logistics and things only occasionally breaking. I hope to write more, more often. I’ve been busy and distracted and I don’t have enough good excuses, but at the same time that’s okay. Things are okay, even when you read and hear about them not being okay. I’m okay, or maybe even better than okay because I don’t see all my peers. The world turns and I think people have been trying to improve things, just progress isn’t uniform and often is invisible to the naked eye. I felt better when I connected to local New Zealand culture. It feels weird being an alien in your own country, or even your own city. When you either isolate yourself off from everyone around you and live online, or you go overseas, only to come back and find everything slightly changed from how you remember it. I feel that is why I connected with I am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki because I could relate to his feelings of reverse culture shock. It feels this writing will go on for ever, though I think I will conclude here.