> Thoughts

I've been watching some violent stuff recently, like John Wick, shonen anime, and the like, and there aren't many things that manage to be as satisfying as seeing a strong motherfucker lose their cool and kill everyone ruthlessly. Especially if they have relatable reasons (take John Wick's dog, for instance).

I have wondered many times what it'd be like to have this kind of power: to be able to deal justice whenever I felt like it. Of course, no one can actually fight like John Wick, or Naruto, or Ichigo, or even barebones Itadori-kun for that matter. There's a more nuanced sort of power we also see in media that's a lot more reasonable for people like us, the kind we see in Mr. Robot. It might not please your uncle Bob as much, nevertheless, hacking scenes can be pretty cool, and even inspiring if you're anything like me.

Either way, here I am in a fucking crowded plane from a completely shitty company which, I swear, even has mosquitoes inside (I can feel them biting my arms as I type). The plane departed late (shocking, right?), and amongst the 250-ish motherfuckers inside this glorified tin can I ended up sitting right next to a bunch of monster-energy high, smelly, noisy, motherfucking athlete kiddos. Take that after a full day of global warming temps, a fucking stupid uber driver that wanted to FIGHT ME because I asked him to follow the GPS, and a buttload of bureaucracy and that's it. I want Sukuna and I want it now, bring this whole plane down even if I go with it.

So, how do you deal with that? That's my question for you: how, exactly, do you not go crazy when you can actually taste someone's smelly feet and feel another pounding their fucking head against your seat.

Sadly, I'm no Mr. Robot, much less baba yaga, so the only thing I can do is cope -- and that's where heavy drugs come in. And, then, after about half-hour of this pounding into my skull I feel a little more relaxed, just enough to quit the need to bring the whole plane down -- I might be just ok if I get to bash some children's skulls at the windows... To quote one of my favorite authors (trans.):

... and then I might be cured.

I actually don't really think it's too bad to feel this way from time to time. What are you? A fucking loser that's just gonna suck it up every time? Sometimes we just gotta feel the fucking thing, let it be, learn to deal. Then, maybe, when the heavy metal stops, you can breathe calmly once again.

One of the things I enjoy the least about feeling this way is that it's so tiring. There's no way you can completely recover from such an awful amount of stress in less than a day or two: It literally takes away some portion of your life, and it's not even in the far future.

In some sense, emotions are what truly brings life to this hardware of ours, otherwise we'd all be just flesh machines -- one could even argue that depression is power-saving mode, in that line of reasoning. Either way, I like to think about what those feelings mean in regards to my machine wanting to take good care of itself. Self-preservation is a thing, you might even say it's our only dogma, but at the same time we're rather bugged by external influence nowadays -- from smelly teenagers on a plane to having tight schedules, or even simply by the lab meat we eat every day --, there's only a handful of people that have been graced with growing up without a television.

So if our central dogma is being completely manipulated through techno-chemical plastic, what are we supposed to do? Hunger, pain, anger... It will all come and go... Especially in the city, it can all feel overwhelming when you're coming home at the end of the day and still gotta get stuff done at home, and you just gotta cope and deliver. You'll flash with those intense feelings by the hour, like a smart light bulb made from the best parts some crazy Frankenstein could find, but that can't get a stable power supply. In that case, how do we deal with the constant flashing, and actually manage to make something useful out of our "smart" bits?

Of course I don't have a precise answer for that. Lately, when I've been feeling too overwhelmed I just step back and try to focus on the next thing. Not the next thing I want to do, the next thing I need to get done. Part of this I developed as a coping strategy for ADHD (or whatever tiktok is talking about these days), but I don't actually think it's specific advice for those deemed ill. Rather, if you stop for a second, you can perceive most people around you, on the internet, and even your parents, have been dealing with the same sort of problems -- it's not just your light that's been flickering lately. Rather, it comes down to some sort of sensitivity to the inputs we gotta attend -- as if your circuits have been hardwired to a billionaire's control room and you lost your agency.

Nature's breadboards are really good though, and even real light bulbs only illuminate decently and efficiently when they're flashing constantly. So I have come to believe it's not about quitting society, but rather developing filters so you can actually output that stream of light. Lately I've been also listening to lots of podcasts, especially Lex', and as I found people that inspire me it became a lot easier to understand the kind of light I want to be outputting too.

You can't actually fully develop your authentic light just by catering to what is expected -- that is, simply reacting --, otherwise you'll probably burn your fuse (or your LED or whatever smart bulbs are made of). When I get in touch with people who are still addicted to social media, I usually notice that I can almost feel someone on the other side, but this reactive nature of the internet makes them blurry, as if they've lost some lightwaves in that medium. Of course that's not only valid for social media, but it definitely blocks out most light in our times.

My personal theory is that disorders such as ADHD and autism have become more prevalent precisely because we're short-circuiting people from their birth, and some hardware copes a little better, some a little worse, but no human is completely immune from that. It might even be a sign of overdeveloped abstract thinking for all I care. Apart from people who are obviously too dysfunctional, it's probably not such a bad thing overall. With ADHD often comes the schizo aspect that makes people more creative, and with autism there's also deep focused engagement -- things that are progressively harder to find not because these people are lesser, but because their minds are muddled in tiktok hyperfantasy so they can't think straight. My point being: someone with those disorders is probably fitter for the modern world, but is also more likely to get sucked by modern techno-drugs.

When it comes to filtering unuseful stuff, it's not only a matter of willpower, but also of what and who you're surrounding yourself with. It's pretty easy to get "lonely" and lost, and devote all your time to unproductive hobbies. On the other hand it gets harder to filter out stupid people and get out of social networks when you haven't even considered the possibility that you should do that, so here I am telling you. No one said having a meaningful existence would be easy, and I'd say it's a pretty remote goal for most people -- forever to be NPCs living through the motions of their small simulations, unable to grasp the power they have over their own reality. Nevertheless, if you've read up this far I can't help but believe that you're not just a tiny automaton but a quantum Turing machine full of potential, so do me a favor and make it true. The people you meet will thank you for shining your light upon them.

Evil, in and of itself, is not a very common concept in our days, as we tend to prefer nuance in our politicized worldviews: no one is truly wrong, we just don't understand their point of view. I claim we have never been further from the truth, at least in regards to corporations, for a system which has inhuman goals in mind -- such as profit -- cannot be anything but evil. Now, I ask you to follow me, in my attempt to show you that there are the ways in which corporate distorts your mind beyond recognition: when you simply aren't human any longer.

Just the other day I've had this private chat with my manager, and most of it was taken by the misfortunate event of having to work with an engineer. This guy not only undermines my work constantly, as he's also created intrigue to demoralise me while discussing code. As this bizarre situation proceeded, I kept wondering why this guy simply won't talk to me directly, though my manager simply dismisses his attitude as being "normal engineer stuff". I'm a software engineer myself so, clearly, there's a widespread notion that (most) engineers simply aren't prepared to deal with people in any instance. Logically, such an engineer must not bother to conform to basic social contract. And this manager ends up as a useless "comforter" of sorts for having to deal with situations that, by and large, he must not act upon.

On a deeper analysis, my manager would have to assume a parental role -- that is, by our society's parameters. While that doesn't bother us in the context of police or, in various instances of education, it's still disturbing to think about a corporate role that should be responsible for something so fundamental. And I don't mean it in the sense that "he's not paid to do it" but actually that we're troubled to hand such basic things to corporate. Many questions arise:

• Should we even bother with such an issue?
• If so, do we trust corporations to handle it?

Those can be condensed into a simpler question, which should make sense from the corporates' point of view: is it an issue of trust or one of efficiency? I believe in the latter -- corporate won't bother because it's not worth solving this -- not only because so-called senior engineers can just find another company that allows them to continue being dummies, but also because, in some deeper level, corporate simply does not care about this.

So, as a manager must completely forget about all the human aspects corporate doesn't mind, we see a very clear disconnect of the worker from the human. This leads to a pruning of their abilities to not think on corporate terms, and corp has a multitude of ways to manipulate people into assuming incoherent roles that they just get used to. Oftentimes, the more absurd the role, the more disconnected from reality people become. You can think of this as a coping mechanism, where the corporees default to doing only what's required of them -- somehow optimising their human traits.

A rather strange example of this in mainstream media is severance (the series). In short, in this universe, some people opt for having a work persona that's separate from the rest of their lives. While this sounds like an interesting way of existing in such a system (as opposed the being consumed by it), it's not really functional in any way, as we're immersed in an environment created by corp, so how do you actually separate the influence it has on you from early on? We don't have develop proper filters until we've lived through damaging experiences, then judged them. There's no good in having an arbiter for such things, just as there's no use in pretending you simply didn't live 40 hours of your life every week. In the real world, corporate must manipulate the conscious individual into becoming numb to their influences.

Alienation is one of the founding pillars of the modern institutional model -- the one model we endlessly aspire to in all instances: study groups, non-profit organizations, and even crime. Alienation emerges as we dissolve the power of each agent. Historically, though, this was quite important in various contexts, for example when all-powerful kings' power was divided into three instances. But, since then, government apparatus has increased so massively that attributing individual responsibility is practically impossible. In such a system people lose sense of their roles towards any particular, real-world, endeavour. The inherent aggression in this system is the general feeling of powerlessness by those who are "entitled" with the tasks at hand. Those who should be responsible for, e.g. keeping the forests safe or caring for people, are either feeling powerless, or they're so detached they become merely negligent. One particularly absurd instance of this is the United Nations, which congregates world leaders and experts to dictate common sense. Yet, they don't take real responsibility into achieving whatever they agree upon, most times working around problems in a frigid, statistical, manner.

As the institutional models become ubiquitous, we've come to expect copycats in all instances of life, and eventually the model grows inside of us. Sometimes, those parallel institutions grow so big we call them parallel governments. Creatures such as Japanese, or the Mexican mafias or, more bizarrely, huge regions in Brazilian cities completely run by so-called factions. Where government can't or doesn't touch, these self-contained organizations emerge. And I don't think that this occurs from organic principles, but instead from necessity inside a system which has prioritised things totally unrelated to humanity itself. And this is our reality, it's the only model we know, so how can we even think differently?

There's also a lack of dimension in the modern corporate presentation. As we experience the decay of personalities in the real world, corp follows suit, tokenising themselves -- that is, slowly abdicating their identities as physical entities, and becoming more and more like pure, virtual, brands. Tokenisation is a rather common branding technique. You can usually see it in status-related goods -- the supreme brick being a common example of this. As a company's ultimate worth is decided by artificial intelligence, tokenisation becomes the ultimate step in the evolution of big corp. There's no longer a need for identification, because of the ruling of virtual over the physical. Corporate has finally transcended.

Capitalism has a very specific role in normalising those structures, and even idealising them to some extent. What capitalism itself has come to symbolise, is a weird fetishism of luxury, now predominant in our society. Thus, through structural manipulation, people have lost their ability to perceive corporate's true purpose, and can now only idealise the massive blob. As responsibilities are subdivided into powerless roles, work becomes meaningless: you have no option but to accept the capitalist ideal of striving for luxury, as there's no way you can relate to anything else on the system that subjugates your life. And it does so because you have to be part of it in order to live. I picture corporate as you might recall in some older stock images, where it's a machine, composed of many cogs. What roles are can we partake in these uncharacteristic institutionalised brands?

You might have met brilliant people that believe deeply on this system. This leaves us with a bitter taste: at the same time there's hope of being fulfilled by making it on the system, we often don't feel as capable as them. I hope you already feel relieved by now, but I feel I must say this explicitly: It's simply not worth it. There's no meaningful role to be gained in a corporation, as there's no effort that justifies getting to a possibly meaningful role. The cogs that compose this machine are made for massacring people, and you'll have to both be amputated of meaning and slaughter others in the process. High societal status and financial power come at the price of a soul. Those things are essentially the ultimate "realisation" we can aspire for inside this system: something flawed onto itself as the system allows no realisation. Its objectives often lead people into the void, gathering infinite amounts of money that are impossible to realise into a lifetime: no luxury is enough for the billionaire because money can't buy meaning. This is mostly because materialism can't possibly fill in the spaces it so desperately wants us to donate to it -- that is, your sense of purpose as a human being.

What is, then, the purpose of work in modern society? I'd like to believe in a definition where it can't be merely a process of alienation. So, to me, work is making progress towards some goal. From that point of view, in which it is always accompanied by clear meaning, most work under capitalism makes no sense, because we are either pursuing meaningless things or we don't have power to effectively act upon the world. Consumerism has been called into question many times, but it's now clear to me that striving for such power is also a black hole of its own. It's a lot easier to be relevant in small contexts rather than aspire for uncanny power, status or luxuries, for narrative tension -- the basis for purpose, that leads to context, and then to meaning -- does not depend on the capitalist machine. I'm also trying to find out where I can build relevant things, and I hope to write about this someday. Inspiring others and caring for them are definitely worthwhile, as we exist mostly among garbage, and we know there are so many people who can't afford to live as well as us. I leave you, then, with my adaptation from one of Byung-chul Han's closing quotes on the fourth chapter of his book "The Scent of Time":

A life that is lived by pursuing void things, no matter how high the rate of luxuries, is itself a void life.

One of these days I was talking to a friend about a LSD trip we had at the year's end. It was quite intense, and on the first few moments I couldn't help but think about what exactly was a person, and I kept entering these strange loopholes in my mind, somehow accessing the most basic structures I had developed as frameworks for thinking about other people. The best picture I can provide is a sort of amalgamation of connections, like a weird, organic, colorful, bundle that shapeshifts -- I might even try to make a painting about it one day.

After a while I got so absorbed in those structures I simply couldn't understand the abstractions I had learned were associated with them: names, faces, genders -- none of it made any sense at the moment, because it wasn't quite real to me. Later in the trip I realised I'd learned all of this from society somehow, but it wasn't of the essence on my own frame of mind.

Time keeping itself, as humans designed it, seemed totally arbitrary, I even remember asking my friend whether she realized the year's end was just like the year's beginning, and also saying that I just didn't understand what an apartment or a city was.

This ended up being very enlightening. When, at some point in your life, you truly realise that the stuff you've been building your life around are just abstractions and theories you have on your head. And what better way to realise that then to close your eyes and see it?

I think I might just have had a peek at my own brain, thoughts materialised as I closed my eyes, and for some reason they were so primitive. Like weird things you think as a child, or weird expressions you have within your mind that randomly show up as you're jumping around inside yourself. My thoughts were so real that for quite a while I simply didn't quite remember what shape a human being was.

There's a more general lesson I learned through my time doing drugs, but only really made sense after this trip, and that is related to their role as a therapeutic tool.

We came to be very accepting of psychiatry as a science for dealing with what are considered mental health issues, but I wonder what exactly mental health even is. Is it simply the ability of dealing with societal roles flawlessly? People often have a great set of roles they partake in their daily lives, and nowadays it's become essentially overwhelming as we also have many different online personas. How can you realistically keep track and be consistent to every persona you pretend to be? I believe this inevitably leads to somewhat incoherent frameworks on your mind, which of course causes many problems that I mainly perceive as anxiety, because none of these abstractions are actually real inside our minds.

And this naturally leads to my actual insight on the role of drugs. Many psychiatrists will admit that their medications (what I'll call "tech-meds") aren't enough to actually deal with so-called mental health issues, and I say this is because coping is simply not enough! Of course drugs also mainly help you cope, but, besides their associated rituals that allow for social bonding -- which already is something much more interesting than tech-meds --, they provide introspective insights that are quite useful therapeutically. This can be by means of weird thought paths that you only take because you're high, or because you're perceiving things so differently you need to adapt yourself, and I think these are really interesting exercises you get to do.

At the time of my LSD trip I got pretty tired from trippy visuals and the weird loops in my mind because they just didn't end. But on the next day, ah, the next day was fucking perfect. We were in such a contemplative mood: everything was an amazing universe of its own -- every pattern, every crease --, it was all incredibly beautiful.

And how great would it be to take this into your life? To be able to live every moment appreciating those beautiful things that have, actually, always been there. And how else would I be able to experience this in our current society? I didn't even know it was possible to look at the world in such a way. And this brings me to back to the conversation I was having with my friend.

Drugs allow you to manage your memory. What do I even mean by this? It's not as if we can choose to forget things while high -- if this were the case people wouldn't have any bad trips --, actually I think it's just the opposite: because drugs change your perspective so drastically you're able to take a step back and analyse your thinking.

Think of abstractions as pointers, sometimes those are pointing to absurd things you didn't realise were even there. Most of them are internalised as your personas absorb contradictory patterns from the environments you inhabit. Just think about the sheer number of physical and virtual places you, thoughlessly and with no filters, expose your tiny, fragile, mind to. Humans don't have garbage collectors, so, of course we must seek therapeutic experiences to help us take those steps and inspect our minds. Then, we can see things we didn't quite realise we'd taken into our (thought) processes and that damage them so profoundly. Drugs allow for careful pointer arithmetic.

Of course, each drug has its own effect, thus each one will allow for different operations. From my experience LSD and shrooms allow for an inspection of the most basic frameworks one has, while marijuana allows you to keep on being somewhat functional, but slowing you down, thus significantly helping with decluttering your stack.

If you want some advice, I'd say try to find a drug that works for you, and don't be afraid to trip :). You can only appreciate home when you get to travel.