> Thoughts

Long were the times punching cards was necessary to interact with a machine.
So long, in fact, we cannot even speak to anyone about it casually, not often enough, about anything anyway.
Is it technology to blame, for our not-punching-cards and not-speaking-casually?
You might as well call it non-existing: the virtuality of being here, while not being here, reading this, while only trudging your way through words until the next mental tick reminds you to check whatever you were doing before, that you are also doing right now, and that you should have done before starting to read this.

Time, as it once were, cannot be factually taken any longer, not even as networked messages can be taken to briefly exist in a wire, so-long as they’re received or perceived by the network. The internet exists in an unforeseeable future of potentiality, messages only arrive in the near future, while nothing can be present on a virtual medium, not long enough for a future to consolidate in any natural or human way.
Posters are usually on a high, addicted to the precocious reaction of others, which in turn triggers their precocious response, and debate continues without thought, powered by the anxiety-inducing instantaneity of the near-future, that won’t allow full understanding as it requires no reaction time in order to prove engagement. If you are not engaged enough, you might even lose track of your own conversation. Every conversation on the web is a group conversation. When it is not, it is a monologue, almost always with oneself, as no Twitch chat can be as demanding as to require more than a few seconds of attention.

So are you frustrated with the state of technology? Can you even see a better way to employ hardware for humanity?

If only I wasn’t working with this, then I would live better

Maybe it is the case, and if you do have other talents that allow you to live well enough, go for it. Not having too many options is fine, actually. You might feel imprisoned by your frontend skills, or your lack of portfolio, but that can only become motivation to actually go and do it. Many people have done it before, and better than you, many more people will do their own versions which might or might not be better, so you should just do something, or anything. And if you don’t believe that software will ever get better, it might be time to improve your skills so that you can do what you believe would be better, or teach newer people about it to forward your hopes.

Hope, like a dream, exists as a practice. Unless you’re hoping for a chance event, you can actually improve your chances of succeeding, transforming the future somehow. Computers have existed for very little time. Most software has NOT been written, even vaguely well enough, to be considered atemporal or to have solved a problem once and for all. Take your favorite open-source software pieces and rip them apart, clone them and see through the bytes. If you aren’t willing to do that you are not ready for this revolution. Not understanding is part of understanding, until it isn’t, but that takes a long time, and you must get used to not understanding it fully. Understanding better always comes with practice, even for mathematicians, or other engineering fields, and in that way we are truly engineers.

Code can be like pain.
Track manager calls helper calls helper calls helper calls binary interface calls networked code sends packet, arrives at a handler, it handles, and then it handles with a helper, then you get state, then you propagate, then in the next loop you might see an error because you have no idea what the previous loop was, and the mutable state could also be changed somewhere else, so you must check references for every shared variable.

But code can also be not pain.
Track manager sends a play command through a gRPC interface, arrives at the main loop which updates the player queue and redraws the UI using an async hook.

We often need abstractions to deal with our own ignorance, because we are not ready to understand what is happening, or we don’t want to see it because there’s too much detail. Detail is often better than non-detail in that it actually describes.

Abstractions hide

so they cannot possibly describe.

It is often not simply a matter of pure skill or philosophy: object-oriented and functional programmers alike will agree that shared mutable state can only cause headache. So then, why do we keep insisting on such patterns? Asynchronous programs have brought upon us a reality in which we cannot see the full time dimension anymore. We’re lost in non-timed slices of requests, communicating with our own services antagonistically through broken, incomplete, outdated, and untrusted data. Microservice-oriented architectures then commit gross transgressions separating all state and all operations still assuming that asynchronous services can be made manageable when they are like ant-colonies. If no one can see the fully Byzantine data transformations, not even after years of enterprise, what can their programs actually accomplish? Collaborative effort is tremendously hindered by our overwhelming focus on meaningless and unuseful contracts with ourselves. Unlike any Fordist model, it is simply, completely, and utterly ineffective to have such complicated designs for what is obviously an artist's craft.

It must be less painful to simply make the code you need, instead of what you think you need. If you ever felt anxious upon going to definition, then it is that which you want to avoid. There must be a stupidly obvious problem with your code when 90% of it needs to be abstracted or else it is repeated. Consider the case that such absurd complexity can only arise from stupid data layout.

Code can only be painless in the humbling process of looking at the data; Then you know you can bring forth your wants through the defyingly plain:
Unobtrusively manifest, impossibly clear, effortlessly built by arduous insight.
The magical code that does exactly enough to perform the task at hand and nothing else, in a way that defies incompetent readers to improve their understanding, and delights the fluent programmer for its simplicity. Better software is like poetry which illuminates how the problem can become trivial once you truly understand it. It is truly a wonder that code can be poetry when the data is simply there.

Elegancy should be our main aspiration, and if one cannot do it, it should suffice to simply solve the problem at hand so as to avoid pain. Avoiding pain has to do with making your own life easier. It has nothing to do with omitting code with thousand helpers. Simplifying life has much more to do with organizing a room, or packing a suitcase.
Similarly, simplifying code comes naturally with organizing our understanding of data transformations.
To make buildings one needs materials and technique. Similarly, to make code, one needs data and algorithms. No builder would spend most of their time planning for all possible renovations their clients might want to do, that is simply an anxious worry if not expressed clearly, because it is not a part of solving the actual problem.

Any sane service can only work as a collection of supporting parts, but more often than not you see programs fearful of their own dependencies: try-catch blocks dealing with obvious cases, or functions that receive hardcoded arguments only to perform illogical statements on what is already, statically, known. That can only happen if the programmer cannot see the consequences of their own actions. Defensive code has become standardized by distrustful stacks, as the nature of incomprehensibly complex networks becomes standard in every application. What kind of half-answer can anyone accomplish with half-solved mental models of what their code is actually doing? Does it only have to seem to solve the problem to convince human souls into perpetual bondage in maintainership? Are we bound to be slaves of these ghosts of the past? The true question lies in what we are trying to maintain, for maintaining is some sort of preservation. There is no other good preserved beyond encoded comprehension, thus software must be a book by which you can understand the problem at hand, not make-up to make your bullshit look pretty.

Long were the times thinking before inputting was necessary to interact with a machine.
So long, in fact, that you might not even need think to interact with another human being across your terminal screen.
What makes you think outside the machine?
Computer is our lens, and all computation is, for all matters, real and true. So by learning to compute properly, you might as well learn to think through the machine -- as a “bicycle for the mind”, as our friend Jobs put it -- as you can use it, as we’re collectively not using it.

Frivolosly typing doubled logic, setting a variable to null to put it through a function that checks the condition at every step, only to return a default at the end, forever available, but you just couldn’t see further enough, blinded by our own omission.
To see a constant as a constant is just the same as looking at the sky and seeing the stars for what they are. To pretend stars are inconstant only because you know sometimes they might go supernova, maybe in a hundred thousand years, is just a blinding assumption for any subject not pertaining to astrophysics simulation.
In order to manipulate programs effectively, you must free your operations from the actual memory lifetime as much as possible. It is imperative to separate data from operations, so as to free them for reuse, and for partial reuse of partial data without deep nesting, whatever nesting even means empirically.
One only needs a field that has another field that has itself and other fields that have itself because they failed to untangle their own understanding, not because the problem requires tangling.
Avoiding shared mutable state can also be seen as avoiding its dispersal.

Any well understood problem can be expressed in many ways, and it is the programmer’s task to find one mere statement simple enough for the application at hand. So much of what could be simple programs turn into unmanageable behemoths. The magic in a main loop is destroyed by callbacks and hooks, all in favor of what seemed right, or superficial statements about stellar physics. Main loops may not solve every problem in themselves, but it is nonetheless one truth about programs. And that every program must have some kind of entry-point also defines its life. Why are we so desperately trying to forget about it, and to make our programs live in non-time, as internet daemons or mere logs of what we could not trace?

Deep as we are, there’s still something about the nature of programs as nature. Not actual nature, not even human nature, but a human-made nature of our systems. And as we deal with them, not having the tools to understand or analyse them, we are swindled by their facticity as inert parts of the machine, meanwhile they are simply code, just like the ones we create ourselves. We can be reminded of this because they are flawed, and so we want fixes, updates, better! However, any truly useful and longevous system is understood as a legacy system by those who work with it. Legacy is either not-understood, or not-competing with the latest understanding, or even both. It may well be that someone or a team’s understanding of the program has been improved, but the program does not reflect it. Or the people who understand the program, alone, could never hope to rewrite it, because even they cannot understand the legacy fully either, full of obscure detail and tales of past glory. Isn’t this the same feeling we have towards historic institutions? Semi-understood, we think we know better, yet no one can actually change anything because the actual thing is truly beyond comprehension. Such is the tragedy of our comprehension.

Take tragedy as study, and probe your own limits.
Why not spend a weekend smashing some legacy and see whether you can actually make a small garden where you want to live? Not caring is important for moving forward, but grasping our transformations for what they truly are may lead us into new possibilities. Just like we know what a tree is, not after seeing one tree, but after recognizing way too many trees. You should be attentive enough to notice rewriting the same logic for the third or the fifth time, or to lookup references of what you are trying to accomplish just to find it is already implemented elsewhere. But you should not be reflexive in making methods for the sake of clean code, that is not what programming is about, or ever was.

Long were the times understanding a machine was necessary to interact with a machine.
So long, in fact, that for the past 50 years, most of what was known about machines and programming has been ignored and is not taught anymore.
Well then, maybe in the end, we just needed to get familiar enough with bytes to see their beauty. Let’s end our meditation with a rant of what has brought us to this point, which was nonetheless heavily influenced by the environment of business software, but mostly the web-sprawl of course.

Object-oriented libraries pose themselves as fully-comprehensive vocabularies for specific domains, and while it is nice to draw analogies and try to make sentences with code – yielding a few lines per thousand of somewhat funny “prose” – the actual bytes are often lost behind getters and setters, and stylistic choices prevail over actual functionality. The choice in high-level languages is often between functional style, or getter-setter style, or imperative messes with adverbial methods to reflect subjective qualities, and neat spelled-out names that can be hugely confusing at best.
What about namespaces? Arguably the only actual stylistic improvement on the C language, as the main mechanism behind modern imports. It is not uncommon, however, to find C-style library code: import * equivalent, or worse, from stable import stable_horse_power, StableHorse, StableHorsePower, StableHorseManager, StableHorseManagerVersioned, among other atrocities.

Well then, what good has encapsulation brought, besides us having stupidly slow editors that won’t work with longer files? You might say that it is great to be able to handle logic when setting a value, so that you can hook asynchronous updates on networked components or whatever. I then challenge you to think about the semantics of setting a value. If the state is shared through the network, it is expected to make the caller perform the full network call when they need it. Imagine an async library abstracted through a sync interface, and that all setters have 500ms latency, so that if I have a main loop to set 5000 elements it would take around 40 min to complete. Now, in Rust this code can be perfectly safe, the compiler will optimize the hell out of it, but it will still take 40 min to complete. If, however, I know this fact about the sync wrapper, and I insist on using it instead of the actual async library, I might find a helper that does set_many and do that instead of my loop. So what good was the abstraction? I can no longer trust that setting values actually completes the operation, because it does not emphatically happen in a useful amount of time. It might have provoked a massive downtime, it might even have cost someone 40 min of waiting because they actually waited through. Just thinking about it gives me chills, so I’ll stop here.

Now, encapsulation might be useful for internal helper functions, but it should not be the default, especially for data. If you have a library that will only ever give you helper methods to access data, and you find that you need that one field not on the API, well, good luck. It is simply unfair, and based on the idea that “implementor knows better”, while in truth it is impossible to decide the true use of bytes, because it is only data. When anyone restricts your use of their bytes, you are unfortunately using libraries as services, and it might as well be a sea-wave emulator crypto-mining thing that steals your computer data, because you don’t even care to go to definition and wonder what the hell the helper is actually helping you with. This pattern of hidden data which creates namespaces as well has led us to the initialization epidemic, where every single struct must have initialization helpers, oftentimes taking unuseful arguments, then performing lots of logic. If every folder and file are namespaces, then every struct/class is its own namespace, and structs owned by the struct also constitute their own “custom” namespaces (as field names), we do live in namespace-hell, and more importantly compositions of this pattern have not led us to “cleaner code”. Code is largely getting more abstract on every new layer that we insist upon adopting, and this is only helping us cope with the problems we ourselves have created for maintainability and readability. Even though there are perfectly good ways to manage “functional” codebases, we keep making our data more nested and harder to see through. This is directly related to the classic memory allocation problem. Keeping track of variable lifetimes seems like a pain, but it is a pain precisely because we don’t think about them enough, because it is not an easily observable property, or even easily explainable for beginners. It is, however, a most important property for any system, and any allocated memory must be prioritized, or avoided as much as possible. With this in mind, let’s ponder on the sacredness of the main function, which protects the lifetimes of all our allocations.
The program can die, and eventually will, and the main function will free the computer of our impure memory allocations, forever until it is called upon again.

Programmers that write CRUD applications will often only encounter the route lifetime, then spawn a connection to a database from a singleton (ahem, global), assumed to live forever as a perfect abstraction of a resilient service that someone else wrote, under “concrete” type system guarantees of the parser that someone else wrote, and then write weird helpers that perform business logic, just like the code someone else wrote just above, because if it stands out in any way the reviewer will ask for it not to, pretty please. Then submit their contribution of 12 changes lines, plus or minus 40 formatting changes, 200 lines of codegen that no one can see a difference by naked eye, and 3 commits, encapsulating 4h of work over the past 2 days whenever the experts about the API were available, because god forbid they push changes to the API without consulting those first (the experts are too busy to review any code though).
Nonetheless, metrics are good, and the 5000 engineers employed in the organization are all happy because there have been no layoffs for the past 2 months.
What actual comprehension they are aspiring towards, no one knows. There are way too many services that each employee has to maintain more than one, if not owned by the company, then it is a forsaken dependency. There are way too many classes and modules so that in the biggest of teams no one understands a single codebase completely, or has any idea what the dependencies are actually for, even less the degree to which they are spread. Vulnerability concerns? Don’t worry, our C++ dependencies are only accessible to our 5000 engineers, some of which we plan on firing tomorrow!
By the way, could you fix it on your spare time?

If I can hope of something that is beyond my control, let it be that AWS main crashes and frees the world of all AI.
Amem.

I've been watching some violent stuff recently, like John Wick, shōnen 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 regarding 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 output your own lightstream.

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 regarding 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 can't 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 amongst 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 an 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 realised 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 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.