Tag: distraction

• Human?

  I took my joy and gave it to a substance to feed back to myself. And now it’s stopped. Why the fuck did I get a job? To prove a point to x? To have structure? Idk. I struggle so, so, so very much w/ my mind and the life furnished by horrors of generations past.

  Mine isn’t better, just more info jammed down our throats from the outset. I can’t imagine the beautiful privilege of life before total screen takeover, briefly though I may have enjoyed it as a child. The world, not just images curated by a machine of that world. We had to render our own images, think our own thoughts; ruminate, paint, live; shouldn’t be possible to avoid boredom in the human world. We lose context, awe (obviously given loss of context), boredom, imagination, 

  I sold those things to the screens for them to feed back to me. But I think I want my things back. I am really not happy or whole-feeling. But was I ever happy before I sold those things? Maybe more natural. But the deep tragic system-halting dysfunction is powerful in that it has just enough potency to its numbing techs for me to survive in the depths of nothingness. Just enough simulated social interaction, emotional stimuli, distractive noises, that I can be almost comfortable in my depleted body-cage and apartment that becomes dirtier every time I look up from my phone, an inhuman bunker where I can order food and goods I need (consume), watch or listen to things (consume), drink or smoke (consume), but all that watching and buying – participation in the spectacle – leaves me very little mental or temporal space for anything but getting angry about my cyclical failure and hunkering down in incredible deep aquifers of self-hatred or paranoia or fear or sheer capitalistic lust. No room for production of anything – out – empathy, joy, love, even boredom – the space is reserved for technofeudal overlords. And I know that but it doesn’t stop me from consistently inundating my brain with context-shorn information. Even good full-length pieces of art turned to mental static in service of being-feeling-knowing nothing of my human self, only constructed algorithm facsimile that constantly sags into its own bad habits. The internet is ostensibly enormous and I’m trapped on three treadmills all owned by billionaires. I am not more connected, but more isolated and hateful. I am not more informed, I am more misled and ignorant about broader contextual frames, I am not happier or more fulfilled or more human; more art may be viewable today than before, but the internet is a massive dump that one has to sift through; ‘oh there, a bigot; oh there, a sports gambling ad, oh there, AI generated spew, oh there an AI generated bigot’; technology is rarely ‘for the people,’ it almost always enters the world as a form of capital and starts dividing from there. And to change that – to reach people, to encourage humanity – I too find myself online. And I wish I could eschew that entirely. But it has successfully interceded in a number of procedures – basic introductions between young people, for example: “Hey, great outfit, what’s your instagram?” “What’s your snap?” The social  interaction has changed, and if all you have is a phone number (still more than I’d prefer most days) then you’d better hope that person actually wants to follow up, or the connection may already have died. 

  Now for some AI has interceded in the basic processes of learning, self-expression, knowledge, even emotional dialogue. Because…?

  We’re lazy, I guess, and the primary values inculcated in our society thanks to the predominant modes of production, distribution, and consumption devised and sold to us by ultra-international-mega-corporations who have conquered the problem of scale, are uncritical ease and convenience for the consumer and efficiency and profit gone mad for the industrialist; yet we’re all well meaning. Chat with most low-level Amazon employees and you’ll discover a normal person who knows this is all fucked. And when we as a proletariat all know, and all want the best (well.. most want the best and many who appear not to have come under the spell of those looking to mystify and displace their legitimate concerns for their personal gain; yet there are enough of those emotional and financial pressure points to effectively avert revolution or even basic awareness of the class-based predicament. And one must know class and race wars are being waged every day in the United States, just without much organized resistance. Capitalistic states have aided and abetted both wars forever, sometimes domestically, and sometimes abroad. This revolution without end stands in stark contrast to the social/political revolutions which fought these formations/configurations of power and capital; in the French case, they ended up at war with the monarchies of Europe; in the Soviet case they started fighting internal capitalistic/absolutist enemies and wound up in a long-standing confrontation with the greatest configuration of power and capital in human history, the United States post-war machine (which funny enough never seemed to really be post-war). The baby boomers, at least in part, fought these capitalistic/imperialistic tendencies then were sent en masse to die in an ignominious imperial war, a coupling of events which unleashed a strange incumbent class for my peers and I to have to interact with as we negotiate our entry into society. 

  So what? Social revolution is stemmed and young men die, and capitalistic revolution – aided by existing power structures, technology that enables further subjugation of the working class (see time work discipline, and industrial capitalism by EP Thompson), and today by their ownership of media spaces and the control over information dissemination which that involves. The police, there to defend capital, operates at a level of militarization and counter-insurgency tactics that render any serious effort to transform the system EXTREMELY dangerous.

  (Bleak ending and a bit of a meander meant more to begin to discuss a few of the ideas bouncing around in my mind but that’s where I stopped writing for now.)

  December 8, 2025

  capitalism, distraction, leftism, revolution, writing

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• From my notes, 11/26

  The psychological damage is best measured in terms of the impossibility to go without the substance, to have a normal day, to know that what is now happening is a departure from what was and something is tangibly lost; in the distance between words and truth; I am terribly lost in the wilderness right now. I think it’s hard because it’s been about motivation, a subtle nuanced contingent thing; so many people deal with more palpable problems than I labor under; total distance from hobbies, routines, friends, everything, mind being strangled on ledge above dried up riverbed; beyond that it’s stasis, rotting in paucity for no good reason bellowing in incoherence; and this pain has me for a long, long time, gripped by personal visions of future, past in unlucid myopic present slipping away through screens. Total back pain major stiffness slight cold sore on left inside cheek, chapped lips dirty pants painful neck; trapped displaced in world of displacement swimming in sea of images unfriendly to mind that begs for naïveté while punishing all such manifestations. One text per day is too many in this splayed open repose of image and ginny soup. Pained fried mind grasping for concepts arriving only at thinking about thinking about things, sitting on sidelines at the one time event, drowning suffocated by own throat lost in pain. Belief that humans all over are suffering in ways not unlike me but often don’t have material ability to change their circumstances for the better; it’s exhausting to know things probably won’t improve. I wonder how much my base fear/worry/disgust about the present and our future has prompted/exacerbated my substance abuse. I think that plus the technologically granted ability to remove boredom, peace, inner life/monologue (+ the marijuana mind bath shrinking my comfort zone) has created a very difficult to transform feedback loop. I am here again writing about the one topic because it is the only topic because it burst from its context and devoured my entire world like a sordid triumphant dead-so-fast circus lion in revolutionary act of self-determination. But I don’t get to just laze and sit, even though I do laze and sit very often; this tension between my oblivion/repose and the accountabilities of different shapes and colors that populate my life; because of my status I am expected to do a certain amount of successful-looking things, so the urge to keep up appearances and never have the total meltdown that may be the exact existential confrontation necessary for growth is powerful; the problem is that the issue then lingers and the cost / amount upended by the confrontation only balloons. And my weird frequently-rendered-hypocritical ambition and rhetoric, punctured in efficacy by my actual behavior  and lifestyle to the point where my words deserve skepticism and I can only just keep talking and talking, building walls of words that then sag and melt and ooze over time very publicly. And the opportunities available to the well-positioned person have not disappeared, they just demand a legacy of preparation and effort that goes far beyond what I’ve been up to. I exist as a raw creature in a maelstrom of change, shattered bits of mirrors creating insane fractal image universe of total access and overwhelming information in soup of mind with so little context, both for individual pieces of information and the act of receiving information in the first place, the gamut of human noises of the world all rendered meaningless distractive sound consumed omnivorously with little discernment. Trembling before machinery not of other skeletons but of minds and now not of minds; silent society world of mute consumeristic spectaclewatchers each going down their unique algorithmic path sagging to fit them perfectly, an unholy personal image of man as a constellation of data points and consumption patterns; total commodification and loss of humanity in the rush for endless wind-howling peaks of profit; I don’t want to try to be the perfect candidate with the best narrative, I don’t want to be being sold something every moment of my life, I don’t want to have a screen, I would like some silence and human peace, the shade under a peach tree and the act of planting a new orchard, the sweet juice running down my chin and view of the crystalline water, warm sun gleaming on tanned hands and no idea how I look because I haven’t been inside to see a mirror all day. I want to run for hours with toes in the sand. Nothing we need as creatures comes from the screens, and the speed with which we have become accustomed to – and increasingly dependent upon / warped and bent by – these tools is terrifying. But I don’t stop my consumption, even while I disappear into the gnashing maw of attempting personhood in our modern atomized society and begin losing the robust support structures that got me to this point of my life, in terms of success and achievement. And I don’t know how to get where I want, especially while remaining so alone in the world; the paradox of needing community then sitting in my room watching TV shows from 1990 illustrates the core problem: I need to turn around and recognize that I am going to start reaping what I sow at some point, and that the painful unrelenting sag will leave me somewhere very different from where I started without the tools necessary to return, left both existentially unhappy as I am now and additionally trapped and limited by logistical/external factors that limit my ability to change things. 

  November 26, 2025

  distraction, technology, writing

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• Addicted to Distraction

  (adapted from my journal entry this morning)

  Stories and essays do not necessarily need to be some transcendent metaphysical Athena springing fully formed from Zeus’ mind; I am allowed to write absolutely anything and it will start sloppy! A friend of mine who studied in Rome with me once said something incredibly insightful about the way that she only became happy after she stopped stopping herself from doing things out of some internalized sense of shame/perfectionism/properness. It’s absolutely true; I basically hid from myself and my ambition during college because it was from moment-to-moment easier than the ‘risk’ of putting myself out there and seriously being perceived and evaluated, even though in a long-term sense that exact behavior is what transforms the activity from something to avoid and build up anxiety about into something that is itself easier from moment-to-moment. (Yes, yes, we’ve all read Brene Brown B, move on!) 

  I trapped myself in a cyclical pattern of abusing substances to arrive at acceptance of (or perhaps more accurately something closer to ‘no longer being actively uncomfortable about’) my ever-shrinking comfort zone, which, in turn, made those substances an integral part of that ‘safe’ feeling. By the end I was taking hours-long baths (a strange self-imposed Marat arrangement) where I just opened my skull and poured in as much content and substances as possible, becoming numb and dumb while directly feeding my greatest fear of potential cognitive decline (Flowers for Algernon deeply impacted me when I read it in school) and enabling my evasion of all there was to do in college, whether it was required or otherwise. That I graduated is a testament to both my ability to do the work at the last possible moment and an exceptionally-lenient academia groaning under the weight of college-as-job-training and student disengagement which has only accelerated since Covid school shutdowns. Of course given this context regarding my experience as a college student a reader might roll their eyes at my attempted treatment of the topic of academia (or frankly anything at all), and that may be valid, but only by expressing these things can I move forward.

  While the substance abuse was idiotic and wasteful, this cycle was rendered nigh-inescapable by my rampant phone usage, a different sort of addiction altogether. I think imagination had almost vanished from my life because I was constantly consuming content, often uncritically. I effectively reprogrammed my brain – no more silence, no more being alone with my thoughts, no more boredom, no more creativity. I think I am stuck writing ‘I can write about anything I want’ on here as a constant reminder to myself because I effectively destroyed my ‘creative’ mode. To be clear, consuming art and the various things one might call content is not some fundamental evil, it just needs to be balanced with space for oneself. I deprived myself of an inner world because I was horrified of what I might hear from myself; I didn’t want to understand, I wanted to be distracted. I am saddened by the fact that it ever got that way. Something interesting to point out / consider – I think there’s something important to be found by considering the limits of video games as a creative storytelling device. Because the game, even an open-ended one, had to be created by somebody, it fundamentally has limitations; creation means both defining what something is and is not. I kept turning to games like Crusader Kings II to try to tell nuanced stories and express myself, but I ultimately lost the illusion of storytelling after having seen every event and becoming far too good at the game as a game – on the level of manipulating mechanics, etc., to resist losing the roleplaying element pretty quickly. Some combination of my dependence on other peoples’ vehicles for storytelling and endless (and often simultaneous) consumption of content ‘noise’ led me to lose basic human parts of myself like boredom, creativity, and awe. I didn’t understand that I couldn’t find a solution to this problem by forging deeper into the internet; I had thoughts like ‘why can’t I find thoughtful ‘content’ about the things I really love?” and ‘what I’m looking for isn’t online,’ yet I continued to uncritically consume so much of the internet that it (and video games) became my ‘base state,’ so to speak. If I weren’t in the bath I would be playing a video game while listening (“listening”) to a Youtube video, and there was no reprieve or peace. The key was/is to TURN AROUND, to stop forging deeper into the internet and becoming more stuck and displaced from my humanity. I think on a number of levels we need to ‘turn around,’ (turn around from investors to workers and citizens, turn around from demagogues and towards the public, etc.) so get used to seeing that phrase in my writing; it is the most succinct expression of my current belief system.

  October 4, 2025

  distraction, humanity and creativity, phone addiction, substance abuse, writing

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