People who are overtly friendly and radiate positivity are that way because they have a strong aversion to negative emotions.

This sounds great when it comes to casual shoot-the-shit type situations.

But what about when something serious happens?

When your car breaks down and you need someone to pick you up, you’ll find that your happy-go-lucky-life-of-the-party ‘friend’ will be the one who responds seven hours later saying “sorry just got this, everything ok?” knowing full well that you’ve already figured it out by that point.

After you fail to get a hold of the people who you thought were your True Friends, you’ll reluctantly text that one guy from work who people avoid hanging out with and you’ll find that he drops everything to come get you.

When you’re stuck in the hospital with a medical emergency, your “I love him he’s such a cool dude” friend who everyone can’t get enough of will be nowhere to be found. Because your cancer/injury/other serious medical situation is a negative vibe, i.e. the one thing that bubbly good-vibes people seek to avoid as their raison d’etre.

The disagreeable friend who you previously weren’t sure even liked you will, surprisingly, turn up and sit by your bedside.

Many people are shocked and confused when this happens. It’s the type of situation that makes people say “that’s the moment when I learned who my true friends really are”.

It’s one of those key turning points in your life that causes you, years later, when someone says to you, “don’t invite that guy to the party he’s such a dick” to find yourself saying, “yeah, that might be true, but he was the only one who was there for me when no one else was”.

But it’s only surprising when you don’t understand the core reason why disagreeable people are the way they are: because unlike people who need to bathe themselves in positive emotions, casual dickheads are actually comfortable with negative feelings.

Everyone experiences a tragedy or two or three or twenty or fifty in their lives.

It’s inevitable.

You’ll naturally want someone to be there for you when the Universe decides to point the Eye of Sauron in your direction.

No matter how self-sufficient and independent you are/wish you were, you 100% need other people. It’s embedded in your DNA.

And trying to get a person who’s addicted to positivity to willingly insert themselves into a depressing/negative situation is like trying to force two magnets together.

Not gonna happen.

But a person who’s comfortable with casual negativity will naturally be able to handle more serious levels of it.

Your personal tragedy is a more extreme version of what they live with inside the confines of their skull every single day. An escalation and intensification of their reality, not a jarring polar-opposite departure from it.

I’ve seen this over and over and over again to the point where I’m comfortable with stating that this is a universal truth of human nature.

And once you internalize it, you’ll never see people the same way again.

Instead of viewing others as likable vs. unlikable, the binary vis-a-vis Core Type of Human will change to: addicted to positivity vs. comfort with negativity.

People have depths to them.

A common cliche states that “the way you do anything is how you do everything.”

That’s not exactly true. You can’t copy/paste a behavior 1:1 across time and space. People are more complicated than that.

If behaviors don’t transfer neatly across levels of seriousness, a person’s emotional makeup does.

A disagreeable vibe is often nothing more than a discomfort with casual social situations; or more significantly stated; an aversion to frivolousness and an intense longing for something real. People who present this type of affect have an emotional depth to them that their day-to-day life simply isn’t capable of satisfying.

A positive vibe conveys the opposite. It reveals a compulsive need for frivolousness and an intense fear of emotional depth and gravitas. Their good nature is the cloak that overly affable people use to shield themselves from the horrors of existence. It’s a way to avert their eyes from the things/people/situations that scare them. Positivity and cruelty are two sides of the same coin; you realize this when the happy vibes morph into the cold shoulder.

Many people learn this when it’s too late.

But you, reading these words on your screen right now on a random day in one of the normal phases of your life, have the opportunity to internalize it before a crisis hits and before you really need someone.

So choose your friends accordingly.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

Miami, Florida

“Hey,” Tracy whispered, putting a hand on my shoulder as we walked down the empty hallway. She put her lips up against my ear. “Want to fuck in the family bathroom?”

This was bizarre behavior, considering the massive fight we just had.

I laughed and looked over my shoulder, making sure no one else overheard her. “First of all, someone’s drunk,” I said, smiling and pointing at her. “Second of all, hell yeah I do.”

Tracy squeezed my hand and made a beeline for the door. She opened it, walked in, and turned around to face me in the doorway with one hand on the doorknob and the other on the frame. “Come on in.”

I mock-grimaced, put my hands in my pockets, and turned my head from side to side to make sure that the coast was clear. I could hear calm piano music from the lounge at the end of the hallway, but there wasn’t a soul in sight in this part of the building. The hallway was completely empty.

“Too late,” she said. She took one step backwards into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. I jogged the three or four steps that separated us and turned the door handle. I’m way too old to be taking risks like this. Getting arrested for public indecency at my age would be absurd. I thought of how embarrassed I would feel when my mugshot appeared online. The thrill of going on our first vacation as a couple was definitely causing me to do things that I normally wouldn’t, say things I normally wouldn’t. Like those horrible things I said during our argument earlier. What was I thinking?

I pushed open the door.

The bathroom was empty. What the hell? It was your standard family bathroom, with a toilet on one side and a sink on the other. The door I had just passed through was the only way in and out. There was no supply closet or any other hiding place.

Tracy had simply vanished.

A lit candle flickered on the sink, just below the mirror. Who puts a candle in a public bathroom? I reached out and flipped the light switch on the wall behind me, turning off the overhead fluorescent lights. I stood in front of the sink and stared at my reflection in the mirror, watching the shadows created by the candle dance around on my face before switching the light back on. I took one last look around the bathroom, hoping that Tracy would somehow appear and that this would all make sense, then opened the door and exited into the hallway.

I was taken aback by what I saw.

The previously empty hallway was teeming with hundreds of people. An overweight man who was talking loudly into a cell phone he was holding six inches from his face bumped into me. “Sorry, man,” he said over his shoulder without stopping. A young couple holding hands slowly walked by. A group of three girls wearing dresses and heels, clearly drunk, stumbled in the direction of the women’s bathroom. I scanned as many of the faces as I could, hoping to find Tracy in the throng of humanity.

She was gone.

I walked down the hallway to the bar where we had finished our drinks less than ten minutes ago. Everything was different. The vibe of the entire place had changed. Instead of being a semi-quiet lounge with soft music playing, it had transformed into a nightclub. A packed dance floor took the place of the soft, elegant couches and the quaint bar stools had been removed to make way for a crowd of people five layers deep waiting to be served.

I did a lap around the small venue. Nothing. Tracy wasn’t here. The only thing left to do was to go back to the hotel and see if she had somehow made her way back on her own. Yeah, and how did she get out of the bathroom? Did she somehow gain the ability to walk through walls? Or are you completely nuts?

“Hey man,” I said to the bouncer on my way out. “Did the girl I came in here with leave by any chance? I can’t find her anywhere.”

The bouncer looked up and off to the side. “I’ll be honest, buddy, I don’t remember you coming in here with a girl. I might be trippin’, but I remember you walking in alone.”

The whole losing-my-mind theory was starting to seem more accurate by the second. What would I do if Tracy wasn’t in the hotel room? I would have to call the police and file a missing persons report, but what the hell would I say? Listen, officer. I watched my girlfriend walk into a bathroom and disappear into thin air. She walked in and poof she was gone. No, officer, I’m not on any drugs. If they didn’t laugh me out of the police station, they would arrest me and force me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Calm down. She’ll be there. She has to be there. I’ll find Tracy in our hotel room and she’ll give me an explanation that makes sense. Something obvious that I overlooked. Maybe there actually was another way out of the room and I didn’t see it. We’ll be laughing about this for years.

Our hotel was a short walk from the bar. When I turned the corner, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. Several police cars and one ambulance were lined up on the street in front of the hotel. A few officers were gathered around a sports car with a caved-in roof that was parked on the street. One was snapping pictures of the car from different angles, squatting to get a close-up perspective before standing with his camera held up over his head to get the birds-eye. The picture-snapper lowered his camera and tapped another cop on the shoulder, pointing directly at me. He summoned me over with a wave of his hand.

“Sir, do you have any ID?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said, reaching into the front pocket of my jeans. I handed him my driver’s license. “What’s this all about?”

He squinted at my license and then at my face. “I think this is our guy,” he said to his partner. He turned his attention back to me. “Sir, do you know a woman named Tracy Crenshaw?”

“Yeah, she’s my girlfriend,” I said.

“When was the last time you saw her?” the officer said.

“We were just at a bar down the street,” I said. “I lost track of her ten minutes ago and decided to see if she went back to the hotel without me.”

The officer raised his eyebrows and paused before speaking. “You were at a bar with Tracy ten minutes ago?”

“Yeah, that’s correct. Now what’s this about?” I said.

He cleared his throat. “Tracy Crenshaw died over one hour ago. She fell off the tenth floor balcony and landed on that car over there,” he said, turning his upper body to point at the caved-in car directly behind him.

My jaw dropped. I looked up at our tenth-floor balcony on the colorful art deco-style hotel, which was barely visible through the leaves of a palm tree, and back down at the destroyed car. Instead of sadness, all I felt was confusion. That’s impossible. I just saw Tracy ten minutes ago. I tried to think of an explanation that made sense. Maybe they had bad information. What if they had the wrong room number? What if they assumed the dead body belonged to someone who had jumped from our room in when in reality she had jumped from the room next door?

The officer with the camera and his partner were looking at my face intently. They were clearly gauging my reaction. Oh shit, am I a suspect? They both looked at each other before the partner spoke for the first time. “See that building across the street from the hotel?” He pointed at a modern-looking office building with reflective windows. “They take their security very seriously. It just so happens that they have a camera pointed directly at your hotel.”

“So the camera recorded what happened?” I said. “Thank god.”

At least there’s some good news. They’ll know that I didn’t kill whoever it was who fell onto that car.

“Yeah,” the first officer said in a gruff voice. “It did. We have footage of the entire incident.”

The officer looked at his partner, who nodded at him, encouraging him to continue. “The footage shows that you walked up behind Tracy, lifted her up by her feet, and threw her over the railing.”

I took a step back and put my hands up, palms facing outward. “No way.” I began stuttering. “That… that’s impossible. We were just at -”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,” the officer interrupted. “You already told us that load of bullshit. You were just at the bar down the street. Now tell us what really happened.”

The second officer spoke. “Hey man, the footage is crystal clear. You’re on it, and you threw Tracy Crenshaw off the balcony. Maybe you have a good explanation. Did you two get into a fight or something? Maybe she really pissed you off? I mean, me and my wife, we’ve been getting into these huge fights lately and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some intrusive thoughts from time to time. It’s part of being married. Sometimes shit just kinda happens. You don’t want it to, but y’know, it does.” He shrugged his shoulders.

Fucking hell. They’re trying to get me to confess to murdering my girlfriend? What is happening?

“With all due respect, I’m not answering any questions without my lawyer present,” I said. This is unbelievable.

“Turn around and place your hands behind your back.”

Allentown, Pennsylvania

My lawyer posted bail and got me out of jail in less than twenty-four hours. He promised me that he’d work on getting the security footage from the bar, which would prove that Tracy and I had walked in together. As soon as I got out of jail I went to the airport and paid the fee to change my flight to the next available. I didn’t want to stay in that god-forsaken city any longer than necessary.

This was all a huge misunderstanding. Whenever those fucking dipshit cops in Miami got around to actually running a DNA test on the body, they’d realize the magnitude of their fuck-up. There was no chance that I’d go to prison over this. That part I wasn’t worried about. My innocence was obvious to me and would soon be obvious to the police as well.

But there was still one massive problem: my girlfriend was missing.

I told my lawyer that I wanted to file a missing-person report immediately. Tracy was out there somewhere and I had to find her. He advised me not to, telling me that it would look too much like I was trying to build an alibi after I’d already been arrested for her death. “Just wait,” he’d told me over the phone. “Let me pull that security footage. It should only take a day or so and then you can file your report.” I took his advice. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

My phone buzzed. It was my lawyer, thank god. It was less than twenty-four hours later and it seemed like this nightmare was finally over. “What do you have for me?”

He cleared his throat and remained silent for a heartbeat longer than normal before speaking. “I need you to be straight with me. What really happened in Miami the other day?”

“I told you the truth. Did you get the security footage? I promise you it’ll vindicate me. I’m not lying.”

“Yeah, I did.” Another long pause. “Listen. The jig is up. Footage from the office building across from the hotel shows you pushing Tracy off the balcony, clear as day. And the police have testimony from other guests in the hotel stating that they heard you two arguing with each other beforehand. The cameras at the bar showed you walking in and out alone. You lied to me. Now I need you to start telling me the truth. I’m your attorney and I’m trying to help you, but I can’ t do that if you continue lying to me. Do you understand? Maybe there’s some kind of self-defense angle that we could -”

I slammed the phone down on the table and swiped the screen to end the call. My hands shook as I ran my fingers through my hair and took a step back. The phone vibrated again. There’s no fucking way this is happening.

I went to my laptop and began searching.

———

The internet is a crazy place.

I found tons of articles and websites about topics that had potential for explaining what was happening to me. Some of them were paranormal, others were much more pedestrian. False Memory Syndrome, time travel, psychosis, the Mandela Effect. All of these phenomena could have held the key to the mystery that was consuming my life, but something about them didn’t feel right. Nothing did. Until I discovered an obscure community dedicated to something called ‘dimensional jumping’.

The members of the community listed several methods that enabled one to jump between dimensions. One technique, the Two-Cup Method, consists of pouring a cup of water representing your current dimension into an empty cup representing your desired reality.

Well that one’s obviously bullshit.

The second technique… well that one actually made the hair on my arms stand straight up. It sounded exactly like what I had experienced.

The so-called Mirror Method is a technique wherein a person gazes at their reflection in a dark room, with only a candle or dim light bulb providing illumination. Apparently, if a person imagines their desired reality while performing this method they will then instantly transport to that dimension. Was it possible that I had accidentally jumped dimensions? I remembered the candle that was flickering in the bathroom, and remembered thinking how weird it was that there was a candle in a public bathroom in the first place. The theory was far-fetched, but in crazy situations sometimes the most unhinged answer is the right one.

I grabbed a candle off my coffee table and carried it into the bathroom. With the lights off, I flicked on the lighter and touched the flame to the wick. I carefully set it on the edge of my sink, just underneath the mirror. There’s a ninety-percent chance that I’m fucking crazy, but it’s worth a try.

Staring at my reflection in the mirror, I thought intently about a reality where Tracy was still alive. I imagined that we had returned home from Miami after a pleasant first vacation together, and that she had just stepped out to buy groceries.

The flame flickered briefly.

My phone began vibrating on the table outside.

I made my way out of the bathroom and checked to see who was calling.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

The most common colors of wall paint are Millennial Grey and Landlord White.

People decorate their houses with slop ‘art’ grabbed off the shelves of the TJ Maxx Home Goods section rather than paintings from artists carefully selected from galleries.

Movies are now things you watch to see sex scenes and explosions (and that’s when you’re lucky enough to not be preached to) rather than works of art with great storytelling.

Movies in the 90s and early 00s were bittersweet and full of human emotion. Now they’re dull and uninspired, something to glance at from time to time while you’re busy scrolling on your phone. The writing feels AI-generated, and the truly sad thing is you know it isn’t.

The world has become bland and soulless.

Is it any wonder that no one cares about reading novels any more?

The driving force of modern culture is efficiency, practicality, and the satisfaction of base human impulses rather than depth and appreciation for craftsmanship.

Aesthetics are an afterthought at best.

That’s when they aren’t being outright vilified being vain and pretentious.

The aesthetic emotions are some of the most profound feelings a human can experience, and most people these days never get the opportunity to feel them at all.

Reading a novel requires intentionality.

You have to set aside time, a lot of it. You have to sit in silence with the words. You have to focus and forget about your day-to-day life, at least for a little while.

It requires effort, but the rewards are immense.

Being absorbed in a book is one of the greatest feelings a human being can ever experience.

When you finally set the book down the world around you not just feels but actually looks different, even though everything is exactly the same.

Reading the right book at the right time in your life can completely change the way you view the world.

An aesthetic layer to reality reveals itself. Things that seemed mundane now feel profound.

The way the wind rustles through the leaves on a cold autumn day, the sound and smell of coffee brewing in the morning, the feel of a page turning.

It all carries a new found depth and profundity that wasn’t there before.

That’s the power of absorbing yourself in literature.

And it’s what everyone is missing these days by defaulting to the mundane and worshipping practicality as the supreme value par excellence.

We’ve all met people who boast that they “only read nonfiction”; as if novels are a frivolity only enjoyed by nonserious people.

It’s hard to break that way of thinking.

The benefits of reading fiction are intangible.

Fiction makes you a better person. Not in the practical, measurable, tangible sense of doing good works that can be tallied and analyzed but in the Nietzschean sense of becoming more in tune with the higher level human emotions.

You enter an elevated state of consciousness that frees your mind from the tyranny of myopic thinking.

You start to view other people as fully-fledged humans with depth to them instead of one dimensional objects/obstacles who exist to either serve a function or get in your way. You become aware of the deep sadness that most people live with. You come to understand that that sadness is the root cause of The Way They Are. People aren’t evil, they’re just broken. The negative traits and behaviors that used to enrage or annoy you now cause you to feel compassion and empathy instead.

The End.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

Moments are both meaningful and meaningless due to their transience.

Sometimes I read history books and wonder why the people involved cared so much.

No one alive today spends any amount of time thinking about the French war in Indochina or the Roman invasion of Gaul or the Financial Panic of 1893.

But the people involved at the time were completely consumed by these events.

From the point of view of someone experiencing the great moments of history as nothing more than words on a page, all the grief that the people went through at the time seems so pointless.

It’s all just water under the bridge on a long enough timescale.

But then there’s another part of me that gets it.

Maybe the very strength of humanity is our ability to project importance onto something that’s inherently ephemeral.

An all-consuming focus on the present moment can be an act of defiance against the inherent meaninglessness of it all.

Because at the end of the day we’re all just dust in the wind.

And maybe future generations (or even ourselves a few short years or months or days from now) will not care about anything we do today, but right here, right now, we’re doing it. And that’s why it matters.

Take a look at New York Restaurant by Edward Hopper:

A restaurant is inherently a liminal place.

You enter, you sit down, you eat, you have a conversation, you pay the bill, you leave.

Then other people do the same thing, at the exact same table, over and over and over again.

A revolving door of humanity.

If you think about it too much, it almost feels pointless to leave the house.

The moment that the couple in the painting are sharing feels both transient and meaningful.

You don’t know what they’re talking about, but it doesn’t matter.

The fact that they think it matters is what gives the moment meaning.

There’s a melancholy feel to the painting, because as the people observing the scene we know intuitively that it doesn’t have any significance in the grand scheme of things.

It’s just another day in a restaurant. The next day will look the same as did the day before it. But to the two of them, what they’re experiencing matters because they’re experiencing it.

We see two people smiling in the background.

What are they talking about?

It doesn’t matter, because on a long enough time scale they will be dead.

And on an even shorter timescale, they won’t even remember what they were talking about or that they even had a conversation at this restaurant to begin with.

But in the moment they’re happy.

We see the back of a worker toiling away.

In her mind her work is part of the grand struggle of her life. She needs the money to live, and that’s why the work matters.

But to everyone else (including us) she’s just background noise. Her unpaid bills, the kids she’s trying to take care of, her looming rent payment; none of it even crosses our mind.

And when she dies her struggle will mean nothing to her either.

But in the moment, to her, it’s everything.

I often think about this about my day-to-day life.

Events that I attend, conversations I have, moods I experience.

I view them as the temporary moments they are before they even end.

And that in turn makes me appreciate the true significance of them.

Not in a grand cosmic scale (I’m not arrogant enough to believe I’m that important), but as an assertion of the fact that, in this moment, I’m real.

The very fact that my senses are able to take in the sights and sounds of this moment is proof that I exist.

One day I won’t. But today I’m here.

I perceive, therefore I am.

That’s why the fleeting moments in your life matter, and why, like the scenes in Edward Hopper’s paintings, they simultaneously feel so melancholy.

Now look at Hopper’s Hotel lobby painting:

This painting is about the sadness of people asserting their own dignity against a backdrop of indignity.

The hotel is clearly a dump.

Yet the elderly couple are dressed to the nines in a way that you’d expect to see in a five-star hotel lobby.

The moment is even sadder when you look at their age: their situation will never improve because there simply isn’t enough time.

All they have are their clothes and their vision of themselves, and no one notices, which is symbolized by the blonde woman reading a book without so much as glancing in their direction.

They want to be viewed as admirable and respectable, but their attempts to do some only make them seem more pathetic.

We’ve all met people who simply can’t perceive themselves accurately.

Like a kid in school whose attempts to act cool just make him seem like more of a nerd, or the swagger of a young guy trying to act tough in a way that just makes it obvious how scared of the world he really is.

The moment captured in Chop Suey is interesting as well.

To me it captures those moments when existential terror hits you out of the blue.

You can be in the middle of a conversation at a cafe and then all of a sudden you stare off into space while you think about the fact that you’re going to die and everyone you know is going to die and 500 years from now no one will know or care about anything that you or anyone else currently living did, thought, or said because the time we live in isn’t special in any way it’s not the end of history it’s just a random time in the middle and future generations will think about us precisely as much as we think about what people were doing in the year 1587 aka not at all and when it comes down to it you’re really nothing more than a walking, talking skeleton who’s just waiting for your heart to stop beating so you can degrade into bones and dust which is how you’ll spend the rest of eternity with no hope of ever coming back to the realm of the living.

Then you snap back to the present moment: “Sorry, I was spacing out for a bit, what did you just say?”

The sounds of dishes clinking and the voice of the person you’re talking to bring you back to the time and place you’re currently in and you blissfully forget about the true nature of reality…

The majority of people are human zombies/NPCs coasting through life. They have no insights, no deep thoughts. Just empty shells who are born, live, and die without leaving anything behind.

But there are rare souls among us who are born with the ability to see things others don’t. They see the world for what it is, stripped of all its illusions and distractions and rationalizations. This type experiences untold mental anguish, but also perceives beauty that others can’t even fathom.

Within that rarified group there’s another peeling off, a smaller group of people who can not only see the things but actually translate them for the rest of us in a way that we can understand, so that we can see the world the way they do.

Those people are called artists.

And Edward Hopper is one of the best.

I mean who among us hasn’t felt like the girl in this painting at some point in our lives?

I could write about the Hopps all day but I’ll leave it there for now.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

Even if you were transported to the most boring situation imaginable (a grocery store checkout line, a waiting room, an office); you would be intensely interested in everything.

The technology (or lack thereof), the fashion, the mannerisms and body language of the people around you, the way the people speak; it would be one of the most fascinating moments of your life.

“Holy shit, I’m here in a suburban office park in 1989, this is incredible”.

But the people who were alive in that time didn’t find it interesting.

To them, the way things were was just the way they were, just like the way things are seem to us like they’re just the way they are.

It’s an interesting quirk of human psychology. Our default state is to view our current era as the end point of history. Not in an apocalyptic sense. But in the sense that everything that happened before was building up to this, and now this is just the way things are.

It’s the way we think now. It’s the way people thought in 1975. It’s the way they thought in 1882. It’s the way they thought in Ancient Rome and Ancient Sumeria before them. A caveman viewed every single day of his life as just another day. He wasn’t conscious of his caveman-ness. The way he lived was just the way he lived. Nothing special about it.

We all find the past fascinating.

That’s why period pieces are such a common film genre. It’s why we all feel an intense nostalgia for the world we grew up in. “Viewing the past through rose-colored glasses” is a cliche for a reason. We all do it.

Almost everyone would step into a time machine if one materialized in front of them at this very moment.

The longing for a world that’s gone and never coming back is one of the most profoundly bittersweet feelings in existence.

Nostalgia creates a hold of desire within us that can’t ever be satisfied. The world you want to return to is dead and gone, and there’s nothing you can do to bring it back.

But the real tragedy isn’t the fact that we can’t turn back the clock.

It’s the fact that we aren’t viewing today through the same rose-colored glasses that we view the todays of the past.

Because one day, people will feel nostalgic for what we think of as ‘right now’. They will contemplate this moment, this window of time when you’re sitting here reading these words, and feel the exact same longing that you feel when thinking about a past time that the people living through it didn’t give a shit about.

If those future people were given a time machine and ended up in our current year, they would be awestruck by all the things we take for granted.

Our advanced technology would seem quaint and simple. Our fashion sense would seem amusingly retro. They would look at the things that make us angry and emotional through dispassionate eyes, because they come from a time when our concerns can only be found in history books or period pieces.

The grand events of this moment will have the same level of emotional valence to future generations as we feel when reading about the French and Indian War or Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, i.e. none.

So if you want to appreciate the current moment, try to view it through the eyes of people who don’t yet exist.

It takes effort, but if you can successfully trick your brain into viewing the world that way things will never be the same again.

You’ll look at a group of young women sitting and laughing in a cafe and appreciate the simple transient humanity of the moment. One blink of an eye ago, their souls hadn’t even been brought into existence yet. The next, they’ll be old women with failing bodies inching towards death, then another quick blink of an eye later their corpses will have rotted away and the corpses of everyone who remembered them will have rotted away as well. But right now they’re young women laughing in a cafe.

You’ll look at the technology you use on a daily basis and instead of being awestruck by the scifi-like nature of it or being frustrated by how much it sucks, you’ll see it for what it truly is, which is a temporary stepping stone in humanity’s quest for perpetual improvement. Not a god or a demon. Just a baton that humanity has been passing down through the generations from the invention of the wheel to whatever it is people will birth into existence the day our species goes extinct.

This thought experiment is how you learn to start appreciating your life before it slips away from you.

It’s a way to avoid sleepwalking through life and the antidote to becoming bitter and raging against the winds of change.

When you become nostalgic for the present you begin to appreciate every single second that passes.

You sitting and reading these words is a moment that’s always existed and always will exist.

It’s no better or worse than all the moments that currently exist in both the past and the future.

When Einstein said that “time is an illusion”, I think this is what he meant.

Sure there’s a scientific layer to it.

But the emotional human experience is more important.

I think he wanted to ease the suffering associated with being a human raging against time. He wanted us to see time and all the moments that it consists of the way he saw it.

Time and the passing of it can either be a heaven or a hell.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.

It’s easy to ignore and laugh at the most unscrupulous/low IQ content creators when they make predictions that are clearly based on sci-fi fantasies rather than anything based in reality.

CLEARLY an internet-scraping technology isn’t going to magically turn into an I Have No Mouth and Must Scream-style emotional artificial life form that decides to commit mass murder against its creators for funsies.

At some level the people who go down the extreme hysteria route with their commentary are playing into the incentives of the Content Creation Industrial Complex: the most outlandish statements get the most views and - most importantly - the most ad impressions.

It takes someone with extreme integrity hold the line against the financial incentives that are contantly tugging internet discourse in the other direction.

Few are able or willing to do that.

So this is what we’re stuck with.

The anti-humans

“What the pathetic commonplace heads with which the world is crammed really lack are two closely related faculties: that of forming judgments and that of producing ideas of their own.

- Arthur Schopenhaeur

But the slightly less cheeseball POV is that - even if it’s not going to somehow develop the capacity for anger and the desire for speciecide - at a minimum AI is going to make humans ‘obsolete’.

The claims extend to all white collar professions, but the most rabid, foaming at the mouth, full on excitement is reserved for it’s potential impact on one group in particular: Creatives.

Any time a new AI video clip gets released (set aside for a moment the obvious fact that most of these clips have been heavily edited by humans) the comment sections are full of excited and gleeful statements like “RIP Hollywood” and “lol humans are fucked bro”.

First of all: ‘AI video’ is just a rebrand for CGI (computer-generated imagery), which has existed since the 90’s. CGI hasn’t put any humans out of their jobs. In fact it hasn’t done much of anything at all other than make movies shittier and less aesthetically pleasing.

So the best the anti-human mob can come up with is rebooting a decades-old technology. Really? That’s going to put an end to human creativity? Come on.

But one thing AI has done is raise the lowest common denominator.

The average adult in America maxes out at a 7th-grade reading and writing level. Now those same 7-graders-in-adult-bodies can click a button and generate slop text that’s (slightly) higher-level than their abysmal natural abilities.

The same goes for art. People with zero talent have moved on from thousands of years of drawing stick figures and smiley faces to generating slop imagery just by typing in a MidJourney prompt (the irony of the ‘mid’ in MidJourney is hard to ignore) that’s much better than anything they’d be able to create on their own even given a thousand lifetimes.

The sole reason AI has such a deathgrip on genpop’s psyche is: It gives mediocre people the ability to LARP as being slightly less mediocre than they actually are.

It might not be a huge leap forward for mankind as a whole, but it’s a huge deal for the resentful non-creative underclass.

AI as a manifestation of ressentiment

“…everything that raises an individual above the herd and makes his neighbor quail is henceforth called evil…”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche warned about the dangers of resentment (aka ressentiment).

Most people think of ressentiment as being based in materialism: Poor people demand that rich people be chopped down to their level, which if implemented destroys the incentive to produce and brings human civilization to a standstill.

This classic view of ressentiment is something that definitely exists. It’s not hard to find examples.

But it also applies to something most people don’t think of.

Natural talent.

Nobody is more resentful than the talentless.

The feeling of hostility that people who were born with no talent feel towards those who were born with all of it is at the root of all dysfunction in the modern world.

And the ephemeral nature of creative talent in particular makes it a ripe target for resentment.

Creativity/nobility

And only the fools who cannot hear the song ask that the rules be posted. Hear the music. And enjoy. But do not cry. Not everyone was intended to reach A above high C.

- Harlan Ellison, Eidolons

What is creativity?

Simply put, the ability to create something from nothing. When a creative person creates it looks/feels like they’re pulling ideas out of thin air.

One person can sit in front of their computer, open up a Word document, and gradually type up a bestseller. Millions of others can look at the same blinking mouse curser on the same blank Word document and can’t even come up with a single coherent sentence.

Some people have The Gift.

Most don’t.

It feels (and to be honest, is) unfair.

People with small amounts of creativity struggle and suffer, this is true. Hence the starving artist archetype.

But people who are born with extreme amounts of creative ability are the closest thing to royalty that exists in the 21st century. This is especially true in the U.S. of A. where we don’t have a formal noble class and thus invented our own in the form of the cult of the celebrity.

This cult rewards people at the extreme high end of the creative pyramid in ways that ordinary mortals can’t even fathom.

Not just financially. In many ways extremely creative people are treated as true First Class Citizens and can get away with things that normal people can’t.

They can be degenerate, they can be lazy, they can be psychologically unstable. It doesn’t matter. As long as people like what they create, they can do whatever they want. Normal rules don’t apply.

And to a certain variety of resentful 9-5 working stiff, this is an outrage that must be rectified.

“Why do these actors and musicians get to make millions and party and get all the hot chicks while I work my ass to the bone for nothing?”

Into this toxic maelstrom of envy and self-loathing by proxy enters AI.

AI is the ultimate defense mechanism for those who feel insecure and resentful about their lack of creative talent and the station in life it condemns them to.

“I might not be able to paint a painting or write a novel but FUCK YOU I can generate a MidJourney image that looks exactly the same as every other MidJourney image or click a button and get 70k words of slop from ChatGPT. And one day all those Hollywood assholes are going to have to get real jobs because real people just like me will be able to create a movie on our laptops with no effort. FUCK YOU.”

The great leveling

“The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of leveling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes, a reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary; it hinders and stifles all action; it levels…

Each individual within his own little circle can co-operate in the leveling, but it is an abstract power, and the leveling process is the victory of abstraction over the individual. The leveling process in modern times, corresponds, in reflection, to fate in antiquity. ... It must be obvious to everyone that the profound significance of the leveling process lies in the fact that it means the predominance of the category ‘generation’ over the category ‘individuality’."

Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

The core message that AI-lovers are shouting from the rooftops is: “Your talent doesn’t matter. We’re all the same now.”

Whenever a large segment of society demands a Great Leveling it acts as a crushing force that destroys the human spirit and any scraps of individuality it encounters.

That’s why the infamous Apple ad struck such a chord. On some level everyone can sense that it was an honest visualization of what AI proponents truly think and feel.

The irony is that they’re wrong. If anything, extremely talented people are going to stand out even more than they already do.

When the world is full of inhuman slop, the non-slop becomes that much more appealing.

Finding someone talented and original on the internet is such a breath of fresh air that you can’t help but feel a sense of awe and admiration.

The way to prosper in the Industrial Age was by neutering your personality and turning yourself into just another cog in the machine (brick in the wall?). The more robotic and machinelike you were, the easier it was for you to find a slot to fit into in the corporatized job market. Being human was a death sentence.

The way to prosper in the current Information Age is by being as much of a personality as humanly possible. The less robotic and AI-like you are, the more likely you are to benefit from algorithms that reward engagement and eyeballs. You’ll be left behind if you’re bland and indistinguishable from everyone else.

So while the current state of affairs is that mediocre, talentless people love AI for it’s supposed leveling effect, the reality is that the ecosystem it creates will drive an even more disproportionate share of resources to the creatively talented people they so despise.

Talent, humanity, and individual striving for greatness always win in the end.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.

The more artificially bland someone is, the more likely they are to be accepted by quote-unquote polite society.

I think that’s part of what makes suicide so shocking. In death a person suddenly seems like more of a Real Person than they did while they were still an actual living, breathing biological organism with a pulse and functioning heartbeat who you could have chosen to talk to but didn’t.

Suicide makes you realize that the part of a person you see publicly is nothing more than a tiny slice of the total human being behind the persona, and that the guy you thought so little of had emotions so vast and deep that you wish you would have been able to talk to him before he was gone just so you could feel what it feels like to talk to someone real.

When your mild-mannered coworker who’s perfectly polite and inoffensive and is described by everyone as “he’s such a good guy” puts on his old army uniform and shoots himself in the head on his parents’ front lawn at midnight on a random Tuesday, you suddenly realize that he was a full person with depths to his soul that you couldn’t even begin to fathom and that his presentation as a kind of blah guy who just showed up to work punctiliously and did his assigned tasks in a non-attention seeking manner wasn’t even close to the whole him but rather just a pleasant inoffensive island poking out of a deep ocean that just barely concealed the volcanic core beneath until it couldn’t.

If you’re wondering why people commit suicide, now you know. It’s not that they want to cease existing, it’s that they want people to realize that they ever existed to begin with. That’s why they leave notes, and that’s why they often fantasize about being there to see people’s reactions after they’re gone.

Make no mistake about it. If a suicidal person could choose to continue existing just long enough to be able to float above their own funeral, they definitely would.

Suicide isn’t a cry for help. It’s a cry for recognition.

People shouldn’t be shocked when someone who seemingly has it all decides to die.

The core of the driving ambition that leads someone become massively successful is the hope that one day they’ll reach a level where they can finally leave the persona behind and Become Who They Are.

The problem is that they eventually realize that no matter how much fame and success they achieve they’ll always be viewed as a Human Doing and never as a Human Being.

The fake version of themselves becomes all they are and all they ever will be, to everyone but themselves.

That’s the point where they decide that ending their existence is the only way to let the world know that they ever existed to begin with.

The core of depression is the desire to stop being perceived as an NPC.

The depressed person will do anything to get people to see behind the persona.

Anything.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

- David Foster Wallace

All great art - be it writing, painting, music, whatever - requires isolation to create.

Physical isolation in a Unabomberesque Writer-In-The-Cabin-In-The-Woods sense can definitely be a part of it, but that’s not exactly what I’m referring to here.

I’m thinking of something much more profound.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five I don’t just feel like I’m reading a great novel on a mere technical level. I’m not thinking “this book has a well-constructed plot [check], effective dialogue [check] and a great blend of tension and release [check check]; FIVE STARS FUCK YEAH”.

Greatness doesn’t automatically emerge when you check off enough boxes on a literal/metaphorical checklist.

The reason I know Slaughterhouse-Five is great is because, while reading it, I get the strong sense that I know exactly who Kurt Vonnegut is as a person. His worldview, his emotions, everything. It all comes through.

He may have died physically in 2007 but he lives on through his words. People who haven’t even been born yet and people whose parents haven’t even been born yet will one day read the same book and get the exact same sense that they know the au on a deep human-to-human level. Not just “wow some dead guy wrote a cool story” but “god damn, I actually know this guy".

A great book can make a dead writer feel more alive and real to you than the ambulatory corpses with functioning pulses and heartbeats that you live with on a day-to-day basis.

So how can you say the author is dead?

In all the ways that truly matter - his impact on the world, his philosophy, his very essence - he’s still with us.

Aliveness can’t be measured through the rote checking of vital signs (there’s that dreaded checklist again). Pulse, breathing, who cares. Does this person project who they are, not just in the present moment but in all moments (across time/space)? That’s what truly makes someone alive in the most meaningful sense of the word.

There’s a lot of debate about what a soul is and whether it even exists to begin with.

From the quote-unquote rational POV (a worldview that’s completely consumed our current era to the point where most can’t even conceive of a different way of thinking), if a soul exists at all it’s completely contained within the physical structure of the human body. It’s nothing more than brain chemistry and the random firing of neurons. It can all be explained by The Science™.

But when you say “I” (Latin: ego) are you talking about your physical body?

No.

I don’t care how consumed by the zeitgeist you are, you definitely don’t think of yourself as a random collection of organs/muscle/fat/bones wrapped in skin.

You have a strong sense that although ‘I’ might be currently inside your physical body, it isn’t defined or limited by it.

Great works of art are the proof.

A painter may have died hundreds of years ago, but it sure doesn’t feel that way when you stand in front of his creations.

You pay an admission fee to the museum of your choice, walk through the different exhibits, think “oh wow that one’s kinda cool” a bunch of times and keep moving. Then, inexplicably, something grabs you. You can’t look away. You stand and contemplate, just like someone stood and contemplated a hundred years ago and just like someone will stand and contemplate a hundred (five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand) years from now.

You contemplate, leave, go back to your life, and eventually die. Just like all the people who admired the same work of art in the past. Just like all the people who will come to admire it in the future. Every new group of humans admires, contemplates, and dies. Only the artist lives on.

Great artists do what all the anti-aging health-optimizing “I’m 55 chronologically but 37 biologically” tech gurus/influencers wish they could do but can’t: defy death.

So how do you create a great work of art?

By being completely yourself.

You can’t create anything profound or meaningful if you’re thinking of what the critics (official or otherwise) are going to say.

Some people claim you should write as if you’re writing to one specific person. I disagree. You should write as if no one in the world is going to read it at all.

Project yourself into the world with your words. Whether anyone sees them or not is irrelevant.

They say that you’re the average of the people you surround yourself with.

That may have been true pre-internet, but now a better way to think of it is: you are what you consume.

The internet is a despair engine that brings out the worst in people and crushes anything profound and meaningful under the monumental weight of utter averageness.

If you consume content from everyone then you become the average of everyone aka the dreaded and much-maligned Lowest Common Denominator.

The only way to find your unique voice is by limiting what you pay attention to.

Be like the old generation and tune out to tune in. But definitely don’t drop out. The world needs more people creating meaningful art and less people creating LCD slop.

Nietzsche says: “Become who you are”.

Easier said than done. But definitely worth striving for.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.

People have complimented me on my writing ability my whole life.

Yet, every time I start to write, I think: “This is it. This is the one that’s going to expose me as a fraud. Everyone’s going to think/know that I suck.”

It’s something much deeper than Imposter Syndrome.

I almost referred to the negative pre-writing thought loop as an inner voice. But it’s not. There’s no disembodied Voice of God-style monologue lecturing me about my alleged/possibly real lack of talent. Even the word ‘feeling’ doesn’t fully capture it.

Writerly self-loathing is more like a Force of the Universe. Think gravity, sexual attraction, the unavoidable death/taxes combo, etc. You can’t fight it even if you try (which I definitely have).

Resistance is futile, even when the thing you’re resisting is resistance itself.

Forcing myself to stand here (I have a standing desk, highly recommended, it’s great for your posture) and write feels like pushing the positive ends of two magnets together. The will is there, but every fiber in my being is trying to force me to do something else.

OK I’m back. After writing the above paragraph I decided to pace around my house to quote-unquote gather my thoughts and holy shit what a coincidence all of a sudden I noticed that I had to clean my kitchen sink and of course doing it some other time was out of the question. What am I some kind of slob who would allow my kitchen sink to remain unclean a single milllisecond longer than necessary?

So I stood there and sprayed cleaning spray on the sink and wiped it down, all while simultaneously being fully aware of the fact that I was doing it as a distraction/procrastination method and wondering if everyone who writes also has an immaculate kitchen sink due to the aforementioned dual procrastination/distraction impulse that I assume lives within us all while also thinking about the fact that I was going to have to write about this neurotic ruminating/cleaning combo if/when I did manage to drag myself back to my (standing) desk.

And they say you can’t multitask.

I did come back and start writing again. I always do.

I’ve taken long breaks. There have been stretches of time (months, years) where I thought that I for sure was never going to write a single word ever again.

And yet here I am, putting words on the screen.

You don’t write because you want to. Who the hell would want to do something so preposterously uncool. You write because you literally have to.

It doesn’t matter if there are literal or metaphorical Forces of the Universe working against the writing process.

Writers find a way to write.

The End.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.