Fuck, I started a Substack.
Picked out colors and everything.
Zoom out. You’re just a bipedal meatsack lumbering about on a half baked rock speeding through a void of total nothingness.
Okay, don’t zoom out that far.
It’s 2024 according to whatever calendar we’ve decided matters in 2024. I was born into a world without the internet, and now I have access to an effectively infinite amount of information. Oh, and we bipedal meatsack seem to be on the verge of creating a new intelligence which we’ll insist on calling artificial for a few generations.
The world is changing. As they have many times throughout history, our belief systems are being challenged. The paradigm is shifting.
We are, consciously or not, creating the myths that future generations will use to define themselves.
And I’d like a piece of that action. I’d like future historians to know me. Wouldn’t it be cool if some great grandchild of mine came across this? Or some AI gobbled it up and integrated it into some approximation of consciousness?
I’m deeply ashamed of my desire for affirmation, for notoriety, for fame. It’s embarrassing to admit that I feel it as a purpose, a (oh God don’t say it) destiny. As if by hiding myself behind a curtain of anonymity, I deprive the world of something it needs. HA!
Perhaps if I could accept this part of myself, it would go away.
Or I would achieve the fame and affirmation I so desperately seek.
Perhaps I could affect the world.
I suppose I already have. Affected the world. But it’s not enough.
Life, or whatever we’re calling this, has never quite been enough for me, which is why I’ve always looked to the invisible for gods, to the stars for aliens, and now - assisted by a healthy cocktail of drugs and meditation - to within.
For what? Answers? What answers? What questions? What is this experience? What are thoughts? Why are thoughts? Do my cats have thoughts? What does an ameba experience? What causes cells to split apart and reproduce? Simply the laws of nature? Are the laws of nature immutable? Where does choice come to play? What the fuck even is choice? Are thoughts and actions simply chemical reactions? Perhaps scientific determinism wins the day. Let us choose to believe in choice, else there is nothing more to say.
Okay, deep breaths, you’re going off the rails a bit, let’s bring it back.
Nice rhyme though.
All right, so why am I Substacking? Pretty presumptuous exercise isn’t it? To take what’s inside and put it on the internet, as if it has some value. Oh God, can you imagine if I ask people to pay for it?
Maybe that’s the affirmation I’m seeking, boiled down into a nice stew of internalized capitalism: to be paid to say shit. If I do ever have paid subscribers, I imagine it’ll be like getting paid for sex. Hot as fuck. And then a little weird.
Stay tuned on my opinion piece about why sex work should be legal.
FOCUS MAN! Jesus.
Speaking of Jesus, I’ve titled this publication “I Don’t Know: An Agnostic’s Adventure in Subjective Reality.” I’ve got a podcast with the same title which, like this Substack, may or may not ever be updated again. (But still, please like and subscribe.)
I guess what I’ll be doing here is examining the world through the lens of someone whose only useful observation in this life is “I Don’t Know.”
I think that’s a pretty good place to start for an upright ape slogging his way through a world where a few billion other apes feel the need to shout their opinions into the magical invisible network we’ve come to call the internet.
Thanks for reading.