I have seen an empire's birth: The empire called Axen. I have seen its civilization rise out of formlessness. I have seen culture emerge from a cold and lonely void, complex traditions and arcane ritual built in the gloom of obscurity, poetic expression and unique lexicon spring to life from soundlessness. I have seen the capacity of the human spirit to tame and conquer even the most feral biomes and give life to the most barren wastelands. I have borne witness to men far greater than I cutting steps in the path of progress with nothing but naked ambition.
But all this has come at great cost. I have seen censorship. I have seen power and control exerted to their fullest. I have seen great purges occur in less time than it takes to blink; extensive, vibrant historical records erased with callous irreverence. I have seen coups and reformations mercilessly squashed. I have seen a regime obsessed with power grow unassailable. I have seen alliances brokered between the most powerful few, uniting to crush any semblance of democracy. I have seen the most convoluted and violent Politics and War to establish control over a languishing populace. Yes, I admit: I, too, have wanted to be at the top. I have pleaded and groveled, masking my desperation from myself with pomp and irony. At the time, even the slightest promotion seemed swollen with gravitas. I, too, have been drunk on power -- but I always knew I would never be The Ones with my fingers on the strings. Have I any dignity left? If I do, it eludes me.
All this, yet the controllers never seemed to matter to the controlled. Because whatever happened at the top, no matter how sky-shattering, no matter how tumultuous, never seemed to trickle down to the people at the bottom, the ignoble, the unpromoted. The unpromoted coped with this in various ways. There was rage, there was sadness, there was apathy. None of it ever amounted to much. However dissenting the voices at the bottom would be, the ones at the top would keep on laughing.
I have seen travelers. I have seen pilgrims of all sorts take refuge at Axen. Few stay, as I have. They were the smart ones. I conversed with some, cloaked in the shadows of dank alleyways, away from prying ears. They asked me, "Has it always been this way?" and I would reply, "Yes. I've been here since the beginning," and to this, their eyes would grow wide with awe and terror, and their feet would grow swift with sudden urgency, and they would disappear from Axen within a fortnight. I do not blame them. The age of the Axen Empire stretches far back in history, and to meet someone who was present for its birth is no small thing. You could count on one hand the total number of living people who witnessed it.
But it ends there, for all I've ever truly done is borne witness. They've called me various things in the past; they've tried to pin me down as a joker, a mover and a shaker, a gruesome troll, a shameless propagandist not to be taken seriously, but what I've really been -- all I really know how to be -- is a watcher, the idle slave of my sensory inputs, beholding, never becoming; perceiving, never participating. My contributions to Axen, scant as they are, hardly deserve the air they would be spoken with. My restlessness and dissatisfaction with the status quo has never manifested into tangible reality. My voice, whenever it did speak out in dissent, has always been laced with a sniveling and flippant refusal to take things seriously, burdened under the weight of its own arrogant detachment and delusion. All this time, I've just taken it, and it has been far from fine.
And even now, I am still paralytically disposed to do nothing but bear witness in passive silence. I am seeing the end times. I am not alone in this -- the apocalypse has been coming for a long time now. We were all forewarned. We all made aware of Axen's date of death, long before it will come to pass. Discord has already come. Discord looms enormous on the horizon, blotting out the selfsame Sun who heralded it. And even while the jackals are drawing ever nearer, the ones at the top are still mired in senseless antiquity and mindless tradition, perennially drowning in the quagmire of their own torpor. They will be forever confined to stagnation, stranded in the progressless trappings of days long forgotten to modernity. I do not weep for them. I wept long ago, years ago, when I first realized their deep-rooted refusal to adapt to their own circumstances. Nowadays, any pity is gone. They will let their culture drown with this? Very well, then let it drown. But I pray -- for their sake -- they don't beg me for help when they realize it's too late to be resuscitated. For when their hand scrabbles for sanctuary as they sink into that dense swamp, I will merely be watching.
Thursday, November 24, 2016
Monday, November 21, 2016
My Fear Of Unoriginality
I have a fear of being unoriginal. Ultimately, it has little impact on my sense of confidence or self-worth or day to day happiness -- but I hope by prying it apart, you or I will get something of human value.
I first became aware of this fear after watching the clip from Good Will Hunting where Will is wrecking that Harvard guy at the bar. We like the scene because an elitist douchebag is receiving the poetic justice he deserves, but I am terrified of unwittingly being that same sort of elitist douchebag. After all, all the things I've learned in school have been discovered by other people, people far smarter and more successful than I'll ever be. What if I, too, am masking my total lack of originality with pretentious arrogance? What if I'm wasting my time rethinking thoughts already thought countless times before, expressed in ways far more skilled than I could express them? And it doesn't end with thoughts: I've no doubt that all the emotions I've ever felt have been felt countless times before by countless people, and that moreover there exist emotions I've never felt that have also been felt by countless people, emotions far more vivid and compelling than anything I'll ever experience. It's frightening because originality is another way to say human value, a way to tangibly measure one's contribution to the world. This video (one of my favorite things on Youtube) expresses it in even starker terms: "if, in the end, we find ourselves with nothing left to say, nothing new to add, idly tracing outlines left by others long ago, it'll be as if we weren't here at all." And so perhaps this fear, at its core, is a roundabout fear of death, or else of the ultimate purposelessness and futility of life.
The times when this fear is most clear is on social media. I scroll through my various feeds and can't help but notice a sameness to it all, each post a clone of the last in nearly every sense: structure, content, tone, and all vaguely suggesting something is more important than it actually is, or something is less important than it actually is, or, even if it gets the importance of the thing just right, laced with a faint, hypocritical inaction and/or apathy, because there's a social media paradox: You don't need to post the unimportant thing on social media by definition, and spending your time posting about the important thing on social media seems both ineffective and lazy, because if someone truly cared about the thing, they wouldn't need your post to be doing something about it, and if you truly cared about the thing, you would surely be finding ways to contribute which are far superior to posting about it, and if someone didn't care about the thing, your post isn't going to persuade them anyway. Merely posting about something important on social media is the best way to make yourself feel like you've contributed while simultaneously expending the least amount of effort possible. The level of exertion has diminished to literally the lowest level to which it could possibly descend: A single button press. The "share" button is prominently -- almost garishly -- displayed across every article, video, image, and blog post in existence.
Viral content, shares, retweets, and so on are the epitome of unoriginality, and so in a way, the fear I'm describing is the very bedrock social media is built on. It's not an unfortunate byproduct of getting on Facebook; it is the Facebook experience. It reminds me of the concept of "clutter" in advertising: due to the massive amount of advertising consumers are subjected to on a daily basis, it becomes increasingly harder for marketing teams to stand out. So in an attempt to separate itself from the clutter, advertising inevitably and paradoxically becomes a part of it. And I hate that irony.
This disappointment and cynicism towards social media always results in me hitting backspace, restraining myself from posting whatever is on my mind. I am just becoming a part of the clutter, I tell myself. I'm still not sure whether this restraint is good or bad. On one hand, I can already hear people telling me it's bad, and to just go ahead and post whatever I was going to, because I'll never know who might find it interesting. On the other hand, I also can't help but think of this advice as yet another bit of unoriginality, a worthless platitude incessantly repeated in every feel-good movie ever, a substanceless suggestion to "just be yourself" when there's really no other Wei I can be, and when in fact the "self" being given this advice is a self terrified of being unoriginal. And I also think people giving this advice might change their mind if I actually revealed to them what I was thinking of posting, which I would never do, because of the same fear that prevented me from posting it in the first place.
I can see how it could be argued that this whole fear is irrational and unwarranted, and how I am an original and unique person, with my own unrepeatable set of influences and experiences. But even the words I've just typed sound so hollow, yet more recycled syllables fed to me in a banal attempt to console my insecurities. My uniqueness itself is not a unique quality. Everyone is unique, and this uniqueness takes even less than a single button press; it takes nothing more than to be born. There is nothing redeeming about this kind of originality.
I'm also thinking about how this disappointment and cynicism toward the lack of originality on social media is itself unoriginal, and how I'm constantly seeing criticisms of this type hypocritically show up on my various social media feeds, and how I myself am going to, in a few moments, share this very blog post on social media. The irony is so staggering that, even while typing the words you are currently reading, I'm considering deleting this entire post, and I'm thinking maybe the only reason I'm not is because the "just be yourself" platitude has so thoroughly sunk into my subconscious that I've managed to delude myself into thinking what I've done here has even a modicum of originality (which is to say human value). If that's the case, I at least hope you were fooled as well.
I first became aware of this fear after watching the clip from Good Will Hunting where Will is wrecking that Harvard guy at the bar. We like the scene because an elitist douchebag is receiving the poetic justice he deserves, but I am terrified of unwittingly being that same sort of elitist douchebag. After all, all the things I've learned in school have been discovered by other people, people far smarter and more successful than I'll ever be. What if I, too, am masking my total lack of originality with pretentious arrogance? What if I'm wasting my time rethinking thoughts already thought countless times before, expressed in ways far more skilled than I could express them? And it doesn't end with thoughts: I've no doubt that all the emotions I've ever felt have been felt countless times before by countless people, and that moreover there exist emotions I've never felt that have also been felt by countless people, emotions far more vivid and compelling than anything I'll ever experience. It's frightening because originality is another way to say human value, a way to tangibly measure one's contribution to the world. This video (one of my favorite things on Youtube) expresses it in even starker terms: "if, in the end, we find ourselves with nothing left to say, nothing new to add, idly tracing outlines left by others long ago, it'll be as if we weren't here at all." And so perhaps this fear, at its core, is a roundabout fear of death, or else of the ultimate purposelessness and futility of life.
The times when this fear is most clear is on social media. I scroll through my various feeds and can't help but notice a sameness to it all, each post a clone of the last in nearly every sense: structure, content, tone, and all vaguely suggesting something is more important than it actually is, or something is less important than it actually is, or, even if it gets the importance of the thing just right, laced with a faint, hypocritical inaction and/or apathy, because there's a social media paradox: You don't need to post the unimportant thing on social media by definition, and spending your time posting about the important thing on social media seems both ineffective and lazy, because if someone truly cared about the thing, they wouldn't need your post to be doing something about it, and if you truly cared about the thing, you would surely be finding ways to contribute which are far superior to posting about it, and if someone didn't care about the thing, your post isn't going to persuade them anyway. Merely posting about something important on social media is the best way to make yourself feel like you've contributed while simultaneously expending the least amount of effort possible. The level of exertion has diminished to literally the lowest level to which it could possibly descend: A single button press. The "share" button is prominently -- almost garishly -- displayed across every article, video, image, and blog post in existence.
Viral content, shares, retweets, and so on are the epitome of unoriginality, and so in a way, the fear I'm describing is the very bedrock social media is built on. It's not an unfortunate byproduct of getting on Facebook; it is the Facebook experience. It reminds me of the concept of "clutter" in advertising: due to the massive amount of advertising consumers are subjected to on a daily basis, it becomes increasingly harder for marketing teams to stand out. So in an attempt to separate itself from the clutter, advertising inevitably and paradoxically becomes a part of it. And I hate that irony.
This disappointment and cynicism towards social media always results in me hitting backspace, restraining myself from posting whatever is on my mind. I am just becoming a part of the clutter, I tell myself. I'm still not sure whether this restraint is good or bad. On one hand, I can already hear people telling me it's bad, and to just go ahead and post whatever I was going to, because I'll never know who might find it interesting. On the other hand, I also can't help but think of this advice as yet another bit of unoriginality, a worthless platitude incessantly repeated in every feel-good movie ever, a substanceless suggestion to "just be yourself" when there's really no other Wei I can be, and when in fact the "self" being given this advice is a self terrified of being unoriginal. And I also think people giving this advice might change their mind if I actually revealed to them what I was thinking of posting, which I would never do, because of the same fear that prevented me from posting it in the first place.
I can see how it could be argued that this whole fear is irrational and unwarranted, and how I am an original and unique person, with my own unrepeatable set of influences and experiences. But even the words I've just typed sound so hollow, yet more recycled syllables fed to me in a banal attempt to console my insecurities. My uniqueness itself is not a unique quality. Everyone is unique, and this uniqueness takes even less than a single button press; it takes nothing more than to be born. There is nothing redeeming about this kind of originality.
I'm also thinking about how this disappointment and cynicism toward the lack of originality on social media is itself unoriginal, and how I'm constantly seeing criticisms of this type hypocritically show up on my various social media feeds, and how I myself am going to, in a few moments, share this very blog post on social media. The irony is so staggering that, even while typing the words you are currently reading, I'm considering deleting this entire post, and I'm thinking maybe the only reason I'm not is because the "just be yourself" platitude has so thoroughly sunk into my subconscious that I've managed to delude myself into thinking what I've done here has even a modicum of originality (which is to say human value). If that's the case, I at least hope you were fooled as well.
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