超越 Expression на завтра
2026-05-09
You know, a guy like me is prone to rumination, obviously.
But over the last 24 hours or so, there hasn't been way too much of that, so I don't have a super awesome thing I want to write about off the top of my head. I never like it when I don't have something I'm absolutely itching to get onto the page, but this process is so lived-in at this point—the words are coming out regardless, so let's get through them, shall we?
I've been blessed with more energy as of late, and finding ways to not channel that into anxious rumination and self-destructive impulses—it's a profoundly difficult thing for a guy like me. Not to imply that I'm unique on that front in any way, but finding a life that's conducive to something healthy has been an undertaking that isn't necessarily a straightforward thing. I blame that on my ruthless skepticism; in my mind, there's always a catch, some kind of "gotcha!" that I have to avoid the trappings of lest I become a normgroid zombie. But as I've gotten older, being a normgroid zombie sounds totally cool and awesome. I like relating to other people about simple stuff. When I was a younger guy, I had this small resentment toward others who wanted to just keep the talk simple and vibe out. It made me want to tell them "Bro, can't you see what's going on? We've got to topple out of the Matrix or else the whole world's gonna collapse!" However, these days I realize those bros were actually correct, and I was the naive and childish one.
I've also been blessed to have some friends over my life where when we hang out, it doesn't have to be this constant back and forth conversation. Maybe we can just put on a good album in the car, sit in silence, and appreciate the music; that sounds a lot better than a cognitively expensive conversation about theology or geopolitics, right? Those guys who a younger me used to decry as "normies" were actually way ahead of me in a lot of ways, and it took years of reverse intellectualizing to figure it out. All roads really do lead to "I just wanna grill!" I suppose. For me, though, I have a hard time sitting still, and a hard time just chilling out and slabbing a couple sirloins on the Blackstone, you know? Even if I can see the griller's wisdom, there's a deep part of me that can't always carry it out. But hey, at least I get the ability to spew out constant prose every day, right?
Is there a way to transcend this culturally perverse idea of "content?" Perhaps it might be labeling it something like "expression," but even then the underlying mechanisms of a project like this still fall for the trappings of the so-called "creator economy." I don't have any qualms with falling under the category of "content," but I guess I wonder about where something like this goes beyond the scope of the current set of waves we find ourselves swimming in. I think back to the greats of yester-centuries like Montaigne, Goethe, or Voltaire, Shakespeare, Chaucer—and the biggest issue we have with accessing those guys is the constraint of a constantly evolving landscape of language. It can be difficult to parse through a Montaigne essay because, at least for me, the prose itself is quite antiquated and filtered through a layer of translation from French to English. The insights garnered from those works had their most relevance closest to when they were actually published, but nowadays we've seen such an evolution of form that it makes those works less applicable today.
We've seen a great rise in the global accessibility of language—not just with English as a global lingua franca, but also with the sophistication of translation technology via LLMs. It's easy for one to think that English will soon become the One Language to Rule Them All, but my Orwellian impulses tell me that it'll be some kind of horrendous mishmash of Latin, Chinese, and Cyrillic that will act as a de facto propagandized globalspeak that the one Big Country Masquerading as Three will push out onto the masses through immense economic and cultural gatekeeping. So I look at this blog and all the swathes of writing we are producing now, and wonder how it'll act as cultural context for the great empires of tomorrow. In the same way we look back at Rome as a signaling beacon for the collapsing US hegemony, how will the people of tomorrow look back at the US's eventual failure and try to make things better?
Don't worry, I say that not as a pessimistic collapse-pilled kind of guy; power changing hands can be a net positive in many cases. In the same way the stock market has trended upward the last century, the same can be said for civil progress over the course of recorded history. Regular people today live better than the emperors of antiquity, and as Christ said all that time ago:
The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.
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