2025-08-08 00:00 UTC
I felt a brief pause before starting this entry today. I have this desire to try and maintain novelty with my thoughts, so I don't want to harp on the same thoughts over and over again in sequence between entries. Unfortunately, though, I don't have a whole bunch of new thoughts to think about. It's funny because I have this desire to constantly get my thoughts out in some form, whether it be in these free-writing sessions or in more planned out pieces or even small blurbs in a notebook. I feel like it's important for me to do this because of how much the world today tries to do the thinking for you. Whether it's politicians or marketing professionals or your mom or your lawyer or whatever, there's always someone trying to get in your head and take your precious cognitive resources. This is also why I try to limit certain media I consume. Every new piece of media that comes out feels like a new wrapping of the same propaganda piece over and over again. Obviously this is true in basically every non-fiction media. Whether it's the news or some academic paper or Wikipedia or whatever, there's always someone trying to sway me in believing in the agenda of the deep state. It's even gotten to the point where I feel the meta-contrarian viewpoints as conducive to deep state hyper-capitalism and authoritarianism. Like, I enjoy seeing other people get into the ideology behind dumb phones or deleting social media or anti-consumer tech, but seeing this as a trend makes me believe that there is some greater manipulation at play. It's something I see myself falling into as well, as if my appeals towards digital sovereignty are all completely in vain because the ecosystem has laid itself out like a fish bowl and within the fish bowl is a labyrinthine house of mirrors. I feel like instead of getting out, I just found a new comfy place within the fish bowl. The worst part is that I feel like it's always going to be this way.
The hard part about this line of thinking is that the fish bowl metaphor extends just beyond ideology or society. The earth itself is the fish bowl. No matter where I go or what I do, there's no escape, no true solace. Even beyond the earth itself, my brain is trapped inside the fish bowl that is my skull. The place where all my thoughts live, supposedly, is a tiny little claustrophobic dome that has little room for movement. I don't know, it seems that all I can see is the walls of the prison that is existence. It's funny because within certain new age movements like idiots who believe in the Law of Attraction and that kind of thing, there exists this notion that there is power within the individual to change their environment. "If I think it, I can achieve it," they'll espouse in their echo chambers. The problem, however, is that they don't realize that they're trapped in the fish bowl and that everything they dream of is simply just a reflection. We can't reach into our reflections. We can't achieve beyond the reflection. All we can do is sit in the cage, move around the cage, talk about being in the cage, but that's about it. We can't even begin to conceptualize anything else outside of it. There is no exit outside of Plato's proverbial cave (I like the fish bowl with mirrors metaphor better though, what can I say?).
Well, I guess it felt good to spit all of that out. Do I really feel like hot shit? No, because no one actually reads this shit. I sit here in a void, devoid of any SEO or luscious backlinking or any discoverability whatsoever. I stand here as lord of my own little digital landfill, talking to myself over and over again, day in and day out until the fire that is my thoughts eventually fades and falls beyond obscurity into the depths of nothingness, like it never even existed. In one of Shakespeare's sonnets, 151 I think (you know, the summer's day one, the most famous one), he talks about how he immortalizes the girl he's writing the sonnet about because he's writing this piece about her. To me, that's not really accurate. The girl is no one. The girl is simply a placeholder because she can be anyone (like the girl reading this) and so because of that, Shakespeare wasn't the one who immortalized her. She was immortal to begin with. So within me and this digital landfill, there's some immortal being that lives within these words. Hopefully they're happy seeing them being written.