9:05 PM. You don’t know what you’re doing. Ever, really. But that’s okay. It’s as OK as spelling out “okay” instead of typing OK.
Just type the first thing that comes to mind.
You don’t know which way is forward anymore. You don’t know the way back to the place you wanted to go. You’re stuck in the machine now, and there’s nothing else you can do to get it together. You can’t get yourself out of it. You just have to explore it and keep making noises until you find something… I’m really just typing now with no idea what comes next. I’m just exercising my fingers, really. Just practicing typing. May as well. Nothing coming to mind. I have ideas at every possible moment of the day except when I actually sit down to write. Then my goddamn brain goes blank. Then everything just comes apart and there’s a wall of nothing.
How do I keep going? There’s nothing here. There’s nothing to put together. It’s all empty space, just full of dust and endless crap. I guess that’s how it is most of the time, though. Do you just keep adding to the same file? Maybe having a file for every month is better than having one for every day. That would get tedious. That would get really tedious. I could write a script to start a file for me. Sure. That would waste plenty of time. There’s a job for you: coming up with ways to waste time. I’d probably find a way to fuck that up as well.
You get close enough to the end of it and then you get closer to the point that you can taste the victory — you just start making up sentences because you want to keep typing but have nothing to say. Nothing, nothing, nothing… It’s just nice to say something at all.
I might be feeling a little down tonight. Can you tell?
You’re out of time. You have to work every night and every morning until you can’t do it anymore. If you have to give it all up completely and just fucking die in the end then fine, but in the meantime you have to give it absolutely everything you have.
You may not be able to do this for very long. You might have other responsibilities, and that may be a good thing. It may be better for you that you pick up and leave. It may be better that you don’t return to this point and have to say something — you may not remember how. You might just skip past all that good stuff and land right in the shit.
Everyone imagines they want the hero’s life, but they don’t. The hero’s life is tragic. The hero’s life is full of more suffering than they want to go through, full of far more hardship and compulsion. Duty. Doing something worthwhile requires a lot more than most people want to put in. Including maybe the hero himself — the quest is something he has to do, not something he wants to do. Maybe he’s more ordinary than we think. Also, this is why Elysium is the end of the story — there’s no more story to tell. There’s nothing further. Heaven is an ending. That’s what you want, an ending. Continuation means hardship, it means suffering with bits of satisfaction here and there. Mostly a climb with little base camps here and there. None of us can sit still for very long and call it fun. Eternal rest is Hell if you’re awake for it.
The only way out of this would be if you could change your own neurology. We’re hard-wired strivers and sufferers. Take away hardship and dissatisfaction and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, we lose track of which way is up. Suppose you could alter the human brain so that we’re content most of the time. You’d probably have a sedentary species that did very little. It would probably die out. What the hell would they even do? I’m bored just thinking about them.
No, you can’t do those things you dreamed about. You have nothing that interesting or insightful to say. You can just talk to yourself. Do you think you want to push yourself deeper into this chasm? Do you have any sort of plan for getting out of it? No. But writing this is something. It’s not nothing. The world keeps spinning. There’s more work for you to do tomorrow. There’s always more. You can always push past it all and make yourself do something clean and easy. You can always just find a way to make your living doing whatever.
You can always just check out. That option is always there. It’s not something you have to plan for. It’s not something you have to think about, really. If it comes time, you’ll know. The idea of keeping yourself together may get too hard and you might have to just shove off to the next place.
You have nothing but silly ideas and silly notions. Silly and pointless ways of hoping that you can make it past some sort of normal life… Nothing will really work out for you if you keep yourself going like that. But you never know what will happen. You don’t know what will come of this if you keep working. If you really have nothing to lose then you have to reason to pull your punches. You have no reason to scream into empty space, you have no reason to flog yourself before the altar of the Great God Humility. There’s just you and the world, and some day it will be nothing because you will not be in it. As it was before, and as it will be for an eternity after you die. I don’t see the point in quitting early when there are so many other options.
All you can imagine and all you can think of is physical labor, that’s all that really comes to you in this imaginative space. That’s what you want to do. You should try it sometime. Maybe you’ll like it, who knows. You think you would like the life of the longshoreman so you have time to be a philosopher at five in the morning. Sometimes all you need are those little moments, and a little scratch pad so you can write down what you think. The rest of it is the life of a monk. The rest of it is the life of asceticism. You have to bring the fight within and just deal with it as best you can. The rest of it is just nonsense.
You can’t keep yourself going and keep the fight up and keep it all together… This is just free writing now. Just typing practice. The real story ended a while ago, didn’t it?
Doesn’t matter. Just keep typing until you can’t anymore. You feel like quitting but you can’t. That’s the situation you’re in, in every regard. You can’t quit. The party never ends.
Just how great do you think you need to be to get paid to write? You don’t need to be Bill Shakespeare. You don’t need to do anything but keep yourself from drifting off into bullshit. (Some people will pay you to write bullshit, but you should never become a whore.)
The only salvation is work, really. The only way is to lock yourself in a shed and get used to sitting down and writing. That’s what this is, that’s all that any of this is. That’s why you sit down and grind this out and don’t stop until you absolutely physically cannot anymore. Quitting early or quitting only when you have to — the difference is basically nothing.
That sad symphony is all you’ve got. All you have ever produced came to nothing because you did not work. That is the only difference between you and the others who made it. You are now massively, irreparably behind. In ten years you’ll get to where they are now. You will never catch up. There is no catching up; you cannot pause time. You cannot go back and fix your stupid mistakes. You have to live with them. You have to move yourself forward and just make what you can of your fuck-ups.
Light a fire, they say. Light a fire and sit on it. Find motive somewhere, anywhere. Find motive in the fact that there is just a little light left. You can find a point somewhere in all of this. There’s nothing else really to get at.
Was this as exhausting to read as it was to write? What pointless garbage. I can’t write anymore. I don’t mean that I cannot write anymore tonight, I mean I have lost the connection between myself and what I put on the page. On the screen. Whatever. There’s nothing here, in all these words. This is the most I’ve typed out in a long time and there’s absolutely nothing in it.
How do you recover from self-sabotage?
“A man struggles against himself even as he pursues his goals…” Something like that from Eric Hoffer. He knew what he was talking about. I wonder what he was on about. In what way did he sabotage himself? Maybe multiple ways. Great people were flawed in ways that it’s sometimes hard to appreciate. They are all very life-size when you look at them up close. It should give you encouragement.
Where the hell do these people get their optimism? Where does this assumption of self-worth come from? I don’t seem to have it. I don’t seem to get it.
Each of us succumbs more to either fear or laziness. The ancients were wise enough to consider Sloth a sin but what about Cowardice? No mention, and that’s probably the worst one. Greed requires ambition and cunning. Wrath and Envy at least stir one to action. Lust and Gluttony at least involve some sort of activity. Sloth is dreadful because it’s just nothing. But Cowardice… A coward recognizes the right action and does not take it. That’s unforgivable. That sin leads to far more suffering in the world than the others. The sloth perceives nothing and does nothing. The coward perceives the evil in the world and does not move to stop it. He recognizes what is good and does not do it.
Why? Short-term self-preservation. He thinks he can just hunker down and wait, and everything will be okay. Someone else will take the risk, or maybe time will resolve things. Someone else can do the fighting. He let his world come to ruin because he was afraid.
You have to spend years on this shit before it goes anywhere. And you’ve sat on your goddamn hands, especially the last few years. You’ve not nearly done enough. You may as well do it now, as you have no other responsibilities in your off-time. Nothing else can really get you together. You have to take one last shot at fighting it out and getting closer to what you thought was a good world. Nothing will come together of its own accord. All matter in your universe is repelling and flying apart and you are the only one who can gather it and make sense of it. You are the only gravitation in this great empty space, the only coalescing force. There is no one else to do it.
No more waiting. Put it together and put out what you wanted to say. Say something, even if it amounts to nothing. Say what you can and let others decide. You always said it was up to someone else to decide whether it was worth anything, that all you can do is your best. You have not done your best so far and you know it. You’re afraid because your best might amount to nothing much. Nothing amounts to anything much. No one is remembered for very long; that is not the point. The point is to do it. If you’re going to be selfish and you’re going to at least get something out of all this then you need to get into the work. Work is the only salvation. Your problem is that you have nothing to struggle against. Your fight is with nothing.
I can only repeat myself so many times. You have work to do. You have work to do. You have work to do. You have work to do. All play and no work makes Jack a suicidal, nihilistic boy.