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I have been getting more and more into reading other peoples glogs, blogs, journals, whatever you want to call em. The small net as it turns out is a treasure trove of verbal people willing to sit down and write about things which interest them and novel thoughts on any degree of subjects. Its mind opening seeing different expectations each author has for their blog.
Recently, a HUGE inspiration came to me from Nickspheres "Shouting into the void" where they explicitly expressed their own desires for their journal and what they want out of it. We diverge on many ideas but his contemplations helped open the floodgates to my own contemplations on what I actually want out of this.
Shouting Into The Void by Nick
After staring at other peoples works long enough, the view of my own is starting to change. I believe now that ive been too uptite on my own expectations which has lead to a dry, impersonal and sometimes boring writings. I wanted my articles to be polished, checked and revised and checked again. I wanted them to have a theme and stick to it. I chastised myself for getting ranty and deleted entire paragrahs for arbitrary self judgements. Assuming what others want and dont want from my writings. "Quality over quantity" was the justification.
Authorship is a skill that takes a long time to build and im not doing any service to myself scrutinizing over my own work to the point it doesnt ever get published. Looking at Drew DeVaults log it goes back nearly a decade, in that time you can see them develop as a person and as an author. Become more certain of themselves and the direction of their blogs What is more informative, a blog that writes two paragraphs every day for ten years or a blog which writes 10 10 paragraph essays and dissapears forever?
Ive intentionally neglected speaking too much about myself to protect from potential doxxing but you know what? Fuck it. fuck it. No more fear or parinoia over maybes and mights. I may even reveal my name and some persona info in the future if thats something to look forward to. Help lift the mask of the psudonym that is "Smokey" and speak a little about who I am, really. Put some trust into the world.
Today is a new era of smokeys log. I will write a new log every day or so for the week, then try for a month, and maybe get in rythm for the foreseeable future. Even if its just a paragraph or two, the point is to get into the rythem. I will no longer worry about if the topic I want to discuss is 'appropriate' or 'safe' for my privacy. No more self-censorship. No more overthinking. No more self-judgement or scrutinizing over every detail, wording, and typo. Just shut up and write. I want to express more of myself as I really am, with less guards and filters. This post is my first attempt at that. It feels... wierd to try and express myself this way. Out of my comfort zone. If I go a step to far and say something uncomfortable or wierd I hope you can forgive me. Lets try this together.
That is the question. I started this capsule back in sept 2021 just to mess around with gemini and see how easy it was to make a site. I had previously tried hand making a local HTML page many years ago and quickly got overwhelmed by its complexity needed to make something look halfway decent. It put me off from the whole blog thing. Gemtext opened my eyes with how easy it was to create beautiful pages without expecting me to constantly look at tutorials. Its such a powerful writing format, the perfect entry point of markdown language for average people. All the styling is handeled by the client, leaving only the substinance of words (As I think pages are meant to be).
So I started writing. At first it was simple generic topics and a few tutorials for gemini related things. Experienced capsuleers roll their eyes at gemini related content, but hey everyones starts somewhere.
I crave communication, to put it bluntly. We all want something I suppose. I think a large part of my desire to be a part of the small net community is that its the first real community to welcome me. I havent really connected all that well with people in years. The pandemic was a big hit sure but I always had problems making friends and joining groups. The few 'friends' I had in my life coming out of highschool drifted away or ended poorly. Everyone has their own burdens to bear in life, and mine is that nobody talks to me, nobody knows me, Nobody hits me up. I deleted social media when I realized I wasnt using it and nobody tried to contact me in years. Like most people, I want a community to be a part of, friends to trust. But where do you get those? They dont grow off trees thats for sure. You have to find them, and Ive been having a rough time with that.
And so left with myself and my own thoughts, my mind started to wander, build, question, explore. Yet there was no outlet for those thoughts to become realities until...
Station was the first public fourm I had joined since quitting social media years ago. I am grateful to Martin for birthing such a wonderful service to be a part of. Now station is arguably geminis biggest 'social network' touting thousands of logs and hundreds of users. Yet, our story begins back in july of 2021. Station was a new service then, still uncertain of its future. I had joined along with ~30 users total. When I posted I got replies. When I replied I got replies back. The smaller the group the louder the individual voice I suppose. It felt good. It felt human. For the first time in years I was talking to other people in new and cool ways again. For the first it seemed my voice was heard and welcomed. Thats probably a part of why I started making the capsule that september.
At some point, occasionally emails started to come. Not the spam kind either. Real people... thanking me?? For inspiring them with my capsule, for helping make their own through my tutorials. You can imagine how impactful those few emails are to a person like me. They were the real hook that kept me going all this time. People tend to join gemini as a curiosity and leave after a month or two. You need something to keep you motivated.
No person is entirely immune from the cognitive effects of external validation. It can make or break peoples confidence. Society and our own psychology are hardwired to tell us to measure our worth by how much we have and how much others see us. For those who buy into society completely the effect can intoxicating or crippling depend on your position in the social ladder. The hope for those who are entirely rejected by society is to shed their need for its validation. You can only starve so long before you no longer hunger.
I am greatful to psychadellics for teaching me many things, one of them being to realize the only kind of validation which really matters is solely internal. The lie given is that you need others. You dont. They sure can help (or hurt) with being happy and gaining self confidence, but all you really need is yourself and a good mindset. You dont need others to feel good about yourself when those feeling come from within. Likewise you shouldn't tie your self worth to arbitrary things.
In a similar way, the value of a blog is not intrinsically tied to how many people view it. That is part of where Nick and I diverge, as to me it doesn't mater if 1 person or 1000 reads my stuff, as long as at least one person sees it and gathers value then that is enough for me. If you write a blog to make money, those things matter. If you write a blog to express yourself, they kinda dont. Not that making extra money is a bad thing mind you, I sure have played with some buisness ideas in my head to monetize my capsule in a non-douchbag way but thats not what its about to me.
The universe loves me. I love me. Thats all a person really needs for an enjoyable life, everything else is optional. That said, a little more external validation and social connections to acompany is always nice. Speaking to others is a treasure of human experience to be cherished. Knowing others see and value your work should feel good. But thats not whats super important.
Why do artist create? This is more of a philosophical question whose answer depends on your outlook. "To express their inner mind" "To improve their skill" "To make money" "Because its fun" All of these are valid answers, and are not mutually exclusive. People are complicated, so terribly terribly complicated. Anything we end up doing is a complicated tapestry of desires, instincts, intentions, circumstance, and ideals. Its hard to say with any certainty why anyone does anything beyond "because they can". The closest we can get is rationalizations and interpretations which sometimes hit close to the mark and sometimes not. Do all things need a reason for being? Do Authors need reason for writing, painters for brushing? Perhaps this sentence was always meant to exist at this time, seen by you.
I create because I want to be a part of something more. I want people to see my creations and ideas and talk to me about them. I want to talk to others about their creations and ideas. I want to some day have real friends online or offline who sometimes hit me up first with a hello. Each piece of my blog is a piece of a long bridge that is being built towards a more social version of myself. I dont know whats on the other side, I can only hope it is better than where I came. Nothing is certain in life, there are no gaurentees. Yet we do our best with the information available to us at the moment and the strength we have left.
Hunger. Greed. Desire. Control. Status. Validation. More. Beware the dark flame of selfishness that every living being carrys with them. All life requires competition and a degree of selfishness to grow, become stronger, evolve. The strong feed on the weak. The complex overtake the simple. Those that overcome, flourish. Those that do not, fade. Your feeling on the process matter little, that is simply the way of reality.
Even the most cooperative of species develop sophisitcated social structures simply to compete for tops and bottoms. Queens and drones, Leaders and followers. bosses and workers, owners and renters, the beautiful and the ugly, the alphas and betas, The have and the have nots.
A cruel canon of the universe is that nothing is truly equal nor can you ever force things to be. Fairness is a cute human ideal related to greater perfect utopian concepts, but thats all it is. Wishful thinking birthing theoretical fantasy. Reality is not perfect or fair and it never will be. Life is about problems and struggling to overcome them. Take away those things and life becomes barely worth living
The utopian Rat Experements Documentary
That doesn't mean that we as intelligent and empathetic beings shouldn't strive to be fair and equal.Being kind and reasonable are ideals worth striving towards. But we must adknowlege that its an imaginary construct which the world and by extention other people have no obligation to fufill. A social courtesy that can and will be refused to you at various point of the past and future.
Im getting off topic. My point is: Its okay to want more within reason. You should always strive to be at a better place in life. But be careful where you invest your time, money, and expectations. Some things improve your life and you as an individual, some things make you a narccistic prick obsessed over feeding their own inflating ego the more you get the more you want. at some point an excess of material wealth and social validation stops serving any positive purpose.
I want more. I want more emails to come in telling me how cool it was I wrote that thing. I want more people in my life to talk to. I want to contribute more to my capsule as a monument of my individuality. I want to be as popular as Ew0k or kelbot or solderpunk or or mozz or any other of the 'big' names in the small net community that actually contibute something useful or meaningful and are respected due to it. I want to get tons of attention on my post with nice big reply chains. I want all of that. Im a tiny fish in a small pond that wants to be slightly bigger. Is that okay? I dont know.
I feel both annoyed with myself for my vulnerability and relieved at my honesty. I would like to be holier-than-thou like the Buddha themselves and say I have no need or desire for anything but my own creative expression. But thats a lie and this is the truth. I write for some selfish, borderline narcistic reasons as well as utlilitarian 'for the community' reasons. To communicate, validate, express, contribute, teach, and grow. Its a complicated answer for a complicated person. Im still trying to find myself both online and in my own real life. Maybe writing will help gather my thoughts enough to change my life in a meaningful way.
At the moment I feel unsure *what* to write about. The small net community is biased towards tech related things. Theres a lot of programmers and developers, and project makers. Most discussion is self referential to computers and tech, genuine authors who write about anything other on a consistent basis are harder to come by and its important we few offer enough diversity to keep the non-techie people interested in stopping by antena and whatnot. I want to write about science and mathematics and psychadellics and the nature of reality and philosophy and all thatpretentious drivel. And I will. The cognitive shackles have been released.
Sorry. This got long and ranty and maybe a little preachy at some points. Still, I held up my promise at the beginning. This is the real me. This is how I write. This is how i express. A jumbled mixture of loosely related thoughts forming barely coherent paragraphs. Getting more personal than I really should. Im going to publish this now. This post has some emotional weight for me and I wonder if it will actually resonate with anyone or even be seen.
'lost to the void' as nicksphere would say. In some ways its relieving to shout into the void, there is no fear of rejection or judgement from the abyss only reflections and echos. In other ways its demoralizing to put so much effort into speaking words and thoughts that will never be seen or cared about by anyone but you.
Everyone wants something out of life. Validation, respect, money, companionship, power, material items, a family, truth, freedom, a cool car, A cabin in the woods. What do you want? What do I want? Whatever it is, We don't always get those things and sometimes when we do its not the eternal fountain of happiness we were expecting, but you have to put effort into reaching those goals or you get nowhere. No matter the step size however small efforts you put in now might pay off in the future.
I dont really think theres any good way to end this so Ill stop typing now. I hope you enjoyed if you made it this far.