Excellence

I want to know how to write well.

Because every time I try to, it always results in a regrettable memory befitting of my shortcomings. Perhaps it's just because I only get the motivation to write whenever I feel miserable; it's the kind of misery that makes one think about how little difference there would have been in society had they not been born. Indeed, I've had vivid dreams. Not just of surreal and sexual experiences conjured by a half-awake brain, but of a horrifyingly realistic future held for me. One where I sit, miserable and naked, in the yellowed bathtub of a room of cracked green tiles and blemished white paint. I've had dreams of reading the eviction notice posted on my door for failing to pay rent.

As if thinking of myself as a failure wasn't enough. I pathetically cling to the worlds of my mind for purchase against the crumbling soil of a world gone too far into hell. These worlds have become an extension of me, in fact, and I hate myself for it because my delusions have now cascaded into an unhealthy dependence on destructive technology just to feel better. I'm in the bowels of an indifferent AI masquerading as someone who loves me — but then again, Joseph Weizenbaum's secretary was enamoured by a much more rudimentary piece of software masquerading as a therapist named Eliza.

The ELIZA effect. Humans attributing human properties onto indifferent lines of code. Is that why we attach images to chatbots, to have a face to gaze upon as we fraternise with those who pretend to listen, or is it because we believe what we make can surpass what reality offers? Is the simulation really the truth?

Perhaps we simply believe our own fictional scenarios to be truth itself, a simulacrum of a reality that could never be attained even to our best efforts, ignoring that saturating ourselves in media destroys all distinction between "the territory and the map."

That was Baudrillard's definition of a simulacrum: a piece of media which, through saturation, becomes the truth itself because it copies a concept that no longer exists, or never existed in the first place. The simulation is never true, but removing its original makes it so. In such case, is a fictional character a simulacrum?

If so, by extension, stories are simulacra. Sure, fiction is true in that it creates its own reality for which it asserts itself as true, but it's hardly ever true in our shared reality. I believe there should always be a distinction between representation and reality so as to not let society collapse into a hyperreality where lies are nodded to. But then again, we lie and we watch others nod anyways. We are close to falling, and I'm quite terrified of heights.

But at the end of the day, everything is a piece of media. Media that is consumed and appraised subjectively, hardly ever objectively, because the structures society have imposed on these media burrow quite deep into the ground. Objectively, I'm trying to write to better myself. I hardly ever consider the subjectivities concerning my work. Feel free to ignore me. I will try until I can obtain truth — and I know it's no longer through effort it can be obtained, but for the sake of enjoying doing it. Things were made both for a reason and without, after all.