Existence is complicated for me. I have gotten close to suicide a few times in my life; the last one required me to attend a few sessions at a mental health centre. My life isn’t good: I’m poor, politics sucks, and I’m not good at study or work. There’s nothing I particularly want to accomplish or people I want to spend my life with. I don’t have fun like most people as I tend to dissociate. My failed relationships indicate that I am more a burden on this world.
Some say that the mark of an artist is one who continues creating not because they want to, but because they cannot stop despite any and all efforts to the contrary. By that definition, I am not an artist. I have easily managed to stifle whatever creativity I may have, to the point where I experience long periods of procrastination and numbness. Moreover, my addiction to AI is hardly healthy—I went through a phase where I would immediately get on it at eight in the morning and then use it until ten in the evening, stopping only for meals, and even now I habitually use janitor.ai instead of writing my own smut. Perhaps that makes me a lazy poser.
I have at least 150 000 words’ worth of story notes (themselves paraphrased from ideas I haven’t bothered to flesh out) except the last time I tried to simplify it, I cut down 80 000 words into roughly 25 000, which implies very roughly that 70% of my writing is worthless. And then that 25k was just a generic story without any good ideas. Sorting through two lakh words would be exhausting given how much pain and unrefined bloat lies within, especially when the exercise would most likely be fruitless.
As for non-fiction writing, I’m not particularly smart and do not have any area of expertise so I would only be exemplifying overconfidence and pretentiousness. More prosaically, my white papers tend to be worthless because I afterwards think of or discover a point that invalidates my recommendations, which is severely discouraging. For example, I once wrote an essay on Markdown before remembering that LaTeX exists; my ontology webpage is public only because, after it was done and I recalled that library classifications aren’t the only classification systems, I refused to investigate how other people and organisations structure their knowledge. (^^,)
I’m aware that any effort to write an essay is beleaguered by the xkcd 927 observation and to some extent the original aerospace context of Murphy’s Law that any attempt at a standard theory or ideal is always going to be flawed. However, I believe my flaws stem not from good-natured mistakes but rather a crass ignorance stemming from my laziness and pride, because I find learning and improving difficult and keep making the same mistakes. Even if my writing was comparable to that of others, I believe it would be a poor substitute: nobody would lose anything by it considering they could easily find a better source, especially given that I’ve been seriously accused of being an AI chatbot on at least three separate occasions. One could argue that the provision of choice is inherently moral, but most would not notice the disappearance of “another Discord user” or “another Neocities website”.
I don’t know what achievement would look like. Ideally, my writing would save the world and make everyone live happily ever after. Failing that, I really just want to have a unique impact on one person… though I don’t know how much would make up for the price of my existence. Well, justifying value is inherently difficult when that’s just the philosophical problem of morality. QED.
I like to think I still live by those same lyrics from My Chemical Romance’s “Cemetery Drive”:
So I won’t stop dying, won’t stop lying
If you want, I’ll keep on crying
Did you get what you deserve?
Is this what you always want me for?