When I was a character, I worshiped characterization...

I swaggered out of high school with pride on my face, shit on my transcript, and commendable standardized scores (which I made the most of by vainly attempting to keep them deceptively private.) I fancied myself a generalist, a jack of all trades, or a renaissance man, depending on what level of excessive smoking was currently impeding my mock humility.

My target narrative coalesced in the guise of a "plan" for me over the summer before rushing into a school environment I wasn't ready for, taking on loans I had no concept of paying under pressure from my parents to opt for the brand name school that would 'surely pay for itself in opportunities'. The idea was to sort it all out. All of it.

Carefully crafted dabbling in Biology and Psychology would help me figure out what makes up the 'brainyness' pointed out to me, that I had now made so much of my identity out of without quite understanding myself. A short hop from there to nootropics (a term I didn't stumble across until my first taste of dedicated university ethernet). Parallel to this ambition more dabbling would be needed to get cognizant AI, or at least some algorithm for effective data mining started.

Because everything seemed to be going well, and we had already (in many cases before 1963) recorded a lot of great facts about everything, but there was no way even a pretend-humble self-presumed genius could get around to reading it, not on factory evolved hardware. Math, physics, chemistry, engineering, biology, psychology, linguistics, language, literature, history, sociology, political science, economics, all great fields, all fairly well understood. Make the end of any of those named fields into -ists, and you end up with people mostly (pridefully?) disinterested in speaking or grokking the language of anyone more than around 3 steps removed. Information overload seemed to have so many pigeonholed, and now it was coming for me.


Escape seemed to be best achieved by expanding conscious capacity to catch us up to the scope of our assembled technology. I wanted to acknowledge that a very broad knowledge about ourselves and our surroundings was being largely underapplied to our state of living. A few clumsy searches later, and I found the keyword for my(?) ideas were already well into the zeitgeist, and (typical) was mostly drowned out in the incessantly overflowing meme sea. I guess I'd found my role, the character I could play now that I was on my own. I'd grow from a clever can't pick a path worm to a put together transhuman butterfly.

Whelp, a story is a string of images and metaphors that doesn't always happen. After eight weeks of working like I'd never imagined, "adjusting" to the isolation of being promptly disregarded by neighbors, and fascinated navel-gazing on all the amazing stuff I'd started to find out about and learn, I was ready to take some easy outs. I lost sleep, my attentions wandered and attached to meaningless things, and by Thanksgiving break I'd fabricated a hidden behind the surface secret realm where all the things I wished I could do were already done for me, just by telling myself that it could be and that I wish it was. There's no sense going into specifics about that realm, since there wasn't any sense involved in trying to live there.

Sometimes I miss that world, but way more often I miss the one before it. I can't fault the industrialized knowledge insertion business for any of the bullshit I've put myself through. But somewhere between "this is the only way to matter in this world" and "maybe you aren't cut out for mattering, it's not for everyone", this seems to be occurring quite a lot.