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.

Sisyphean narcissism.

 If I don't manage to say this, it doesn't exist. This is a discipline I need to ingrain on myself if I'm ever to salvage my thoughts from the total obscurity of my own thinking. The monologue I experience as my mind cogitates and digests the ideas to which I've become accustomed means nothing if there's no way to get this stuff untangled from the momentary encounter and stored in a comprehensible medium. There are countless times I've surprised myself with an idea, or a clever way to phrase an old idea, and been once again reminded of the reason why these times are countless. I never record them, never make them count. It would be absolutely fitting to judge my intellectual musing to be nothing more than trite mental masturbation. I find a conceptual space where I can comfortably languish, tease my notions and sensibilities with speculation and thought experimentation, until ultimately I coax out the 'aha' moment, the minor epiphany that seems to have been the whole purpose of my auto-analytic fixation.

The process of coping with the effervescence of my favorite ideas naturally lends to a desire to preserve them. Simply thinking these thoughts as loudly as I can and hoping they will reverberate in a lasting memory probably does serve to break in the path, reinforcing my ability to find my way back here again. However, it does not do much to package the idea in any sort of tidy, organized fashion which can be easily externalized. In fact, training myself to consciously hold on to my prized meditation all at once might easily be counterproductive to the act of writing it down. In its most unwieldy configuration, the concept I'm trying to record has been given the illusion of some kind of atomic unity, a fully amalgamated whole idea with no clear beginning, middle, or end. Of course there had to be an orderly progression of cognitive events before there could possibly come a climactic conclusion, and I'd expect any effective description of the whole of the idea would necessarily include a proper representation of this progression.

The twisted magnitude of my egocentric introversion is clearly evidenced in the very existence of the text I've written thus far. I sat down with the intent of describing an idea I had, but as soon as I transitioned from having the idea to writing it down, my attention got mired in an unnecessarily verbose narrative encapsulating the experience of having an idea and struggling to write about it. It would seem that my self-consciousness has gotten entirely in the way of actually coming to the damned point.