Category Creative Writing

Weird essays or short stories I’ve written

Presence

Max Alexander Leave a comment

“Happy ever after” doesn’t mean forever.

It just means time.

I feel like I keep dying.

And I don’t really know how to communicate that to anyone else. I had hoped it would stop happening, but it hasn’t. It’s only gotten worse.

I keep having this feeling, like I’ve somehow died; yet instead of the blackness of unconsciousness there’s just… this.

Once upon a time I went to Philadelphia to visit my friends. One of them flew in from Amsterdam, and we slept on the floor — two air mattresses laid next to each other; a coffee table moved out of the way. In the evening, before our hosts retired to their bedroom, we took turns playing YouTube videos, and we watched a movie about the arrival of a new perspective on time. As we inflated the mattresses, I argued back and forth with one of them about the film’s theme — about its compatibility with the non-existence of free will, and about its existentialist undertones — while a different friend got sheets out from her closet.

I feel like I keep dying.

And I felt this way before I even knew what was happening, or the why of it. Years and years; you can trace the feeling across my writing and my journal entries.

But now I’m older, and despite the fact I’m mostly not wiser, I do understand what’s been happening to my brain; at least a little. And it’s mostly not getting better. Though at this point it’s mostly not getting worse either, and so I’m mostly not sure what to do.

Once upon a time my Grandmother died. We held a funeral, and everyone cried, because she was dead. The day before, my aunts and uncles came from the other states where they live, and we all had dinner in a restaurant I’d never been to before, forty-five minutes away from where I live. My brother sat in the back of the car, and while I helped my Mom navigate Google maps, one of my friends told me I should buy a camera, and that we should amend our writing pact. While we ate, the AC vent above began to leak, maybe from the rainstorm twisting itself outside, across the evening dark, and so I shifted my chair a foot to the left. At the other end of the table, my cousin took off her sweater because the restaurant was too hot. Two days later, the day after the funeral, we all had bagels at a different cousin’s house. People shared stories from their childhood, and I learned a little bit more about all of them. The last time all of us had been in a room together must have been at least a decade ago, maybe more.

I have persistent feelings of unreality.

It’s interesting, actually, what the human brain is capable of experiencing. It’s like this pressure sets in, almost like being at the bottom of a pool.

Total silence.

A weight to everything — and yet my brain can’t see how anything actually exists. I feel something bearing down on me, and it smothers any conception of understanding I ever pretended to have, and despite this sudden lack of reality it feels like being crushed — enveloped in nothingness — an ever present reminder of what’s happening; everywhere I look; even if I try closing my eyes — I can still hear this metaphysical lacking thrum inside my head.

It’s claustrophobic.

Maybe death is just lacking — this certainly feels like a crushing sense of lack. And yet the world becomes so big and empty. There’s this tension between the weight of the silence, and the infinite expanse of the aloneness.

And I mean this as literally as I can. It really does feel that way. Like standing in an endlessly open field in the dead of night, while your ears are clogged from water pressure.

Once upon a time I went on vacation with my family to New Hampshire. When I was young we would always go up there, sometimes with my Grandmother. The last time my family was all together it was here — each of us renting a cabin around this crescent shaped lake; all except for one of my aunts, who lives twenty minutes down the road, on a street named after the dairy farm her husband owns. A decade or more later, in the evening, we turned the TV to a classic movie channel. I drank prosecco we had bought at the supermarket, and my dad lay — eyes half closed — on the couch, while the rest of us sat in chairs and watched some old film. It was in Spanish, and about an eight year old girl who believes her attempted assassination of her father, with baking soda as the poison, to be a success. After the movie I went outside and sat on the dock, by the edge of the lake. My mom came outside and we stared up at the stars, and the half lit cabins across the lake — all reflected in the dark water — while we failed to correctly identify any of the constellations.

Often when I’m like this I listen to music.

The sound doesn’t breathe any texture back into reality, but it helps distract from the silence. There’s an almost familiarity to the way the cords progress — the same pleasing pattern playing out exactly like whenever I first heard a song — even though I can’t actually feel the feeling of recognition anymore; only intellectually understand that I’ve been in this place before, or heard this song at least a hundred times.

I hate when I have to stop, and I’m forced to sit with the full silence of my situation.

Once upon a time most of my friends from High School came home for the summer; all except one, who decided to stay on campus. During the pandemic, the spring of my first year of college, the new friends I made there got me to join a game of Dungeons and Dragons. A few weeks later I started running sessions for my High School friends, despite the fact none of us had ever really played before. Then, later, when almost all of us were home for summer, and vaccinated, we unfolded a table in the center of a friend’s basement — and tried to set up a microphone so all of us could be heard by my other friend, who had chosen to stay on campus. Then we played a tabletop rpg, for one of the only times I’ve ever actually played it on a table top, and I threw a box of tissues at someone in a vain attempt to bring order back to the session.

It doesn’t feel like there’s anything to me, I suppose because I feel as if I’ve died. And I can’t see why anyone could ever care about me, because I’m not real. I’m dead; just a delusion that’s somehow still moving, despite its status as non-existent.

I just can’t see how anyone could love that. Or even just care about it at all; find any enjoyment in its presence. Want to spend time with it — with me.

But maybe no one else can see that endless pressure that’s always ready to descend on our reality. Maybe no one can see the real me, or the real universe, because none of it is real anyways. Maybe I’m the only one with the eyes to see the truth.

And that makes me think I’m an imposter.

Somehow I tricked everyone else into thinking I exist, despite the obvious fact of the matter — if only they had the sense to see it.

Once upon a time I went to Philadelphia to visit my friends. One of them is in a band, and on Sunday we got into a rental car, put a guitar and an amp in the trunk, and drove several hours into Pennsylvania. It began to rain, and our phones flashed with various warnings. The highway flooded in sections, and at one point we pulled over by the middle of the road — where the two directions of traffic are subdivided by a no man’s land — and waited for the rain to subdue itself, if only slightly. One of my friends brought a book, and while they read I stared out the window and played twenty questions. On the way home, another of my friends turned around from the front seat to ask if I’d had a good time — since we drove three or four hours in the rain, there and back, to reach the show — and I’m not sure they fully understood why the answer was an obvious yes, even though all we had done that day was sit in a car.

This feeling of dying — or being submerged — it’s almost like staring into the void. If you do it too long it takes something from you.

Sometimes it doesn’t feel like my life is my own, even after I reanimate — even after I’m resurrected. If you sever too many connections, even by accident, the whole thing falls apart.

Dead men don’t have any connection to their memories. They’re dead. They don’t have anything. Stare too long into the void — into the silence — and it takes all that from you.

Once upon a time I sat at my desk, in the basement of one of the only dormitories that had air-conditioning, and the two of us called over Google Meet. It was winter, but I kept the window by my bed open, and the brickwork of the wall was cold with January. She didn’t have internet, so she used a hotspot to connect her laptop to mine. On the floor by my bed was a large — wide but shallow — cardboard box, full of Lego pieces I had bought as an adult or saved from when I was a child. Together we watched a TV show, hundreds of miles apart, as she lay in her bed and I sat in a chair at my desk, and I cried a little — despite the fact it was only fiction. I don’t like the way this memory tastes to me now, and I’m not sure I want to try repairing my connection to it, but it’s still the case I felt a deep sense of affection that evening.

I want to say I don’t deserve love anymore, as punishment for the sin of tricking everyone into thinking I’m real, but the truth is I don’t deserve anything — because nothing’s real, and so no one is owed or has earned anything whatsoever.

Once upon a time someone drove me to Boston. We spoke about civilizational collapse and constitutional liberties for five hours, and the resiliency of various infrastructure grids. In the city I met someone from my book club — started a year prior, through near random chance — face to face for the first time. Two days later, right before my trip back, I met a different friend face to face for the first time as well. I navigated a suitcase over puddles, and protected my shoulders and my backpack with the umbrella I always keep in it, to meet them at a cafe. I had some french fries, and they had a sandwich, and we slid into conversation amongst the Sunday bustle of a downtown lunch crowd.

I don’t know why no one else can see the silence.

Once upon a time I took a train to the city. Everyone claims to love New York, or at least it seems that way, but I think the crowdedness shoves me out of my own sense of self. I met two friends there and we sat in a park and chatted. While our conversation readjusted me to myself, we spoke about the risks from artificial intelligence, and what kind of clothes we dressed in during high school, and they sipped coffee — all before we navigated our way across the city to buy bagels one of us had seen in a TikTok. In the evening I took the train home with that same person. They slept on the pull-out couch in my basement before then taking a different train to the country’s capital the following morning. Another day after, I then took a train there myself, sitting next to the second friend I had visited two days prior in the city, and I read a philosophy paper — occasionally checking my phone — as we moved across the East Coast. The following afternoon all of us met up again, alongside several others, and we toured the cherry blossoms and drank until the late evening began to shift to morning.

I think I’m overdramatizing my experiences, because I can’t help myself.

People certainly have it worse. People who experience this regularly; or lose entire chunks of their memory. Maybe hallucinate voices or experiences. I just kind of have to deal with this, sometimes — but outside feeling like a timelord, there’s not much impact on my life.

Drowning in non-existence sounds terrible, but I think it’s significantly preferable to actually drowning — which hundreds of thousands of people actually do, every year.

The only real impact on my life seems to be me writing very indulgent, or poorly structured, essays for my blog. That’s not a particularly heavy burden; it’s not much of a boulder — more of a Sisyphean skipping stone, if anything.

Once upon a time I sat by my window, let the cool wind of a rainstorm wash over my face, and the sounds of raindrops filled my ears. I tried to express the confusion my brain forces upon me, just because I’m me, and I tried to explain what it means to express love. I’m not sure what I’ve accomplished — mostly I just feel like a storybook character; a wrapping of descriptive traits around empty pages.

What does someone who experiences persistent unreality have to teach us about anything?

Maybe once I’d have said “quite a lot” — but I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

Then again, what do I know about anything? I just know that I feel as if I keep dying.

I think for me, deeply so, love is about presence. It’s not even about attention — though of course that is often an important aspect too — it’s simply the act of being near.

That’s how I express love — and that’s something I appreciate from others.

Because I feel like I keep dying. And it’s calming when I get a few moments with someone I care about — before I have to die again. And it’s meaningful to me that I’ve chosen to give my very limited time to the act of being close to someone else, even if we’re focused on two separate activities.

Love is a choice. Because I feel as if I keep dying, and I’m acutely aware of the fact that none of this is real — not really, anyways.

Because nothing’s really there. It’s just energy and position values — evolution somehow tricked us into thinking it was meaningful.

Without warning the world could become empty, and alone, and you could be crushed by the weight of nothingness. Your brain can just feel that way sometimes, for no real reason.

Maybe most people think this sounds insane, to which I say “you should try bartending”. Though apparently most people don’t uncontrollably dissociate if they serve drinks after eight p.m. — so again, what do I know?

None of this is real. There was never any point to any of this, and I am actually going to die one day. Not just this make believe version of passing on — I’ll really be gone one day, and so will everyone else too.

And I just want to be here with you. For these seconds we do have. To make it as real as I can, even if it never actually will be.

Nothing is real, and love is a choice.

I decided to be present for those moments I could. To be near people I care about.

I chose to take memories that don’t feel like mine and keep them close to my heart; hold them so tight they burn my hand. Let that heat bring me back to the world.

Nothing’s really real.

And still I won’t let go. I think that’s love, in the deepest sense. To ignore the silence that’s always threatening to crush us, and instead be here with each other. Even if we’re all just absentmindedly on our phones — not even saying anything as the evening takes hold of the living room, or our basement.

We choose to make all the meaning that exists, just by letting ourselves live, or by deciding not to die. Some say that’s the only actual question within philosophy — though others would say that’s really more of a myth.

Nothing is real, and nothing had to mean anything. So it’s especially special to me that I chose to let these people be meaningful — and I’m not sure how to communicate that to them, outside simply being present.

Because I could have chosen to be alone instead. It would have been easy, the water pressure is always there, in case I wanted it.

But I don’t want that. I just want time — here with you.

Once upon a time… someone asked me what the meaning of life is. There isn’t a real answer, not really; instead we get to choose one — if we want to. Because the world is chaotic. Just atoms, and the space between them. And every chance I get I like to say that, and maybe that’s because every chance it gets my brain forces me to feel the weight of that truth. Or maybe I just like using vaguely scientific terms to sound vaguely poetic — who knows. But nothing is really real, and there isn’t an answer to any of our grand meaning making questions. Yet, still, I have found my own — and I like to hold it against my chest, or cupped in my hands, and allow the warmth of it to evaporate some of the silence’s weight. For me, what is meaningful is connection — love and friendship — and for me the core of such experiences are based in-

Presence

Sometimes I get into a weird mood and it all feels this way, anyways.

Once Upon A Time

Max Alexander Leave a comment

Once Upon A Time

The world was terrible.

That’s something I didn’t appreciate for a long time, and I’m still not sure it’s something I really grasp. It’s one thing to see a statistic. It’s another thing entirely to sit and to try to imagine what those numbers are trying to say — what horror is tracked by the size of some zeros — and beyond this, it’s a wholly different thing to have lived through all that past sorrow and suffering.

Apparently, for hundreds, and thousands, and thousands, of years the child mortality rate was about 48% — on average. Some societies had it worse, and some had it slightly better, but mostly every other child was dying. 

I can’t imagine how sad that would have been. To watch helplessly as every second child was ripped from the world. I’m not a parent, and I’m not very old, but I’m older than billions of children will ever be. Because the past took them before their time, before they could even reach my not very advanced age. Twenty-two, almost twenty-three, years old. A brief cosmic flash. An almost nothing amount of life, and it’s a decade more than any of them got.

But that was once upon a time. 

Global morality is now at an average of 4.3%. Some countries have it much better, and some have it much worse. But everyone is doing better than before. The world is much better. A lot of stories get to have a happy ending now.

I wasn’t built to really grasp any of what I just said. I can’t appreciate how the world closed its eyes for but a second, and when they opened again my parents didn’t have to worry about losing me. I can’t see all the people saved by dividing one simple number by ten. But still, I can feel some of it — the weight of the words, the significance of the story — by taking a little time out of my day to really read between the lines. To sit and think about the pathway traced by a downward line on a graph.

༻❁༺

When I write something it feels, in some way, like carving a statue out of a block of marble. There are all these possible contours I could create, but as you remove a tiny bit of stone the potentiality of the work narrows. By choosing one word, one sentence, one order to place the paragraphs, you deny all the other possibilities that could have been. Eventually you’ve removed enough, and you’re left with the final shape — and then you press publish.

༻❁༺

Once upon a time, three billion years ago, the first steps of life emerged on a tiny rock caught in the gravity well of a slightly less tiny ten thousand degree sun. 

I often assume that things are as they were.

I suppose this is just the way the brain was set up to work. But it’s a trick of the light. It’s not the truth.

I lived through the advent of the smartphone, and an explosion of affordability for personal computing. Now there’s more RAM in my pocket than the giant Apple computer I played games on as a little kid. The world blinked and suddenly everyone was connected at every second of every day. 

And I just kind of assumed this is how things always had been. Empirically I knew it wasn’t true, but I never really thought about the transition I lived through, just because it happened slowly enough to make me believe nothing had really changed. 

Isn’t that strange? Shouldn’t that mean something more?

I can’t tell if I’m reading too much between the lines, but when you start really thinking about the world we find ourselves in, it’s hard not to think it’s a fantasy tale.

Because once upon a time it was just rock being smashed together by cosmic force. Then we took our first steps out of the sludge and onto the savannah — and then we brought child mortality down to 4.3%.

Once upon a time.

༻❁༺

A narrative is myopic. It’s the carving of shape from stone — focusing some features in a way that necessitates the absence of what might have been. I could tell you a tale about my day, and in that time you’ll never get back, you could have heard about somebody else’s. 

To grasp the truth of our world, the whole truth, would require moving beyond this. You’d need to see everything, all at once, across all time. I don’t know how to do that — so I have to read between the lines if I want to figure out where we’re all heading. I can’t just track the throughline of every atom until I found its conclusion. I can only see the carved out version of reality I make for myself.

༻❁༺

Once upon a time people hated some other people so much they tried to reorder the world just to keep someone like me from being born. Some numbers on a piece of paper can’t really capture just what that looks like. What that means.

We just assume that the shape of everything is the only one that could have been. Maybe that is true, because there’s no true randomness. But if that’s true then there was never any other way, and when I think about the billions of children who had to die I feel pain in a place I can’t quite describe. 

It shouldn’t have had to be like that.

But the point is that things aren’t as they always were. Once upon a time there was horror everywhere you turned in the world. And the world is still full of monsters, but there’s a lot more hope in it too. 

But it didn’t have to be this way. We could all have been born just a few decades earlier.

༻❁༺

There’s this distance I feel now, not always, but more often than a year ago, and I worry this makes me wrong somehow. I keep viewing the world with this fairytail breadth — like everything is just a collection of words on a page.

I’m seeing the world like that block of marble. Every day we carve a new groove into it — and the shape of the universe becomes fixed into a once upon a time. 

I’m worried that we’re carving something horrific into the stone. That our energy and our atoms will be eaten by a superintelligence, as it tries to grasp some truth we sent it searching for. Or that our happy ending was a blip — that tomorrow the world will close its eyes again, and when they reopen every second child has to die. 

Normally all of that seems implausible — because things will be as they always were, as is the way of the world. Tomorrow looks like today, and the sun always rises. 

But something strange gave my brain a mallet and a chisel, and now I can’t stop myself from seeing tomorrow as an unfinished stone statue. I’m getting closer to understanding what it’s like to see that pure, untouched, block of marble. We could carve almost anything into that — into the shape of the future — and that’s kind of horrifying.

Because once upon a time it was now. And that now was terrible. And then it got better, and we came into the present now. Tomorrow a new now will be shaped by the choices all of us make today — and I’m staring out my window with worry that tomorrow will bring what was once back upon us.

༻❁༺

Once upon a time two people fell in love. There’s decades of time captured in that one sentence. Once upon a time one of those lovers died a tragic death — from heartbreak or plague. That’s happened a billion times over. And all the nuance and all the scale of such a story is lost on me — on all of us.

My brain wasn’t meant for any of this. I’m moving too far away from everything.

But it’s with distance you appreciate the scale. And it’s with nearsightedness you learn what each tiny groove really means. The closeness I have to my family and friends lets me glimpse, with the distance of statistics and abstraction, the true horrors of the Holocaust or our historic rates of child mortality. 

༻❁༺

There’s something so alive about my life. So totalizing indescribable about it. How do you express the phenomenal aspect of simply being conscious?

I can’t see that deeply brilliant aspect in a statistic. It’s too dissociated from that feeling of aliveness. Only the person who lived it could feel it.

And so many people die every day. From the local level, from the eyes of the story, that’s unbearable. And somehow the fact that it’s happening so much makes it more okay. Watching the protagonist die is heart wrenching. Watching a planet explode is meaningless. 

༻❁༺

Once upon a time.

༻❁༺

There was a point to all of this, but I don’t know how to properly convey it — at the very least I don’t know how to tell if I’m succeeding. I need you to read between the lines, so you can really see it. 

༻❁༺

Once upon a time I sat at my desk, looking out at the rain, and I worried for the future. I can see where my words, here, and now, are going — but I can’t see where the rest of me is. Across all of history all those people who got to make it past 15 have worried about the same thing, in a sense. 

Some people think of these horrible futures as implausible. The world is stable — the now is stable, even the once upon a time is stable — it’s all fixed in place. Fixed in time.

And sure, the future is too — probably. But two centuries ago every second child died. Twenty years ago you couldn’t play the crossword and listen to music on the same pocket-sized screen.

The real world is a block of marble. If you actually knew what was to come, you could see exactly what that solid shape meant. 

Don’t you see how that stone really could take any form?

༻❁༺

What does it mean to be conscious? It’s to live in a story, of a sorts. More adaptable, more cohesive — more concrete and more comprehensive — but still, just some stories.

I built one around myself, just by opening my eyes every day.

Sometimes I run into another tale, and it conflicts with everything the narrative had revealed to me thus far. Of course it does. That narrative is myopic — because all stories have to be. They’re all just a piece of the marble block.

I don’t think any of us should assume we grasp the full nature of the world’s previous chapters, or even the current page, and especially the remaining words, just because we happened to be the main character of our own personal tiny tale.

༻❁༺

Once upon a time the world was terrible.

And I think it’s important to remember that.

A hundred billion humans lived across time — across all those onces. There’s something incomprehensible in that.

We should remember that too.

In the logic of a story things are finite and fixed. There is a pathway to the last page, but it can never be changed.

Once upon a time the last line was set in ink before you even began reading.

That’s probably true of our world too.

But we’re the authors of this story, even if we’re characters in it too.

We should try to make sure it’s a good one.

Make sure it isn’t reaching its conclusion. At least not too soon, or too abruptly. We should make sure it doesn’t repeat any of those incomprehensibly horrible past plot points.

Because for now, that ever-present and ever-brief time, we’re the ones with the pen and paper.

We’re the ones carving away tiny shapes into the stone.

The ones dividing a simple number by ten.

Once Upon A Time

Tomorrow Never Comes.

Max Alexander Leave a comment

For the past three years, every new year, I have one particularly rough night wherein I reflect deeply on the fact I am going to die.

And not just die, but irreparably warp into a new person. Every day. Every minute. And I can’t stop myself from melting into someone new — no matter how much I might want to.

It took longer this year, but all roads lead to this one night.

And that’s tonight. For me at least.

Tomorrow.

It’s hard to know what to say.

Talking about things helps me think them through and it helps me feel better.

But I just want to write what I did a year ago, or more like thirteen months, when I was slumped against the brick wall of my dorm room  — crying. 

I don’t know how to communicate to the people I love just how deeply this affection goes. One day they won’t be here anymore and all I’ll have are fragments of memory.

Well, it’s been over a year, and now my grandmother and my dog are gone.

I don’t know how I’m going to be able to live when I wake up one day and it’s my mom or my dad as well. 

There’s such an overwhelming sadness to that feeling that I simply cannot communicate.

I wish I knew how.

Not that it would change anything, but maybe I’d at least feel like I could show people what it’s like to be me — at least me right now. Express why I care, or how deep it goes.

I know everyone feels like this, sometimes, but I don’t think most people feel it the way I do.

Never.

So, as it turns out, I have some sort of disposition to dissociate.

With the benefit of hindsight, this explains some things.

It’s also remarkably stupid that it took me so long to learn that my brain was randomly causing this to happen. But, thankfully, I spent a lot of time last year dissociated. Eventually I put the pieces together and figured out why going to museums as a kid had such a distinctly weird feeling.

And, to be clear, it’s not always bad to dissociate, I think.

There’s a kind of magic to getting lost in another world. But you don’t want the world you’re getting lost in to be your bedroom, or your own mind.

Comes.

We could psychoanalyze me.

Why do I fret so much about change? About losing people?

Because I feel cosmically alone when I’m like this. Because I intently understand the transience of this moment and my own personality.

Because I feel like an outsider. An observer. Not really here anymore. Not really real.

And sure, none of that stuff helps. But I don’t think it’s the main reason.

Dissociation is like your mind and your body shutting down — except nothing actually is.

Physical sensation stops getting passed through and subsections of the brain stop reporting information to your consciousness. 

The result is that I’ll take my coat off in the middle of a winter night, because I can’t feel the cold, and that mundane objects become fantastical, because the concept association part of my brain no longer respects the conscious part of me.

But everything still works the same, even if you can’t feel it. I still move and respond the same, even if I can’t understand it.

So I need to be careful not to give myself a cold, even though I can’t feel any right now. 

Tomorrow.

I think there’s something wrong with me.

I mean actually we’ve identified one of the problems — the issue is solving it.

And it’s not like this is impacting my ability to live life. It’s not like I fail to show up to class or eat dinner because I’m too dissociated.

It’s not like I perform worse on tasks, at least none of the ones I’ve been doing, when I’m like this.

I don’t even think it’s noticeable, unless I told you. 

This makes things weird — though in fairness that is always how things are with me. Even when I’m in normal states I think my head is a chaotic place. It’s just strange to be me, no matter what’s going on.

But it does make things weird to watch your body move on its own, and know you’re just a passenger to your own life.

It’s weird to see yourself respond as you always have, to watch yourself move as you normally do, and to have your consciousness drowned in murk as it happens. 

To view reality through a window. Outside space and time.

It’s weird to understand that no one has any actual control. That we’re just physical systems responding to stimuli, all in perfectly predictable ways. 

It is weird to go outside and not feel the cold. To not understand why the street you live on doesn’t look familiar anymore.

It’s all just very strange. Even now.

Never.

There’s a silence that comes with these experiences. An aloneness.

I’m not connected to anything or anyone — not even myself.

But in the stillness and the silence, and the absence of concepts or mental clutter, there is just one thing. 

It’s not always the same thing, of course.

It’s like getting to view a tree or a street lamp for the first time. To see only that thing. To feel fully the concept that goes alongside that cluster of molecules.

And so the world becomes overwhelmingly beautiful. 

I’m not sure if everyone else can see things like this, and the fact I do seems to cause me a not-insignificant amount of strife — but I do wish I could show other people the way I see things, at least some times.

Comes.

There’s the world above ours. One of silence and meaninglessness — not because of any profound or existential nihilism, not because of some grand point about the universe.

It’s just that the world is silent and still, because motion and motivation only make sense with regards to a referent; There’s no true point of reference for reality, and the total amount of matter and energy is remaining unchanged. It’s still.

So I’m not trying to make a grand existential point.

I just wish other people could sometimes understand what the world looks like. At least what it looks like when you peel back some of the layers. What it looks like to me, right now, today.

And then I wish I could show you how beautiful everything is.

And that makes me want to cry.

Tomorrow.

I just broke down crying as I was walking home.

I don’t usually break down crying — except for unexpected break-ups, which somehow has also been all of them.

But here I am.

And I want to say I don’t know why.

But that wouldn’t be true. I’m crying because we’re all going to die, and one day none of us will see each other again — and that’s just too much for me right now.

Never.

I feel things intensely.

Sometimes I wonder if this is weakness, but passion and excitement aren’t bad things.

Things just feel intense to me, whatever they are.

And right now I’m in a state where my brain will only provide me with a few pieces of sensation or a few concepts to work with. Everything else gets filtered out, relegated to the background.

So I am intensely feeling the fact that I care about things. About the people in my life.

And these feelings are outstripping my ability to act, to communicate.

I’m only here for a moment, and then someone else takes my place.

I’m stuck with all the memories of the people whose lives I’ve taken over. 

Soon someone else will have my memories.

The memory of this moment.

And in this moment I’m barely even here. Everything is staggered and still, and the distinction between instances of time has become jagged, instead of the smooth transition our brains typically bless us with.

So deeply I understand that each moment of our lives is fleeting. 

And I don’t know how to communicate that to you in a way that you can understand. I’m not that good a writer.

So deeply I feel overwhelmed by the truth in front of me, and I don’t know how to tell anyone else that.

Comes.

I’m overwhelmed by the fact I got to live this life.

These moments were valuable. They were beautiful and I want them to be mine forever.

I think I have lived an almost entirely unremarkable life. But it was my life. I loved these seconds I got and the people who shared it with me.

Overwhelmingly so, the times I got to sit on the couch with my family or chat over the phone with friends were delightful to me. I don’t yearn for some grand adventure or some luxurious party — I just want to live alongside the people I care about.

I don’t know how to communicate that the day to day of my life is what I want most. I don’t know what more I could want, or need, than a bit more time with those who are important to me.

I just want another tomorrow with you all.

Tomorrow.

One year ago, or more like thirteen months, I was in a basement dorm room, under my covers, crying, as the cold of the outside seeped its way into me through the brickwork of my wall. 

I blinked and I woke up today. Here in the future.

It’s so strange to fully and completely understand what was happening to me in that moment.

I didn’t think I ever would again, I think.

But I thought wrong — this is exactly the way I felt a year ago. I haven’t felt that way since, but I feel it right now.

The texture is identical, and I wish, again, I knew how to communicate that. 

But I don’t.

Never.

I don’t know what I am anymore.

I thought this might stop happening to me, but it hasn’t.

I thought I might feel okay again one day, but I don’t.

Because I’m just me. This one single second. And then I’m someone else.

I don’t know how to handle the fact properly. Because day to day, most days, I’m mostly fine. Even though the last year has been more stressful than normal, and even though I don’t yet have a real job, I’m mostly fine most of the time.

Actually I’m probably vaguely happy most of the time, at least. Most of the time I get to use the internet or talk with people, so it’s hard not to be at least a little happy.

But I’m not talking with other people right now. I’m not watching a YouTube video.

I’m here.

Tomorrow I’ll do those things, but it’s not tomorrow.

And it won’t be me.

So intensely do I feel the finality of my existence, and the inescapable fact that because something like me exists, sometimes, someone is going to have to feel what I’m feeling right now.

By being alive, the system that is me condemns one person, once a year, to this.

Tomorrow someone is going to fix the spelling of sentences I typed on my phone, and tomorrow someone will copy these sentences onto my blog.

But I won’t be here tomorrow. 

No number of exclamation marks can convey that fact properly.

I won’t be here tomorrow. Someone else will. 

Comes.

I just want to see the people I love. I just want to be okay.

Tomorrow.

The problem, I’m realizing, after three delightful years of this tradition, is that I am mostly okay.

I have a home and people who care about me. I was lucky, and so I’m smart and charming. I have food and I have more wealth than almost every human who has ever lived.

Most of the time I’m on Twitter, or watching a movie with my parents, or chatting with friends. 

The issue is that someone else is doing those things, and not me.

If 99.99% of the time I am perfectly fine, it doesn’t change the sheer overwhelmingness of being like this right now.

It’s so strange and I don’t have the words left tonight to explain just why every thing conspires against a feeling of normalcy when I’m like this.

And that sucks — for me at least.

Because tomorrow someone else will be okay. But I won’t get to see that tomorrow.

Never.

I think I take a little pride in the way my mind works.

It’s confusing and there’s all these tangents, but usually it all relates back to itself in the end.

Sometimes I’ll talk for five minutes straight, and then my friend will point out that I’ve done this. And that somehow, miraculously, it did all make mostly sense in the end.

I don’t know if I pulled that off tonight.

Tonight I just want to pull a blanket over myself and cry. I don’t know how to live life properly, and I keep living my life in spite of this. My brain fundamentally refuses to work normally and yet I keep going about a very normal existence.

I can’t accept that things will change and that I’ll die.

I can’t accept that some things are lost to me forever. I can’t accept that my grandmother is dead. That there’s a different dog sleeping in our gray chair.

I can’t accept that tomorrow isn’t coming for me tomorrow.

I refuse.

And that refusal won’t stop anything. I’m going to fall asleep eventually.

But still I do.

Comes.

It’s hard to communicate the futility of using language, which is of course a byproduct of the problem I’m failing to explain.

I realize that when you read what I’ve written it won’t really make sense — or it won’t make the sense I want it to.

I can say that I care deeply, but that sentence isn’t expressing properly what I feel like to care so deeply you burst into tears.

Sometimes inside my head I’m exploding, and sometimes my brain is staggering conscious experience and preventing me from feeling the cold, or recognizing familiar shapes, and on the outside it looks the same either way. Whether or not I understand what my reflection really looks like has no bearing on whether or not you recognize me.

And what I feel has no impact on what these words mean to you.

And so I just can’t capture what I’m feeling tonight, even though I’m really trying.

Tomorrow.

I don’t know how everyone else can function when this is the world we live in; though I suppose I’m still functioning.

The way light dances, actually dances — spins in circles across a doorframe or reflects off the moon — or the way vines crawl alongside the paneling of a house — reaching up for the stars, just like humanity has. The way vapor and atmospheric pressure form a crucible, that chaos theory then forges once in a lifetime celestial shapes with.

One day I woke up and found that everything was still, and that everything vibrated with hidden beauty. Every day I go outside and I am washed away by that absurd beauty everyone else is nonchalantly walking past.

Never.

I don’t know how everyone else can make it through their day without breaking down, without crying; though I suppose most days I don’t either. 

One day I’ll have to say goodbye to everything I’ve ever loved. Or someone will have to say goodbye to me.

Think about that fact. Actually think about it, because I don’t have the words to properly capture what actually reflecting on this should feel like to you. But it’s a horrific truth. 

“How do you live with that?” ask the man who continues to live, whether or not he actually can stomach that truth.

I can’t bear to say goodbye. Not to this world. Not to the beauty before us. And not to the people I care about. 

Maybe the real question is how I only have a breakdown over this once a year.

Comes.

What’s the real cause of this then? Why do I feel like this sometimes?

I dismissed the easy answer, so there must be another. 

If the cause isn’t this sense of cosmic aloneness, if the cause isn’t how empty the world looks right now — how still it all is — what is the main thing causing all of this? Because it’s a pretty intense thing to be experiencing, whatever the reason for it is. 

I think it’s love. I think that’s the explanation. 

Being like this makes everything more intense — or more aptly the few things I am left with more intense, which is saying a lot given my baseline levels of intensity. And right now those things I’m experiencing are affection for the important people in my life and recollection of the moments we shared.

Right now my brain is placing no limit on how deeply it will let me feel that affection. 

And why should it?

I don’t think the issue here is that I’m feeling like this. I think the issue is that I’m not at home, I’m not with those people. It’s late at night and everyone is asleep. Friends on different continents are disconnected from my life and the people who are dead now are forever trapped in the past.

And that’s just sad.

And so I’m crying.

It’s not some maladaptive existential loneliness that makes me like this. It’s just me experiencing the appropriate affection, the appropriate reaction, to the cosmic circumstances I find myself in. It’s just me properly reacting to the fact everyone will be dead one day.

And it is in fact made worse by being dissociated. Because even though I know tomorrow someone like me will see these people, and even though I know I will continue to spectacularly fail to communicate my affection, I am also deeply aware of the fact that for me 

Tomorrow Never Comes.

The Answer?

Max Alexander 1 Comment

My friend once asked me what the meaning of life is. Would you like to know…

The Answer?

To live as one pleases

God is dead. Who will stand in judgment of you?

No one. We are free from the tyranny of divine castigation; this world is unchained from morality. Shame is a tool of cosmic beings that we now know to be purely fantasy. There are no rules, no reasons to abstain from acting on desire. When you see a beautiful person kiss them. When there is fresh fruit before you, do not wonder if it is yours to take, simply eat.

What is the meaning of life? To live as you please.

To spread joy

There is something simple about the laugh of another person.

For a brief moment the potential energy naturally produced by the basic quality of our very existence is burned away, transformed into kinetic power that vibrates the world itself. These subtle changes in the motion of air can effortlessly bridge the distance between a group of once strangers, generating social bonds out of aether. When someone laughs the world changes, and for a moment it is brighter, and more forwardly energetic; their happiness literally reshapes reality.

What is our purpose? To spread joy.

To imagine wonders

Our world is mathematical statements made manifest.

Physics constrains possibility into mere probability. But there are forces in our universe that surpass the seeming banality of actualizable structure. Math underwrites our physical laws, which determine the flow of chemical, and then biological, reactions — all of which give way to conscious experience. But there is a realm beyond this — our cognition explodes out into imagination. With the same and simple basis that all of existence operates on, our minds construct shapes and beauty that could never be instantiated. Planets, starships, and superheroes that defy what we accept as possible. In this metaphysical wildland we can breathe fire and control space; move mountains with our fists and fly across watercolor skies.

What is life for? To imagine wonders.

To prevent suffering

The word pain carries with it a deep and intuitive meaning.

It is sharpness. It can be quick, or slow, but it lingers with you all the same. It is the jaws of a predator closing around your neck. A cancerous knife struck between your ribs. We like to believe that there is good and bad in our universe; and while pinning down the former proves elusive, we know what is bad. Suffering. And there is much suffering in our world. Flippant breakup texts, the failing of a cherished friendship, and all-encompassing death. The ever-present force of starvation, or sickness, faced by billions of people, spread out across all of time. The prevalence of pain eats away at the core of existence. It steals away value from our world. At all ends of life there is suffering to be found.

Need I say more? You know with what end we must act; to prevent suffering.

To witness beauty

Reality is defined by our consciousness, there is no sensical shape without our gaze.

A tree is a stack of atoms, bound together by cosmological forces and given definition by unpredictable evolutionary processes. But when you look at a forest you don’t see physics or molecular chemistry; you see explosive and vibrant green. You hear the sound of wind swaying wood — leaves rustled by a butterfly ten thousand miles away. Snow is the product of water and frigid air, and when it touches our skin you have but a second to appreciate the intricacy of randomness. What would any of this be if you weren’t there to see it?

We have but one life. Witness whatever beauty you can.

Unfettered nihilism

By now you have no doubt noticed the truth. The real truth.

There isn’t one. Nothing matters. We can spin tales to comfort ourselves, but stories cannot save us from what is real. Make believe will never produce actualized truth. Nothing matters; and there is no escape from this fact. Your loved ones will die, and their love was only ever a byproduct of a systemic answer to an evolutionary optimization problem. Perhaps for a short time, or even a long time, you can distract from the reality we find ourselves in. Perhaps you can even run — but you cannot hide. Not forever.

Where will our life lead us? Unfettered nihilism.

To hate

Cruelty permeates our world, perpetrated by people and physical processes alike. 

When your partner cheats, or neglects, they inflict a damage that tears apart your bond and scars beneath the flesh. Sickness steals love from the universe and replaces it with unbearable death. Perhaps these are the inevitable outcomes of whatever chaotic system dictates our lives. But they are wicked occurrences all the same. Disgusting. Perverse and worthy of infinite derision. Something out in the universe aims to hurt us, over and over again. It doesn’t matter who the perpetrator is, there is a single tenable response. Do not let our malefactors win. Reject them with the entirety of your being.

With what life we have there is but one path. Hate. Hate unceasingly. 

To force it all to make sense

Reality is a trick of the light. An illusion crafted by millions of years of cognitive development.

Insofar as you believe your body to be your own, believe your consciousness to be connected to your physical feelings, it is because of a carefully regulated flow of neurochemical treatments — surgically administered by folds of gray matter. If this flow is disrupted, naturally or otherwise, you soon find yourself intuitively realizing that truly, fundamentally, nothing makes sense. We are just strings of atoms, held together even as we feel ourselves fading to mush. When you gaze into the void it steals away any understanding you once had of this chaotic world. There is no sensical structure to the universe, just arbitrary lines we drew around groups of molecules. The canvas before us is infinite and incomprehensible.

In our hands is a pen, and with it comes a simple purpose. Force it all to make sense.

To end everything

In the end all life was a waste, and the world would have been better without us.

Heartbreak and starvation; sickness and hatred. All we do is transfer pain amongst ourselves; distributing suffering on the people we claim to care about and the environment that sustains our very existence. When philosophers one day tally up the total value of our reality’s continued instantiation, they will realize the devastatingly unwieldy and monumental mistake that is perpetrated by life. We must turn the world to glass. Sterilize the universe.

Why do we exist? To ensure nothing else can; to end it all.

To supplicate

God is dead, and the smoking gun is in our hand.

But the dream need not die alongside the divine. Humans have an innate drive to serve each other. Leadership does not flow in our veins, at least not for most of us. Instead we are symbiotic beings. Do not search for your own path forward, there are others who can guide you to the promised land. 

Meaning need not be found, it can be given. Our purpose is to become supplicants.

The question is mistaken

We find endless conflict in the search for the Answer.

But the truth is, this is an absurd task we have set forth for ourselves. We search for that which cannot be and that which we will never find. This fact, the reality that resolution is beyond even the infinite expanse of time, drives us to madness. The path is different for each, but the end is all but the same. Suicide. Either philosophically, as we clutch to false truths — gods, prophets, and scientific speculation  — or physically, with a gun in our hand. But this need not be the end. It is beyond a disservice to let the truth drive you towards death. Embody the foolishness of the search. Revel in the absurdity we find ourselves submerged in.

Do not let them trick you; the question is a mistake.

To be passionate

We like to believe that out in the depths of space there is yet undiscovered purpose.

But it is a lie. No unexplored region of reality will contain the Answer; we have all we need at home, already in our hearts. To exist is to reshape our surroundings — rewrite them with our will and our every breath. Passion is a fire that burns as bright as any sun, contained entirely within our chest — with this power we can blaze a path across the cosmos. Let this heat lift you up. Let it warm those close to you, and shine so brightly it can be seen from solar systems yet unknown. The act of sculpting, or singing — stagecraft or screenwriting — is ontologically defiant.

Why live? To be passionate; burn brightly, for as long as you can.

To be timid

Actuaries provide an underappreciated service.

The celestial equations that dictate the functioning of our reality move atoms and energy towards an end state of disarray. The risk of a walk outside is low, perhaps, but still any action carries with it the chance of a cosmic conversion. A movement towards your own type of stillness. Grand goals and noble aspirations are all well and good, but they mistake the danger that comes with simply existing — or they foolishly ignore it. To be scared of the outside is not a vice, it is to understand what the wider world contains. Take what you want, sure, but do not be so greedy as to lose all you had. A healthy dose of fear lets us protect that which really matters.

You want purpose? Tread hesitantly; timidness is the proper pathway forward.

To build a Legacy

The cosmological view teaches us one thing; before galaxies we are fleeting and inconsequential.

But the universe has no inherent consciousness, and has no mechanism to counter our whims. We are not beholden to the feeling of insignificance people find amongst the godless stars. Death remains yet unconquered, but our actions here and today will shape history long after we ourselves are dust. The collective whole that is reality is simply energy and matter; ready to be reconfigured. With your two hands take stone and spawn and shape them into timeless monuments.

With what purpose must we act? To build a Legacy that stretches to times thought unreachable.

To fight entropy

The light is dying, the stars will not burn forever.

Does that not anger you? Laughter and love brighten the world the way a campfire does. And like a campfire they will one day be smoke, blown away in the forest wind. There are millions alive today who lack the resources to properly live. Changes to a complex planetary atmosphere, set in motion a century ago, will steal the future of people not yet born. Do you not feel it in your bones? The universe yearns for stillness. Craves disorder. And yet we resist. Lowly humans, built of carbon and powered by metabolic explosions, have refined and reconfigured the world to fit our needs. Space and heat transfer aim to spread our resources thin; aim to level whatever havens we have constructed. And yet we dance. We sing and scream our whims out into the entropic wilderness that everencompasses the realm beyond our cities. Our very existence defies the innate desire of physical reality. 

So fight. Fight! Purpose is to be found amongst the stars; blaze forever as we hold back entropy.

To escape

The universe is traveling to a cold and motionless end state; one where nothing valuable exists.

You know our world has no real shape. No inherent meaning. No gods. No glorious purpose. Just mathematical shapes projected onto a cave wall — a trick of the light and the eyes evolution crammed into our skulls. The universe built a prison around us, and fooled us into believing this is paradise. There must be worlds beyond this. There must be peace — beyond time and space — there must be somewhere we can rest. We can rage all we like but we cannot defy the shape reality moves towards — not so long as we play the game fair. We have stone tools in our hands, and the stars laugh as they burn falsehoods into the rock wall before us.

It’s a trick of the light. Our purpose is to escape this long-con, somehow.

To be excited

In the simplest terms, energy is just the exciting of particles.

 On an intuitive level, this fact is obvious. To be exhilarated is to feel this desire to move about. We want to dance; clap our hands; swap and sweep others off their feet when we ourselves experience this state of increased energy. Excitement takes hold in our bones, and it spins our muscles forward — compelling us to spread out our increased heat to all those around us. Do you think subatomic particles feel as we do? Do you think they appreciate the way music pushes your body to move? Do you think they delight at the compulsion to sing, and the way your eyes water when you’re just too lively? No matter the answer, these experiences still thrive in our own hearts.

Why must we wake up each day? So that we may vibrate with excitement.

To foster

There is no inherent morality in our world; no truth hidden in subatomic depths.

But still, our world is a good one — or at the very least, there is much good contained within it. Yet this need not be the state we find ourselves in. We live in a chaotic system. Wind back the clock far enough and hit replay, we could find ourselves in a very different, and far worse, world. Goodness is a flame, hanging on as rain pelts from above. But the hopelessness that creeps in alongside this understanding is misplaced. We always knew things could be different, and sometimes different does mean worse. But we still have the wheel in our hands. No cosmic rule prohibits us from steering towards even brighter and better days.

To what end, you ask? To foster what we care about; to foster good.

To savor existence

Each moment is fleeting; no food can ever be sampled twice, at least not in the same way.

For some this is a painful fact. A first kiss or the discovery of a new passion can only ever be encountered once. These are wonderful and powerful experiences; and we should, rightly so, long for them, even after they have passed. But you must never let this aching distract from the ever present truth of our world. Just as each passing moment takes the joy of a first time, it brings with it the opportunity to experience a new delight. Let each new experience seep into your bones. Let its taste redefine your conception of all that is — then move onto the next sampling. Drink deep and grow fat on the sweetness of life

Why are we here? The fine wine that is life can be tasted but once — savor existence.

To embody sadness

The knowledge that someone you love has died is like a sudden wave of frost.

It sinks down into your core. It feels like no amount of clothing can stop this onslaught, and your teeth chatter and your whole body shakes. Sadness is a pressure at the bridge of your nose. It pushes against your eyes, making them water — and against your forehead, making your mind throb. Sadness cools the fire that swirls in your chest. It slows you — sadness pushes you into the ground; it aims to keep you there. But the cold is not itself evil — it brings snow and simple beauty, and an appreciation for what was. Mourning is the act of honoring what once was. We are put here to watch supernovas die, and we shepard what remains — the gray-soot of sorrow. Remembrance is what gives meaning to what once was; and remembrance hurts; remembrance is salt drying against your cheek. For all the joy and passion life brings, its end state will forever be the still coldness of sorrow.

This is not a curse. Honor the flame of life by accepting where it leads; endless mourning.

To hold on

A decade from now a new man will wear your shoes.

Identity isn’t a well defined concept; it is an intuition we cling to. A formality that keeps our financial systems running and elections stable. But just like the universe we are an ever shifting and ill understood concept. Your atoms flee the collective that is you, and your brain twists itself into new shapes every day. What makes you, you? Memories turn to dust and quirks dull and fade; how many of your hobbies have remained stable? Whatever it is that gives us definition, you may find yourself lacking it sooner than you thought. What will you be then? Will you go gently into the wilderness of change?

Your question supposes a referent. The answer is simple then, hold onto yourself; tightly.

To love deeply

Millions and millions of miles away a celestial engine is exploding.

The power of our nearby sun radiates across the desolation that is space, and it enriches our planet. For over three billion years evolution has driven the world forward; and now life exists that can take the power of the Sun for itself. There is a cycle. Vegetation prostrates itself, and is rewarded with cosmic fuel. Even more advanced beings consume the sun worshipers, and in turn they are consumed. So on and so on, until the celestial fire reaches our own stomachs. And then, when we embrace that special person, or kiss their cheek — rest our head against their neck, or walk across the snow, our hands held together, tucked away inside their coat pocket — we transfer once distant and divine heat between ourselves.

What is our purpose? To love; deeply.

To not be

Are you not tired?

To exist is a choice, and one we’re under no obligation to make.

You need not continue.

To be

The dimensionality of the universe is at least ten, and so we are each multitudinous.

No one thing should consume us. To live is to engage in this joyous, sorrowful, heartbroken, and thrilling experience. Every day brings new trials and new wonders. Sometimes we will feel anxious, and sometimes we will feel unconquerable. Each moment is unique, and we are given it for but a transient second. Drink deep, laugh hard, run fast, kiss freely and love foolishly. Succumb to sadness, give in to rage, hate and hate until you know not what to do next. Then stand or sleep, and find yourself traversing to times unfamiliar and wholly exquisite.

What is the purpose of all this? You already know; it is the delicate balance of simply existing.

The Frenchman is.

These are all half truths; none is fully right. But I promised you The Answer, did I not?

Let me tell you a story.

My friend once asked me what the meaning of life is. So I told them a story.

Once upon a time, there was a faraway place known as Europe, and along its ocean border rested a kingdom called France. 

In a not too distant time from our own, it seemed as if all of Europe was falling apart. Evil men did evil things. They took and they took. And they razed whatever they could not, or anyone deemed unbecoming. I know imagining such turmoil today is difficult, but suspend your disbelief for a moment. For the people living in this faraway and fantastical place it was as if the world was ending.

And then that evil came to France; and it seemed as if everything might burn to the ground there as well.

There was a sick mother and her child, The Frenchman, who was of an age such that they could serve in the army.

The Frenchman wonders whether to stay home with their dying mother, or to go off to war. 

If they leave, who will take care of the person who took care of them for so many years? If they stay, who will protect everything people like their mother worked so hard to build?

For a short time, and then a long time, they sit and wonder what to do. They sit by their mother’s bed, feeding her soup and telling her about the dreams they once had, during nights now long lost. They walk through the village, and they sit and pray. Pray with The Minister and with all the other young frenchmen, themselves unsure. And they sit and wonder what to do; even as The Armyman waves fliers about and shouts all the latest from European Kingdoms now set ablaze.

Something dawns upon this young soul. There are dozens of answers to their dilemma. But no one knows anything.

Not their mother.

Not The Armyman.

Not even The Minister, or any of the other frenchmen.

No one but The Frenchman can say what the right answer is.

The world is chaotic. Just atoms and the space between. Reality contorts itself towards disorder and stillness. Some force wants to reduce us all to nothingness. 

Is it evil or is it entropy? It doesn’t matter. Something compels the universe to burn Europe to the ground. Something poisoned The Frenchman’s mother; gave her sickness. 

So fight! Fight if you want to. Or stay by her bedside, until the unconscionable end.

The world is chaotic. Just atoms and the space between. We must choose what is meaningful, and then assert it onto reality.

The alternative is nothingness. 

Silence.

This isn’t a test. There isn’t some higher being that gets to stand in judgment of your choice. It’s just atoms, and the space between them. 

So I can’t tell you what the point of all this is. But I can tell you that the possibility for purpose exists within us — at least if you want it to.

The Minister and The Armyman aren’t the ones who get to decide how The Frenchman should live their life.

I’m not the one in control here —

I’m not the one who gets to say how this story ends —

The Frenchman is.

All I can leave them with is a question.

How do you want to live?

The worst that could happen?

Max Alexander Leave a comment

I have, perhaps overall wisely, decided to make a writing pact with my friend Inés. Unfortunately, I’m bad at sitting down to write, and am down to the wire on my assignment (it’s just like being in college again!). I apologize for not writing a long and unwieldy essay about my deepest darkest thoughts; I’ll try to finish one of those in time for Christmas.

Anyways, I want to talk about the thing people sometimes say when someone is feeling stressed or worried about an upcoming event or task they have to do. Why don’t you ask her out? How bad could your presentation actually go? After all, what’s-

The worst that could happen?

The universe is your mind. 

Obviously there is something out there besides you, and your consciousness. When we die the instantiated atoms that constitute you don’t cease to be. But, as I’ve tried to argue before, the reality we can interact with is entirely within our mind.

There are atoms, and light, and mass and matter, but the sense of the universe comes from within us; not from out there. Trees don’t inherently look like anything. What we see is an artifact of our cognition, and the specific senses evolution predisposed us with. 

We learn and form concepts as we age and by simply existing in the world, and then through this act those notions become the world itself.

The universe is your mind. 

And so what happens in your mind can shape the universe. Not just because you yourself are capable of interacting with all that light and matter. No, the stories we tell ourselves and the feelings we feel in turn redefine the texture of reality.

Of course all of this is generally constrained by all of that energy twisting itself into various ‘shapes’ out there in the wider world. And of course there are substances that can alter this general truth.

But the point I’m trying to make, ignoring psychedelics, is that the worst that can happen is pretty cataclysmic. 

What happens if they laugh when you ask them on a date or you bomb that talk in front of all your professors?

Unwieldy anxiety or deep shame. 

Maybe not forever, maybe not even very long. But these experiences necessarily alter the shape of the universe. 

What’s the worst that happens? The universe ends.

Literally explodes. And leaves you with whatever comes next.

And for the time it takes reality to reform, you are stuck in a world that is defined through terribleness, or one that no longer makes sense.

And in the end some future version of you won’t care very much about this; probably. What’s in the past is in the past.

But I guess I think we should care about things that are worth caring about, regardless of when they take place. This is why I worry about climate change or a future pandemic; even though I myself might not live to see the worst of it.

So an entire universe of terribleness existing seems like a big deal to me. 

The fact this transformation can occur effortlessly, and instantaneously, and even if you are trying your hardest to stop it from happening, seems like a big deal to me.

And I guess I don’t know what this changes. You still probably have to give that presentation, and most of us want to go on dates.

But the burning of a universe, or the transformation of it into a far worse place, is scary. I think so anyways. I think that is in fact worth caring about.

And I know it’s all in your head, or our heads — but that’s all anything ever is! We are what is.

All we have is where we are. And where we are, right now, is defined entirely from within our mind.

That possibility of universal calamity seems very much like a worst case scenario. I guess I just think more people should stop and think about this before asking what’s-

The best that could happen?

My new year’s resolution was, or is going to be (once I make it to new years), to look at things more positively. 

Well actually it’s to write more uplifting things. Mostly the stuff I put on my blog is depressing, and has a weird motif about death.

I’m not that bothered by how positive I currently view the world overall, moreso a bit bothered that my blog doesn’t seem to reflect that positivity very well.

But, I guess it is the case that I should care a bit more about this more general ‘positive outlook’ thing too. I just spent 600 words arguing that stress and anxiety, even if temporary, literally destroy the universe. Or at the very least reshape it into a far worse place.

But there is an opposite side to this coin.

Joy. Love. Beauty. Friendship.

These things redefine reality too.

When your crush says yes, or you wow everyone with your thesis defense, the world explodes in a different kind of way.

I guess I just think we should have more empathy for how totalizing these shifts can be. It really is, in the moment and for that person, quite and universe definingly terrible to feel anxiety or to experience rejection, or failure.

And in just the same way success and joy and companionship are universe defining experiences.

The worst case scenario is equaled in badness only by the goodness of the best case scenario.

And so, at the end of another unwieldy — and somehow even less polished — essay about my (admittedly not deepest or darkest) thoughts, I am left feeling what I often feel; confusion.

I don’t really know what to do with everything I’ve just said. What it changes, if anything.

Maybe this:

Each person is a universe unto themselves. Infinite possibilities. All the truth and beauty that could ever be lives within us; and is expressed exclusively through conscious experience. Our world is a garden. 8 billion universes just wandering around. A multiverse, contained entirely within one sphere, about 8,000 miles in diameter, which is itself contained inside an even greater whole. Layers upon layers.

Just like Shrek taught us.

And so it seems to me the course of action we ought to take is the one we already set ourselves on. When someone asks ‘what’s the worst that can happen’ they aren’t trying to make light of a situation. Not generally, I think.

They just want to help.

They want to see you happy and flourishing. They don’t want to see you full of anxiety. They don’t want to watch your universe end.

And so they’re doing the best they can. 

And this is what I think we should aim to do too. We should try to fill all those 8 billion universes with joy and love and beauty. Or, at least, aim to fill a few of them. We should try to do-

The best we can.

The lies we tell ourselves

Max Alexander 2 Comments

In periods of extreme sadness, and in periods of witnessing such feelings in others, I’ve noticed that the very mindset of stress and pain alters how we perceive reality. 

When I’m drowning in insecurity I become immersed in a story. I’m unlovable — and the reason I’m in pain is that I’m worse than everyone else and this is why I’m not getting what I need, and this will dominate my life as I suffocate in these feelings while others succeed because they’re simply better.

I recently was drowning in a story, and I’m not sure that I won’t get pulled back by the riptide. But for this one moment I am able to take breaths. I can see myself and I can feel things besides the fantasy that had a stranglehold on me. 

We have to fight against the oppressive narratives we unwittingly construct around ourselves in moments of pain.

Stories are just that. Stories. A narrative can never be the full picture; it is a collection of words and a window in on a moment in a moment; a magnifying glass against one thing. Narratives are myopic, unable to express the totality of the space available, only a single part of the whole.

It’s hard. Unbelievably difficult. It feels nearly impossible — but when we are crushed under the pressure of the story that is our feelings, we need to find a new story. One that is better able to approximate the whole of reality.

In moments of clarity or normalcy we may fail to appreciate just how the story we take to describe our life has changed. In periods of extreme suffering we are unable to remember that there could have been any other tale.

I’m not even sure how, but we… I  need to find the path back to the narrative of multitudes we experience when we’re okay.

***

I live in a world of stories. 

When I turn my head too fast reality fractures and I see the layers underneath everything. Colors and geometry I can’t describe; the embodiment of feelings and narrative and concepts. Giants so tall their shoulders can’t be seen. Starships crashing into the side of a building I’m walking past.

I am untethered from the universe. I can see and feel all of existence, and all of the existences layered on top of those. A winter’s wind is liable to blow me away from my own body.

My mind is an endless space of possibility. When I close my eyes, my consciousness spreads out across the infinite recesses of my imagination. Different shapes, feelings, people; all who inhabit this shared volume of immaterial stuff.

The stories I tell myself spread out from me and twist what it means to be alive into the shape of their silhouette. What I see when I look at a wall, and what I see underneath that wall, hinges on whatever infectious feeling is burrowing around my mind in that one moment.

I often feel like my brain is vibrating in my skull as it tries to process everything it’s seeing. I can see through time and through walls and through people all at once all the time and it’s overwhelming.

When I’m excited or in love these feelings come to shape the universe itself.

Energy radiating out from my body. I can physically pull myself across the universe with exhilaration alone.

But pain will drag me down so far my ears pop from the pressure. 

I can see undefined hands clawing at me as they try to pull me into my mattress. 

I can see the fire licking off my skin as I burst forth from a black lake of hate someone once tried to trap me in.

I have watched nearly everyone I love suffer as I stood powerless. Unable to help at all. I’ve watched as my own life crumbled in on itself through no fault of mine. Unable to stop it.

Here in the world of my mind I am divinity made manifest. Powerful in ways I cannot be anywhere else.

When you can twist the air around you into fire and fractal geometry you too would feel like a god.

***

I hate feeling powerless.

I’m falling through time. I don’t know where I am.

I’m falling through the sludge of feelings that have crushed me in the past. I don’t know who I am.

I hate that I am a weak god. There are monsters in here alongside me, and they’ll expand until they consume all the matter in the dreamscape that is my mind.

I can exert control, shape and bend reality to my design. But at its core it is an ecosystem that refuses me. I can take the currents and turn them into something new, but I cannot decide which way the tide goes.

If I really was a supreme being there wouldn’t be these stories that can drag me so far down I can’t breathe. I’ve felt so dominated by a feeling it is as if gravity was a hundred times more intense, and it takes an endless amount of power simply to avoid collapsing to the ground.

If I was a god I wouldn’t be scared of my own mind. Scared that all of reality will constrict in on me, and I’m just one break up or bad nights sleep away from the endless layers of limbo.

There is an impossible gulf between me and everyone else in the universe, and I feel so alone sometimes. 

I’m just this collection of stories spinning across space, crashing through time and the walls between bouncing light photons. It takes so much strength just to ground myself to this current moment, and something deep inside me worries that I’m never grounded enough to truly connect to someone.

***

I feel connected to her, not some sort of untethered phantasm. I feel in my own body when she’s around.

When I look at her my vision stops fracturing. I can see what’s really here, not just the fantasies that underwrite our perception.

When we talk I’m just me. Just Max.

***

The lies we tell ourselves

I wrote that nearly three eight months ago. Almost exactly, actually. 

I wish that story had a happy ending. It would have been nice if this story had a happy ending. Instead reality crashed down on top of me, and the torrent of stories that surrounds us nearly washed my consciousness away. Somehow I made it to the Otherside; though it was narrowly done, and in spite of everything.

But let’s pretend it’s still May, so the rest of what I wrote actually makes sense.

I’ve returned, but only barely. More determined than ever to exist and yet more fractured than before.

I am forced to live out the physical manifestations of everything that happens in my mind. The only respite is seemingly leaving my own body, my own self-perception, or more aptly its lack, twisting until my reflection makes me sick.

Or, as it turns out, drinking solves this problem too. But I was wise enough not to treat a breakup with alcoholism.

I feel like my thoughts and feelings become real. Manifested fifth dimensional objects I can throw about the world, or pull apart with my mind. When I feel something it shapes the universe itself.

How am I supposed to live when there’s an ever twisting infinite expanse between me and every other person? How am I supposed to be loved if I’m trapped here in my own mind?

With anger I didn’t think I’d ever have, I punched a hole in reality and pulled an earlier or more whole version of my consciousness back into the universe. Maybe if I get angry enough I can punch through this expanse that separates us.

I soared to seraphic heights when I reconstituted myself. Shimmering I emerged from the space beyond reality. I returned embroiled in energy, and I built wonders in my mind with that power. I shaped the universe around me, and I never felt so alive. But that strength is gone now, and my friends who were depressed are still depressed. Though they too have gotten a bit better, at least for now. People are still dying. Maybe this too can get better.

I’m not really a god.

I’m still broken.

I’m still just as overwhelmed by the fact I have to exist as me. 

Sometimes I’ve wished I could escape reality. Escape this. With my power anything should be possible. And yet… 

I’ve brushed against the edge of our universe, and I’ve seen the horrible truth. There is no escape, or none that I can find. No matter how far my consciousness travels away from my body, from this physical world, it will never pierce the barrier between us and the next layer of reality. I’ll never find peace. 

One version of Max sought to use their infinite power to move forward in spite of this. To move forward purposefully. I am not him. I am more nihilistic. But I am not. I’m more tired. But I am not. We both all accept the same basic conclusion though. 

The only way out is through.

Maybe that’s okay.

The Forest and The Trees

Max Alexander 2 Comments

This summer I went on vacation with my family to New Hampshire. When I was young we would always come up here. My parents would rent a cabin on a lake, just a ways away from where my aunt and uncle own a small dairy farm. My family hasn’t been to this lake in seven years, not since before I went to college, which I’ve since graduated from. But it’s completely unchanged. The smell, the paint, even the arrangement of furniture. The floorboards creak the same and the bean bag sags like it’s been holding its shape for nearly a decade. Just waiting for us to return.

The Forest and The Trees

A lot of my life feels like a contradiction. Like I’m always caught running between two extremes. I can be really overconfident; full of myself. And I can be radically unsure; insecure. I’ll travel between these states every other second.

Sometimes I feel; very intensely. And sometimes I am unconquerably numb. 

For whatever reason my brain doesn’t seem to process the world right, at least some of the time. It’s like fading away from the universe or letting go of any delineation between myself and everything else, and I don’t have any control over when this happens. 

But emotion, and simply being conscious, is a physical experience for me. I find my body moves on its own when I’m overpowered by a feeling. I find this strange, because I can feel so disconnected from myself sometimes. But even when I’m no longer holding on to the world, I’ll still experience my indeterminacy through my chest or with my hands.

And when I feel excited it’s like my body is vibrating between different dimensions of space. When I’m angry it is as if fire swirls around my lungs, and I feel compelled to lean forward and breathe it out through my nostrils

Love feels like the memory of a kiss against my neck, lightly ticklish and warm. 

Sadness starts at the bridge of my nose, or the edge of my eyes, and travels downwards into my shoulders. Pushing me into the ground. Sometimes it feels like a weight inside my heart, and I worry I won’t be able to keep my blood pumping.

To live is to engage in this joyous, sorrowful, heartbroken, and thrilling experience. It’s intoxicating and sometimes I can’t stand it. It’s an ever shifting combination of these sensations. Often they harmonize and occasionally they feel like they might rip me apart.

I think there’s something lovely about being alive.

It’s hard to capture with words just what it’s like to experience the world. I wish I could use language to make you feel the cold breeze that comes after a storm. I wish I could make you see the way clouds darken the afternoon, and trees explode with verdance following the rain. How seeing all of this just makes me want to move. To sway and soak up whatever current moment I find myself in.

But I can only gesture at these feelings. Motion at the raw and delightful experience that comes with just being outside.

Despite how loose I can be with my language, I am well known for my pedantry. I like taking words apart and trying to untangle concepts. What is value? What makes something good?

What does a tree look like?

You would think I’d have a quick response, given how much time I spend looking at them; but this is a difficult question to answer. Partly because words and their definitions are often vague, and partly because there are a lot of different types of trees.

But there is a larger problem. This question presupposes an observer. 

A tree doesn’t look like anything, it just is. A series of atoms stacked on top of each other. Without an entity to gaze upon it, nothing looks like anything.

We often think of beauty as a thing that exists. Vistas and awe-inspiring mountains beckoning from beyond our daily life; just waiting for us to seek them out.

But it’s a lie. The visual landscape we find so captivating is an artifact of our perception. Of the specific wavelengths of light our retinas can process, and the way our brain weaves it all together.

Do you think a bat or bug can see the world the same way we do? Their sensory input is divergent from our own, and so colors will simply appear different to them.

If someone asks what a tree looks like, it makes just as much sense to hand them a photograph as it does to show them a matrix listing out the position, velocity, and temporal values for a series of molecules. 

An idyllic landscape isn’t anything by itself. It’s just particles and reflecting light.

Isn’t that horrifying?

Without an observer so much of what I find captivating about the world stops to make sense.

My brain always feels like it’s trying to fold in on itself when I think about this. I just don’t know how to properly communicate the absurdity of this point, and that frustrates me.

This summer I went on vacation with my family to New Hampshire. When I was young we would always come up here. In the evenings we would sometimes turn on the television and watch old movies. This year was no different, except for the fact I can drink alcohol now.

After the movie I went outside to see if I could glimpse the stars. Surely this isn’t the first time I’ve done this on vacation, but I also can not remember any other time.

It’s incredible without the light pollution. When you look straight up the stars take on the form of falling snow. It’s confusing and magical. The after image of celestial fire blurred across my vision, reflected back up towards the sky by the surface of the lake. 

I went inside to get my family, and my mom came back outside with me. We sat on the dock, shivering in the late summer night, and alone in the dark we tried to identify the different constellations.

I imagine the past was worse in most ways, but I think it would have been special that so much of humanity could experience views like this daily. Without the light of the sun, when you look at a cloudless sky, it’s almost like you can stare into the infinity that lies beyond our earth. 

It’s been a stressful year for me. Breakups and thesis deadlines. But still, I have found the time to be raptured by the world around me.

I’m not sure how to use words to capture this spiraling emotion that moves in my chest. I just have this excitement to exist. I want to explore the universe. I want to look up at the stars. Listen to music. Love and be loved. Watch the way rain crashes into the sidewalk. I want the world to reflect my desire to be here. I want the trees to react to the beauty I find hidden amongst their leaves. I wish I could whisper into their bark, or to the cosmic furnaces exploding millions of miles away, and make it all understand that this universe is more than a matrix of position values and velocities. 

This is a beautiful world we live in.

My grandmother died a few weeks ago.

Death is more than a lack of future experience. It is the deprivation of beauty and love from the universe.

When my grandmother died, creation went with her. It’s hard to think about, because how do you imagine a world without observation, but the visual texture of reality disappears when we do.

To look through an old window during a December snowstorm or up at the stars on a warm night is to grasp the artistry of the universe. But these moments are contextualized through the experiences and history we have with a location. What we had for breakfast. A fight with a friend. Or a partner. A dozen past vacations spent here. It changes the way the world looks.

Death robs a sunset or a summer night of what they could be. Robs the universe of its very appearance.

Death steals meaning from reality.

And so an infinite amount of possible beauty disappeared alongside my grandmother. All the things she could have seen are now nonsensical.

That’s horrific.

So what could be worse than death?

Extinction

The wholesale loss of everything that is.

Sometimes living is stressful. Philosophers and regular people alike will question if being alive is worth it at all. How bad would things really be if we all just disappeared? I’ve heard people wonder this after a rough day or a breakup; or during an environmental ethics lecture.

But it would be bad. It would be catastrophic. 

I can’t think of a single important thing that doesn’t require life to exist. 

Justice: Justice is famously difficult to define. It’s the righting of wrongs. A balancing of the cosmic scales. What would justice look like if none of us existed?

Art: As we now know, the creation of novel artwork can be done efficiently with GPUs and computation. But would a world barren, save for servers constantly generating new pictures, be a world worth anything at all?

Truth: Evaluative statements or knowledge about the world. Would we desire a scorched earth, one where all that exists are math textbooks and reams of chemistry facts? True statements in a universe devoid of consciousness are worthless.

Beauty: As I’ve been trying to get at, the visual aspect of the world, something we assume to be inherent to reality, is but an artifact of cognition and eyesight. Without us there is no such thing as appearances. It’s impossible to imagine what a world without life looks like, because it does not look like anything. It’s just a soup of molecules, bound together by magnetism and gravity.

Love: Love is the interaction between two people. A parent and child. A kiss shared as the leaves turn red from cold. It’s a flood of neurotransmitters to your brain whenever you see that person. It’s identifying constellations during the last nights of summer. It’s moments made memories, reflected upon again in instances of quiet contemplation. It’s commitment. Love might be a lot of things, or maybe it’s exclusively brain chemistry. But it is a thing that exists, because we exist. We bring it into the universe, create it from aether, through the power of our actions and our experiences.

Imagine if death permeated the world instead. None of these things could exist.

Doesn’t that make you angry? A universe without any of the things we care about. A universe without beauty. Truth and justice. Love. What a sad, cold, place that would be. And no one would even understand what was lost. Or what could have been.

Maybe every life that’s ever been lived wasn’t worth it. We’d all be better off dead, perhaps. Or so the line of thought goes.

But just how terrible that barren universe would be. Complex systems dance across the night sky, and their interactions, intentionless and predictable, paint incomprehensible beauty. Works of art I’ll only ever get to see once, before they flow into something new. 

Imagine if my death reduced it all to nothing but physical computation. Just atoms stacked atop each other. Indifferent.

What luck I have, getting to sit here tonight and look at the stars. To find joy in their motion.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want my family to die. I don’t want anyone to have to die. I want us all to get the opportunity to sit wherever we want, feel the breeze wash across our skin, and experience whatever emotions come. 

I want us all to live. I want the universe to be full of people who can appreciate everything and anything.

Standing here alone, under the stars again, listening to music, I feel things intensely. My mom has gone inside but I am still here. To be alive is to experience. To see and to be emotional. It’s the wind against my face. The inverse of the status quo. The universe contorts itself towards disorder and stillness. And to be alive is to burn hot and move with excitement.

To create beauty with perception, and truth through thought.

That is valuable. It is worth protecting.

We must fight back. Fight death. Fight extinction. And keep beauty in the universe.

A story about my Grandmother

Max Alexander 3 Comments

A story about my Grandmother

My grandmother died about two weeks ago.

This world we live in is made of atoms, light, and the space between it all.

When I was little, whenever I’d see my grandmother, she’d bring a poppyseed cake from a local bakery. This dark orange crust, and a light color inside with specks of gray, and hardened white frosting on top.

In school I was taught that you’re supposed to refer to events in stories with the present tense. There’s no temporal frame of reference for a book. Every moment is happening simultaneously, and you can jump from one to another on a whim. The hero is resisting the call of adventure, watching as their mentor lies dying, and standing triumphantly over the evil that has pursued them throughout the narrative. Every story beat is happening right now, and none have come to pass, yet each requires the preceding to exist.

I remember getting in the back of the car as a kid and my mom driving us to my grandmother’s. Up the steps to her apartment, I remember the wooden owl that sat on a square table besides the couch. It had a heart shape carved into its chest. Slats of wood could be pushed out from the center; I think they were coasters.

What is the world besides a possible configuration of matter? Energy taking form. Nothing more. No supernatural anima, we’re all just bundles of motion.

Memories are just stories, of a sort.

I remember pressing silly putty into the newspaper and seeing how it pulled the ink off, slightly hugging the contours of the print. Waiting for a veteran’s day parade to start. Waiting in the living room of my Grandmother’s apartment. They’d throw candy at us from cars passing in the parade.

The ending is just a page turn away.

If I got up and walked away from my computer it would still exist. A distance of space does not preclude something from existing. And the universe is made up of dimensions of space, but there is also an axis known as time. Every second that passes moves me away from the slice of time I currently inhabit. It’s like getting up and walking away from my computer. The computer still exists. The past does too. All that’s changed is the position.

The story of me and my grandmother is over. I’ll have to say hello through photographs now. Or other people’s memories.

When I was little we had this large plaything made of wood. You could put it down and it would become a set of stairs. Flip it over and it was a rocking boat. Put it on its side and it became a narrow table. Once I set up a camera and chair and sat on my grandmother’s lap and we filmed a make-believe news show. We used the wood plaything as a desk. I think I elbowed her by mistake, or something to that effect, and she let out a yelp. I remember watching the video back on our TV upstairs, and us all laughing at the funny noise she made.

I can always walk back to my computer. I can’t walk back through time.

When I was little we would go to her apartment and see the parades. They’d throw candy at the crowds. I liked the multicolored tootsie rolls. They tasted like sugar and imaginary fruit.

One day I’ll forget everything about her. Those moments are still out there, but like toys and knickknacks I’ve misplaced they will be lost to me. 

Sometimes I’d play with her jewelry. She didn’t like the feeling of earrings that used piercings, so all of hers would clasp on instead. I remember the afternoon darkness of her kitchen, the sun not far gone enough to warrant putting the lights on.

Every second that passes moves me away from her. Like the drive back after a parade. 

The universe is just particles dancing through spacetime. What we call experience is simply the observation of one facet of this incomprehensible multidimensional shape we call reality. And I think lots of people find this terrifying. But there is beauty in the absurd truth of our world. Somewhere across space and time my grandmother is laughing. 

She’s still out there, even though I’ll never be able to reach her. The memories I’m trying to hold onto still exist, and are playing out immemorial.

I think I can live with that.

The end.

Not Quite Crying in Museums

Max Alexander 2 Comments

Last October, as fall was overtaking the Midwest, I went to the store to buy a bag of potato chips. It was around 7:30 P.M. and the sun had already set. The sky was so dark the blueness seemed inky, and I could no longer see the clouds. Across the street from the store there was a great old tree that had yet to lose its leaves. I want to say it was an oak, though truthfully I cannot remember. The cold had already turned the tree auburn. Green faded into orange and red, like old paint was flaking away to reveal whatever lay underneath. Beneath the leaves stood a lamppost. It wasn’t old, like I remember the tree being, but the black paint was covered in dust and mud. White light shone up from the streetlamp, spreading out against the endless dark blue of the evening sky, breathing life back into the leaves.

Not Quite Crying in Museums

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Sometimes people will say nice things about my writing; that it’s poetic and beautiful. Of course I always like getting compliments, though I feel it makes what I’m going to say next somewhat ironic.

I hate dreaming.

To me it feels like drowning. Sometimes I’ll dream about the people I used to date, or being lost in chaotic imitations of our own world, and for various reasons this is never fun. But the subject matter isn’t the main reason I hate dreaming, it’s the actual feeling of being in a dream. 

I can feel this pressure around my consciousness. I can sense that what I’m seeing isn’t real. And while my sleep-addled brain tries to figure out exactly how the scenery before me is fake, the dream drags me along. Forcing me to move while something gnaws at the back of my mind, telling me this is wrong. It feels like the pressure of being at the bottom of a pool, and the panic of running out of breath while you’re still 15 feet from the surface. Like there’s only a few seconds left to figure out that none of this is real.

Sometimes when I wake up I’ll have to sit in bed for half a minute or so just to make sense of what exists and what doesn’t. Readjust myself to the universe.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

I didn’t always know this, or perhaps it wasn’t always the case, but my favorite type of museums are art museums. Though I’m not sure I get on well with museums at all, of any kind. 

Looking at a painting feels almost like dreaming. I have this sense that if I’m not careful I’ll be sucked into the artwork. I have to physically brace myself to fight back against the gravitational pull.

But there’s something intoxicating about skirting the void like that.

I find that my eyes always wander to the landscapes in the background. It feels almost like if I let myself go I could fall into these works, and if I kept walking along the painted hills and the watercolor clouds I would simply leave reality. Go beyond. Go to wherever comes next.

When I look at a painting I worry I’ll get endlessly lost. That I won’t be able to find my way back. But you can’t stare at art forever. So in the end I always pull away from the colors and force myself back into my own body.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Probably on account of how disorienting my own mind can be. Anyone who does analytic philosophy for fun surely doesn’t have the kind of brain you want to be lost in.

And I find that I often get lost in my own thoughts. I mean this in a very literal sense.

Like dreaming, sometimes the conscious world becomes shaped by whatever is happening inside my head. My feelings become instantiated objects, not quite corporeal but more real than an idea in the back of my head. I can move concepts and sentences around like sticky notes on a wall, and I can take them in my hand and feel their texture or crush them between my fingers.

The shape of the universe changes, new fourth dimensional architecture subtly altering the landscape around me, and my personality becomes smothered by all these random abstract objects I let clutter my conscious experience. If I don’t have anything to ground me I often start to slip away. I won’t even realize it until it’s too late.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Everywhere I turn I feel as if there’s this risk of losing myself. Of my consciousness getting ripped apart while I sink into a dream, or a painting, or a trip on the subway.

And unfortunately I’m currently in London on vacation — I figured if there was one thing that would improve my life it would be visiting the UK — so I’ve been taking lots of trips on the subway, and looking at paintings, and sleeping weird hours.

I will say, though, that the wide availability of public transportation is a nice change of pace from Ohio.

But seeing all these people makes me think about all the lives that are being lived. For a thousand people today I am just a brief and seemingly insignificant interaction. Someone taking up a seat on the subway, in their way as they try to exit. But my mere presence will ripple out across the whole of their lives. If I’ve offset their trip by even a second the gender of their child  may be completely changed.

Life has evolved as a complex method of energy capture. A sea sponge sits near a thermal vent so as to harvest the heat expunged by holes in the tectonic plates. Humans are simply the most cutting-edge form of energy collection to exist on this planet. Able to harness power on a near cosmic scale.

When I look at someone on the train I just see an advanced energy harvester. I just see these deterministic creatures that seek out warmth. When I look at the faces of people on the train, their clothes, their shoes, I just see random bundles of matter. Arbitrary offsettings in the schedules of random passerbys forever changing what they wear, or what their hair looks like, or even the shape of their face.

And this is true for me as well. And I can’t understand the thought of interpersonal connection anymore. 

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

I think it’s something you can’t really explain, though that hasn’t stopped me from trying. There’s no real point to any of this. In the most meaningful sense of linguistic communication it is true that nothing matters. People aren’t important, or valuable. You can choose to care about whatever you want, but it’s not grounded. It’s just a particular opinion.

Sometimes I’ve looked in the mirror and not understood what’s looking back at me. All I see is a configuration of matter and the seemingly random attributes it has. And sometimes I’ll look at other people and see the same thing. Is this any more wrong a way to view the universe than how I normally do?

I think if you haven’t experienced these things what I’m saying sounds confusing or stupid, even if you can comprehend in a technical sense what I’m describing. Same thing for the nihilism. Even if analytically you understand the point I’m making, even if you think it’s right, you won’t understand what I’m really trying to communicate.

There’s a kind of horror to being on a train and seeing every face as just an ordering of carbon atoms that I just don’t know how to express.

We can sympathize with other people’s intuitions and feelings, but if you haven’t ever experienced them then you won’t be able to understand how that person is seeing things. For billions of people I simply cannot grasp what it is to be them. And so I’m mostly failing to communicate my point.

I think this makes me insecure; like I’ll be judged for seeming stupid or saying something that appears obviously false to everyone else. I don’t even know if I would have understood what I’m saying 8 months ago.

Either way, it’s just a difference of opinion between us.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

My brother and I went to an art museum today. To be honest I had forgotten the disorienting feeling I get when I look at art, but even if I had remembered there isn’t really an alternative. I wasn’t going to keep my brother in a hotel room all week, and anywhere I go will probably result in the same thing. Nihilism.

Surrounding me everywhere are random people, with random haircuts and random clothing, randomly looking at random paintings. Or it seems this way to me, though in actuality everything was likely determined by the particular way atoms exploded into the universe 13 billion years ago.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life talking to robots, so it’s horrifying to see deterministic machines whenever I look at a person’s face. To feel as if they might be of comparable worth.

I know this is just a state of mind, but it’s so hard to see the otherside in this moment. I want to love and have people care for me, and I can’t understand how those things can exist when everyone is just animated arrangements of atoms, held together by physical laws I barely know anything about.

What if the rest of my life is spent like this? What if I’ll never be loved? What if such a thing isn’t even possible?

It’s overwhelming, but at the same time I don’t really feel anything at all. Just that this is how things are. So I keep walking from room to room, staring at smudges of paint on canvas.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Looking at a painting feels like willingly entering a dream. In some sense suffocating. But there’s also something freeing about being in a different universe for a moment.

I don’t know if the painting I’m staring at is fictional or biographical. I don’t know if any of this is real. But if it was, it would have been beautiful. Even like this I can understand that. These oil paint people would have had hopes and dreams and cared for each other.

I’m not sure why, but I want to cry, and I almost can’t stop myself from doing so.

I long for connection. To not feel so apart from the universe. I don’t feel connected to these painters, or the people they’re detailing. But for the first time in days I feel like it would have been possible if they were alive.

Somewhere across time people are looking at or dreaming up beautiful things, and through decades of dedication have honed the ability to capture what they’re seeing. None of this really matters, but there’s still something melancholy about that.

I don’t feel connected to anyone in this old and ornate building, except maybe my brother, though he is in another room. But I know some of them feel connected to each other. The way they laugh or stand around reading the plaque cards communicates this.

An incredible amount of work and sacrifice made a place like this and the paintings inside it possible. Made it possible for me to stand here. For everyone else to stand here too. I don’t know why but that makes me want to cry.

For the first time in a while I feel some sort of connection to the lives of other people. Not in a literal sense, but in the way that I could see how they might work. See more than just automatons moving. So many people and so many reasons and so many paths in life that all lead us to this one moment in time.

I don’t know if every person feels like me. If it’s just normal to see other people the way I sometimes do. If it is, I hope the people in these paintings, who may or may not have been real, still found time to be happy, as I sometimes have.

(You can click on the pictures)

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

Nothing really matters.

The universe is mostly a black void that is somehow slowly fading into even more of an unordered sludge. Everything I care about is arbitrary, and who I am is fragile and radically contingent on random seconds in a billion other people’s lives. I’ll be dead by century’s end and there’s no reason to love my family.

And this is the part where I say but… 

But I’m not sure I have a hopeful conclusion. Which is what I always say before I find one anyways. But I’m not sure I’m the one to fish hope from the void either. I really, truly, believe that all that exists is a mesh of atoms, energy, and force; and analytically I’ve thought this for almost a decade.

But I haven’t spent the last decade nihilistic either. Mostly I’ve found the time to be happy, and to love. And, as I have also thought for all that time, the absence of truth and reason gives way to the most important question anyone can ask; what will I care about? How do I want to see the world?

I don’t want to view the world with the eyes of a nihilist. Thinking this way makes me feel alone. Unlovable. Like there’s some void in my heart, some lack of soul that means I deserve to be this way. 

To exist is a choice, and one we’re under no obligation to make.

To care is an act of cosmic rebellion, one we don’t have to partake in.

To love is to make a hard decision. To draw an arbitrary line around a set of molecules and fluids and somehow find the will to treasure any of it. To find a reason to ground yourself in this universe.

I’ve been feeling really nihilistic lately.

It’s all just a mesh of stuff, meaningless and randomly arranged.

All that separates us from nothingness is the sheer will to value a few random people. To care about a couple arbitrary goals.

With all we have we need to shape the universe to reflect that which is important to us. Love is the purest form of commitment; one must etch it into the fabric of reality. 

At least this is how I view it.

We are only here for a brief moment. With the time we have we must change the universe to reflect the things we care about and the people we adore. 

No one else will do this. The default is meaningless and lifeless atoms drifting across the cosmic void. And I can’t stand to see the universe like that.

I think this is why I take commitment so seriously. So when I choose to love someone I choose to give them whatever I can. To prove that even when I’m like this, things can still be beautiful and lovely, despite the fact that such concepts are true only in relation to me. To prove to the unconscious stars that these people exist, and that they are cared for by me.

I doubt I ever really succeed, but this is how I feel.

I’ve been feeling a lot of things lately.

The trajectory of the universe was set from the beginning. There’s no changing it now. How my life goes is outside my control. 

We are limited by the nature of reality; by what was set in motion billions of years ago. But we shouldn’t pretend we know what our limits are either. The only way to discover those is to move forward in time.

We are not destined to spend our lives alone and miserable. At least you can never and will never know that was your destiny until the end.

Standing here in this art gallery I wish I was holding someone’s hand. That there was someone next to me to tell me it’s okay that I’m like this sometimes. That there’s nothing broken in me. Someone to push away the darkness with. To keep me from getting lost. Someone who will breathe life back into the autumn leaves and the evening sky.

But besides me are only strangers. My brother has wandered off and for now I am alone trying not to fall into this painting. Trying not to cry.

And Then I’ll Be Gone

Max Alexander 3 Comments

Memento Mori

It is often the case on the weekends, at least in the winter, that I will not see the Sun. I’ll wake up late, not eat lunch, and forget I can go outside until it is too late. Exiting my dorm at 5 pm I am often struck by this fact. Because natural light struggles to make its way past the concrete pit and the wrought iron fence outside my basement window, many winter Saturdays will pass without sunlight.

Wait no this wasn’t supposed to be the depressing part.

I bring this up because, as is often the case, last Saturday I exited my dorm at 5 pm, looked towards the sun, and realized it had already set. But, unlike most nights when the sky is an inky black, what I stared up at was this beautiful shade of dark blue. There was just enough light left from the sunset, and because of the discontinuous cloud cover, the sky was this ever-shifting watercolor painting. It was like standing in an art gallery, gazing up at a work of cosmic scale.

It only lasted for a minute, but I understand why people will wake up early for sunrises or stay out late for sunsets. The hand of chaotic and unpredictable systems painted the sky with patterns and colors no human eye will ever see again.

There is a hardship that comes with being alive for many, but this is an intense and immense privilege I was granted. I feel lucky that I got to witness such a night sky. Had I taken but an extra five minutes to leave my dorm I would have never even known the beauty I would miss.

The Snake

Seeing that night sky changed me. I think for the better. But still, it did change me.

Part of being alive is changing, and I think in a very real sense this means we are not the same person year over year. No one can truly say that when I was sixteen I was as ‘Max’ as I am now. That doesn’t even make sense, we are just different people. Different hopes. Different days and different nights. Different dreams.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to go.

But what if I have to? That’s just what it means to live.

I think I might be in love. Well, truth be told, I’m not sure I know what that word means, if I ever did. But I think I might be in love.

I would not be in this place if I had not changed. Day over day I shifted, and I shifted into the sort of person who is, for the first time in a long time, awkward and tripping over his own words as he talks on the phone with a girl.

Change brings loss. The loss of a moment, especially moments of deep beauty. But change also brings new and equally beautiful things. I’ll never see that watercolor sketched sky again, as long as I live. But I’ll see new sunsets. Pinks that spread across the horizon. Brilliant bright blues and endlessly black midnights.

Change takes things. Things I deeply love, and wish I could see again, if only one more time. But change brings things I’ll treasure just as much. I’ve never really know how to feel about this. But in this current moment I’m happy with what change has brought me.

That Eats Itself

A few months ago I encountered a beautiful idea in a comic.

What if when we died, instead of decomposing, an entirely new person, an entirely new body, sprouted from what was?

The mutants of Krakoa are immortal. The Immortal X-Men. Mental backups from across their life, and genetic code, all stored across multiple redundancies, allow for endless resurrection. They could even return as they were in the past, without the memories of the days they have now lived. But should they die on Otherworld, an Avalon inspired dimension at the confluence of the multiverse, they will truly die. Their mind and its archived copies become corrupted, at least in the sense that it is no longer what was, and upon resurrection their physical form forcibly changes to serve the new person who stands in the place of the changeless old.

One of the mutants dies in Otherworld. What they are is forever gone, erased from the Krakoan archives. They muse, as they stare out and up at the night sky, that they would one day like to die again in Otherworld. Change brought them here, and one day they want someone new to use their eyes to see what they see.

When I die let them use my atoms to make something new. These won’t be the last eyes to gaze up at the sky in wonder. I won’t let that happen.

I don’t want them to bury me under rock and dirt. I don’t want my body to turn to entropic sludge as the decades pass. I want to see beautiful things, and in lieu of that I want someone else to. I don’t want to be the last person who falls in love.

I’ve always had difficulty expressing myself. Maybe that’s why I was single for so long. But I remember discovering I could write, deep into the fall of the pandemic. I felt something churning in my heart, and I crafted that feeling into a story. A small thing I could show people so perhaps they could relate to me, if only a tiny bit more. But I’ll never get to relive that discovery. I’ll never again get to live those nights where I’d let music wash over me and turned sound into digital ink.

Maybe someone else will, one day.

They’ll see the world in a way I’ll never be able to again. I can only fall in love with a person once. There are beautiful things that will dull as I dull. But one day someone full of life will walk the world, perhaps in my stead or perhaps unrelated. They will see new and intensely wonderful things.

In the face of death let life triumph, no matter whose it is. 

Ouroboros

I wrote the end of this essay before the beginning. Like a snake eating its own tale I am inevitably traveling towards my own end. I want to run, I wish I could hide. But the immutable truth I’ve already written won’t let me. No matter what we are traveling towards the ending a dead man wrote. Trapped in the final paragraphs is the person I consumed to propel myself here.

Once More

It’s already started. I can’t stop it now. This is just the reset.

I’ve been in this place before.

Am I destined to repeat this over and over again until my life is gone from me? Must my new year’s tradition be a preoccupation with my own death? My own impersistent identity? 

I’ll be in this place again.

Memento Mori

I don’t want to lose the things I love. I don’t want to lose myself.

But I already have. I’ve died a dozen deaths this year alone. I can see the lingering images of people who woke up a week ago, but I can’t feel what they felt. I can’t see the world through the eyes they had.

They are alien to me, just a grim reminder of what is to come. Death.

Six months ago, before anyone else had moved into their dorm room, I sat alone and wrote. I wrote of great shame I kept hidden, and a great hate that threatened to consume me. I tried to express why and how and what it felt like to so deeply despise myself I cried. 

And now that feeling is forever gone. Everyone I know knows of the reasons I thought explained why my blood boiled when I thought about my own self worth. I just can’t see why the things I thought made me worthless could ever have been reasons to hate myself.

I don’t mourn this loss, but I mourn what it is emblematic of. The very nature of that person is gone. I will never see the world that way again. We are two different creatures, spread across time, a gulf of six months separating us forever. Someone died when I published that essay. I died.

The Snake

When I close my eyes I can see the moments of my past fate has randomly chosen to imprint on my neural pathways. Every time I bring them forward my brain permanently warps them, slowly robbing me of my ability to properly recall the traces of my life I can still call mine.

One day they will morph beyond recognition, and I’ll be none the wiser. I’ll think this is how these moments always were.

They will be lost to me forever.

I remember when I was angry all the time, though this epoch of my past is rapidly becoming foreign to me. I no longer understand the way my mind worked then, I just have the memory of my memory.

When I close my eyes I can see a hike I went on with my family. The long wooden pathway built above a river. From the parking lot it slopes down deeper and deeper into the forest.

I can see the hill we walked up. The view above the nearby lake. The empty beach, far below us.

I can feel the trees cascading afternoon shadows down upon me, and the patterns moss tile the forest floor with. 

As I try to draw more out my mind fails me. Senses become twisted and different trips meld in on each other. I can’t tell where one hike begins or where another ends, or which years separate them.

But I remember this hike, and my headphones as I tried to tune out the world.

I want to scream at myself, use my desperation and willpower to force myself back in time. Don’t you realize your parents will one day die? You’ll wake up and never see your dog again. Your grandparents won’t be here forever.

You idiot. What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you appreciate this moment in time you had? So blinded by your anger and youth you couldn’t see what was in front of you. 

I want to scream at myself. But no one could hear me if I did. Just void and shifting memories, a fake world presenting itself as if it was my life.

One day there will be nothing left of me. Just regret and sadness and the lingering fragments of moments I wasted. Times will change and fade, and I’ll be left alone and powerless. Peering back through time, wishing I could hug my mom or be a better brother.

That Eats Itself

This was supposed to be a celebration of death. When I’m gone let something new see the universe through the eyes I once had.

But I still can’t let go. I don’t know how. Every single second I’m dying. Every single second another moment I could be totally engrossed in the existence of my friends and family slips by. Each new second brings an instance I will one day be shackled by, a failure to capitalize the present which I will mourn.

I can’t stop the passage of time. We may one day halt aging, but I’ll never get back my middle school years.

Maybe I won’t have to watch my family die, but my personality, my very nature, it will still twist and turn until it’s unrecognizable.

Will I wake up tomorrow and hate my family? Will I burn decade old friendships? Drift so far every hobby, every passion, every thing, that made me Max becomes repulsive?

How could I accept a world where I can’t hug my Mom? How could I accept a world where I don’t remember the face of my Father? How could I live if conversation with my brothers was unbearable?

I’m going to die.

I don’t want to die.

Please…

Ouroboros

I wrote this essay across different days and different weeks. Different people are trapped in different paragraphs. It starts with someone awed by the idea that all the joy, all the wonder, he has felt or seen may one day be the privileged experience of some new person. I got my turn to see the value life brings, one day someone just as amazing will forge their own path again. Even if they’re not me.

Then someone new opened this Google doc late one Thursday night. Consumed by dread they tried to capture the fear they felt. Fear they wouldn’t see their loved ones tomorrow. Under the crushing weight of regret, and anger at their powerlessness to fix a life full of squandered moments, they tried to capture what it felt like to cry as they considered a world without their parents.

And then time marched forward.

Someone new sat under a blanket and tissues, tired and sad. Slumped against a wall wishing they knew how to end this essay. How to breathe hope back into their life.

Tomorrow a new man will read these fragile words. He will fix the grammar and fish hope from the void. Find some way to end this, and then format it for the web.

And I’ll still be here. Slumped against my wall, wishing I could fix my past and hold onto myself. Desperate to see the people who brighten my life and weeping because I’m going to die.

And then I’ll be gone.