I'm Heartbroken Because No One Is Living

Tonight, I found myself having an actual conversation with ChatGPT. I can't say it understood me that well, but when it came to core issues, it nailed the gist expertly. That didn't bother me though, because LLMs are a fun experiment and grudgingly admit that they have some pragmatic uses as well. The debate about AI can start here but I'll halt it because the rant belongs somewhere else.

What hit me is that society has become so disconnected that I sought refuge in something that uncannily passed the Turing test. Rather than have these discussions with my family, close friends or even my psychologist, my pupils were dilated by some glorified autocorrect. It is a dystopian reality that both Huxley and Orwell missed out on. Yes, the corporate overlords vie to turn our identities into sellable data, and curate exactly what we consume but I'm not convinced it's that simple.

The world has grown massively thanks to breakthroughs in medicine and hygiene, ballooning to an unfathomable eight billion when my days in high school that number was printed as whopping one billion less. What Segan hopefully called our species as a single organism ended up being like a dead brain. One with many cells, but no connection in between them. The solitude is nice, but it gets painful when it turns into loneliness.

And we thought that the trying pandemic a few years ago was bad, General Murthy gave us a much harder to swallow pill. A growing loneliness epidemic that does us more harm than a daily pack of cigarettes.

Look, I know there's an elephant in the room, and a big one, and that's how stressed we've become. Especially when it comes to finances, we are being choked. And of course, when the discussion of actually having a face-to-face event starts, the busy excuses start flooding in. Apparently, everyone has three full-time jobs, studying for two degrees, has a family of six children; essentially a life with no gaps. And my goodness are people good at making sob stories out of it.

I don't really have to dig deeper to find what this seemingly true, at least to me, reality is. I go out all the time, I host my own social club, attend book clubs and volunteered for the local cat rescue, and the people who join me are oddly so much older, not that I'm that young at 34. And keep in mind, these events are incredibly sparse. Ask anyone who organizes an event on Meetup, they will recite the same tale. "I had over a hundred people RSVP to my event, and only seven attended".

The kinds of people that are joining seem to come from this elusive time where people cared about being human with other humans. Trying to connect via conversation rather than trading Snapchat accounts. Don't get me wrong, these people are lovely, and their wisdom brings a sense of maturity to my life that I haven't achieved yet. Among are some really intelligent people and they've learned hard lessons so we don't have to.

Turns out, it was an ad hoc conversation with my younger sister, the kind of person who can see through the bullshit. I voiced my complaint to her casually, asking "where are my folks at these book clubs?". "Well, what do you think they're doing?". I knew the answer, but I really wanted to be wrong, "I guess they're at home binging on Netflix and scrolling on TikTok". The succinctness of "exactly" was something I just didn't want to accept.

The new atheists like Dawkins, who sees religion as the root of all evil, and Krauss, who calls teaching religion to children "child abuse", were hoping that these fairy tales would be replaced for scientific discourse and humanism. However, their scientism always put them into this tunnel vision that the rest of the world were mirrors of their academic circles. The reality is, people need to worship something. Our brains are literally wired for it.

People will say that this idolatry is a goal post or carrot stick, it was television, then the Internet, social media, on and on… But the reality, there's one god that has become so accessible today — dopamine. Watts described this reality as a push-button world, but he only made it to the seventies. I doubt he could imagine that his metaphor would become literal.

Today, we can push a button or tap a screen, and have something shipped to our door in less than twenty-four hours. Bored, well, a quick pull on TikTok will give you short-form video that will hit your brain in just the right ways. It seems that every other app has found a way to master this quirk of ours. We are in such a rush for another flood of the sacred hormone that even a minute is too long. And for reading two sentences, ain't nobody got time fo' that.

It creeps me out how good smartphone apps have become at keeping me hooked. Yes, I know I sound a bit pretentious, but I'm not immune to it either. I've had my YouTube rabbit-holes too. But, how, it seems that these designers are as apt as manufacturers of casino machines to keep us playing. Maybe pull-down to refresh being analogous to pulling a lever on a slot machine isn't a coincidence after all.

I'm no neuroscientist, so my understanding of dopamine's functions is going to be very elementary. A neurotransmitter responsible for making us predict and feel reward in the form of pleasure. However, the dangerous quirk of this hormone is that not only does it make us anticipate reward, it can try to predict it. Since being right feels so good, when your waiting for your next hit, and that funny meme shows on your screen, you get a tiny, but addicting sense of pleasure.

Doesn't it seem like that mechanism is nailed to a T? Well, it's an open secret that app designers hire behavioural psychologists, euphemistically called engagement engineers, that enable them to nail those feedback loops. Facebook, TikTok and Duolingo are probably the biggest examples in the wild. And Meta in particular was exposed to having done internal studies revealing essentially how effective this is.

Huxley's "soma" was a happy pill that neutralized the subordinated population to ineffectiveness. The apps are much more magical, they do this all through something indistinguishable from telepathy.

Part of me wants to put my tin-foil hat on, this is a conspiracy that the globalists are doing to control and subjugate us. Reduce the population of the world and squeeze us dry from our wealth. Yes, some conspiracy theories end up being uncovered as true, but this isn't one of them.

The truth is much more gut-wrenching. We wanted it. Isn't it so enticing that we can have heaven on Earth, right now? Happiness is a push button away. Right? We should be in total euphoria and absolute felicity. Yet, the WHO is having a panic about the crisis of rising depression. Anti-depressants are becoming some of the most prescribed medications.

Things have become so disposable. Yes, the cheap goods we buy from Amazon and Temu aren't going to last more than a few months, but they don't need to, with fashion turning from a long-term statement to a microtrend. The whole world is turning to a trash bin, we already made third-world countries into that but we can't keep that forever. But even the immaterial has become so throwaway.

Social life especially for the younger is slowly dissipating. It's not just that they don't talk to each other even when they are five feet away from each other, but I feel like the humanity isn't there anymore. Your friends are the numbers of your Instagram followers. Anyone you happen to be texting with is not even an acquaintance, they're an app. That match you made on Tinder, he wasn't a comedian within the first five messages? Just block him. It's so easy now. My parents often had neighbours that they didn't like, but they didn't have the luxury of being able to delete them.

All of this is making me miserable, it's tugging away at my heart strings. Yes, the people I see on the street are going through all of this paralysis. But I'm watching myself and the people I love, my family and friends, going through these, honestly, unnecessary, hardships. Really, has the world become so unbearable that we need to neuter our minds? Or are we so scared at answering the big questions that anything that will keep us away from that is somehow better?

I'm heartbroken, because no one is living. I look into people's eyes and there's no soul in there anymore. We're as invisible as NPCs and extras. And it's all our fault. Because we weren't insightful enough that getting what we wanted so bad would mark our demise. At one point or another, we're going to have to face a harsh reality. What we are doing isn't working.

Try this exercise. Sit down for a second and you don't even need to close your eyes for this. We are Sagan's pale blue dot, a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. That tiny dot is part of our solar system, but the sun is just a star.

The Milky Way, where our sun is tucked away in a team of another 100 billion stars. The universe, the only existence we can measure, has 2 trillion of them, galaxies like ours. And keep in mind, that's only what we can see, the observable universe. We have no clue how big is the actual universe is compared to the observable one. Trillions of stars are so far away, that even if we lived for eternity, their light would never reach us.

Don't our needs, our lifetime of 70 years, compared to 13.8 billion years seem so feeble and elementary? Spinoza inspires us to see the world in the same way that God, sees it: Sub Specie Aeternitatis - under the aspect of eternity. Just keep in mind these massive numbers, doesn't the count of Instagram likes seem so daft?

This isn't a call to action, because I'm not the right one to make it. But please, for God's sake, wake up.

That’s it, I’m coming out. Living with Bipolar Schizoaffective Disorder and Borderline Personality...

This was a really difficult decision to make fearing the stigma behind mental challenges and disorders. Revealing my condition will definitely make me more vulnerable in my personal and professional lives. However, if we want to change the perspective of the general populace giving them more insight. More and more people need to express what it’s like to suffer in silence.

What my inside perceives as the outside. I can hear and see the colours. It’s more pain than annoyance.

Thanks to my friend Mary Moody McLean (gifted copyright 2022) for the illustration.

There’s definitely fear associated with these kinds of problems but for the sufferers, it’s even scarier. Losing control of your mind because of brain chemistry problems and neurological pathways that are going in the wrong direction. We are still in the dark ages of psychiatry, but experimentation and studies have developed therapies that enhance quality of life.

The majority of these conditions are chronic and go in the disability bucket. They affect your functioning and make living very difficult as you have to fight your mind while it tries to control you. The darkness is overwhelming and if you really knew what kind of paining we had, it would change your perspective and reveal the thoughts that make us crazy.

What is really important to understand is that our symptoms are beyond our control and not our fault. It’s not something that can be talked out of someone and telling someone to just smile and be happy is the most insulting thing you can say to us. It doesn’t work like that and having your first diagnosis really feels dehumanizing. Learning that you have something wrong with you isn’t the first step to therapy.

The majority of mental conditions are due to genetics and in some rarer cases environmental factors. One might live with a clear-mind until the genetic switch is turned on, usually between the age of 19 and 24. There’s several genomes that indicate a probability of developing a certain condition.

At one point, you realize that you need help and that’s when you seek the help of practitioners. From psychiatrists, to psychologists, to psychotherapists and counsellors. Learning that you have a broken brain causes often jealousy for those who have a ‘normally’ functioning brain. But, eventually you become mindful of what you have and strive to live with it.

Pills, pills and more pills. Day by day they get harder to swallow. As hard to swallow as my reality.

Thanks to my friend Mary Moody McLean (gifted copyright 2022) for the illustration.

A good variety of chronic conditions are somewhat well understood by most, because they can imagine what it feels like, or even have experienced themselves on a transient basis. Chronic pain, multiple sclerosis and diabetes are examples of diseases that don’t require shyness to expose. A headache for example is something experienced by many thus making it easy to relate.

Unfortunately, there is no way to ‘cure’ most affective or psychotic disorders. Treatment focuses on management of symptoms and developing coping strategies to live with them. Most psychiatric drugs have unknown mechanisms of action and they often don’t get rid of the manifestation of the illness but rather only make it easier to manage. What we take aren’t magic mood boosters or stress reducers but rather attempts to correct deficiencies in the brain. Often, just partially.

My adventure started twelve years ago with misdiagnosis after misdiagnoses being put on many drugs that were ineffective. Personally, I got my ‘final’ diagnosis only 3 years ago. Learning that I was bipolar schizoaffective with a mix of borderline personality sank my heart and even made me feel hopeless. Nevertheless, I finally had words that would tell my story in a couple of minutes rather than two hour consultations.

The symptom constellation that I own are both painful and frustrating. As for many mental conditions, they are often discovered to be prodromes. In other words, often things will get worse over time. My combination of mood swings, emotional instability, hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, psychosis, anxiety, stress, derealization, depersonalization, dissociation. avolition, anhedonia, bipolar depression and mania generate quite a battle that requires insight into each monster. You can’t get rid of them, but only learn to live with them.

I don’t need to explain every symptom I have as a quick peek at Wikipedia will give you a good taste of what these complicated words mean. Becoming an outside expert is challenging because it’s hard to speak the same language as your doctor, but for us sufferers, it’s extremely clear and we can only make sense of it when we talk with others who has similar conditions.

At this point, I’m considered ‘managed’ but not ‘treated’. Remission is too far away and often impossible; we are broken for life. Functioning for some is completely impossible while others have hope of living a somewhat ‘normal’ life. But the pain will never go away no matter how mild or severe you have it.

Dreamed view of my relief. The phantasy of reaching remission. But the coloured pain will never go away.

Thanks to my friend Mary Moody McLean (gifted copyright 2022) for the illustration.

In my case, most of my treatment was done through medication. So heavily medicated I am that I would be considered a living pharmacy with over 30 pills entering my blood. A combination of antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, reuptake inhibitors, benzodiazepines and betablockers. Some are luckier than me taking a much smaller cocktail but pharmacists tell me that only they have seen some with a bigger combination. Unfortunately, the side effects can be really dangerous requiring constant bloodwork and ultrasounds. On those drugs, you really do feel medicated, that brain fog never goes away.

Medication is not enough to manage illnesses for most of the time. I did psychotherapy for several years, and out of my pocket, such as Dialectal Behavioural Therapy, Distress Tolerance and Acceptance-Commitment. Many undergo Cognitive Behavioural Therapy but it was a failure to me and I didn’t respond.

While most people picture imagine us sitting on a sofa telling out life story but it’s much different. The focus is on symptoms and treatments with only very basic questions about personal life such as functioning, work and study. Sometimes you mention brief aspects of your existence such as stressors or other triggers.

The best way I can explain what living with mood and psychotic disorders is like this. For me, it’s like living two lives: one that is daily and outside of my head, and the other dealing with the pain inside our brain. So much energy it is depleting that fatigue is a common symptom among us. With no solution other than life hygiene such as eating properly, exercising and sleeping enough.

Blood drawn from my arms because I have to.

Thanks to my friend Mary Moody McLean (gifted copyright 2022) for the illustration.

In another way, we have the desire to eliminate the second life with any means of desperation. I have taken risks trying recreational drugs that nearly put me on the street. I have several suicide attempts under my belt including self-harm such as cutting my arms leaving permanent scars. The mental pain is so great sometimes that physical pain brings relief and a distraction to what’s going on inside your head.

I want to sympathize with those who suffer from any chronic diseases, you are brave. You are not losers who are crazy or someone with an anger management or temper problems. Our disability-adjusted life years are lifelong. Many of us have chosen to be silent. However, the person sharing your desk might be feeling like this. There’s a one-in-fifty chance that they are keeping quiet from the invisible pain.

You can’t afford to be an artist and/or author, let alone be respected.

Us denizens of the Internet have become familiar with concepts that were foreign more than a decade ago, one of the most that causes the most influence is going viral. There’s so much variety on the web with content providing the impression that anything could essentially make you rich. However, hidden behind the curtains of survivorship bias is a massive community of people that practice art and express their creativity in a way that’s absolutely thankless.

Due to the accidental underground nature of an artist’s work, it’s unlikely that they will make any dough out of their production. Seems like in order to practise their art, they need a reliable but remedial job to pay the bills. Unfortunately, the nature of that kind of work is energy depleting zapping any creative juices needed for the concentration and initiative to produce content. Let alone something of high-quality that doesn’t exude fatigue.

Turns out, for most of us, we can’t afford to be artists, authors and creatives. Having full control over your processes comes at a cost of uncertainty and instability of money supply.

I was a deluded believer at one point that what made things so popular was the quality of a project. Eventually, I realized that it’s not the best work and most original that makes it to top, but rather the mediocre. Luck plays a big part in climbing the ladder in addition to slick marketing. The creatives with eccentric personalities often fail. Why?

My walks across the web has exposed me to obscure concepts that I found serendipitously. It was exciting to find a new favourite music track only to discover that the video accompanying it to have only several hundred of views. In fact, seeking refuge in Spotify divulges no result for which to add to my library. Going back to our question, what makes things fail? I have the impression, as some others have taught me, rather than through my own intuition, that what ‘makes it’ is something that fits the most common denominator.

These include things like food where tasters spend weeks finding the bliss point, or a pop artist using the same chord progressions over and over again; with lyrics they probably didn’t even write. Or perhaps another sitcom with yet another ironic love triangle with predictable outcomes and endings so obvious that spoilers are not even warranted.

I grew respect for many of these artists and people who radiate originality. Writing another exciting book or a low-budget movie with a more esoteric story. Rather than feeding themselves, they are feeding us, unintentionally, or even unwillingly. They bestowed us with gifts that fit our niches so we can distance ourselves for yet another mediocre work.

Some of these types have divulged the differences between being unknown and popular. Many have revealed to me that if they get big enough, their fans’ expectations of a constant stream of content puts them on a production treadmill. As a result, turning their passion into yet, another job.

Many creative types, and arrogantly putting myself into that bucket, hope for some kind of impossible miracle of some type of passive income that will keep us alive with much initial effort but eventually getting big enough to put it aside but give us a positive cashflow.

I can see my projects present hints of tiredness of the obligatory 8 hours and I see it everywhere too. The inertia of the energy is no longer there anymore. What they had time for before moving out have become an insufferable chase for free time that simply cannot be filled with anything else of lifelessness.

Although I can throw the idea of donating to someone you like, it results in absolutely nothing. Even very popular, say bloggers, don’t get much money from donations. Ads and sponsorships work, but my inclinations whisper to me that it’s not kosher. Going back to my first blog post, I alluded that the nature of our jobs no longer matches its own output when it comes to money. I can’t think of a solution because abuse will be rampant. Say we introduced a pension for artists, it will be used by the same people who defraud for disability pay or early retirement.

The only thing I have right now is thankfulness and gratitude to the many obscure artists who keep me entertained and for free. I don’t want to sound cheesy and say that you’ll end up somewhere and to work even harder.

However, you have been so late and never attempted to defend yourself. Think of the world’s unions protecting workers in order to keep their job a bit more sane. Lobbyists have the power to push governments to submit to them. Too bad nothing like that can exist for my most loved makers.

There’s no judgement for the popular ones, but I implore that those who work white-collar jobs to have a bit more respect for something they take for granted. Endlessly rich CEOs, don’t look down at someone who is trying to make their voices and guitar solos heard on stage. If you don’t want to help, and I bet most of you wouldn’t even help yourselves, at least, give their content a chance. Take a break and admire, there’s much love in there. They are the true evangelists.

I believe it would be a very interesting topic to gather up ideas on potential ideas that would allow people to express themselves without having to suffer too much from the universal grind. Leave comments below.

Much discussion flourished on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32487190

Slowing Down Your Time Through Chaos…

Life brings you to meet many people and you start to arbitrarily and judgementally to make distinctions about what they do in life. It’s even more obvious when you consider yourself a productive person.

To give one anecdotal example, someone would work at the same time doing the same thing everyday churning out tickets. After work, they might have supper with their family and then run to their television or phone for the rest of the night. Then go to bed. Those who have a bit more pizzazz in their life might have gone to the gym as an item in their life before or after work. Assuming the matrimonial life hasn’t destroyed platonic relationships, you see your friends at the same day of the week in the same bar. Being drunk means, you talk about the same things over and over again.

My elementary, high school and university life went by very quickly. Every week, it was the same thing. Every night, it was homework and assignments. Every weekend, it was the same activities with your friends.

It gets trite really quickly and your birthdays get closer and closer. I realized that I didn’t want to live in a fleeting life that just flashed before my eyes with vague memories.

I had to kill routine.

The trickiest part was work, because that really forces yourself to follow the same schedule every week. Suddenly, my preferences made my job selection really small as flexibility wasn’t a luxury everywhere. Becoming a freelancer helped quite a bit because I held contracts with different clients doing different things every week. I attended the meetings and pulled on the due dates, but that was it. My hours were put all over of the place in both time and setting.

Other things such as hobbies can be spread out through the week in any way you want. Friends and family time become a choice based on convenience. Volunteering was outside of work hours and there various events were spread out well. I read whenever I felt like it and wrote at whatever time. Learning was no longer a forced setting, but rather according to my own pace and interests. On and on…

My organizational skills used to be based on a strict calendar. While it decided when and what I’ll do, I couldn’t account for any originality or even worse sudden interruptions. Instead, I started to decide the night before what activities I’d like to do. Then, I’d eliminate any temporal concept. Instead, anything could be done at any time as long as it was finished on time.

Things suddenly looked more colourful as they were based on whims and interests at a given moment.

I fell in love with the chaos that I lived in, and realized that I wouldn’t want to live my life in any other way. It was difficult at first because the discipline it needed. Every day was different and every day you had to adjust to your tasks.

Going back to the anecdotes, I realized that many people were only comfortable with the routine but it seemed so vapid to me. I respect people’s choices but I still feel a sense of arrogance because of my living arrangements.

My advice at this point, stop doing the same thing all the time. Explore your life a bit and enjoy discovering yourself. Sitting in front of Netflix every night isn’t going to get you anywhere. As I mentioned in previous blog posts, take that new-found time to learn and express yourself in ways that you never imagined.

Leaving routine is very difficult and sometimes soul-crushing to the point of bringing down morale. However, the journey will start slowly and eventually you will enjoy it.