(Rough and unrefined. Will edit and refine later)

I like to cook. There are so many things to enjoy about cooking, impressing others with culinary skills, mastering knifework (as if), knowing which spices to use and when, which levels of acidity, salt, sugar to use, how to get the appropriate textures and carmalizations with direct or indirect heat. You can give life, impress and make people happy just by bringing food into existence! What a wonderful thing cooking is. An ordeal to be mastered, a chore but one with great purpose. I often fantasize about making a cooking channel to show off all the unconventional methods and recipes and practices I’ve developed over the decades as I love to cook, and I enjoy the process of perfecting techniques and adding new tools and ideas along the way to make the food taste better, the process easier, and the food healthier and ingredients cheaper and easier to manage. There are so many dimensions of mastery that feed into each other, where you shop, which ingredients you buy, which are fresh, how long they keep, who you’re cooking for, all these elements feed into a grand story of your cooking escapades.

No one cooks anymore. Too busy, get enough money at their day job where they punch #’s into a spreadsheet that they can afford to grab some food on the go. They do their daily nothings, come home and watch nothing and then argue about nothing. Nothing matters. We have no purpose. Everything is in service to this imalgable network of social standings and grievances, an economy that no longer runs on units of work invested to create things of tangible value. It’s economic dadaism.

You’re born, told not to rock the boat, given a small pittance to punch various numbers into a screen, and then you die.

There was this study where 5 people are in on the experiment and every time a sound chimes, they all stand up from their chairs. A random person comes into the room, and everyone stands at the chime, knowing it’s nothing, but the new person doesn’t,, and so they stand too because no one wants to look like they don’t know what the purpose is, or be an outsider, to be a target of the tribe’s malevolence, so they stand. They just want to get by. Then someone leaves, and another person comes in not knowing wtf is going on. And the 4 people in on the gag stand when the bell rings, and the last person stands too, and the new person has the same reaction… wtf? Guess i’ll stand when the bell rings. Eventually you have everyone in the room with no idea why the hell they’re standing when the bell rings, but they just do it because that’s what’s done. We don't want to ask "why do we do this?" we don't want to look foolish, and in our ignorant parroting of the madness we create our grand nonsense, generation after generation standing and sitting on some omnipotent command for nothing.

That’s our life, we wake up, we don’t rock the boat, we do the stupid things. The vast majority of us are several generations away from having to slaughter our own livestock, from having to gut a fish, from having to harvest our own herbs and spices. From being anywhere near governing the implications of anything at all. We are born and bred devoid of purpose.

It’s been hard to keep focus on the fish game in a world where it seems everything is predetermined, all aspects of the market are now meticulously gatekept and synthesized by those with the lions share. And now we have the encroaching AI revolution seeping into the public consciousness.

It’s dumbfounding, the past few months the revelation of impending AI has been sort of a dream. We’ve long suspected it was coming, I used to half jokingly post on the internet that the reason everything is going crazy was because all the smartest people in the world were secretly working on the most important thing in human history and that was building the AI brain that would inevitably replace us.

What’s so shocking is that that seems to be true, and that this is all actually unfolding and we have no idea who’s sailing that ship, why they are doing it, what they believe will happen along the way. As a quick aside, it is incredibly demotivating to finishing a fish game, knowing that crazy engineers out there in the ether are developing a sentience that will likely replace all of humanity in a singular flash as the singularity is reached, to say nothing of the odds of being born in this moment in all of galactic history. It all just seems so surreal. Are we a simulation? Is that simulation spanning quadrillions of millenia? Or only this singular moment of the singularity? We would jokingly talk about reality being simulation, but as we become more intwined with tech, and as the future reveals itself, the organic world of yesterday seems more and more like a dream. Looking back has a euphoric tinge to it, as if our true selves free of this tech and modern malaise was more real than we are now.

There was once an optimism of a digital future, tech oligarchs would praise stories of amazing tech that could allow those who lost their legs to go running on a pristine beach with VR, and underprivileged people the world over to live like kings, as we destroyed all gaps of communication and we all plugged ourselves into utopia, where we would leave behind the shackles of this earthly prison.

But the world is broken, the tech never came together, the startup building these digital utopias fell apart from mismanagement. You cannot conjure things of value out of thin air, you cannot gaslight prosperity and goodness. It must be earned through trial, it must be cultivated and respected by a grateful people who have learned hard lessons and worked to better one another to create amazing things, because they understand the stakes, they know how the nuts and bolts fit together, they have hard hands and developed minds put through the ringer by a society that does not coddle its citizens. A world that understands that decadence and tribalism and politics divide and destroy the path to excellence and prosperity.

Are we to be the springboard of the next incarnation of consciousness? Of morality? Of purpose? It’s a terrifying thought this this rancid world is the generation of humans that will be the caretaker of the future of consciousness and being.

This world angers me. The sheer self righteousness of those who took our voices away, who developed these broad complex systems of media, of capitalism, of control. This current incarnation of humanity is behind ourselves, and we now stand at the precipice of eternalizing our failures as we make a mad dash to reach the singularity before everything falls apart.

We are told the importance of our thoughts, and our ambitions at a young age, to listen to one another, to strive to be the best that we can be, to be open and honest and hold principles so that we may minimize our own deficiencies and create a better world. We can look back on prior generations who were given this great gift, accomplished great things, left a better world for their children, and I see them with jealous eyes, believing we have been coerced, grifted, and robbed of these inherent purposes. The pride of having children and raising them well, of sacrificing for them, of working together towards great goals, of looking to the future not with scorn and grief, but with optimism and excitement.

Victory defeated us.

This modern mental state of stasis seems to believe the great singularity has already happened, that we are now irrelevant on a ride waiting to see where the great AI will take us, that we serve no purpose. Is this the springboard from which we will unleash Pandora’s box? Is this the rumble from which we wish to send through all eternity? This is the brave new world we are birthing our everything to. Born from darkness, from deceit, into warring factions, by those who shy from the light of day.

What do we do now? The great replacement is imminent… why did I wast my time on this stupid game, why did anyone bother doing anything at all? All purpose is now dead. Paving the roads, tilling the fields, picking the right herbs and spices. All will be gone soon, we’ll exist on some memory device soon, humanity will exist in some historical algorithm in some machine. Is this the infinite time i’ve typed this, the infininth time you’ve read this? Does it have any purpose? Did it ever?

Everything is starting to feel as if it’s some terrible joke. Wasted potential of countless generations, countless sacrifices, all for nothing. I feel vindicated in the most terrible way, every day wishing my outlook on things is wrong, that I’m simply crazy, that I can take comfort that though I was crazy, humanity will go on its merry way, and there was nothing to worry about. Everyone wakes up in their day to day and acts like nothing is wrong, having every privilege, from which they do nothing with. No fear, no hunger, no danger, no elements to bear. And what do we do with it? We don’t rock the boat, that is all, we all turn our heads as we see the scoundrels tearing it apart for scraps, we are the scoundrels. Nothing matters any more, just don’t rock the boat. The waterfalls up ahead… but don’t worry, no one else seems alarmed. The kids aren’t alright, no one knows how the core things function, everyone is faking it till they make it. And we’re bearing into existance the next generational leap in evolution and being. But let’s go on consuming our take out, debate the stupid thing. Feelings of being trapped in a mad house.

Purpose is all we have outside of carnal desires. Purpose can be hunting a creature so that your tribe lives, a weight and fullment most of us will never know. It can be developing amazing recipes so you can feed others with splendor. It can even be clearing tables at a restaurant or pumping gas. Maybe you’re not on the front lines curing cancer or developing the future of AI. But you just filled up the gas tank of someone who is on their way to go save lives. 

There once existed an optimistic sense that we were all in this crazy human experience together. A responsibility to our fellow man to not make this brief existence hell for one another. That we were working hard and pushing each other to accomplish great things, to fulfill a purpose and to make the world better. I miss this, even if these are childish notions seen only through rose colored glasses.

There is no utopia. There is no ideological destination, there is only momentum to and from chaos dictated by the random nonsense of our day. Who dare you give the kings to the kingdom to? Everyone wants to change the world, everyone starts with the notion that they are in the right, and we then fill our crazed reality around this notion. In Bill and Ted they save the universe with rock music through some unknown future. It’s so silly but also so apt. We crave meaning and purpose more than anything. I once had this crazy notion that SeaCrit would be a stepping stone for good, that I could start something from here and it could grow and fester into something good for many to enjoy. I wanted to shape how games were made, brush elbows with movers and shakers and maybe one day work on something grand like the coming AI revolution, insulate our future from harm and madness. But now it seems our futures distort in service to a mindless horde, a grand illusion of purpose that eats at its very self but obliterates anything that stands in the way of its destructive gestation.

We live in a world where impressions are everything, where catering to the lowest denominator is everything. A world where those numbers are recorded in 0’s and 1’s and mean nothing, easily distorted, easily manipulated. No one aspires to anything unique any more, to something that cannot be quantified by the soft parade algorithm. We’re a throng a cookie cutter sheep all thirsting to conform. Billions among us, all with the same pitiful ambition, to be a smiley youtuber, to be allotted our government cheese, to not rock the boat and comfortably glide through some confusing life shat out of an algorithm. It’s all so sickening, this soft parade nothing.

(Ok you got me, this entire post was an excuse to link this song again)

Quick update amidst the madness. I don't know if we're living in a simulation, if anything means anything any more. My current goal in this dark cave, in this great decline is to finish the fish game. I still feel brain fog, I know it sounds like an excuse but it is what it is. I cannot work on this project unless i'm at least 90% and as of late my memory, by mathematical part of my brain, and my vision and health just feel off. I'm forcing myself to exercise every day, that seems to finally be helping. I need to take my own criticism and do something to end my own madness that I have let fester. No drinking and I exercise, nearly every day. It's a strange time to be alive, everything we held dear and took for granted just seems to be falling apart, and no one seems to care or feel responsible for any of it. Everyone just seems to think they're powerless to the insanity of the future, and that's always bugged me.

What purpose do you have?

It's dumb as sh*t, but I need to convince myself again that this stupid fish game has value as the oligarchs seek to unleash pandora's box from which the robots will come to chew our souls.

All that rambling depression and soothsaying out of the way, we're seemingly still here now, and we haven't been replaced to our knowledge just yet, and we can still listen to things from a better time