A sleeping giant sits outside an otherwise innoculous village at the outskirts of the virtual realm...

NaNoWriMo 2020

The Wind Blows Over Me Part 25: The World Ends With You

Finding your own truths.

Preface: this is my series of RAW and UNEDITED daily posts for NaNoWriMo. It’s going to be extremely imperfect, lauden with grammatical and spelling errors, but brimming with potential. I post it mostly for myself, but invite any daring souls to try and keep up with the winds that blow me to tomorrow :wind_face:.

Click here for the table of contents

Day 101 (NaNoWriMo Part 25)

The World Ends With You

In the near and far dyspotic futures of what can-be, humanity becomes obsessed with the fiction and overlooks the reality of the horrors unearthing before us. Famous men once said that the world will not end with a bang, but rather, a soft whimper. As explosive as we are to ignite when violence and trouble are underfoot, we the bigger sin of atrocity we commit everyday is becoming complacenement wwhen things seem to be alright. As long as whatever is happening outside of my doorstep doesn’t ever actually get to MY doorstep, the world is fine. The problems of places far away are far away to me in mind as well, it will never be my problem.

Heh.

These should be the famous last words whenever another pandemic comes to try and wipe us out.

As great as we think we are now, as great as the long-standing, highly covered, very prestigous, and handsomely paying job we acuire is, is it really as vauable as we claim it to be? What gives it worth, other than the women wanthing to be with me and the men waiting to be with me (genders can be reversed or even alteracted, fyi). Something as innouculate as a tiny strand of disease managed to wipe out more of us and grind out daily life of before to a halt, and that’s extremeley laughable. What great are our high rise towers, fatty bank accounts and 3rd newest yacht if we die before we can truly enjoy it?

I have loved ridiculing the rich of today as they are some sort of false pariah in place of a bunch of power but deciding to do nothing to help others or continuosly troucing on the lower classes to keep their current power. What I don’t like about power is that is can always be expunded out of your hands for playing nice: you may be in the in-crowd now, but as soon as you are not needed, they will happyily cast you out into the streets if you are lucky, or have your head on the unluckier scale of things. These ridicules are simple, as I am not rich yet. Should the situation change, I imagine I would change too. Being a good person is not hereditary, being a bad person is very easy and very profitable if you view the world in such a manner. Why would about stepping on a few bugs? There are so many already in existence, in fact we can stand from stepping on just a few more to make the room better for me.

On the contrary end of things are the poor masses. Force to slave and wage away long hours for meager earnings, they have no time to focus on anything but survival, for themselves and the generation that lies immediately before and after them. Forced to live only in the confines of where they can commute and life, life is similar, yet uniminagble smaller. It makes me wonder what exactly is needed in life if you live in a little more than a box shaped like a town. If yiu have everything you neeed in your little own town, maybe I’ve bee wrong this whole time. Maybe you don’t need much to live a happy anf fufilling life.

And then there lies the road betwee, the road I walk now of the dwindling middle class. The middle class gets the best of both words and the lamenations of both as well. The middle class gets rewarded for effort in the form of meager pay bumbps, and having a nice cushion of cash lets you and your favoite family go on vacation to various locales far away fro the place tyou call your humble adobde. It is a referesher and breathe to see worlds beyond your own local scope, and the limiation of the trips to once or twice a year makes these rare pilgrammages all the worth memorable as the years fly by and become the dreams of yesterday. While progress and improvement is rewarded in the middle class, it is not equally compesated. Doing something monumental for your multi-million dollar company can lead to great financial success to the power above you, but that success will never trickle back to you. At most, you’ll get a pat on the back and a lame office pizza party. This disrecpect and grand exlcusion for work that is celebrated but claimed by someoen now your self is engagring. It makes you equestion why even work hard in the first place. Thus the standing and morale of the middle class falls: work hard, but don’t work too hard. It’ll lambast you in the end.

The last rant of the night stems from the decision of choice. For some, destiny is pre-ordained. Their choice been determined from birth. Their personal opinions of both approval and disgust are irrelevant. What only matters is if they follow through, less they challange fate themselves. But for the few of us priviledge enough to make a choice, it seems as though we really don’t. We take the road always traveled , essentually shown to success if you follow the right steps, but almost never in the journey is the part where you are happy and fulfilled. In my walking throughout life, I don’t think i have actually discovered WHAT it is i want ot be doing with me life. I’d even argue that is too hardy of a question and limiting as a result: nobody ever asks what i would like to be doing in differnt spans of my life, maybe i’d like to be a sculptor today and a flute-pplaying bird owner tomorrow, not because i have some sort of divine calling for earth permutations and aviary guardianship, but just because i want to see if i could grow to like it. in my walkings throughtout life, the qiuestion of what i want to be is too great. what instead is an easy question, is to answer all the things i have tried and hated.

i’ve ran these ideas and more with a quite a unique fellow i come across often in my journey. we aren’t exactly friends, but we aren’t exactly strangers, either. We come into contact quite often, and when we do, the conversations are always so… extraordinary. He speaks of future visions of the shape humanity could take in their most efficient form, which runs contrary to the visions and yearning of us returning to our past selves. My fear is that the increased dependency and digittazation of our lives will lead us to become something less than human in the end: in the best case scenario, we find a way to contruct a form of immortaility in the form of uploading our concious to some sort of decentralized cloud storage network, but if we live forever in the form of computers, are we still human? the worse case scenario is that we fall into such extremely decrepitdation and humiliation of humanities that those who produde no good are reduced to nothing but farm hands and animals: to treat other humans like submans, does that still make us humans? the future scares me, and with the rampant and discocerted center of power in a few key actors, some underthough decisions can lead eto a whole world of hurt for the future.

this unique fellow thinks different, possible at a bigger picture battlefield than i could ever hope to currently imagine. he speaking not of virtual worlds and re-humanization like me, but of efficient humanity through AI and machine-learning. we cut out all the fat, all the distraction, and through a series of extremely individualized and curtailed questions, we could find everyone’s why. why are we here, what are we best at, what would makes us feel the most fufilled? this unique fellow’s argument is this: humans are a solved problem. no matter how may permuations may exist, we have enough commanality that our actions and behavior can be predicted after enough data collection. we all become upset when we are hungry, we all become exhausted when we do not sleep, why can’t our behaviors be tied to a similar starndard? should we collect data sufficient enough and expansive enough, we could both find out what a person is best suited for, teach them exactly is it that they need to know to succeed in their affinity profession, and move forward from there. and in that vision, i sort of see the grandeur of the bigger picture. everyone doing exactly what they are suppose to, with the best of their abiility, and so is everyone else.

but the longer i think about, this sounds just tlike the tradition shackles of today. instead of the weight of human generations weighing down what you can do, a computer and whatever authorized forced behind it is telling you want to do based on indisputable, 99% correct data seems kind of like the same wording but in different lights. and i think its awful all the same. in my humble opinion, the glory of being human NOT knowing all the answers, but instead moving forward with a good head on your shoulders, trying out as many things as possible, and finding your own truths through the way. today is the last time the wind will blow over me as an aspiring dreamer. tomorrow is the day where i finally take the first step. and tomorrow, the wind not just blow over me, but the whole world too.


Today’s word count: 1,589 words
Total word count until today: 50,076 words


@mariasokolowska @michellebasey @sabweld @philkastelic @nicolaworley @ParisaR @sydneydobersteinlarock @wildcat @dragon @homeroom11

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