Predictably Unpredictable

Writing amid all this technology is maddening. This must have been how people felt at the dawn of computers or typewriters or the pen and quill. What is writing now? A desperate race to keep up with a computer that has a fraction of my computing power? It feels that I'm not particularly efficient by comparison. Like although I can create more interesting scenarios, most of those are ludicrous anxieties like what to do if my pants dissolve in public. What is the rest of my brain doing? Hopefully deciding what to make for dinner. 

The rise of artificial intelligence feels like it has exposed something about our own methods. All the stealing and reshaping and reimagining we’ve been doing is now being done at a much faster rate, cheaper, arguably better, and by just about anyone who can comprehend how to manipulate the algorithm as well as a four year-old child. And I've watched in the past few years how everything I used to know and aspire to has gone. It's depressing and I'm starting to think of having cake for dinner, again. 

Still, my insight here is a reminder: that I'm not writing to be the most prolific, or the best. I'm writing for me. I do it because it gives a sense of satisfaction when finished -- like painting a room or growing something in a garden. For me, it is like cleaning, too. It is oddly soothing to write because it forces me to focus on a set of circumstances and rules that occupy enough of my mind that it brings all my thoughts into alignment. It is as if, no thought can exist without being related to the story or narrative at hand and why I am ready to murder my neighbor for playing music loud enough for me to sing along right now.  

I also write because it helps me alleviate uncertainty by highlighting cause and effect. This helps anticipate the future, to see the patterns and hints of what is coming next. Writing is almost like we are reading tea leaves about the lives we are currently living. We know from experience that we are unable to study life directly -- it is too reactive, too predictably unpredictable. So we instead need to observe it indirectly, as though through a mirror we hold outside of the bars of our cells, looking down the hall at what our little shard can reveal.

Revealing. Writing is frustrating at times, but revealing, too. So with little better method, I'll keep looking, peering, writing.