Residuum

Wednesday 5/12/26

This is a letter to some people I know from early this afternoon.

Among the most depressing things I see now are accounts in teaching subreddits from teachers, as to their experiences in classrooms. And their experiences now, versus in times past. It's just going to get worse unless there's some drastic sea change. I don't need these instructors to tell me this. These accounts, though, of children--high school kids included--who can't do anything for themselves, follow more than one basic instruction at a time, comprehend anything they read, write anything on their own; their lack of motivation, any curiosity...it's terrifying, and especially so for me.

I'm dependent on other people. I'm not the plumber depending on the pipes failing and the sink leaking. Then you have all these academic institutions embracing AI, telling staff to push it, basically. The way of the world and all that. We can't think. Humans can't think. Never mind read and write. They can't formulate thoughts. I see this even in the Monument. It used to be, too, that you went to bed, and you read. Parents encouraged reading, and likely read to you. All of this rot starts in the home now. The teachers don't have a shot by the time the kids get to them.

The parents stick the device in the child's mitts, and the device, the screen, is "the book" of yore. And it rots the brains out of their heads. They'll never be able to think. And it just happens. Nothing is being done to stop any of this, but rather the opposite. You can't have any internal quality of life this way. You can't have fulfillment. You can't have true connection with anyone, anything, or even yourself. Remember when 1984 would be cited as a kind "Oh, no, not that" type of thing? This is worse and getting worse.

Anyway. I just worked for ten straight hours, and now, exhausted, I get to walk a mile and a half to Charlestown to go up and down an obelisk. One of the three stories I worked on today, by the way, was "You're Probably Just Tired," which is the real national anthem, or should be. It just happens to be in the form of a story. But nothing speaks better to how so many adults now are. People are losing their minds, losing themselves, and they don't have the tools to do anything about it, and there's no support system to do anything about it, no framework of commonality (as distinct individuals who are also part of a whole), empathy, and peer support. It really is becoming this awful rat race, without the rat's thinking powers. But not a true race, which implies fair play anyway.

People are being engineered, and are self-engineering, to be beasts of burden. Physical burden, spiritual burden. Post-human residuum. The mind needs to be broken by 1. What are in effect digital plantation owners reliant on people being too stupid to realize what's happened to them, and what they're helping happen to them and 2. Those same people who don't have the strength and courage to handle what their mind and thinking would cause them to see, especially as pertains themselves. So the mind--for both the masters and the people who are mastered--needs to be dispensed with. Gotten rid of. You have these unthinking, barely sentient callous creatures. Just one big blind callous. Like a callous monster in a '50s sci-fi film.

I think about people in vegetative states, hooked up to machines, and technically alive. That's ambulatory people now, if you follow me. The metaphor is bang on. Not thinking, not being able to think, protects people...while also making their lives worse. Their time on earth mostly without a point to it, save eat, fuck, procreate. And pass this shit on. Pass on being this way. And as time goes on, there are fewer and fewer holdouts. They're weeded out. Until you'll have a race where not a single member of it can think. Who can now? It's such a small percentage. Another generation and thinking could be gone.

And you know what? They'll often boast about their own inability to think. It's this violent defense mechanism because they can't take accountability and self-reflect, accept, address, alter, grow. Those are beyond our capabilities now, and we're not emotionally strong enough either. We've made ourselves too fragile with all of this nonsense. All of these lies. These "likes" and follows" and near complete aversion to...reality. Such that when reality is made to intrude, it's a potential killer, it's the devil, it must be kept out, shouted down, or the bearer of its news executed. Or the next best thing, that failing. Shunned. Etc. They rally around this notion, gang up with others in pounce/bully-style against the non-enabler in this behavior and being this way. Which is the same thing that makes their lives what they are. So joyless, disconnected, unhappy, unfulfilled. And, in turn, makes life that much harder for the exceptions.