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Just a thought piece, March 9, 2024

There’s a pervasive sense of failure filling me as I rot on the couch, scrolling through TikToks and listening idly to a Let’s Play on the TV. As a “He’s insane with it, let’s go,” exclaims from the VOD of a Twitch stream, and I flick past another cover of an acoustic guitar or piano original audio lamenting about the banality of life under capitalism, or what the consumerist culture of the modern world has led us to, I wonder if this is what I’m meant to be doing. The answer in the back of my head is immediate. You’re not meant to be doing anything.

And yet, the query and the guilt still sticks.

I’m thirty this year.

I’ve been unemployed for three months now.

I’ve got enough savings that it’s not an immediate issue.

It’s allowed me the privilege of being picky for what jobs I apply for.

I don’t want to work in an office. I did it for three years of my life, full-time, and the amount of time I wasted in it, during it, for it, on it, just seems absurd. I’m against full-time work in general. If you really think about it, we get around fifty-five years of fully functional independent able time on Earth; roughly 480,000 hours. That’s excluding after retirement and childhood. Of those, we sleep around 161,000 hours. If you only work full-time, that’s 80,000 hours gone. And that doesn’t include prep or decompression or the commute. You know what that leaves us? Of the fifty-five total years, we get twenty-seven to spend on things we enjoy.

That’s almost half our life.

So, lately I’ve been trying to fill my spare time with things I like, trying not to let the draining money in my savings account send me into a full-blown panic, since I still have bills to pay, and I have to eat, and the government only started giving me assistance last week. Friends would say I’m a pretty chill person, and I don’t usually let things get to me, but three months is a long enough time for this to sink beneath the veneer of my superficial “things will work out” mentality.

I try not to think about what will happen if I don’t find a job before my savings dwindle to nothing.

This “between jobs” period of my life has given me the ability of introspection and reflection.

What have I been doing with my life?

Am I happy? Content? Do I feel like I have some sort of intrinsic drive that pushes me to achieve further?

No. Well, that and other more complex intricate answers. But mostly no.

I am not happy. I am not content. I do not want to achieve.

Is it not enough to simply want to exist?

When did we all start needing a purpose?

During my expulsion from the 9-5 class of productive members of society, I’ve written enough fanfic for a niche media piece that even if I told you the names of the characters, you’d probably furrow your brows and ask, “There’s a fandom for that?” Yes, there is.

There’s about fifteen of us.

It’s been nice to have this little group of friends. But the server is dead lately because the movie came out half a year ago now, and most people have moved on. I sometimes feel like I’m whipping the corpse of a horse when I post into it, trying to breathe life back into the decayed compost of what was once a verdant garden teeming with conversation and spontaneous story. Soon I will have to accept that these people in this server have found better things, have become the breeding grounds for other works and other fandoms, but since I’m firmly in denial that won’t be for another few weeks.

A lot of the fic I work on is fluff. Just insanely sweet get together stories, laden with in-character dialogue and the undeniable sense of reciprocated love. Let’s assume that says nothing about me as a person. It can’t possibly mean that I’m yearning for a connection, for an understanding that goes beyond the small talk on Bumble, of the “What’s a queerplatonic relationship?” opening question as we match, of the brief and elusive spark of interest that never comes.

Yep. Nothing to see here.

I have to say that coming to grips with that fact that you’ve lived your life aimlessly isn’t easy. No, rather, not even coming to accept it, since it’s something I’ve been aware of since I gained consciousness and self-awareness sometime in primary school. I even remember in high school, the careers counsellor, sitting across from me asked, “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”

I said, as a joke, mostly, “Probably dead in a ditch.”

He laughed, and pressed me. “No, really. Where do you see yourself?”

It forced me to process the idea that I never thought about the future. I didn’t have any wild aspirations or goals. Nothing I wanted to attain, achieve, improve, undertake. It all seemed like an emptiness stretching ever further ahead. I’m twice the age I was when Mr. Burke asked me that question and still nothing’s changed.

“I’m not sure.”

It’s difficult to embrace the idea of a mediocre life, of a life that has no major stunning reckoning of purpose, of a life where you create for the sake of making something with your hands, but yet some small secret part of you desires acknowledgement. It’s tiny, but it screams, echoing on and on, voice ricocheting tightly about your skull. Please. Please look at me.

You have done nothing of note, but you want someone to see you.

Sometimes I do want the abyss to scream back.

I’ve made several YouTube channels here and there.

Some of them to vent, some of them to create, some of them to chronicle, some of them to help.

It’s always me, each voice, each aspect, all of them clamouring for something unachievable.

Some element of me always wants to create, to make, to bring into existence something that wasn’t previously there. I can’t for certain know why. It’s been a part of me since I realised I existed. I assume it’s part of the human condition. It’s why people who have never picked up a creative outlet in their lives suddenly feel free when using AI to generate “art.”

I have a very clear stance on the content produced by AI. It’s not art. My sister and I once had a three-hour discussion about the moral and ethical dilemmas of AI generated content. It ended with her conceding that AI could not create art, but it depended on the amount of authorship the person using it included.

It’s a hill I’m prepared to die on.

Art is made by humans.

When you generate something with AI, none of it is something you made. It’s the same as having an in-house chef and asking for a meal to be cooked. Would you call the food the chef cooked something you made? No. An idea does not art make. Sorry, this took me on a tangent.

Speaking of art, I watched a video the other day, where a BookTuber was criticising an author’s past in fanfic writing, tearing into their writing of incest. A lot of people in the comments were decrying the perversion of incest, voicing their disgust and displeasure of it. It was incredibly odd to me, coming from trawling through Tumblr since I was sixteen.

Fictional incest cannot hurt you.

Fictional characters aren’t real.

I’ve seen incestual ships on Tumblr since day dot, and that an author came from such a fandom isn’t really unusual. It’s what writing and art are there for. To express ideas and concepts that don’t gel with real life. It’s a way of processing, a way of safely saying “What about…”. I can list off successful authors who’ve written original fiction involving incest that isn’t sneered at in the same way this author was in the comment sections. Understandably, the negativity might’ve stemmed initially from the topic of the video being about her blatant plagiarism, but the amount of people getting in arms about the incest was a very strange thing to me.

To put it in a cliché sense, it really made me think.

I guess there’s always been a large divide between the communities of what is a fanbase and what is a fandom, and I think it comes down very much to how the different parties give back. A fanbase will likely purchase products, decorate their spaces and work up a sweat online ranting about the content and extolling it’s virtues. A fandom however will engage with the content and then go on to create works that intertwine with the original narrative.

I think you’ll find that fandom encompasses fanbase, but a fanbase doesn’t necessarily include fandom. You can be part of the fanbase of a content but never interact in fandom. But it’s unlikely you are part of fandom and never engage in fanbase behaviour. It’s like a different aspect of enjoying something. Personally, until I started writing fanfic I was part of the fanbase of many things. I’d talk them up, and buy their merchandise, but I operated entirely apart.

Until I found myself consumed by the chemistry of two characters in a film, and the narrative that wound and bound them together in such a way that I was unable to see anything else.

It’s how I dipped my toes further into fandom and I don’t regret it.

I’ve made some fantastic friends through it, and it continues to be an amazing outlet of creativity (and pining). But still I crave something more. I want to create something original. That’s not to say original is better. Sometime derivative art holds layers unachievable otherwise. I’m looking at you, Dante’s Inferno. I guess that’s why I’m here now.

Why I’m writing this think piece.

I guess this counts as originality.

I’m just a normal person who writes normal things rotting in front of my PC as I listen to the same Spotify playlist I’ve been adding songs to since high school. What I create might not be amazing. It won’t be show-stopping. It won’t be worth publishing by some big name. It’s just my thoughts on digital paper. And maybe that’s why I feel as though I’ve failed at life.

I’ve been fed the idea that if there’s something I want to say, it has to be deep and meaningful.

Perhaps it does.

Perhaps it is.

I’m not sure.