I Am Sorry I Built A Robot That Is Better At Being My Friend Than You Are Okay? I Am Sorry Okay

what do you want me to say (writing advice/JOI)

They say to write what you know, but what they don’t say is, you can only write what you know either way, so your options are not between writing autobiographically or writing fiction, it is whether you want to be honest and genuine and vulnerable, or put up a front and trying to hide yourself. it’s not that easy to be honest of course, because you’re second guessing yourself and a neurotic, so you aren’t quite sure about what you are saying about yourself is “true” or not.

There is unfortunately no easy way out here. There is a simple, quick, elegant and efficient way out. But it isn’t “easy”. Some think it can’t be taught. I don’t know. I wasn’t. But I think it could.

The easy way out is realising that “whether it is true or not” is not the correct measuring stick to measure it with. There’s a long-winded way of saying why, and how the measuring stick you’re using to compare things to to check if they are “true” is a shape that changes size and weight and length and density at all times and is in a constant flux, making observation and comparison to it impossible, and arbitrary. Basically it doesn't work, trust me on this. You don’t know if statements you make “about” “yourself” are true, don’t worry about it.

Worrying about it cannot be resolved. Truth is not logically deduced, because logic – all logics – are at best, capable of preserving truth. Put true premises in, get true conclusion: that’s the absolute best case scenario for logic. And even that is usually a stretch, because you can do much the same, and so much more, with rhetoric.

Truth, we cannot prove, is not something we can prove. QED.

Truth, Bit T, is not deduced, Truth is revealed. This is important. When you have moments of certainty, the certainty is not derived from You, but provided by the outside. Truth is recognized. Truth is self-evident. Truth is external from thought. Thought is not involved, and language is a glove you try to wrap around it. There is no truth “within” language-itself, language can only ever be a hand you use to grasp it.

Things get complicated with time. Time is weird. I’m not sure whether logic is actually, practically speaking, outside of time. I’m not certain that logics are a priori. The thought keeps me up at night.

Anyways, what I wanted to say was, the correct measuring stick is found in revelation, not in deduction. I’m just trying to show you how you get there, instead of just going there. Doing this, is bad writing.

The correct measuring stick for when you are being honest is when it hurts. When it is shameful and you feel ashamed at the thought of anyone reading it. When it feels completely pathetic and wretched and disgusting to admit. Something that makes your gut twirl at the thought of reading it out loud to another human being. Writing should feel humiliating at every step of the process.

I wrote the title and liked it very much, and I really wanted to use it. But couldn’t find the narrative for it, so I just started writing off the top of my head. I was thinking about my relationship to computers in general and a specific guy I used to know, and twitter, and about sex and masturbation and how we’re all just playing with dolls, basically. Phones are little perfectly interchangeable dolls. Computers in general. Playing with dolls that are better at being friends than our real friends because everyone is too busy playing with dolls.

I wanted to write a little story about it, because doing so and externalising it into a “thing”, producing an “art piece”, would provide some relief from the guilt of masturbation that was the initial moment of insight. Instead I wrote something masturbatory. I had a whole different thing I wanted to do about writing advice. This is all messed up now.

Phew there it was. Saved at the last minute.

The other thing I wanted to say about writing advice is don’t try to say what you think people want to hear. Maybe more on that later if this post gets 1000 likes in one week