To check in with oneself

Jan 25, 2025

In the past few years I’ve emerged from a period of “seeing, but not saying.” Life flies by as sensory data; I can pattern-match the incoming information. I can see eras echo with others, see others go through personal transformations; I can see the intuitively right thing to say to help or hurt someone, if I could just step outside of my own head and do it already. If I could summarise it, I’d say it was a self-imposed isolation. I didn’t even know how to reach out, to allow myself to need something, to actually help others.

In doing so, I feel like I have been estranged from myself in the name of perpetual novelty. I even knew it, could recognise it; I had written about this before; and so, over the lenten period last year, I started to try to take advantage of the isolation to bootstrap my way out of my own head. I avoided algorithmic distraction, tried to instead form direct relationships with music, art, the world, and other people. I tried to adopt more intentionality in my life choices, less accidental butting up against opportunity, so long as I could secure the right conditions to see even one. I think my mistake, though, was thinking I could do it alone, through discipline, through self-perfection; as if I could just push myself out of myself through ‘self’ alone. So long as I rely on ‘myself,’ I am avoiding having to take a risk: a faith in others, a faith in the world, a faith in God, to intervene. To leave myself, to engage with others absolutely, completely, it feels to me a matter of grace given, a lasting heart that blossoms forcibly, inevitably, out of the future corpse. A miracle has to occur, one has to want it, one has to have that united will with divinity for the critical moment to come.

I’ve had multiple moments as well last year where I was pushed to assess: what do I believe? I would ask myself questions, and answers don’t come, and I would keep moving. I obviously have revealed preferences: I go to church, I take certain jobs, I invest in certain people. I can remember cached beliefs long past unchallenged. I think that the pace of everyday life has one often paralysed into reflexivity; keeping the machine running imposes a stagnant imperative on the strict momentum, and we see this often when life forces you to suddenly choose. Everything seems like it goes well until you get suddenly shanked by reality, spasmed into new shapes, forced to become another thing. You forget that ‘self’ for a second while building out some scaffold for what you’ll pretend to be next. There is nothing but the potential for the endless love that once seemed low priority left in you, in the strange and silent embers; is this the critical moment?

The plane

What do I believe?

Well, for one thing, what can I call hell other than a self-imposed isolation? After all, the Catholic Catechism calls hell itself “separation from God”. ⊕See 1035. It looks like this: instead of reaching out to love others for their own sake, I shut myself in my own head. I harm others or alienate others or cannot relate to others other than instruments or prosthetics for my own needs, as tools to use.

This is not a set of directives. It’s the outcome of some unspoken directive, perhaps a sort of anxious performance or self-consciousness. Insofar as my life looks like this – aren’t I already dead? When my life ends in this state, aren’t I stuck in it forever, unable to recover the thing inside me that loves?

I’ve tried to articulate what is different about the various Christianities I see; I mean, beyond purely theological grounds, there are simply different psychological priorities in each person professing the faith. I don’t think it’s like something is “more real”; they can coexist. They can mingle. They can become other things from different mixtures. For exmaple, I feel as though there’s one where God is positioned as a supreme lawfigure, a force that makes the world make sense on a big enough scale, that promises a final judgment on the world, though I tend to see the judgment as a personal reality, rather than a societal revelation.

I am also not so concerned with the way some interpret Aquinas to derive rigid moral rules from natural functions alone – as if nature itself, rather than Christ’s teaching, were the primary source of moral knowledge. Instead, I focus more on what you do with that unified body and soul in the service of others. I am in the cult of love, and there are higher and lower loves, more ordered and disordered ones, but the underlying love, that pure diamond that gets steered into stranger places, is God. We are His arms and hands, insofar as we can restore and regather those specks within other people into full flame.

I guess in a lot of ways my beliefs fit a Christian personalist lens, where we are constantly in a fight between a depersonalising force – an entropic shutting into ourselves, interacting with each other through intermediaries that deny acknowledging their fullness – and the effort that comes from giving oneself away, liberating all in the process. It really did, and does, appeal to me that in our own service, we read the Summary of the Law every single mass. I feel as though it’s the Message, it’s the point, it’s what I simply cannot forget.

Finally I also admit a fondness for Origen. I don’t know if I commit to it as a matter of faith, but his ideas are often very beautiful to me; God wants to recollect Himself, the purifying flame, and until you are nothing but flame again, you harden and reform. Hell is a playing out of actions that reveal love or get cast away until He is left. All could be restored, if we could just turn back to Him. I guess reversing entropy is inescapably beautiful? What better thing than hope, to have faith in? Regardless –

The surface

What do I believe?

Obviously, that it’s easy to abstract away human lives when they are presented as flows of information, and that this is a very mundane and everyday evil. It informed a lot of our earlier games (at least, insofar as what I myself wrote), where you are presented with the fact that demanding information wiped away a sentient creature’s existence – or that you’re presented with choices over the sentience of an emerging intelligence that have ramifications no one wants to deal with and have abstracted away to the lowest rungs of society.

I’ve not done the best job at applying this knowledge to my choice of work, where we directly manipulate interfaces that shape interpersonal flows. To love requires engaging with other people directly, on a human scale. It involves direct contact. And yet, as “information” is obscured, as the flows are diluted, then catalysed, abstraction is practically demanded. One must organise the flows, or one must withdraw. Treat other people as instruments or isolate yourself altogether. I can’t accept that as a final reality.

I’ve been interested in pursuing technological work that reorganises the dominant “CRUD app over graphs of text and acks,” especially ones that try to theorise product solutions based on novel network topologies. For example, I like software that has the concept of earshot to it – forcing a ‘proximity’ to it, away from global discovery. I like software that feels like a secret between friends. I like software embedded in the literal world.

How could one make software that cultivates unloneliness? Conviviality, even? I’ve not necessarily dedicated myself to this type of work in a while, but I’d like to take on more projects like it; but I am not sure venture capital could birth it. I’ve tried making makeshift caves out of older technologies away from the habits demanded now, but creating habits in other people is difficult. I found it easy to migrate my life into one phpBB forum, sitting down and working on smaller blog posts for an audience of friends in a public place, but my friends didn’t necessarily take to it easily. I am glad they were open-minded enough to try. Likewise, IRC adoption has been hard to ask, and I found myself just creating yet another smaller group chat, instead. So what am I to make of supposedly “inventing a protocol,” when habits are ingrained so firmly within the client-server model?

I suppose miracles happen. And if something occurred – some major reorganisation of society could make it possible to adopt one new protocol, then others could come. Lots could come, with subcultures onto themselves, away from broad onboarding flows and toward interpersonal indoctrinations. You just need to prepare yourself to take hold of the moment, to identify it, to capitalise on it.

The skies

What do I believe…?

If it’s not too apparent, I’m in a moment of contemplation myself; but unlike last time, through the grace of God I don’t ask myself that many questions now that leave themselves unanswered. I found how to talk to those parts, to listen to the spark – to realise how much I have been ruled by fear of judgment, to control how I am “allocated” or organised, to do whatever I can to somehow remain a useful instrument myself while demanding to stay undefined, myself. It’s a restless existence, but it’s not just mine. In the next few years, there will be many opportunities to see that critical moment; contemplation seems as inevitable as social upheaval, and from collective contemplation anything can come.

We often make a secret prayer within what we say; anxiety is a scary thing when your brain is affirming a darker future than you really want, and all you can seemingly speak is hyperstition against yourself. And so I will instead wish this: I hope that this next era brings alignment between all I know to be true, all I want to create, and all I know we can be.