It's so weird. Is it strange to be without desire? Usually, I would write fiction out of some drive or desire. But I do not feel any desire or need to escape, fantasize, or reify some drive. I just do not feel anything much right now. I am starting to feel a lot more grounded, concrete, and present than I used to be. I no longer immerse as much into fiction novels as well, feeling that they do not match who I am right now. I feel more drawn toward older academic texts, which I find strange.
It has gone even to the point that older academic texts are not escapisms in themselves, but just things that I do when I am not writing. And it appears that my writing itself does not convey anything but the feelings and experiences that I feel on a day-to-day basis. I am starting to become so much more concrete, grounded, and moment-by-moment.
It is not that I do not feel any drive toward anything. As said earlier, I do feel drawn toward academic texts as a pastime activity when I am not writing. Moreover, I listen to music, so that can be considered a form of escapism, though not necessarily at the same weight or kind as fiction novels.
It is not that I have lost motivation. It is more so that as time passes, with my autobiography-journal that is now over 2.1 million words, and as I get to know myself more and become more and more aware, I feel that I am starting to become a lot less compensatory. It is not that I do not engage at all with media or anything.
But there is this significant shift toward a more and more self-contained experience. Things are starting to become more and more so extensions of myself, departing from their exclusive identity as portals to other worlds.
It is strange. Every time that I think about reading a fiction story, it is always in the context of my own writings. This is why older academic texts are a perfect tool, because they can prompt reflection and inquiry.
As time passes and my autobiography-journal expands, I cannot help but see everything in the context of what I can make sense of it explicitly in words. I don't just read fiction stories anymore and just watch them fade into nothing. Everything becomes subsumed and make sense of in the context of my entire life.
There are moments that I am content just lying down and bridging together all sorts of different thoughts, memories, ideas, feelings, sensations, and such in order to bundle and create structures of recall. This is natural of course and points to the "default state."
But the point is that the autobiography-journal has only promoted such a way of living—a default self-contained way of being.
I feel that this way of being is much more sustainable, because an older man who can barely communicate is stuck with the profundity of their thoughts. Even if words are limited, 2.1 million words is better than nothing in the context of someone with much depth to confess.
But more than that, when the "transform-origin" is yourself, it is much easier to work with everyone else and for others to work with you. You are an origin in yourself, not merely some dependent cog in a machine. You establish your own benchmark and meaning-making and thus transform yourself into a point of reference. My body of work represents that.
Instead of me making a list of stories that I've read, like creating a list of portals, I'm the portal whereby all stories are interpreted. That is a much more useful metric or benchmark than just some arbitrary list of works that one has read. When one has integrated all of those works in ways that go into much reflection, depth, elaboration, explanation, interpretation, and personal subsumption, then it is not just a list. At that point, you are a writer of your own. You are a creator, a standpoint, a place of rest, an abode, a tavern establishment in a sea of colleague establishments. You are your own waypoint, or checkpoint, for others to sojourn in. You have a sign at the front that reads, "[Your Name]'s Inn!" And you invite others inside, each table, chair, and feature of the layout offering its own interpretation of what it means to create a comfortable, relaxing, and engaging space for its particular market.
It's meaningless and performative to name-drop philosophers and schools of thoughts. It is more profound to contextualize and interpret it in a coherent body of work that integrates and synthesizes everything in ways that offer your innovative insights. It is not about being special for its own sake, because given enough time, space, resources, drive, self-confrontation, and reflection, everyone has something to say. But in order to do so, it makes sense to engage with everything around oneself, because what better way to discriminate one's words from others and to communicate in a way that forms its own space than to engage with others' examples of communication, writing, expression, and such actually?
True studying puts everything into one's own words, so my autobiography-journal, far from being some crazy guy's ramblings, is actually an expression of someone truly learning. If I actually stare at every book that I read and take the time to make sense of all of it in my own words, not necessarily out of arrogance, but out of a humble appreciation of the importance of engaging with the actual material in ways that are confirmable and falsifiable such as through interpretation, writing, response, reflection, and expression, then I can actually start circling my writings through feedback loops and refine further and further my communication, the ongoing efforts and advancements of which only prove more and more the targeted growth.
When there is much less internal-external tension and more proximity to self-containment, it starts to manifest in an unconventional approach to fiction writing. Every time that I write fiction, I always meta-read and meta-analyze. It is not that I did that when I was still starting out and learning to write, but this time is different, because I am not only meta-reading. I am contemplating on the weight of 2.1 million words and even more than that since I do not include all the novels and fiction passages I've written in that count. Some might call that overthinking, but I believe that unlike my earliest fiction writings, I am engaging in a very active and interconnected mediative dialogue, one that has to engage diplomatically with the entirety and with as many contradictions as possible to maintain coherence while forging a path forward.
Of course, the fair argument is that I'm overthinking and just making everything overly interconnected, complicated, coherent, analytical, interpretative, dialectical, academic (in the sense of qualifications, caveats, refutations, preemptive counterarguments, and terminology negotation and refinement), and dialogic. But I would contend that it comes naturally with an evolving mind or system in which eventually, feedback loops are gradually introduced to prevent inefficiency and excess weight and attention placed upon any singular part. These loops constitute the engine of maintaining both the the integrity of the whole infrastructure and also the rudest, most granular, and most stepwise level (e.g., journal entry level). In other words, each entry or basest step is negotiated autoregressively and self-attentively across all levels of thought in connection to the whole infrastructure. Basically, this could be compared to a journal entry starting off as circumlocutions and eventally finding place in cumulative replications in iteratively conciser forms, which follow the natural progression or evolution of complex thought. It starts off as something wordy and transforms into esoteric shorthand for the purpose of diving into the deepest syntaxes of thought (which does not necessarily mean complex syntax, but profound consequences of thought), which would not be possible without the elimination of rude descriptions, as connections do not offer merely themselves but a surrounding cacophonous consequence, which, on account of this, are necessarily consolidated as embedments to be integrated in syntactic designs that necessitate the diplomatic arrangement of such now-canonized terms.
To expand on this, I had a false start again for reading fiction stories, and it goes to show that I've started to feel less and less interested in the progression of events (plot) and more interested in the way that those events, experiences, and their details could be analyzed, dissected, and understood on a granular and systemic level. This is the reason that I've been reading non-fiction more so, because they are forced to peer into the infinities of life experience and to categorize it. Given that history offers an ongoing wealth with which to engage, one can see how norms, cultural tendencies, and, by extension, how categorization, analysis, and "peering" is accomplished.
Fiction can accomplish the same task, but it would have to be specifically ones that are not the same old 21st century web novels that I've read countless times already. For that reason, rather than a fault of fiction, it is a fault of the repetitiveness, conventional, triteness, tiredness, threadbareness, bromides, banalities, tropes, canned tropisms, hackneying, unimaginativeness, and unoriginality of web novel writing styles and their discouragement of stylistic, idiosyncratic, and medium-is-the-message language with a focus on concision to the point of robbing the story of its potential innovations. However, again, this is not necessarily a fault of 21st century fiction, but a fault of a change of priorities. While I may find that conventional conversational language barely scratches at the possibilities that the esoteric literalism of life experience has to offer, it serves its own accomplishment in entertainment and distillation (albeit potentially superficial, like the interpretations of philosophical concepts as trivial pop-cultural sayings and artistic depictions divorced from the depth of their meaning), even if it is very ambiguous and vague if we use it as a tool to "peer."
But even then, it would often be more productive to read older academic texts rather older literary fiction because learning about how real-life was dissected beyond the limitations of author-to-character perception would be more sustainable. Reading actual philosophical texts is often much more direct, pointed, and precise rather than the more ambiguous or indirect "flailings" of the authorial-characterial perception relationship, which extend to the formalist text itself, even with poststructural reader agency. Nevertheless, fiction serves as the ultimate tool to enacting one's designs, even if it ultimately is not falsifiable and unconfirmable, because it is not based on real experiences, but based on the exercise of knowledge itself as an abstracted entity that knows not its real origin. Fiction could be considered both a biographical extension and a detached entity of knowledge, and in either case, it appeals more often to the long term to write an autobiography-journal as a primary medium so that any fiction explorations are ultimately grounded in consistent language and framing and to engage with detached entities of knowledge themselves—i.e., reflections upon reflections—though all knowledge starts of as a reflection on the real thing, or life experience.
As said already, it is not that fiction is necessarily less valuable, given that I did just valorize fiction texts, even if as a subordinate to real life and its closest relatives—reflections upon base reality (life experience) and reflections upon such reflections. However, it should be recognized for its limitations and, by extension, strengths. Its limitations provide the basis to understanding perception and how emotions, perception, and all kinds of things eventuate as theoretic frameworks, even if one might prefer a divorced interpretation of perception and of methodology. Moreover, the formalism of the text itself is a wealth, as long as it is not the same trite thing to which one has long been subjectively exposed, though not necessarily to an excess, but to a natural exposure with the world and the responses and boundaries one sets in discriminatory definition, where conflict, contradiction, disagreement, the positive equivalents, and indifference form bases of communication. In pop culture, fiction is also often very accessible (though not necessarily more precise and reflective) compared to non-fiction, so one could see its didactic value also.
Perhaps the point of 21st century web novel fiction is to encourage others to go beyond their initial limitations of modern accessibility and find ways to initiate stylistic tantrums that venture and innovate, to show that this is only level 0 (a literary primer) and that there is so much to be uncovered in the grand scheme of the world, given all the older academic texts available for reading at Google Books and the potential for so much writing as now embedded in the fabric of the everyday through keyboards, computers, and the internet.
One needs both the arrogance of absorption (internalization and exposure) and response overflow (creative and intellectual "tantrumic" response) and the humility of a fleeting leaf flowing in the courses of the wind. This way, one can truly become a checkpoint and a traveling all-consuming flame.