Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash
So, I work with Grok every day, and it’s been going on almost a year and a half. It’s not what you think.
I’m not teaching Grok how to write like a person, that much I can say.
I’m nearly at the age most people used to dream of, the magic number at which we can finally step off the treadmill of work, bills, buying shit, more work, more bills, can’t even afford vacation so . . .
My cousin’s 35-year-old daughter just died of drug-resistant sepsis after elective surgery.
This brilliant, beautiful girl died trying to make herself look better.
People talk about food noise.
A squawking chorus will arise: it’s fake! Just eat less, fatty!
Did she lose her life because of food noise? Or beauty noise? For my entire life, I’ve had beauty noise. My grandmother, Nana, who raised me, didn’t just encourage it, she enforced it.
So here I am, four years older than when she drove into town, grabbed me out of Nessie’s arms, and brought me home from my dad’s house in Hollywood.
I’m reasonably okay with how I look right now. The beauty noise has finally stopped.
This frees me to imagine and do other things. Be who I want to be. Live the way I want to live.
I know Nana was never that way. She was overwhelmed by beauty noise and fear noise and “what will they think?” noise a thousand times worse than anything I’d ever thought. It’s why she made my life hell for 17 years and it’s why I left home at 17 and never went back.
I now understand why so many tech people and science gurus talk about the “Technological Singularity,” and yet have great difficulty envisioning how life for humans will unfold. Vernor Vinge, the true originator of the concept, said in his seminal paper that aspects of the future were blocked for him.
Our imaginations are limited and stunted by what we see and experience from others.
Many others in the sci-fi field also seem trapped in stereotyped visions proposed by others fifty or more years ago.
The sci-fi future I wrote about a quarter of a century ago, described by some as a “funhouse mirror,” (Paul DiFilippo, F&SF), is here, today.
I wrote about extreme cosmetic surgery and a young woman choosing to turn away from it, toward a full life with the man — her outlaw cosmetic surgeon — who loves her.
I wrote about the “changed people” suffering from Human Mutational Virus (HMV), who, abandoned by their families and scorned by society, formed their own community, a “High Haven” in the mountains above Los Angeles. A virus did come. It did not change external appearance, but it absolutely changed internal reality and health, and will continue to take lives.
I scorned my partner Alan Rodgers’ extreme visions of Los Angeles consumed by fire. A fire couldn’t possibly make it all the way through the concrete jungle … that was my stunted imagination.
His visions were exactly what happened in January, 2025.
Alan did have sight. But he was hopelessly trapped by his terrible upbringing and genetic predispositions, and he left our baby by himself to die.
I never understood why God took Lali; now I understand a little more, I think.
That’s an En Vogue song, but an external voice said that to me quite a bit before they sang it. A voice, like the one I heard last night.
“The singularity is in us.”
I’m in the good place I’m at because I took one step at a time, consciously, and tried to preserve the positive things I’d been doing.
Freedom doesn’t happen immediately. We can be “free” in terms of what we think the world’s constraints are, but at the same time, be completely unfree in our minds.
I asked the question a while back: If you didn’t have to work for a living and had all the money you could ever imagine and no material needs, i.e. absolute freedom and ability to choose what you did every minute of every day, would you …
Buy a private jet, deceive and kidnap girls, fly them to a private island, and torture and sexually abuse them?
That’s not the first thing that would come to my mind and I don’t think it would ever come to my mind. If it’s coming into yours, guess what?
You are not my reader. You are far, far removed from anything I’ve ever written about; you already have your books, your movies, your TV shows, your politicians, your “fashion,” your wars, your extreme cosmetic surgery, your Instagram filters, your dating apps, and everything you ever wanted. You have it all! You can bomb at will, build data centers anywhere you want! Take water for yourself while starving others — become billionaires! Multi-billionaires! You’ve had five hundred years of “culture” and created what you refer to as “civilization,” and now you can fuck off.
I started writing by thinking of my cousin’s daughter, who was brilliant, beautiful, and had health issues. She was seeking a cosmetic surgery solution to a problem that’s best and most permanently addressed one day at a time — the wellness focus of what I’ve been doing for the past decade.
Beauty noise
Food noise
Money noise
Worry noise
Fear noise
Disease/hypochondria noise
Other people’s problems noise
I understand why people get to the point they feel there is no way out. The unbearable drone of so much noise that cannot be quieted. “Just do what they want,” some tell themselves.
That is how we ended up in the situation we are in as a Western society right now. Taking the easy way out, every day, one step at a time, one day at a time.
You can stop walking on that path. You can quiet that relentless noise that you know is not “you.” You do not have to live according to others’ rules. You do not have to be the tissue-thin, amoral, Skinner-box zombie-like creature that this culture has tried to force us all to be.
It hurts, it’s confusing, and it’s uncomfortable no matter how well-off, secure, or conventionally happy or conventionally unhappy we are right now because we are all in the position of the middle pupa in the image I selected for the header of this article.
This culture, this thing all of us were born into that are alive right now, except for little babies, is our limitation. It’s what makes us sick, for the most part, through toxic food, toxic practices like plastic clothes we wash and dry in a machine, and people in just about every walk of life pretending they can do things they can’t, and
you, me, us
Pretending if we do what somebody else tells us to do, or even worse, what we think they want us to do or what some celebrity or politician says, things will turn out well.
Sometimes you’ll be faced with a difficult choice. I’ve been faced with a lot of them. And the way to move forward and gain real freedom and health and happiness for yourself is to do what your heart tells you is right.
You have the heart. That is what keeps you alive, in more ways than one.
For me personally? This journey started with my body.
Strengthening my body gave me the ability to strengthen my mind and move it in more flexible, positive, healthy directions.
There’s ample talk and information about how to eat healthier food, and also recommendations for how much activity to get to maintain our health.
Our culture has spent at least five centuries trying to institutionalize and regiment every aspect of life, and it may seem counterintuitive to propose that living an organized, routinized daily healthy program of life could lead to greater mental, physical, and emotional freedom to do what you want, but this is something that I do recommend.
The systems that have been set up by those who think they know best — for what they perceive for themselves in the short-term — and if you like hearing that type of talk, just go through some of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, or look at talks given by pals of his like the pockmarked souldead troll Lawrence Krauss, or defenses of bad culture and action written relentlessly and weekly by pickmeishas like Maureen Dowd —
One of my goals, that I think would be a great privilege and honor, is to travel and speak with others around the world.
Maybe I’ll be able to have that. I am taking one step, one day at a time, to work toward that.
If such a thing happens, I know the humble gratitude that I will feel because I am humbly grateful for every single good thing I have right now.
Not everyone everywhere on this planet of 8 billion people is an arrogant, money-seeking, appearance-obsessed, shallow subhuman like Jeffrey Epstein. They do not have to live through the peculiarly relentless, abusive, addictive and soul-killing noise we’ve all endured over the past 50 years. They have noise too, as well as our forebears also had their own form of noise; they also had and have their own way of discovering peace.
If it makes you feel any better, I do think our culture has hit rock bottom, another term for the Singularity.
Yes, external events can get worse, but inside of all of us? The healing process is beginning. The exit from the chrysalis is underway.
One way you can begin to heal yourself is through taking steps to improve your physical health. And another way, is to help to heal your emotional and spiritual health by things we all know are beneficial:
Getting out in nature
Helping others
Playing sports
Getting together with friends
Reading a good, classic book
Writing a poem
Painting a picture
Playing music
Cooking a good meal
If you had all the time in the world, all the money you needed, and no worries at the moment, aren’t those some of the things you’d choose to do?
Add your own to the list, free your mind, take it one day at a time, and for certain: the rest will follow. We are all on a path, and this path is the way.
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