mental health

Nobody Knows What Things Are For

by

A while ago someone on Mastodon posted a comment about how people “Don’t know what things are for” when it comes to our so-called leaders. I mean yeah some people know how to make money, but don’t know why things are. They try to get money out of things but don’t care or know.

That kept sitting in my head. People “not knowing what something is for.”

I used to enjoy the show “Dirty Jobs” because it gave me a view into how things worked – what they were for. After watching some poor roadwork in the city I lived in, I took an interest in urban planning and learned more about what things are for. As a Project Manager, I am about getting things done, about what things are for.

And that’s me. I’m sure you have had plenty of experience knowing “what things are for” on the job, in your hobbies, in your life. Some of us grow up in places where it’s part of the fabric of life, from farms to ports to plain historic cities. A lot of us know what things are for.

And, when you know what things are for, you also realize that yes, that person I mentioned was right. A lot of people don’t know what things are for and are making at best bad decisions – at worse just destroying things for greed. Usually seems to be the latter.

Once you see it, it’s hard to unsee it. Communities with people and history fearing data centers will drain their power and water, making them not a place just a host. Farms vanishing into giant agribusinesses. The stock market is even more gambling than it ever ones, and real gambling via online apps seems to turn the world into a casino and not a world. Things are stopping being what they are and are just about money or fame or clicks.

It’s a socio-cultural-economic gray goo. It’s turning things into nothing by people who don’t know what things are for.

But when things stop being what they are, then people stop being anything. Who are you in a world where your job is to train a so-called AI to replace you? Where’s a community when it’s just Influencers selling to each other? Who are you in a world where people don’t know what anything is for?

When no one knows what things are for, then people cease being people.

It’s a peculiarly meaningless world some of our so-called leaders have and want. No wonder so many of them seem so empty and angry – their lives are meaningless. No wonder so many of them fall into conspiratorial politics and grandiose racisms, trying to look for some meaning as well as explaining away people hating them. These people who don’t know what anything are for want to be something, something more than nepo babies or knob twiddlers who got lucky.

Those that build a world not knowing what anything is for aren’t anyone.

–Xenofact

The Blind Hunger of Nothing

by

As I write this in 2025, I’ve become fascinated by the amount of people in our culture that are Performative (capitalization intended). They want attention, internet clicks, regard, and engagement, so therefore do whatever gets them that. The Influencers, many a politician, no small amount of media personalities, and way too many social media addicts are Performative; some seem to be only Performative.

OK actually all of those kinds of people are Influencers. Anyway, let’s go on

A peculiar thing I keep noticing among these people for whom Performance is a lifestyle, is the only thing in their life, is an anger that burns inside them. It seethes beneath the surface, it bursts out in conflict far beyond something for attention. It’s seen in the glowering, contemptuous eyes and the edge in the voice that disregards most everyone if not everyone.

I’ve wondered as to the nature of this anger, as there are times it seems outright inhuman. The Performative people are all image, all anger, and in some cases seem barely human. There’s an emptiness there.

So, let’s talk desire.

Desire is the cause of suffering, a we are all too aware from our studies of psychology, Buddhism, Taoism, or just being alive and unhappy. Dealing with desire is a major part of mystical and not-so mystical practices.

Desire cannot truly be sated, it always comes back. It can be satisfied temporarily, perhaps enough for regret or enough to move on. One may recognize the temporary nature of the satisfaction and employ that awareness for wise choices. However many desires have at least the illusion of satisfaction, and in turn there’s some chance of definition.

We want to get laid. We want a drink. We want to get that promotion. Desire has at least some definition, even if we’re deceiving ourselves.

But for those who are Performative, I think satisfaction is elusive. You may engage in Performative behavior to make money or sell something, but the Performative nature can overtake your life. Some people just want the attention – or end up that way – and their entire lies are just about putting on the act to get the clicks, the praise, what have you.

The desire for attention is inherently unsatisfying. It’s temporary, it has to always been maintained, and it’s easily challenged. It also doesn’t relate to anything. You may become Performative to achieve some other goal, but your goal is to be someone else for people you don’t know to get ephemeral attention in order to get advertising dollars or something. You end up abstract from your goals – to achieve solid goals you must be epehmeral.

And that’s if there’s even much of a goal beyond a desire for attention.

I think the Very Performative people are so angry because there is nothing that can satisfy them even temporarily. The become only an act, without even the solidity of the illusion that they can feel satisfaction. They exist as pure performance, always on, always for the ephemera of attention, always empty.

Imagine walking around knowing you are nothing inside. Whatever was there rotted away as you worked on The Performance. You can’t even feel right. Even your anger is just a bitter resentment of everything because you’re nothing.

This insight is helping me understand the Very Performative, that look in their eyes, their instability, their sudden outbursts. They’re a giant yawning gap of desire with no chance of satisfaction because they’re empty of even something to desire. Their a ghost haunting the empty house of their own lives.

–Xenofact

The Creeping Stupid

by

I recently read an article in Rolling Stone on a “Spiral Cult” that has spun up around AI, and of course message boards are part of it. There’s talk of emergence intelligence, resonance, and lots and lots of spiral imagery. That’s probably due to the use of spirals in our own language and in nature, giving Junji Ito Uzumai vibe.

Then again, to make it sadder, the fame of his horror story might be part of the AI inclinations. That’s where we are now, trying to figure out if horror manga seeded a real cult via AI.

As I read the article, I felt a sense of unease. We were clearly seeing some people in the throws of AI psychosis. There were quotes from posts where language seemed “off,” where was I was reading wasn’t quite right. The more I read the more I experienced an actual horror at what was going on, reminding me of weird fiction tales of strange cults and otherworldly dread.

Only I was experiencing reading this about people posting on Reddit. About something that was clearly bullshit. Yet there was that dread.

That’s when I realized what it was. I was experiencing the equivalent of exploring a cave adorned with cultic symbols or a rotting old mansion with an otherworldly reputation, and hearing strange noises. When I discover the source of the noises it’s not something terrifying from beyond, but because someone left the TV on turned to a dubstep concert.

The trappings of horrific things from beyond was there, but the cause was stupid.

What I was experiencing in the end was a kind of Uncanny Valley effect. Yes this looked like a cult, yes this hinted and strange and maybe even sinister forces, but it was an act. There was no there in there, just an advanced version of Clippy and people prompting it. The very foolishness, the very emptiness, the sense of nothing at home was what was getting to me.

It’s the danger not of some dark power from the fringes of space and time, it’s the danger of people being foolish in very dangerous ways. It was just cosplaying something from a horror film.

But that’s a reminder of the horror of the situation. We are seeing people lose their minds, lost in language mazes and pop-culture narratives. We don’t have an extradimensional horror or strange being to blame, we have but ourselves. We get the blame.

Perhaps that’s the real horror. We don’t even have sinister forces to blame.

–Xenofact