Memories from The Digital Underground
Unknown author (Yet another fragment a torn from a sheet of paper)
There are people out there, usually the ones with tidy beards and large blackboards , who will tell you everything is predetermined. That we’re nothing more than moving pieces in a cosmic automaton, some Wolfram-style system where time is just another line in the algorithm, running its course like clockwork. They’ll explain it with stunning clarity, backing it up with mathematically sound arguments, logically coherent and completely irrefutable, at least within the rules they’ve chosen to play by. It’s like proving how an object moves using the rules of chess. The conclusion is elegant, but it only applies to the board they’ve decided is the world.
Still, they argue. They write books, publish papers, go on podcasts, and get into bitter online fights about how free will is an illusion. You’d think, if they were truly consistent, they wouldn’t bother. After all, if everything’s determined, so are the idiots who disagree with them. So is the urge to correct them. So is your indignation. What’s the point of all the noise?
But I’m not here to sell you my personal shitty beliefs. Those I digest on my own, in silence, with the grace of someone downing spoonfuls of expired cough syrup. I wouldn’t dare recommend them to anyone still clinging to a shred of mental sanity. I have no theories at all and just a half-coherent note scribbled from the back room of my mind, during a long night I never intended to be part of.
On the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got the mystics of will. The self-styled manifestors. The “your dream life is just one intention away” people. They believe everything that happens to you is your creation. That if you just align your vibration, heal your inner child, write in the right journal with the right pen, the universe will open like a well-trained doorman. Again, there’s something to it. I’ve lived small shifts, strange coincidences, moments that felt like quiet answers. It’s not all nonsense. But give it a little too much weight and suddenly you’re trapped in another cult. Except this time, you’re the god, the preacher, and the exhausted congregation, all rolled into one.
People cling to these frameworks, deterministic or mystical, as if stretching them far enough will somehow save them. I wonder from what, exactly? I don’t think even they know. From the void, perhaps? From the idea of being dead? From the unbearable thought that maybe nothing is in control(?). Noise and inertia. Dressed up in language.
I try to guess. Perhaps what’s really unbearable isn’t the idea that we aren’t free but the idea that we might be trapped and awake at the same time. That we could be aware of the cage and still have to play along. So we oscillate, some days we wake up with delusions of grandeur, imagining ourselves as mini-gods writing destiny in real time. Other days we slump into our chairs feeling like wet puppets pulled along by forces we’ll never understand.
Maybe the only thing that keeps us going is pretending. Pretending we choose. Pretending it matters. Living as if we’re free, even if we suspect it’s theater. Because that illusion, that fragile lie, might be the last thread of dignity we’ve got.
It’s maybe a necessary stupidity. Like art. Like love. Like staying alive long enough to write this down while everything’s on fire, knowing full well no one’s reading. Or more unsettling still: that someone is.