Project Narcissist is an effort to collect interesting things from my daily life that can then be compiled into a big and coherent piece at the end of the week. It is not a journal. A basic point of difference here is the keen editorial eye that’s supposed to fit material into an interesting structure.

So a day’s entry goes something like this:

Let’s just start with a recap of what all happened today. The day started with a lot of music blaring. NxWorries’ Why Lawd. Struggled to find a bike taxi. Saw a man refusing to move a roadblock even though it was clearly in the wrong place. The man looked young and was ready to fight over that roadblock. He was dedicated to his crusade against traffic. We trudged along more bad traffic burning under a hot sun. Got to the office. Came back. The cook had a black eye. It looked very suspicious but I didn’t want to interfere. Communication with her is bad enough as is. Perhaps I lack moral courage. Seeing her like that wasn’t a pleasant experience regardless. Got some new clothes. They look promising.

At the end of the week there’s six of such notes. That’s a decent bit of material to identify philosophical themes and a structure that might draw interesting things out of the mundane. It’s a way to collect material. A way to establish the habit of collecting material.

The self-centered nature of this project informs its title. Expanding consciousness from the personal to the interpersonal seems about right. Perhaps one day my consciousness expands enough to capture society at large. But for now it’s baby steps. Let’s see how it goes.

There’s a lack of boredom in my life. Life outside is too interesting. Distracted. Time is experienced as a blur of visuals and sounds. My brain needs downtime. This constant, nagging sense of distraction is a possible contributor to my writer’s block.

My understanding of the creative process, among other great balancing processes of life, is that it takes its own time and often begins in places of profound boredom. Getting to these states of profound boredom is hard. Curiosity combined with the internet can keep a mind distracted for eternity. Spinning the wheels of the mind, as the information is never truly absorbed. Skimmed, passing through the mind as if it were a gust of wind.

Thinking about structure again. For quite a long time now I’ve held the view that narrative structure does most of the heavy-lifting in any written work. A piece has to start somewhere, go places, and stop at an appropriate place. Not doing so results in a shapeless blob of text with no narrative drive. Walls upon walls of text that go nowhere.

Structuring a piece, however, is not easy. Having enough ‘meat’ in a story to warrant a substantial structure is another orthogonal, but equally important, problem.

I would love to write more, but structuring a piece takes a lot of thought and nothing is gained from rushing this process. There also happens to be a dearth of stories in this prolonged writer’s block. Hopefully ideas just appear out of nowhere.

Reading about the ways prolific writers go about finding ideas does provide hints. Many of them appear to be regimented and time-conscious. And so a part of me wants to see if structuring my day would help, but I’m not a fan of time-tables. My time was always unstructured until people decided I was having too much fun and needed to get serious in life. Turning relaxing hobbies into regimented activities doesn’t sound like a bright idea. The idea of slicing a day up into blocks of time itself sounds absurd to me. All hours of the day are not made the same and it’s about time that people started respecting the subjective nature of how time is experienced versus how it’s measured.

I do happen to think about abstract structures outside of prose. Writing software for a living involves reasoning about structure and how different information entities interact with each other in mathematically defined ways. Perhaps this monkeying around with abstract structures is the reason I believe prose should also work the same way. It’s all muddy and difficult to reason about. Woe is me. I wish I had a burning passion for middle-management or an affinity for multimedia.

Ultimately this piece has the structure of a wet tissue. It starts out feeling substantial but melts away into blob of nothing.

A foray into graduate studies, a taste of employment, and here we are again. The world has changed quite a bit in these years of absence. Overeager capitalists who don’t recognize the value people bring to their work are betting on a half-baked energy-hungry technology to increase their margins by eliminating humans. People all over the world are (hopefully) realizing that capitalism’s promise of rising tides lifting all boats was a bait and switch. They want to replace you and keep the loot for themselves.

Me? I’m just bored out of my mind. Why else would a reasonable person write in the age of text generating machines. Having a job helps this little corner of the internet quite a bit as no one has to ever read this for it to be successful. It’s okay for it to be good for nothing.

The streets are caked with mud. They used to be covered in dust, but then the rains came and turned it all to mud. It was a relief from the dry heat of summer that had only recently turned oppressively humid. The humidity was worse than the dryness as damp clothes clung to the skin, not unlike the mud that now covered the streets. The rain cleared everything. Oppressive humidity that suffocated people now antagonised the streets. All personal grievances had finally turned public. The rain purified the air for the people but muddied the streets. Was everything purifying bound to soil the purity of something else? Was purity ultimately a zero-sum game? Such thoughts came to me as I sat looking out the window. Then I realised that the dryness, the humidity, and the relief from humidity meant nothing to me. It was all academic. None of it actually bothered me. I peered at life from behind a window.

An emotional shutdown is not an all-defence game based on glib responses and a stubborn refusal to talk about things. It is an outright refusal to engage.

A refusal to think about what the things people say or do mean because the inferences drawn might be unbearable.

A person in the state of emotional shutdown can be likened to a voluntary shut-in. One who does not venture out of the house due to unfounded or legitimate fears.

Glib responses require understanding where the other person in the dialogue is coming from. As thinking about intentions and goals is suppressed or even rejected by the shut-in, it is impossible to have any understanding required for deception.

The shut-in is not afraid of talking about things. That person is afraid of thinking about things, brooding over them, or going over them mentally. It is a defence mechanism that can be likened to the strategy of burning bridges to avoid unpleasant travellers and enemy troops.

Thus, the shut-in does not refuse to talk about things but talks without understanding what the other person is trying to get at. It is talk without any common ground. Ultimately, the person enquiring is unable to comprehend what the shut-in is trying to say. That person then will either disengage or sympathise but will not be able to understand. As far as the shut-in is concerned, such a conversation is a victory. No connections formed; mission accomplished.

Sometimes when others find themselves rebuffed in such a manner, they assume malice. But the shut-in cannot be malicious because they do not intend to cause any distress.

Naturally, this system breaks down from time to time. Memories seep through the defences and the shut-in broods over them in unbearable agony. Sometimes bits of conversation hit home and force a connection which consequently causes distress. Ultimately, the person in question is left without connections and has to live in fear. It is a lose-lose situation.

Creative: (adjective) relating to or involving the use of the imagination or original ideas to create something.

This definition implies that creativity cannot exist without unique ideas originating from the mind via the imagination.

Creative writing: writing, typically fiction or poetry, which displays imagination or invention (often contrasted with academic or journalistic writing).

Again there is an insistence on contrast with fields that relate to objectivity and do not allow the imagination to have free reign. The implication is that creative writing has to, in some manner, concern itself with imagination. Narrative non-fiction appears to contradict this definition, but the presence of a narrative invites imagination.

One can object that all written word is inherently subjective, so the elimination of imagination is impossible. The difference, however, lies in the significance of the imagination in different forms. In narrative non-fiction, the facts serve as constraints for the imagination, but imagination itself remains a key player. This is not true in the case of journalism or academic writing.

Invention or originality creates another crisis for the existence of creative writing. If creativity entails the creation of something new, then it threatens the very existence of the central idea behind writing. Since writing is a means of communication, writing something totally original would also, by extension, be writing something for an audience of one. Writing for a reader would require the writer to have common ground with the reader, so the writer will have to sacrifice creative purity for the privilege of being understood.

The paradox of creative writing is that a written work has to be equally understandable and obscure to be of any value. But this element of obscurity need not be limited to obscure words originating from the writer’s personal dictionary. Writing is the articulation of ideas, so originality can be found in the ideas expressed or how they are articulated.

The originality of ideas expressed can be considered as the standard commonly used to gauge the originality of a written work. The usage of this standard appears to muddle the line between academic writing and creative writing. However, academic writing almost exclusively concerns itself with the articulation of new ideas but is not considered creative writing. The strict logical requirements of academic writing can explain this distinction between the two. So, the imaginative element of creativity is essential for any writing to be called creative.

Style is the other even more elusive characteristic of writing used to judge the creativity of written work. Style concerns itself with structure. Even rhetoric, at its root, is how arguments are structured. Structural innovations affect how the information is presented. It plays on the creative relationship between the writer and the reader where the reader is equally responsible for the creation of meaning from a text. The writer uses structure to guide the reader’s line of thinking down a particular path. A different structural spin on a familiar idea can excite original interpretations in the reader, thus lending the idea a novel meaning.

The English language, in particular, depends on structure for meaning: suffixes and prefixes have strict structural limitations and affect the meaning of a word, and phrasal structure determines the meaning of a sentence. This idea can be extended to the ordering of sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. This widens the field a writer has for originality. Any innovation in any structural element can be considered creative because such innovation will transfigure the ideas contained within the structure into something original.

The creative value of a written work also depends on the reader. A reader unfamiliar with an idea will regard the idea to be original, however, another reader may trace the same idea back to an existing document. The same is true for structural innovations.

This variability makes it hard to assign a particular definition to creative writing. It means the reader is complicit in defining the creative value of a written work. Might the creative part then be what happens when the reader reads? As in, a piece of writing is creative if it provokes the imagination of the reader to create new ideas.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) introduces new complications. NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that concerns itself with linguistics. This technology is used by blogging bots which can produce outlines for blog posts or complete blog posts. The writing produced is not good but is serviceable for some use cases. A simple next-character prediction algorithm can generate facsimiles of Shakespeare indistinguishable in structure.

The content of these imitations ranges from the surreal to random gibberish, but the structure is there. GPT-3, however, is a language-prediction model that has shown the capacity to generate content that is not gibberish. Coherent AI content-generation software is just one or two leaps away.

If the structure of a particular written work is important, and simple algorithms can generate outlines or create facsimiles of any writer’s work, then what about the writer who indulges in structural imitation with the aid of a computer? Can such computationally generated writing be considered creative? Its creation does not involve any use of the imagination but has the power to excite the reader’s imagination.

AI thus presents itself as an existential problem for writers and creative writing. This can be a good thing as writers are forced to use more of their distinctly human advantage. Surrealism and greater use of intuition? Perhaps a return to the all-knowing narrator? The death of creative writing as a trade? Only time will tell.

Did you know that Instagram has links in story; WhatsApp added disappearing messages; Telegram has new weird scrambling messages; scientists successfully transplanted a pig’s heart into a human being; Kattar beat Giga 50-45 UD; Ireland beat West Indies 2-1 in a three match ODI series; Manchester United blew a 2-0 lead vs Aston Villa; Real Madrid won the Supercopa de Espana and all this happened last week. Notice that I did not mention anything about politics, technology, or the major pandemic which has caused some serious PR trouble for Djokovic and the government of Australia. These things are trivial at best but enough to overwhelm the mind.

The age of information is thus turning into the age of overwhelm. Gone are the days of the well-informed citizen who used to be on top of matters and formed informed opinions instead of some dogmatic cant recited by the disseminators of information. Due to the sheer amount of information, discounting its increasing complexity, it is impossible to process all of it. Everyone is already overwhelmed by either things to keep tabs on or people to contact and the small window of time afforded to a citizen to be well-informed is just big enough to fit a smorgasbord of headlines.

As a result, getting news from social media is becoming the new normal. This opens up a whole new set of possibilities for trolls –- who are strictly defined as people who try to mislead masses using clever misinformation for a hoot and not the hate-mongering ideologues the term is now used to refer to because of lazy journalism –- and ideologues. Trolls create chaos and mischief. Ideologues promise to make the world seem oh so simple and understandable and not overwhelming at all.

Powerful, as measured by social reach, ideologues then spawn a whole subspecies of ideologies because the matter at hand was never so simple as to be reduced to a single line of thought in the first place. This is a contributing factor in the curious phenomenon of the internet being a breeding ground for niche subcultures. The formation of subcultures leads to more alienation, more dogmatism, and further fragmentation of thought into simple rationalisations.

Fragmentation of ideologies often has disastrous consequences. Some branches of ideologies take a moderate idea to its logical extreme, which is a phenomenon observed in religions around the world. And ideologues can have a religious fervour to them, their actions, and the certainty in their speech is mesmerizing for people struggling to make any sense of the world. These are the larger questions, at least a subset of the larger questions, with implications on the larger society and not the individual, but individuals do not exist in a vacuum and are affected by what exists around them.

The amount of information present calls for curators: Google curates millions of websites according to your specific query, YouTube’s feed, Instagram’s explore page, and so on and so forth. They were always there: newspaper editors, radio/TV news correspondents, book publishers, etc. But the internet promised decentralization and freedom of information which, when you really look into it, is just an illusion. Even community websites like Wikipedia have curators, moderators, editors, basically, people who have authority over the information you can see. So curators may exist as long as information does, they can be human or AI-based algorithms, but they’re there and their presence is morally, mostly, neither good nor bad as an idea. What matters is how ethical the individual curators are.

All this means is that we are, at any point in time, part of a large community of curators whom we trust. Our mental makeup is then a collaborative effort which means we are essentially the CEOs of a hypothetical company that produces the product that is our mental model used to produce opinions and judgements. It is then crucial to not fool ourselves about our sources of information and to choose wildly.