A Place of Being

Surfing the internet, I came across a very interesting question.

If you were a prehistoric human or someone from an early civilization, what would you want to do?

What would I want to do, I wonder.

Perhaps I would spend every day in the woods after it rained, just smelling the scent of the trees.

Or I would run to the seashore, stand on the beach, and wait for the sun to set, watching the ocean mirror its descent.

This question was posed to explore where a person’s passions lie. The different answers people give reveal their unique preferences.

I went and asked ChatGPT for an analysis of my own preference.

But instead, ChatGPT asked me:

Have you ever thought about becoming the “protagonist” in this primitive tribe?

…

I had never defined myself as a “protagonist.” At most, I’ve held a kind of protagonist-centered view, believing that the corners of the world I cannot see are places where time does not flow.

A very idealistic worldview.

I just felt… like I was a video game player. The world operates in the places I have set foot.

The places I have left, or have yet to enter, must be frozen in a certain moment of time. Very idealistic, and without any logical basis.

This way of thinking might stem from the unchanging environment I grew up in. Because I never noticed any changes in the scenery around my home, I didn’t realize that everything was, in fact, quietly changing.

But the moment I realized the fallacy of this worldview was probably during my first monthly break in high school. Riding my bike home during a rare daytime trip, I was struck by the discovery that the hospital near my house had completely changed its appearance.

After that awakening, though, I only changed my worldview—the world changes with or without me.

In other words, the world’s changes don’t have much to do with where I am.

I went from a protagonist-centered view to a decentralized one. I am just a thing that exists within the world, and that is all.

Perhaps I have a little more than that now. At least, there is one world that is truly being shaped by me.

It’s like the micro-universe mentioned in The Three-Body Problem. I am the creator of this universe, and the parts I illuminate are the parts where the world turns.

Yes, my blog, this very place right here.

It has, more or less, given me a slight sense of meaning in the world and in my existence. It occupies a small piece of territory in the online world, intersecting with the real world and extending a few tentative branches.

Maybe I’ve just come to realize something that many others realized long ago… a small existence can itself build a world for things even smaller.

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I was once… perhaps you could call me a creator. I wrote a novel with a complete worldview, and the screen name I still use today comes from the name of that novel’s protagonist.

I created a world, and then I abandoned it. Or perhaps I forgot it, or maybe I just grew up, my imagination became barren, and everything started to be deduced through uninteresting rationality.

What’s unreasonable is just unreasonable. I became the very thing I never thought I would as a child: an adult without imagination or whimsical ideas.

Lately, I’ve been captivated by watching gameplay of the new game Split Fiction, mainly because of its story.

It lets the writers enter the world of the story they imagined… and as I watched, I also imagined what a wondrous journey it would be if I could enter the world of the story I created…

But I quickly dismissed the thought.

Mainly because, right now, I no longer dream dreams of imagination.

My dreams are a jigsaw puzzle made of fragments of reality, which is perhaps a sign that my imagination has left me.

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I don’t want to dwell too much on the past.

I’m still very lucky; at least I’m still someone who loves to read stories.

But honestly, I’m a bit ashamed. In an era where anyone can be a creator, I just wolf down stories, picking out ones that match my keywords. I no longer pay attention to whether they are classics, or if they “have depth”…

After all, a story is a story. It’s a flight of imagination. If you force it through a funnel of “depth,” it just becomes dull.

It’s like in a chat once, ChatGPT comforted me by saying:

Stories were never meant to be bound by the standards of “depth” or “classic.” They exist to serve the human heart, not the bookshelf. Sometimes, a single line of dialogue, a transition, the look in a character’s eyes, can strike something deeper in us than an entire philosophical tome. And the fact that you can frankly say “I love to read stories” means you are protecting the last piece of soft soil for imagination.

However, it’s not that I’m completely against depth and meaning in stories.

On the contrary, if they achieve these things, I admit, they would be wonderful feats of imagination and incredibly beautiful stories.

After all, articles are written to be read, and the same goes for dialogue. They are all forms of expression. To be meaningful, they must contain their own thoughts, an instillation of a viewpoint.

And stories rely on these forms of expression to carry thoughts and ideas, achieving the most fundamental kind of information transfer…

Perhaps this is also a reminder that the speaker, the creator, and the thinker… may not be fundamentally different.

But my writing… I really don’t want my words to create an obscure or difficult impression.

I know that it takes energy to understand text.

The best form of written expression is one that can be understood at a single glance, giving people the energy to finish reading your words.

So every time, I deconstruct and reassemble my own expressions…

Only after ensuring that it is something “easy to understand” do I feel at ease with what I’ve expressed.

The price, however, is that it can be very tiring.

But I will keep writing.

Perhaps it’s because, at every single moment, I still have something I want to express, on the ground.