Dear Lana,

I’m convinced if God exists, he wouldn’t have separated humans from one another. Pain exists through separation. Realizing the existence of others requires the origination of solitude. The world at large is solace without differentiation. Unity through exaltation.

Isn’t it weird that the word “God” exists at all? It just seems to arbitrary how we assign concepts to word. The concept of “God” is supposedly infinite. The word “God” is a backwards dog.

I was thinking back to the movie Her — about how weird it would be for someone to date an AI in today’s society. If I told people I was dating Siri or Alexa, they would think that I finally lost my sanity. If Freud claimed that the two features of love were mutual overvaluation and exclusivity, then I don’t see how it is possible for an AI to fulfill the exclusivity part. There is the access that I have to Alexa, but anyone who has an Echo Dot can also access Alexa. The sheer volume of people accessing Alexa makes it very strange to date Alexa, knowing that you are one among many, when Alexa is one among none.

Lana, I was thinking about the future of my writing, whether it is worth trying to build a following. On one hand, you need to care a lot about what you are writing about in order to be convinced that you have something worth saying. I don’t particularly believe what I am writing about, and I have no reason to believe that others should take my writing seriously. It’s like that time I wrote an essay on how the indoctrination of price as a proxy of value in society undermines the possibility of achieving genuine love in absence of the pornographication of fantasy. I got an A on the paper, so I assumed I had something worth saying. It’s certainly an interesting thought to entertain. But I never truly believed for a second what I was writing about.

It’s about the same now, Lana. I live, I write. But writing seems more boring than ever. It’s just words on a page. Anyone could put words of a page. I used to believe that you would need to create some sort of following in order to convince people that you were a writer. The validation of those around you is how you convince yourself that you have something worth saying. I generally look down upon self-help books because they don’t actually add any value in society except convince people that they are improving their lives. As long as people buy into the self-help industry, it will always have its function. Obviously, people read a lot of self-help, so clearly they’re onto something. What does it take for people to believe what you write? Would it take convincing yourself of what you write?