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Paradise Is Locked

2026-06-07 · 4 min

I was always used to writing on a notepad, manually, when it concerned personal things. The internet has made posting or uploading unapproachable for people who dread being made the subject of indiscreet attention. One opens modern social networks only to be bombarded by what falls within an interstice of (but not restricted to) LLM-generated media confined to the promotion of absurd content. Many fervent posts, products of the era where the desire of people to be perceived as worthy to look up to in one space is subdued by the learned helplessness that leads to reward-hacking, i.e. the desire to scramble a facade that will capture the attention of people through some contrived ruse as opposed to the silent and sincere efforts that bear fruit and can not be disputed.

Reputation, rank, honor, fame are nothing but events inside other people's heads, yet many people will sacrifice their own individuality to mold them. What constitutes this tuple runs on appearance, which is why it is so easily distorted. Most often, a person will care nothing about knowledge for its own sake, but only strive to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own selfish and material habituation. Dreams conceived once, even momentarily, by children, become smothered and pale into deep unconscious memories of adults. It is true that most of the glories of the world are but mere outward show. This was, throughout time, not necessarily bad. Happiness, sense of accomplishment, or whatever drives someone to go about with their life, is defined by each person. Each of us fosters one's own reality that may approximate the one that is objective, shared by all, or diverge greatly to what can be clinical delusion on the other polar end.

A lot of things have coincided with what now is the stark progress of technology, with AI currently at the forefront. Taken as an example: how the wealth gap between the top 1% and the bottom 90% of households has exploded (Saez & Zucman, 2020).

This has the implication that it is now increasingly difficult for the "common person" (as defined by Gaussian curves wherein classes can be superimposed without noticing any clear geometric difference when it concerns human traits) to go about deciding what it is that happiness means for them, and what they wish to live for. The common person is drowning in obligations, deadlines, and worldly challenges that limit room for free thought. The housing market follows, as the ratio between salary and rent narrows.

Now, it is a bigger privilege than ever for one to define what is important for oneself, not out of necessity or being cornered by everyday events, but by staying loyal to one's aspirations that date back to childhood, inherited predispositions, and what comes about after acquired knowledge. It is the worst period since the world wars to be a random.

And what is next?

The pictures are from Schwarzwald, or the closest I have been to Lake Wallenstadt. Not many of them were taken. Below is Heidelberg Castle from the view of what looked to be a main square. To its right, just a tram station in northwestern Bonn. It was so very warm, and many hours of sleep were missed.

A lot is pending at the time of writing. The short-term future can hold either a few celebrations or failures to learn from. But neither should change what is currently in the works. It is human for there to be noise among predicted checkpoints. Around the trend, it's all Brownian motion.

Going back to the first paragraph, what would make one find attention dreadful? Humans observe, copy, adjust. This dates back to ancient civilizations, where it was most common for attention to come without acclaim. One notices how off-putting another's public actions are, and then dreads being made the subject of adjacent critique. But it is true that in modern today, the opportunity to build something from the ground up, publish an anonymous white paper, and change the course of humanity, is something heavily unrealistic. There are world-class labs occupying so many problem subspaces, that if the whole space is considered, it is debatable the world is compact. While it most certainly is not, it takes too much digging to find the holes, most of it being blind. The determination required to look for these holes or edges does not suit the majority of people, because today's reward-hacking isn't confined just to hacking public perception, but to that of one's own system of endorphinal triggers. There are countless outlets of slop that will satisfy what is human in one. Then, does the abstinence from these render one something non-human? To be above these things yields what?

That is it for now, until next time.