M. Alan Thomas II ([info]thecrazydreamer) wrote,
@ 2007-12-28 13:54:00
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Current mood: angsty

What am I doing with my life?
Those of you on my friends list got to read a bit of profanity last night, along with a promise of explanation. Those of you not on my friends list don't read this thing anyway.

I had a bit of a shock last night. My reaction was not helped by the fact that just beforehand I had just finished reading Watchmen for the first time. (I had purchased it earlier that day.) Neither was it helped by the fact that, upon looking at the (also just-purchased) book that I was going to start reading in order to recover from the shock, I discovered that it was a sequel to something that I hadn't read, and I have no interest in owning or reading sequels without the original. Given the circumstances, I hope that my little display of angst last night may be forgiven me.

So what was the shock? Well, it was nothing most people would find upsetting, so first let me explain some things that I have not talked about a lot. This has to do with my goals and desires in life, so hopefully you'll find it interesting.

I want to change the world. Actually, "driven" is the term that keeps springing into my mind: I am driven to change the world. I want to be able to look ten thousand years into the future and be able to say that the world of 12,000 AD would have been different were it not for me. Not merely were it not for someone with my skills in my position, but for me. This is partially because I am not sure if an afterlife exists—although if it does, I'm fairly sure that the Roman Catholics are right—and, as Glen Cook's Black Company novels say, "It is immortality, of a sort," but I'd be doing my damnedest to change the world even if I knew for certain that God exists. (Incidentally, I'd prefer that the change in the world be a good one, partially because that's the sort of person I am and partially because if God exists, I don't want to piss him off; Pascal's Wager still holds.) I have never been quite certain how I will accomplish this, but I am absolutely certain that I will not be happy in a world where I am merely a statistic waiting to die. Apparently some people are, but I don't dream that small; I'm the CrazyDreamer for a reason.

About half a decade ago now, I got pissed off at all of the mediocre artists and webcomics that got so much attention while fiction languished, so I started something that I had never seen or heard of before: a webfiction. In later years, I ran across a few others, so it turned out that I wasn't the only one or possibly even the first, but I could still, if I played my cards right, be the one who made it popular, right? Eventually I rewrote my website to concentrate on promoting webfiction. Then, last night, I run across Pages Unbound. Oh, look. Someone's already had the idea of popularizing webfiction, has been doing it for a long time, has half an order of magnitude more entries than I knew existed, has been writing webfiction herself for twelve years, and is popular enough that it's her day job.

Can you count how many goals, backup goals, and pitiful attempts at self-respect in this area got destroyed by that one site? Yeah. Turns out I'm nothing but Yet Another Stupid Hack who can't even use making other people popular as his claim to fame. Half of my interest in writing—I'm sane enough to not bet that I'm going to be popular on the basis of writing talent alone—and half of my interest in digital humanities—a field I enjoyed partially because it involved digitizing text and partially because it left me with enough energy to write—have gone out the window. Now how the heck am I supposed to leave my mark on the world? Go into politics? (Don't think that I haven't considered it as a long-term plan.) I just have this sudden feeling that I don't know where I'm going with my life, and until I have a plan to change the world, I'm not sure what the point of my existence is.

For the past year and a half, doubt about existence of God has gnawed away at my sanity. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't care as much about not having an immediate plan to achieve immortality through my effect on the world. As it is, you can see where that gnawing's suddenly hit bone.


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[info]anison
2007-12-28 09:54 pm UTC (link)
I'm sorry I didn't get your message until just recently... and I have to run out again now. I promise I'll call you as soon as I can.

It'll be okay, ya? Don't worry.

(Reply to this)


[info]mutales
2007-12-28 11:11 pm UTC (link)
As oddly flattering as it may be to have somebody credit me for the dissolution of their hopes and dreams, I think you're looking at this the wrong way.

Shortly after I started Pages Unbound, I learned to my (momentary) chagrin that there was a well-established and organized community of people devoted to what they call "blooking" (horrible word, isn't it?), that I never knew about because I'd been busy writing and doing my own things.

As I said, I was momentarily chagrined... and I braced myself for a lot of accusations for being a Jenny-Come-Lately and not giving proper credit on my site to Those Who'd Come Before... and then I got over it and started trading links with them.

Why?

Because that's how the internet works. Nobody "owns" an idea like this, and something like the explosion of webcomics didn't come about because of any one person or one site. Even with Pages Unbound and all the other sites, most people still aren't aware of the tremendous potential for web fiction as a medium. Each new site that gets into the act, whether it's a work of web fiction itself or a promotion/review/networking site, is another strand in a net that will ultimately draw in a wider audience as a whole.

So, if your goal is to "change the world" all by yourself, then maybe you were looking in the wrong direction in the first place... but maybe you just need to rethink a few things. I'm successful as an online author not because my work appeals to the whole world but because it appeals strongly to a niche... which means I don't have all of internet readership wrapped up in a neat little bow, and I never will.

Again, if your goal is to have that, then you probably are doomed to disappointment... but consider, if your goal is to know that the world will be irrevocably different in 10,000 years because of you, touching and changing a couple thousand people's lives today isn't a bad place to start.

To wrap this up: if you want to encourage literacy and/or web fiction, the best way to do that is to connect with other people who are doing the same thing, not fold your tent when you realize they exist. And if you write the story that only you can write, then it will reach some people far more strongly than any attempt you make to reach everybody.

What results in a greater net change, punching one person in the gut or a soft breeze blowing against a crowd?

-AE.

Edited at 2007-12-28 11:12 pm UTC

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[info]thecrazydreamer
2007-12-29 10:06 am UTC (link)
[Apologies for the roughness of the draft; it's taken me until 4:00 AM to finish, and I'm not sticking around to clean it up any further.]


Hello again. (I've commented on your story before.) It didn't occur to me that the one or two clickthroughs you'd get from this post would attract your attention, or even that you'd be watching your referring sites that closely at all. Not that I'm blaming you for coming over here and commenting on my middle-of-the-night anxiety attack; I would have done the same thing, if I'd been in your position.

Incidentally, I find it amusing that of the three people to discuss this with me so far, exactly zero of them have attempted to deal directly with the fear of death that underlies my psychological position. Only one of them's opened with a note of sympathy, for that matter, although another tried comfort. Interestingly, the two non-sympathy responses seem to be assuming that my planning reaction is much worse than it is while more-or-less ignoring my emotional reaction. That is to say, everyone seems to assume that I'm completely giving up on something that I've only lost some of ("half") my interest in while ignoring the fear and anxiety expressed by the term "angst" and my reference to my sanity, among other places.

(Sidebar: Generally speaking, it's more strategic to place the sympathy first, because it implies that the comforter has experienced something similar themselves and is therefore speaking from a position of authority when they say that everything will be alright. The worst thing to do is to imply that the comfortee's emotional disturbance is silly, as this both suggests that the comforter is not taking the whole thing seriously and implies to the comfortee that the comforter does not understand the comfortee and/or their problem, ruining whatever authority the conforter had and driving the comfortee away. And if that calculated analysis of the strategy of comforting people in emotional pain hasn't clued you in to how my mind works, read on.)

As I am a strategist and an organizer and a planner who needs to always have a plan to feel comfortable, even if it's the backup plan to the backup plan to the umpteenth backup plan of the long-forgotten original plan—and part of the problem here is that suddenly none of my backup plans are applicable without retooling—I shall respond to a few of your points in order:

I think that I must point out that webcomics owe quite a lot to a few specific people. These run from the early commercially-successful, popular artists and writers such as Piro and Largo (MegaTokyo) to major organizers and providers such as Gav (Keenspot/Keenspace) to the artists and writers who took their commercially successful print comics online—thus providing a certain level of establishment credibility—such as the Foglios (Girl Genius). Most fields are like that. The internet and the web themselves would neither of them have happened until years later (at the earliest) had it not been for a couple of people each. Webfiction already owes a certain amount to the professional authors who have started posting stuff online for free, sometimes with a donation system attached (and causing a blowup inside the SFWA to boot; you know how important you are by whom you annoy).

[continued below]

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[info]thecrazydreamer
2007-12-29 10:07 am UTC (link)
[continued from above]

Of course, people like this wouldn't have been important if other people hadn't followed them. As you say, other new people add to the web, &c. The problem for me is, who those other people are doesn't really matter. The early pioneers who had new ideas, only they could do what only they had thought of. They left their mark. The few really good ones who inspired so many others, they too left a unique mark—talent above a certain level is more-or-less irreplaceable, given that the supply is generally fully committed—but I have no reason to believe that my talent, while good, is at that level. (The cost of making the attempt is greater than the chance of being right and succeeding multiplied by the reward for succeeding; acts of hubris rarely stand up to risk-reward analysis.) Everyone else could be replaced by any other person of equivalent talent without changing the outcome; all that was required was sufficient warm bodies, sufficient statistical mass, and thus no individual excepting the special few has left a mark on the world with anything of themselves in it. And I have already expressed my complete and utter rejection of being one of the faceless horde.

Touching a couple of thousand lives would be nice. It's very difficult to know what the effects that has, because social engineering's particularly vulnerable to Chaos. (I.e., a small motion might have a big effect, a big effect a small one; it's hard to predict.) Two thousand's a pretty good minimum for counting on probabilities in the percentile range observably responding to the law of large numbers, though. However, I must assume that the odds of my doing that directly (e.g., through my own story) are not good enough to justify the attempt. (I have explained why above.) Therefore, I need some form of force-multiplier, such as aiding others in such a way as to be able to claim some of their success for my own. (In D&D 3.x, the person who does the most damage, particularly in a low-level party, is the bard using bardic inspiration; they can claim responsibility for all damage as a result of the damage increase that they provide and as a result of any to-hit roll that succeeds by a margin equal to or less than the to-hit bonus that they provide.) My present concern is whether I am in a position to act through any such multiplier.

Finally, I would argue that punching someone in the gut tends to cause the greater change. Even if no-one is serious injured, a fight can cause permanent changes in personal outlook, and punching the right person at the right time can make national news or start a riot or both. A soft breeze, however, never makes anyone do anything substantially different from what they would otherwise—not fanning themselves is about it—and is generally forgotten as soon as it's over. A nice image, but a lousy metaphor.

If you have a specific suggestion for a venture that would allow for a strongly individual impact—a joint venture, perhaps?—I'd love to hear it. If you'd just like to debate this some more, I see no reason to object, presuming that this debate will remain civil, logical, and impersonal insofar as it possible, given that some portions of it touch upon my mental state.

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[info]mutales
2007-12-29 10:26 am UTC (link)

Finally, I would argue that punching someone in the gut tends to cause the greater change. Even if no-one is serious injured, a fight can cause permanent changes in personal outlook, and punching the right person at the right time can make national news or start a riot or both. A soft breeze, however, never makes anyone do anything substantially different from what they would otherwise—not fanning themselves is about it—and is generally forgotten as soon as it's over. A nice image, but a lousy metaphor.


A minnor typo: you say "argue" when you mean "agree."

Or did you seriously see anything anywhere in there that suggested I thought the gentle breeze was the bigger change? The metaphor relates to my point about appealing strongly to a narrower segment vs. trying to appeal to everybody.


The early pioneers who had new ideas, only they could do what only they had thought of.


Yeah, I'm calling B.S. on this.

This is a fact: you and I both came up with the idea to write for the web on our own, as did bunches of other people. We both independently came up with the idea to make sites for the purpose of promoting them. If you went back in time and destroyed the creators of Keenspot... somebody else would have made it. Yeah, the name and initial line-up would have been different, but the potential, the need, and the technology were all there. Somebody would have seen it.

It's the same with the internet itself. The idea that it wouldn't have come about without a few people is an example of a fallacy whose name escapes me... like "I found your wallet; if I hadn't found it, it would have laid there forever." Not necessarily; we don't know what would have happened to a missing wallet if one person hadn't found it. The only reason nobody else found it was because it was no longer lost.

Telephones, electric lines, automobiles, railroads, steamboats, and pretty much every other major technological innovation were being worked on by multiple people independently of each other because the technology was in place. Multiple people can look at the same world and see the same potential or same need. Viewed in this light, even the innovators are not necessarily indispensible: if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have. We can pinpoint who exactly fulfilled the role in actual history, but if they were removed from the timeline, it wouldn't mean we wouldn't have the tech today.

The only way in which you can make a unique contribution to anything is in the details. If you wait twenty years and then write a web fiction based on your personal outlook and experience, the exact end result will be uniquely you and uniquely yours. Tha's your unique contribution to the world.

On the other hand, if you were the first person to ever write a story and post it on the internet, the bragging rights would be hollow because if you had never been born, somebody else would still have done the same thing with their story. Your unique contribution to the world would still begin and end with the uniqueness of the story you chose to tell.

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[info]thecrazydreamer
2007-12-30 12:55 am UTC (link)
As for the punch/breeze bit:

Sorry about that. I guess that I'm just too cynical and too used to people claiming that happiness and flowers will change the world. My apologies for letting that stereotype color my view of your statement.


As for the impact of inventors:

I'd like to say that I think that this is getting a little off-subject. Additionally, suggesting that even fewer people than I have proposed have any appreciable long-term impact on the world is not going to cheer up anyone determined to become one of those people, as it makes their quest more difficult.

I could argue such items as whether my writing is likely to affect any significant number of people or just become an unread, functionally meaningless series of 1s and 0s in the Internet Archive fifty years down the road or whether or not the many instances where someone was the only person working on a discovery, discovered something by accident that wasn't being pursued by anyone, or otherwise discovered something years before anyone else would have, advancing society faster than otherwise, constitute a valid counterargument to your point. However, I don't think that continuing this as a discussion is going to achieve anything useful for either of us, and right now I'm less interested in debating psychological issues such as my motivations with someone who is not familiar with me than in revising my plans to take into account this unexpected shift in terrain.

As I said before, if you have a concrete suggestion for something to do beyond "write a story and pray that you're actually good enough and lucky enough that something actually happens because of it," I'd love to hear it. (No, seriously. That sentence may be slightly snarky, but I have nothing against you or your suggestions, only your point of view on some aspects of this topic.) Meanwhile, I'll be working on publicity for the January 1st launch of CAR-PGa.org, which I've put off too long already.

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[info]mutales
2007-12-30 01:26 am UTC (link)
Additionally, suggesting that even fewer people than I have proposed have any appreciable long-term impact on the world is not going to cheer up anyone determined to become one of those people, as it makes their quest more difficult.


I believe that given your current perception of the world, history (both past and future), and the individual's role in it, and the importance you have attached to being "important" in this sense, it's fruitless to try to cheer you up as such because you're doomed to be disappointed.

Look at what you're doing now: shifting attention from promoting web fiction to promoting roleplaying games? How're you going to make your mark that way? It's a cyclical business, like comic books... dedicated hobbyists keep the industry alive and afloat during the dry periods, which are punctuated by craze/fad like outbreaks (such as the one caused by World of Darkness in the 90s) that breathe new life into both the industry and the fan base until the fad dies down... given the number of people who still play out-of-print game systems and the huge aftermarket for such titles (check eBay for examples), even if the entire roleplaying game industry shut down overnight, it would be started up again within ten years as a generation of players graduated to game designers and then publishers.

I'm all for promoting roleplaying, but if ever there was a medium that isn't crying out for a savior or a spokesperson, this is the one. Seriously, do a quick web search and you'll find that--as the internet is comprised mostly of geeks--there's already a million and one sites dedicated to p&p gaming. Some are even dedicated to promoting obscure/older systems. Sure, none that I know of have the exact same drift and thrust as the site you're starting, but that's mainly because there's no great need for such a site. You're at least a decade late for the heyday of the anti-roleplaying "moral panic"... most of those people have gone on to pointing their fingers at the ever-more-realistic video games.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into this and your RPG site is something you're doing for yourself for fun with no particular aim towards posterity or securing a legacy for yourself.

If that's the case, have at it.

But if not, what do you do when this fizzles out?

What's your next "cause"?

I'm not saying these things to be cruel, but because I believe it would be cruel for me not to say them. You're setting yourself up with impossible tasks (achieve immortality through promoting... things that are going to happen anyway) in order to reach an irrelevant goal (your idea of being one of history's supposed "irreplaceable innovator.")

So, no, I don't have a specific suggestion for how Sir Quixote can best slay the giants with the spinny, spinny arms...

But I do have a suggestion for how you can live a happier, more fulfilled life which will end with a feeling of accomplishment and the certain knowledge that you left the world a better place than you entered it.

Do something for yourself.

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[info]thecrazydreamer
2007-12-30 02:02 am UTC (link)
Or maybe I'm reading too much into this and your RPG site is something you're doing for yourself for fun with no particular aim towards posterity or securing a legacy for yourself.
1) It's not "my site," although I've done the majority of the technical and presentational work on it. It is the site of an international organization that's been around since the '80s. I happen to be one of the directors and have been for a number of years now.

2) I'm doing this because it's something that I think needs to be done. There are currently no major, public attacks on RPGs unless you count the situation in some states' prison systems, but people continue to report personal problems with individuals, and I'd like to give them a source for information that they can use to help themselves. (That, and Howard Taylor kinda shamed me into it. As for the mention and link, he also volunteered to provide some publicity, I feel obliged to provide some promotion for him as well.)

CAR-PGa.org isn't something that I threw together overnight in response to anything in my personal life, and if it looks that rough and incomplete then I need to postpone the opening while I work on it some more. However, I don't think that it does. I included a link to it in order to show that I do, in fact, have other things that I'm doing with my life and because I figured that it couldn't hurt and might help my publicity efforts. In fact, you were originally on my list of people to contact about the site, which is why I'm discussing it with you here.


I have said that I do not want to continue arguing about my motivations with you. To enforce that, I will be locking comments on this entry. Your methods of planning my life and happiness are not compatible with my methods or psychology. Furthermore, if I wish to tilt at windmills—and I used to have calling cards that read "El Caballero de la Triste Figura"[1]—that is my own choice, and a conscious one. If the windmill that I am presently concerned with, the promotion of webfiction, is also relevant to your interests, you may help me or get out of my way, but please do not attempt to dissuade me.

Any further comments may be directed to the e-mail address listed on my website. If they attempt to discuss aspects of this conversation that I have twice stated that I do not wish to discuss, I will take further measures to prevent contact.

[1]This is also a reference to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy's entry for "Knight of the Doleful Countenance."

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[info]thecrazydreamer
2007-12-30 02:08 am UTC (link)
Replies to this thread are now frozen. Comments by non-friends will be screened, comments will no longer be reported to me via e-mail, and I will not be checking this entry directly for new comments.

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