enjambments
A garden of linked notes / Kael Espino
I learned to be human by watching other people. I learned to be human by being other people.
Newest
Moving beside a spreadsheet: Bernard Williams' one thought too many, Weil's grace without friction, and learning the finite limits of infinite responsibility.
“Whatever happened in me when I broke the plan happened next to a spreadsheet.”
Thirty days after retrenchment: refusing heroic narrative scripts for dull necessity, retying the knot of competing selves, and choosing by reading absences.
Asking 'Did you see this?' in the grammar of a lost public: algorithmic feeds as private bubbles, and why saying 'No' reveals the seams rather than the real.
Reading one's life as a narrative: foresight, an "inner oracle", comes from self-knowledge and radical honesty about one's own intentions.
Offloading human emotional labor and purpose to sycophantic AI: corporate automation, the loss of friction, and resisting self-dehumanization.
Passive media consumption as a compulsion for novelty: how algorithm-tailored feeds create a desire without an object, displacing personal introspection.
Rage-baiting and weaponized engagement: freedom of expression stripped of responsibility, and how passionate online reactions feed a narcissistic economy of noise.
Companion (2025) as Ex Machina meets her: a partner built to fit our unexamined self feeds the ego, and an Other cannot be switched off when it suits us.
Baudrillard and the feed: tech has demystified the world, and belief accepted without imagination, sold to us as progress, costs us part of our humanity.
“Words do not answer a loss. They only move the weight of the absence somewhere I can carry it.”
“We have blurred the existence of the heavens with the smoke and steam of progress.”
“I check the mirrors: my reflection shifts between prisoner and guard.”
“The hand that reaches for a cup has never said the word ‘cup’.”
“The type of failure I am feeling now is an empathy towards humanity as my own kind.”
“I am hungry for interpretation because I haven't expressed anything in years.”
“Grief is bound to a single loss and cannot be lent.”
“I cannot always drag a corpse to my body for sentimentality and a sense of familiar comfort.”
“I am here (and I am there), incomplete and complemented by this void that incompletes me.”
“Nowadays, everyone just assumes that everyone is expressing a point that should be taken seriously.”
“With the right amount of god complex, the desire to become human must be present.”
“I am afraid of not having to want anything.”
