2026-01-28 04:27:00
hi! welcome to my website!!
right now it's still kind of ugly, but i realized you can just write html in posts and pages. there's also an option to customize css. that makes bearblog a website maker! and you also get a nice blogging system too.
so yeah i want to try to make a fun site that's similar to those cool neocities ones! wish me luck!
that's all for this update, thank you for reading!
2026-01-28 04:05:00
I’ve noticed that most conversations don’t really start anymore, they’re triggered.
Someone sends a TikTok. A reel. A screenshot of an Instagram post. We react to the thing, maybe exchange a few lines about it, and then the conversation just dies as soon as the content runs out.
It made me realise how rare it’s become to just… talk. To text about anything and nothing. To rant and rave about something that’s happened in our lives. To just say hello or how you doing without a prompt, or to check in without a goddamn link attached.
I watched a video recently where someone switched to a dumb phone and gave everyone their number. Out of the whole friend group, only one person actually texted it. Everyone else texted their iPhone and just waited for a response instead because what they wanted to send wasn’t a conversation, it was just a piece of content.
And I’ve noticed the same thing in my own life. Conversations that start with something being shown rarely turn into genuine connection. It’s shallow and superficial and once I’ve responded to what I’ve been sent, well… there’s nothing left to say.
It makes me wonder how much of our social lives now are built on sharing things instead of sharing ourselves. We’re always “on”, always reachable, and yet somehow more distant than ever.
Maybe that’s why so many of us feel lonely? Because we’ve replaced talking with… forwarding.
2026-01-28 01:42:00
Wake up. It's 5:20 am. You're still tired from the night because your daughter is sick and you spend half an hour cleaning vomit off a Pikachu plush. You hear the sound of Lease by Takeshi Abo, a familiar song if you circle niche aesthetic forums. It brings a slight bit of comfort in the otherwise existential dread of the routine you stumbled into. The rut.
You didn't make a rut, you stumbled into one that was premade for most people like you. The rut was already made by people who existed long before you.
Loving wife, beautiful daughter, a comfy desk job with full benefits, and a salary that's just big enough for said wife to be able to stay home and raise your daughter.
You feel this dichotomy. By seemingly most measures of societal success, you've won the game. It's all side-quests from here. So why does it feel hollow? Is it because a significant part of your life is taken up by the mundane and exploitative nature of corporate America? The fact you spend most of your life either asleep or working for a group of people so out-of-touch with the needs of the people they deem beneath them? You've gone through this thought pattern before you've even brushed your teeth.
You get dressed in attire that you hope screams "I refuse to participate in this masquerade", kiss your sleeping wife, and walk to the garage. You get into your boring car, turn it on, look for what album you want to listen to for your hour long drive to your cognitive labor camp while the car warms up.
There's almost a dissociation that occurs between the half hour mark and the near-end of you commute. Lapses in consciousness that make you wonder how you even got there if you look it in the eyes. Only ever seemingly disrupted by cars with headlights that were engineered to make even Stevie Wonder think it's too bright. I am Jack's burning retinas.
You arrive at your office. You take a light puff of your THC vape pen, a jingle from a Serj Tankian song plays in your head:
anti-depressants controlling tools of your system. Making life more tolerable, making life more tol-er-a-ble.
You walk out into the city, it's quiet. No surprise, it's not even 7am yet. It feels almost like a liminal space to your liminal space between home and home. You get inside and walk to the kitchen for water, making sure to check and see if your boss's boss is out. If he's out, leave an hour early. If he's in, 15 minutes early.
He's in. 15 minutes it is then.
You're earlier than basically everyone else, so nobody can tell you're skipping out early. It's like playing hooky for a class where the teacher barely knows you exist.
You've zoned out by this point, entrenched in doing literally anything else other than work. You check the news. Another person killed by ICE. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. You go onto YouTube to get something out of anything.
It's now somehow 9am. Either because of the THC in your system or you've slipped into another state of unconscious consciousness. Have your ADHD meds kicked in? You can never really tell.
Meeting, followed up by another meeting, followed up by another meeting to extend the previous meeting. Is this all there is?
You get around to doing some work, it's done in less than an hour, but you gotta make yourself look busier than you are. I am Jack's sore office chair-fused ass.
It's 12pm, lunch. Brief period to take your headphones off and soak in the mundane conversations of people on your floor. Waffles with 18g of protein that taste just like eggos. Another kid is sick, you almost wonder if they indirectly got your child sick. You eat at your desk because it's one of those days where your coworkers aren't hanging out in the lunch area.
You get done at around 1. Now to just survive the longest 1 hour 30 minutes of your life. You wish time moved as quickly now as it seemingly did in the morning.
You reply to most messages received via Teams using the default generated responses. It's almost as if even it knows this shit is mundane.
You start to visualize an elevator interaction with the CEO of the company you work for, where you proceed to verbally rip her apart for her obtuse return-to-office policy. You're angry that you spend more time doing things you don't want to do for people that don't matter instead of spending that time doing things you want to do with people that do matter. You used to be so optimistic about work.
It's ironic actually. You spend the same amount of time on Teams calls in-office as you did work from home. It's almost like the whole "it's to promote more in-person cooperation" is just another example of corporate double-speak.
Somehow, the hour-long 10 minutes finally pass and you get the hell out of there. Same hour-long commute just backwards. You go 15mph over the speed limit like the rest of left lane traffic, keeping an eye out for cops.
It is now an unbroken dissociation between work and home. What have you even actually done today? What are you going to do with the rest of your day? Northbound traffic is clogged for reasons you can only theorize based on the presence of police and highway assistance vehicles that come after a car accident.
Exit freeway, find the rest of your way home. You finally get to the best part of your day. Despite your little girl being sick, all she wants to do for the next 3 hours until bed time is play with you. Is this why work exists? To make you appreciate the limited time you get with loved ones? They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. I am Jack's burning hatred for corporate America.
Seems like you've just begun when suddenly it's time to put your daughter to bed. Where did the time go?
You cherish a moment that you know won't last forever. Sitting in a rocking chair, singing to your sleepy girl. You put her in her crib and kiss her goodnight.
You walk out, wife is studying for her classes in the bedroom, again. You almost take it personally, but you remember why you have frequent date nights.
You go sit on the couch in your office and turn on the TV to play video games for an hour. You're well past exhausted. 8:30 rolls around and you decide to go to bed early. Your wife is still studying. You finally drift off to sleep at 9-ish.
This isn't every day, but it's more often than not your day.
Welcome to my world. Poor me, right?
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can you tell I wrote this while bored at work?
2026-01-26 21:12:00
Average is a perfectly neutral word.
But what if someone were to call your life average? What would you feel?
In statistics, average is a descriptive tool. It does not praise or condemn, it simply names a reference point. In large datasets, someone will always fall near the centre of any measured scale let it be life expectancy, income, height, someone has to sit in the middle. But when we take this concept out of mathematics and apply it onto human lives, a tool for describing data turns into a judgment of one's worth.
Humans love comparing themselves. Numbers fascinate us because they simplify complexity. But simplification has a cost. It leads to rewarding extremes: exceptional beauty, exceptional success, and expectational failure - especially in mass media. What it leads to is the erasure of average. The middle becomes synonymous with invisible.
Once your sense of self depends on your position on a graph, average stops being a description and becomes a threat. If you are not above, you feel below even when you aren’t.
However, human life is not one variable. You can’t average curiosity, loyalty, humor, moral courage, values, or the way someone notices small things. Compressing a person into a single metric always produces a lie, even if the math is there.
The fear of being average is really the fear of being told your life didn’t matter. But meaning isn’t assigned by percentile. It’s generated by what you do, what you refuse, what you protect, what you care about.
The real tragedy isn’t being average. It’s wasting your life chasing numbers that were never meant to measure your worth.
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2026-01-26 09:02:00
I recently read the wonderful "Don't Get Hung-up on Trending" by Becky. It addressed something that I've been thinking about for a while with my blog and the Discovery feed, and I wanted to add some thoughts of my own.
I mentioned in my post "On Being More Social" that I used to blog mainly with toasts disabled so my posts wouldn't show up on the Discovery feed. I did this for a couple of reasons.
First, I felt that I was writing mostly for myself, and my posts were centered on my personal life and things I enjoy. A lot of the posts I was seeing on the feed were about blogging or webweaving or tech or things like that, and I was over here writing about point-and-click adventure games and concerts I attended. I didn't think anyone on Bear would be interested in my online journal (even though I like reading about other bloggers' interests and life adventures).
Second, the Discovery feed had one of the things I was trying to get away from on social media: "likes" and the idea of "trending." I was tired of connecting my personal value with a number or with how visible I was in online spaces. I wanted a place of my own to practice web design and do the thing I love most (writing), and while I did want to meet like-minded people, I couldn't help but have a desire to hide because social media had worn me down.
I'm still not really sure how I feel about the toasts feature or having likes on blog posts in general. The Discovery feed has undoubtedly been a nice way to discover fellow bloggers whose writing I really enjoy, but on the other hand, having a like button is giving me that same niggling feeling that Twitter or Instagram did, that my worth correlates to a number ticking up.
And, to be brutally honest, I've run across some trending posts on the Discovery feed that I'd rather not have seen. I like that we have the ability to hide certain blogs, at least.
Regardless, Becky's post gave me comfort and reminded me that a like is nothing but a click of a button. What truly matters are the connections we make through being our genuine selves, and realizing that as long as we continue doing what makes us happy while keeping in mind that we are part of a community, other people will be there for it.
If you're watching what's happening in Minneapolis right now with horror and disgust, as you should be, please consider donating to one of the following organizations that are in the thick of it:
Midwest Immigration Bond Fund
National Immigration Law Center
Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota
North Star Health Collective
Leo Towing for ICE Victims
Women's Foundation of Minnesota
2026-01-26 08:24:00
hi. i'm sorry for starting this blog in a positive way because it looks like it might be full of my sad posting for a while.
so.. i might just be overthinking stuff but i feel like i'm at a point where i can't really bring myself to do anything. i mean i can occasionally do stuff that makes me at least a bit happy (like posting here) but when it comes to school and other stuff i can't really convince myself to do it. it gets even worse because school has deadlines. and some of them are REALLY short for me.. so next thing i know i'm stressing over something i should already have done but haven't and don't have much time to finish it. that basically paralyzes me and i rarely finish the stuff during that. thankfully the teachers in my school don't really grade stuff they make us do at home so it's not really a big deal i guess but still. i also struggle with learning for tests and stuff and i just can't get it in my head.. so i'm really stressing and worrying if i'll even be able to finish school.
at the same time there's trump saying dumb things on twitter about greenland and other things, the things ice does (did they even do anything good? 😭), the department of justice protecting a pedophile (who did a lot of bad things on his island) with the us president potentially being on the same list. on the other hand you have the uk with the online safety act (more like government control act) enforcing dumb id/face verifications to access stuff. i can't wait until i can't even play minecraft without "verifying my age".. 😭 i'm sorry for talking about this, i don't usually get into politics but i just had to get this out.
all of this happening around me while i'm also struggling emotionally because i'm an extreme intorvert and don't really have anyone to talk to + i'm really scared to talk to people (even just to greet them) makes it even worse. recently i've been spending almost all day everyday in bed and even almost crying on some days. how can i be so miserable?? i also have bad parents (i mean i have a place to sleep and food and stuff but theyre really destroying me emotionally..) and my school has a counselor so i went there and i don't really want to talk about it but something happened that made me lose trust in the counselor.
so now i'm here.. thinking if it's even worth it to stay here. and i know people will always say that it is and everything but like i don't even feel safe here or anything so what's the point.. and also the world is becoming worse and worse to live in everyday. i mean don't get me wrong there's a lot of beautiful places to explore and stuff but you can't really do that if the governments or whatever don't really want you to.
i'm sorry this blog turned around so fast but i just felt like i had to get this out.. there's also a really big chance i'll end up unpublishing this after a while because i won't feel comfortable with it. so sorry if this post just randomly disappears
thank you for reading and see you next time (maybe) 💕