I’ve never met a real person.

These colonies of living organisms & organs controlled by an ad-hoc mushy-computer can appear to be very tangible, but if I think about it: I’ve never actually met a real person. They call themselves people; humans… they have their friends, and their goals, and their dreams, and this perception of self, but at the end of the day they’re really just a mass of decaying matter trying its best to either pretend mortality isn’t real, or distracting themselves from it: a complicated mass of flesh spewing out its own story; generating a narrative as it goes along. But do we ever get to really know anybody? We only get to know their story, and we base our trust in them on how accurately their story reflects our experience of them — but is that the same as knowing?

The person that you think you are is merely one version of you: the version that you’ve gotten to know; a culmination of memories, stories, bullshit, lies, self-deception, and much more. Is that really you? Are you not really just what others experience of you? You are many people, and nobody, all at once. You become a part of other people’s stories, but they are just stories too. Stories become memories, which becomes history, legend, fables, and is eventually forgotten or distorted into something utterly different: a new story based on a “true” story.

I have never met a real person, I have lost track of my own story, and some of my best friends have been animals. People. What would they be like if they couldn’t talk? I often like to think that reality is wordless, and our “Matrix” (like the movie) that we’re lost in is the matrix of stories. Social Media is the culmination of this ability to weave a narrative. But what is it all for? A distraction from the inevitable? Progress? How can I truly know anyone… if I don’t even know myself?

“The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about.” ― Gil Scott-Heron