I am Papercutlife, a writer, artist and a casual anime watcher. This blog is about everyting that interests me. Some of it might be a bit disturbing, mainly from the philosophical standpoint. I'll be writing about life, its meaning (or lack thereof), my favourite animes, games, music, and some other stuff that might come up in my brain. I used to be a very creative child, sadly I lost most of that creativity. This is my attempt at creating something I like again.

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One thing is going to be prevalent on this blog, and that is me complaining about my scrolling addiction. I have like six or seven (…) hours a day and I don't count my Genshin time in that. All together it could be like eleven hours. That is one of the reasons I returned to Neocities after three years. I need to do something, I need to be creative, otherwise I'm going to fall into my classic depressive pit and start writing insanely concerning articles (like those below lmao). I was thinking the other day about how different internet used to be. I used to have a blog about Paramore when I was like twelve. I designed my layout in Adobe Elements and uploaded it on the website, twisting and tweaking everything for hours and hours until it looked normal and no banner was overflowing into the text, or until the text wasn't disappearing somewhere off the screen. I always felt a sense of accomplishment, I felt like it was a time spent doing something. Now, being on internet is just wasting time. Everything is curated for you, everything is controlled, there's no freedom when it comes to customizing your own page. You just consume, consume and consume. Sometimes I don't even feel like replying to my friends, that's how fried my brain is from the constant scrolling. Another thing is, I used to have a blog that only a few people visited and I didn't really care, it was my project that I did for fun. It was a hobby and I didn't think of gaining anything from it. Nowadays everything you post is intentional, polished, aiming to gain as much attention as possible. And why is that? People are lonely, real connections are disappearing, and everyone is grasping for the last straw, which is getting some resemblance of friendships from the online world. I remember early social media time, and yes, we were competitive when it came to who had how many friends on Facebook. But all those friends were still real people close to us, friends of friends, random people from our school, cousins… No celebrities or influencers to fill our heads with useless junk. I am honestly so fed up. And what makes me the angriest is the fact that I can't stop. I can't stop going on there because the fear of missing out is stronger than my need to leave. So here I am, creating another blog and hoping to spend my time in a less brain frying way.

With the rise of social media, friendships are becoming increasingly shallow. Maybe it's just me and my inability to maintain connections solely based on sharing reels, reacting to each other's stories, and sending the occasional "hi, how are you?" There's a depth I miss in most people these days. Tell me something interesting, tell me about something other than the content of your "For You" page. Our brains have been reduced to answers processed by ChatGPT, our attention spans destroyed by algorithms. There's a weird duality in the world presented on social media that no generation before us has been able to see. Swiping through cute kittens followed by videos of cities being bombed somewhere in the Middle East surely doesn't benefit our brains in any way. How does a person like that decide what they should actually feel? It's like flipping through emotions on a whim, never realizing what we're actually feeling, floating in an ambivalent vagueness of emotional pathos. And the feelings we have for other people in real life seem to be the same: vague and shallow. Once the conversation gets too deep, we retract, because what if the fragility of the friendship couldn't handle it? Isn't it better to just laugh-react to someone's story to keep the notion of a friendship going, rather than engage in a meaningful conversation where opinions could differ and egos might get hurt? I have been affected as well. I also only keep in touch thanks to online platforms, watching other people's lives through videos and photos, desperately reaching out for those straws in hopes of striking up a conversation on an algorithm-suggested topic. It makes me feel strangely abandoned and alienated. Do others feel like that as well? Do they see the absurdity of society as it is right now? We're all burned out; everyone is talking about the loneliness epidemic, trying to cure the illness while ignoring the symptoms. And the worst thing is that it's too late - the illness is already festering deep inside our brains. We're all instigators of our own suffering; we're just way too brainrotted to realize that fact.

I haven't written anything for a very long time. I haven't read anything for a very long time either. All I do is scroll. And yet every now and then, my brain reminds me that I want to do more than that. It's the times when scrolling no longer gives me the satisfaction it once did and when the dopamine hits don't hit as strongly as they used to. That's when I put my phone down and stare at the wall, feeling sick to my stomach. There's no meaning to any of this; there's no higher power that would make this turmoil worth my time. Every question I have can simply be answered with "just because". Evolution wasn't looking for logical answers to philosophical questions, and neither should we. And yet there's something that keeps eating at me, longing for answers to questions that have none. "Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined," is what Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus. The more you prod, the more you realise how futile everything is, how hilariously absurd we all are. What does nothing mean? What's going to happen after? It is knowledge that hurts us most, because it uncovers how much we don't know. We're all made of the same stuff; there's no difference between us. Read more...