What Do You Want?
For Born Without Borders members.
Welcome to my thoughts, raw and unstructured. Structuring ideas, experiences, and information into essays and stories takes time I haven't had lately. Sí, AI can expedite the writing process, but at the expense of deep thought—by turning us into sea squirts that eat their own brains.
One of humanity’s distant ancestors—though one that’s unlikely to show up at your next family reunion—are the tunicates, also known as sea squirts. In their early stage of life, they are active, little tadpole-like explorers, propelling themselves through their marine world.
As the creature matures, however, that free-spirited life gives way to a sedentary one, in which the sea squirt attaches itself to a suitable rock. It will never move again. Its body becomes little more than a passive sack, no longer searching or exploring, just waiting to see what drifts by, day in, and day out, for the rest of its life.
This is, as you might imagine, not a particularly intellectually demanding lifestyle. The sea squirt’s brain therefore becomes superfluous, an unnecessary waste of energy.
So, it does the logical thing: it eats its own brain, and gets on with surviving on whatever floats past.1 Even without a full brain, evolution has given the sea squirt the wisdom to realize when something no longer serves a purpose.
Many humans, by contrast, now mimic the sea squirt’s lifestyle on social media, but have not yet recognized an unfortunate truth: that their brains have become superfluous.
- Brian Klass
I'm no longer on social media, but I use AI in some Spanish-language articles to meet the demands of our capitalist society, where efficiency comes at the cost of intelligence.
I don't write for fame or even recognition. I used to. I wanted to sit down with famous intellectuals and be part of a discourse I believed could change our society. Then, the same people I respected ended up on podcasts that push supplements and complain about a masculinity crisis. I don't need to be part of the pseudo-intellectuals, celebrities, and politicians getting together in their artificial circus. I don't want to monetize what I do through Meta and Google. I don't want to support the corporations that paid Trump during his inauguration to drop court cases and support technofeudalism.
I don't want to sustain the dam they built—the one we're currently stuck in.
I want to tell you stories.
- I want to tell you about a cousin's death and turn it into a movie—a movie set at an affluent family dinner after the funeral. We get into the characters' heads and wonder if they will reveal what they’re really thinking to others. We switch focus and move the camera with reactions, but also with thoughts, showing the shared consciousness we're often unaware of. The movie explores class, fear of death, and how these ideas living in our minds affect our physical bodies and societies. I want to play with how each decision one person makes affects another, showing there is no free will. I want to show how one person’s thoughts and choices change another's. We are all connected threads that can unravel the tapestry of our world. Just because we have no free will doesn't mean we don't have influence and responsibility.
- I want to tell you a story about expats: When a young woman disappears after a festival in Castellón, a dysfunctional group of expats and locals set out on an impulsive road trip across Spain to find her, each with their own secrets, motives, and growing doubts about whether she wants to be found at all.
Nolan Yuma
I want to help you aprender idiomas.
I want to help you connect with people around the globe and think in new ways.
I want to write poems.
I want to get silly and play.
I want to get offline.
Everything I want keeps me online. Why?
Why spend unpaid time online when we could be in the natural world, exploring this blue and green miracle that birthed us?
It's true—writing helps us discover and articulate our thoughts. It's a journey into the self. A journey that no longer interests me. I know who I am. Self-actualized? Puede ser. But that's not the real top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's self-transcendence—where you let go of the self, open yourself up to our shared consciousness, and live a life for others, which by this point, you've realized aren't separate from the self. We're all going down the same river.
To live a fulfilled life, you can't force it. Accept that you can't control the current, only influence the ride. This doesn't mean lie back. Throw yourself into rapids and learn to navigate them, but if you spend your life swimming upstream and building dams, you won't see all the river offers. When you try to control the future, you accept emptiness. Don't accept work you know leads nowhere; work that doesn't serve others and denies the river. So, I'm asking you:
What do you want?
The fact several hundred people take time out of their day to read what I wrote means a lot. Thank you. Te lo agradezco. Yes, paid subscriptions are the only way to keep this going, but you owe me nothing. Just by taking the time to read my work, you've shown me it has worth. Yet, I need to know how to make this sustainable while we're in this capitalist dam that's bound to collapse.
Do you want me to develop one of my scripts? Do you want more language articles? Do you want poems? Do you want to learn how to communicate across cultures? How do my stories and essays help you? Which of my stories and essays are worth our time online?
Let me know in the comments or reply to this email.
With love,
Nolan
All my work is published on Ghost, a decentralized, non-profit, and carbon-neutral platform—free from VC funding and the grip of technofeudal lords.
I don’t use algorithms to hijack your attention.
My work can only exist if you share and support it.
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