Thoughts on a Recent Read

—Spoilers ahead—

My most recent read was The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. I watched the 2002 movie a looong time ago, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting what I found in this book.

Within the first few pages, the Time Traveller asks, “Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real existence?” A cube has length, breadth, and thickness, but without time, can it really exist? 

After beginning with this idea of time as another dimension (which, honestly, thoroughly surprised me), Wells sends a man to AD 802,701. There, he finds two descendants of humanity: the Eloi and the Morlocks.

At first, the Time Traveller sees Eloi as the perfect result of human progress. They are beautiful, free from labor, spending their days doing nothing but eating fruit, playing, and sleeping. But as he learns more about them, he realizes that they have no curiosity, little intelligence, and hardly any instinct to protect themselves or each other. All that comfort hasn’t made them wiser. It has slowly erased the human qualities they no longer needed. So, if nothing required us to think, solve problems, or be curious, would we keep those abilities? Why would we? Evolution doesn’t really care about creating something more intelligent. Humanity can very well evolve without progressing.

As for Morlocks, they seem to be the laborer’s, providing for and sustaining the Eloi through the machinery underground. The Time Traveller tries to make sense of them through his world. Eloi are the descendants of the upper classes, living above ground in comfort, while the descendants of the workers have been pushed underground, until generations of different lives have turned them into different creatures. Even after hundreds of thousands of years, the class system hasn’t really changed, it has just taken a tangible form. One group works while another enjoys the results.

But later, we learn that Morlocks eat Eloi. This tells an entirely different relationship. Morlocks are still underground, still bound to machinery and survival in brutal conditions, while the Eloi have escaped labor and hardship so completely that they have become cattle.

The hierarchy has changed, but neither side truly holds the power.

And then the tone of the book changes completely. What if we go far enough that the future isn’t ours anymore?

The Time Traveller goes farther still. More than thirty million years into the future, he reaches a cold shore beneath the enormous red Sun, where humanity has long disappeared. All the class division, misery, survival, human evolution, whatever bullshit Wells has spent the story discussing, shrink into tiny hurdles in the thing we call humanity.

The Earth continues without any concern for what humanity once built or believed itself to be. This is really my favorite part: the Earth just continues.

We think we have become so “intelligent” that we automatically imagine the future as ours. But is it? Because we might colonize Mars? Because we can exploit our planet, use up its resources, build more technology, and then escape once we have destroyed it? Or because our brains have become so powerful that extinction feels impossible?

What are we, really? Homo sapiens has existed for roughly 300,000 years about 0.007% of Earth’s 4.54 billion year history and yet our intelligence makes us the god emperors of this world?

I don’t think so. Nature doesn’t work like that. Evolution doesn’t care what we think is best for survival. The conditions we create for ourselves and the state of nature determine which qualities remain useful and who can survive in this ever changing world, just as Wells imagines with the Eloi. 

The ending isn’t completely nihilistic (read it for yourself) but I want to leave it there. Nothing lasts. Humanity doesn’t last. The Earth as we know it doesn’t last. And we are only stardust that somehow gained the ability to observe itself.

On survival, convenience, and quiet surrender.

Is it possible to hate the system more every day while becoming increasingly “good” at living in it?

I was the angry teenager who had a problem with society, authority, and this entire arrangement. But as I grew up, I kind of lost it for a little while. Everything couldn’t be terrible. There were things I enjoyed, things I wanted, and eventually things I needed to pay for. It is difficult to be a rebel when you’re forced to be a part of this system.

So, like everyone else, I found my place in the system and kept living life as we’re all destined to. Get a job, work “9 to 5”, come home, and do it all over again to buy things you need and things they make you believe you need. But it didn’t take long to realize I was fucking furious.

Because, excuse me, what exactly am I helping to keep running? What is all this work supposed to be for?

I can hear the reasonable response. People need jobs, industry, and technological advancement. Yes. I know. I am one of those people. That is precisely what makes me angry. Our needs become the explanation for keeping the whole arrangement going, including the parts that seem to exist mainly to make greedy people who already have enough acquire more and more and more and never get full.

We take a living place and work out what we can get from it. What can be extracted, built, produced, sold. I read horror stories on the internet about big companies and their big plans to make the world a better place. They spout the most villainous shit imaginable, the kind of thing you’d expect to find in dystopian fiction, and market it as something so essential that humanity would die without it. And it gets me thinking, what other things we’re used to in this greedy system would have sounded like fiction hundreds of years ago? We are actually finding millions of different ways to exploit our planet and turn every fucking wonder into a financial opportunity.

I can’t get past the arrogance of it. And I participate. Of course I do. I buy things from companies whose priorities disgust me. I enjoy convenience. I fucking enjoy my nerdy and also fucking exploitative hobbies. I get excited about technology, science, and what we might discover next. Then I feel ridiculous for being impressed by these things while also wanting to rebel and live in the woods.

And what do I do with that? I can’t resign from needing things. I can’t stop the destruction of our beautiful planet by not buying another Magic booster pack.

The irony is that we keep going like this. Everybody says, “Well, I can’t change the world.” Well, I can’t do it alone either, but it’s kinda fucked up to think that this is exactly why I’m a slave and keep being one. We are slaves to our own needs and desires, and it feels like we can’t change that. Like it’s just human nature.

So, well, tomorrow I’ll wake up and carry on being part of everything I’ve spent this entire post complaining about.

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On remembering somewhere.

Some music makes me miss a life I have never lived.

I can’t quite name it. It makes me feel homesick, but not for a real home. I know I’ve never been there. Still, it feels as though I almost remember that life, as though it belongs to me.

This feeling has no clear image. I don’t know the place, the time, who is there with me, or, most importantly, who I am. It is just a faceless emotion.

The closest words I have for it are homesickness, melancholy, and longing too, but none of these words quite describe it. How can I feel homesick for somewhere I have never been?

It carries tenderness, distance, and loss. But I know there is no event beneath it. Nothing happened, no one left, and I have nowhere to return to.

It is not exactly grief. This is more mysterious, and somehow comforting. Perhaps music messes with the boundaries of memory. It enters the rooms where feelings, dreams, and forgotten moments are kept, then leaves behind something that resembles all three.

When the music ends, the place disappears with it, and I am left thinking about somewhere I can’t name.

---

I wrote this poem when I was 16 and kept it hidden in a notebook for more than ten years, too afraid to share it. I think it is finally time to let it exist somewhere.

-Irmak

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That’s one of the songs.

On the beauty of never fully knowing.

Technically, we are permanently trapped within our own experience of reality.

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, prisoners spend their lives watching shadows move across a wall, mistaking those shadows for the whole of existence. But the cave has an exit. The prisoners can walk outside, and see the source of the shadows.

So where is the outside of a human mind?

Every sight, sound, memory, and thought reaches us through consciousness. When we encounter something unfamiliar, we experience it through a series of limitations set by our bodies, our memories, and the kind of creature we happen to be. We can leave a physical cave, we can’t step outside of our mind.

Thomas Nagel asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” We can imagine being a bat, we have enough scientific knowledge about bats to do so. But this is still a human imagination turning human sensations into the shape of a bat’s life. We don’t discover what it is like for a bat to be a bat.

I will never see nature through the eyes of a butterfly or know what it feels like to breathe underwater. I can be with another person for a lifetime and share grief and joy with them, yet I will never experience the world from their perspective. 

There is a strange loneliness in this. Imagination and empathy can try to overcome the boundaries of the self. We can try to translate each world through science and art but we can never transfer it whole. 

Isn’t it somehow beautiful? This ‘loneliness’ is one of the strangest fascinations of being alive in this vast universe. Each creature has a consciousness through which the universe witnesses itself, and no two are alike. Every mind is mysterious in its own way, temporary, limited, and astonishingly specific.

There is no “outside” available to us, not as an experience. There is no single creature for whom the whole picture could ever appear. That is not a prison, it is part of its intricacy. The universe is too vast to understand through one form of consciousness.

A poem, a painting, a piece of music, or a conversation is an attempt by one universe to reach another. Stay curious about all the forms of light we will never see. 

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
- William Blake

On cosmic messages, lost purpose, and becoming someone I never expected.

Albert Camus described the absurd as the confrontation between our desperate hunger for meaning and a universe that remains silent in return.

I have always wanted the universe to be there for me.

Not in a religious way. I don’t believe in a higher being watching over me, and I have never imagined an old man in the sky testing or guiding my choices. But I liked believing that the universe was hanging around in the background leaving messages for me to decipher. Cosmic breadcrumbs leading me toward who I was meant to become.

It was a comforting arrangement because it took some of the weight off my shoulders. I didn’t have to know exactly what I was doing. The universe knew.

There was once a version of me who believed that creating things and growing intellectually were the most important purposes a person could have. They weren’t hobbies to her. They were evidence that she was living correctly and the universe was doing everything in its power to keep her that way.

Funnily enough it didn’t make me happy enough to stay.

That was difficult to admit because I had expected this purpose to do everything. It had to give my life meaning, provide an identity, make me interesting, keep me intellectually alive, and ideally turn me into someone I could admire.

But of course, I could never be perfect. Nothing I did was ever enough for me. I had placed so much pressure on that path, to satisfy me, and prove something about who I was that I eventually burned out and moved toward something I expected much less from. I decided low expectations were perfect for me.

And here I am, walking along a path that the person I was ten years ago would barely recognize, feeling lost and unfulfilled, with nothing to feed my soul. Waiting for a miracle from the universe to bring my purpose back. She might be disappointed. I am disappointed sometimes, too. But she was also younger and dramatic.

Lately, I have come to the realisation that it was up to me all along. I can’t alter what happened to my younger self, but I can change what her life means to me. She doesn’t have to be my disappointed judge. She can simply be an earlier draft, earnest, imperfect, and slightly too confident about her purpose in life.

I have started bringing my soul back into the world. I have finally accepted that the universe is not going to help me collect the scattered pieces of myself. Oddly, this no longer feels like abandonment. More like a liberation.

I don’t need to manifest a perfect life or wait for a miracle to point me toward it. I need to behave like someone who still wants to participate in her own existence.

It may not make me as successful as I once hoped to be. Nothing has ever been as successful as I hoped it would be.

But perhaps success isn’t the only reason to bring something into the world. Just write the strange essay at 3:31 AM on a Sunday ‘morning’.