[posts]


The First Week
by Asterion
12 OCT 2025

And here I am, at the end of my first week back in real life. What do I have to say about it? Not much. As much as I'd like to be verbose—or rather, feel like I should be verbose—I just tend not to. It feels like I'm failing to explain myself properly despite my info-dense writing style.

But not much isn't not a thing. I'll start with some context. My place of work is what I guess you'd call one of those generic, back-of-the-cabinet industrial businesses that keep everything together behind the scenes. It makes rubber parts for mostly aerospace/medical companies. Much of it is a machine shop, with some offices and a separate storage warehouse—where I work. My job there is to move and make inventory of the molds which are used in presses to make those rubber parts. It's hard work that, at times, I utterly loathe. But I'll get to that.

The first day, I had mostly been in my head while doing things I was given to keep me busy. I had gotten the phrase ora et labora ("pray and work") stuck in my head. Maybe it was because that day I'd heard a lot of talk about religion from others. Religion, exoteric politics and interpersonal gossip make up most of what people talk about on their breaks. I'm indifferent to it all. Another thing stuck in my head was comparing myself to a worker bee in a hive. I am a small, probably unessential, but nevertheless existing component in the grand machine of civilization. My life will have a bigger ripple effect from me being there, I feel.

After that day, I was utterly sore all over. Was probably not used to physical labor. My legs and arms ached. One of my left toes had been giving me trouble from what I guess was chafing in my steel-toed boots. I had a slow, thick heartbeat in my fingers when I tried to ball them into fists, which I couldn't do fully without more effort than usual. When I got home, I immediately took a hot shower hoping the heat would do my muscles some good. Then I ate the dinner my mom brought to my room (because I could barely walk!). After that, I crawled into bed, also hoping my trapped body heat would help my muscles. Instead, I woke up. No light from the window. Time was maybe 8:17 PM—a 2 hour nap I had tripped into. Parents had already gone to bed. I distracted myself with YouTube, Discord and other mundane things for a few hours before spoiling myself and staying up late playing my favorite vidya game.

Next day, I felt like shit. I had some philosophy-brained, head-in-the-clouds naive optimism yesterday, but that day I had just felt terrible. There's as much I could say here as I did about the first day, but it'd likely be unwise to share it all. Looking back on it now I'm not sure why I had been so upset. Sad, specifically. I'd expect disappointment, frustration, but of all things not despair! I even started thinking about collapstiarianism again, and how civilization is slavery and so on and so forth. Today's special was philosophy-brained, head-in-the-clouds pessimism! Ooh-hoo-hoo! But God, what a crummy day... Better not to dwell on it.

That day I had not come home sore, and the next day I had come to some baseline crabbiness/agitation which I was mostly comfortable with. Besides getting my first bank account that day(!!!), the rest of the week was uneventful, though more interesting than my previous stint as a NEET for sure. My weekend, too, has been uneventful. I've spent it on vidya and thinking about my special interests. I'm considering making a Zettelkasten. Might be the right thing I need to gather my scattered, rhizomatic ideas into something more coherent.

This is perhaps not the life experience I'm looking for. So far, I'm only a degree less isolated from the world than I had been as a NEET. "Home-school-home-school" became "home-work-home-work"—the same cycle of living my life in two buildings. Perhaps things will change. I hope they do, for the weirder and more interesting. Otherwise, how will I get all the stimulus and information I need for what I say to have any value? Maybe it doesn't, anyway. Philosophy (and politics in particular) for me has always been a hobby. The likelihood of, say, my social vision being applied without compromise, let alone at all, is basically nothing. 

What'll most likely happen is I'll keep rambling on my blog for as long as it takes me to prepare my escape, and then I'll ramble on it some more after I do. Some time in my life I'd like to find someone to escape to some peripheral region of the US with. I'd hate to be near centers of civilization as the world goes to the dogs, but most of all I'd hate to get out only to be alone.