I’m slowly realising that the book that I’m writing is a sort of fuck-you to my teenage years, which is something that most twenty-somethings go through in less overt or embarrassing ways.

The book talks about a society that tries to infuse itself with narrative meaning, where every death feels like a natural conclusion, tropes and arcs are deeply felt, and breakthroughs are always around the corner because they’ve been put there. Everything is finely tuned with the experience of the subject in mind. Not necessarily pleasant experience - hardship and horror can be character-building after all, and there’s the flexibility necessary to continue upholding the appearance of free will - but at its core is this perverse fascination with depth, and philosophical truth, and a deliberate rejection of nihilism and existentialism.

And - well, it’s a dystopia. Maybe it’s the fact that I was writing and reading voraciously more or less constantly from the age of thirteen, or the fact that I was the protagonist of a pretty significant family drama at the age of seventeen, but literary meaning was something I desperately clung to for a long time - that there should be some great significance to everything I did or said, like every sentence I uttered had to create a philosophical ripple effect that could be felt thousands of miles away. Either way, the things I was thinking were bullshit.

I have learned that the way your life works out is mostly a matter of luck. That we impose meaning on our actions to varying degrees, and that actions themselves receive meaning sometimes more comfortably than on other occasions. I’ve settled more into absurdism as a way to approach life - that it’s up to me to try and negotiate my way through existence, and success is far from a foregone conclusion.

You don’t get to these sort of conclusions through dramatic moments. You get there from weeks of total inactivity, months of depression, the sort of hopelessness that doesn’t justify itself. I haven’t learned anything from being an anxious wreck, other than to not fall into certain traps again. Throughout the last four years, there are dark spots that I don’t expect to learn from, and I imagine that they’re far from over. Assuming I have a regular life expectancy, eighty to ninety years is too long to pack with fresh revelations every week.

Funnily enough, the characters in Dystopolis do find some meaning, to varying degrees, but usually against prescription. I hope there’s ambiguity to a few. The last story I finished, about a farmer in the middle of a murder trial, ends on a point of ambiguity, and not one where each outcome is equally important. There’s a distinct possibility that characters at the end of the story end up spending the rest of their lives going through the motions, or get into a freak train accident, or become wild-eyed sex addicts, or live happily ever after.

It’s a hard line to tread. This is the first thing I’m writing that really reflects a sort of ideology, but given that my own personal ideology is still evolving there’s tension throughout. On the one hand, my key point is that grounding everything in an artificial, American Idol-a-like sense of huge significance is a recipe for disaster, and that a lot of people seem to think in those terms at the expense of really getting to grips with their own lives; on the other, these are still stories. This isn’t quite a philosophical novel, because if it was, it’d be shit. There are things I want to get across that aren’t tied to that central idea - that, occasionally, might contradict it. Sometimes, it finds hopelessness in the idea of defining lived experience, but at other times it extols self-definition as a huge virtue. It’s a mess, but it’ll hopefully provoke a few thoughts.