Dead Artifacts

(written 23.01.2026)
(published 01.02.2026)

Connection established.
"Dead Artifacts." These words have hung in my mind for an indeterminate amount of time, for what feels like at least a week. A massively-compressed summary of my recent thought, they existed on the bleeding edge of creation before finally seeping through to reality, where they can be observed now.

These past weeks, months, years, I felt the need to meditate on reason and suffering. The mind works in mysterious ways, recombining and iterating on concepts, refining, complicating, then simplifying again, oscillating between simplicity and elegance. I have seen this play out multiple times recently, the explosion of words, followed by a collapse into few, simple terms fit for human consumption.

There's this seemingly insurmountable barrier at the beginning of all my efforts to bring something into existence. At first there is just nebulous confusion and something else: a kind of primordial desire to create something. It is there that the rest follows from. It is the meaning and the suffering, both originating from the same place.

Unfortunately, I am not a deeply religious person. I have been undergoing a deep crisis of meaning, struggling to find it in the world around me. So I looked inside myself. The body is the locus, and the world, all in one - it is the immaculate vessel, the most astonishing mechanism in the universe, through which we interface with it. It is the mirror through which we can see the everything outside.

I believe God to be a sort of universal constant, fundamentally almost a feeling rather than anything more concrete. I think God is the product of human spirituality, but maybe other animals can feel it in some form, too. God, in my view, is the answer to the question of why are we here. God is the catalyst through which suffering is converted into meaning.

I don't believe in one God. The way I see it, we are each one of us a separate world, out there in a boundless universe. We created religion as a tool to share God between us and build communities around it, but the discovery of God is a deeply intimate, individual journey. We may have similar ideas of what God might be and what real-world values he might represent, and ultimately I believe divine communion is a spiritual experience anyone can have. I believe in a God of many forms, revealing himself to people in a very personal way.

I experience this vast gulf between the internal and the external world. A kind of primordial suffering originates from the abstract desire to entwine our minds somehow and let others feel exactly what I feel, free from any and all ambiguity. Pure experience, transferred perfectly.

So, it is those two feelings that are the starting point of all my creative endeavours: first the desire to create, and also the confused, nebulous desire to send out a clear, understandable signal, and the painful futility of trying to bridge the endless abyss separating every living being, only having crude tools such as languages to encode and transmit meaning. There is a sense of inescapable loneliness in an abyssal, uncaring world that underpins everything I do.

In a way, I detest creation. It is the necessary evil through which existence is realised and life is breathed into the cold, dead, meaningless and uncaring world. Almost as if the very act of creation was the necessary justification for our existence, and our lives had no meaning otherwise - at least, no meaning observable to any other person but ourselves.

There are many ways to approach creation. The most mundane one is purely transactional, to create value and enrich oneself financially. We create goods and services for the economy, to earn a living.

As I grow older and my remaining time becomes increasingly more valuable, I look for ways to ensure that my life has meant something.

I'm lazy. I haven't made a habit of working on stuff in my free time. This of course comes back to bite me at the end of the day. Regrets gradually mounting, vague frustration rising, resulting in depression from a meaningless life.

And so, I've figured, I have to make something. But what, how, and why?

At the heart of these meditations, there is of course an existential crisis, and that is what this all boils down to in the end. Like every other person who's ever lived past a certain age, I have to confront the truth of my own mortality and my fear of death.

Most of the time, I just idly pass the free time. But every now and again, I work on things. I detest what I create. I make things to validate my own existence and to sublimate my suffering through channeling God. Every such creation is never truly finished. To create is to kill, to butcher the original meaning that only existed inside my head. The ideal is slaughtered, and the end product only encapsulates a fraction of the original. These are the eponymous Artifacts - products of artifice, on a metaphysical level the end result of transformation of inanimate matter through human labour into something that for a brief time may hold some meaning to someone. Somewhere in there, legends say, might lie a faint reflection of the spark of God: some glimmer of long-lost brilliance that shone brightly for just a moment before inevitably fading away.

But it gets worse. The accursed creation is a gift that keeps on giving. The things I make end up feeding me back more suffering. Every time I come back to something I made, I am filled with grief. The feeling is vague for recent creations and more substantial for things I did long ago. The older they get, the clearer it is for me that those are the products of a dead person. I see in them a reflection of my inevitable death.

The banal truth of existence is that, even on a cellular level, we die a little every day. It is a gradual process we might not even notice on a day to day basis, but looking back we might realise how different our past selves were from today. We are doomed to always change through exposure to the world around us, and death is just another metamorphosis.

Death, like time, is one of those concepts so strange as to feel almost made up, and yet it affects us all in very tangible ways. Nobody truly knows what it is like to die. From a certain point of view, death might as well not exist, for there is nothing to experience it anymore. It is up to interpretation what lies beyond. I view it as a long, dreamless sleep. In the end, I believe life is inevitable. In an ocean of oblivion, tenacious bubbles of existence push on through determinedly to the surface, where they expire. Life is all we know. Either way, every time a death occurs, something is irrevocably and permanently lost.

So, my creations represent to me a life and potential long lost. Coming back to them fills me with grief, like visiting a grave of a friend I once knew. I cling to the memories of that person, knowing that even those will be one day lost to time.

Some of the things I've made were seen by few or no people. I am often the only one left, the last person alive with living memory of those things being made and indeed with knowledge they even ever existed to begin with. I am the keeper of memories. And I, too, am dying.

Some days, it hurts too much to even look at the things I once worked on. The loneliness of my existence is just too much to bear. These dead artifacts lie silent now, bereft of any further meaning. That only exists and is bestowed upon them when these artifacts are observed by someone.

Death will one day inevitably come for me, but that day is not today. I live, and I suffer permanently, irrevocably. Suffering forces me to beget meaning. My work is never over. I come back and I exhume those artifacts, desecrating them, once again breathing life into them, summoning new meaning from the void and affixing it to them, if only for a little while - and then I transform them, refine and extend them. A sort of resurrection takes place then.

So long as I live, I experience not only metaphysical death, but also its flipside - eternal rebirth. I am forced to create meaning and bring life wherever I go - to refrain from that would mean succumbing to nihilism and facing oblivion. The most sublime of my creations are ultimately little more than cry of pain, transformed in a way that can hopefully mean something to others. Life is all I've ever known.

There is God somewhere out there, past the fringes of our understanding, beyond the veil of death, unbound. God represents totality and is almost by definition all-encompassing. In the physical world he exists more as a faint idea. I believe that when we have a spiritual experience, we are able to glimpse into the world beyond. The only thing that keeps me going some days is pondering the grand designs not of this world, and thinking of ways to bring us closer to our ultimate purpose (creating or attaining God: meaning incarnate). But everything I ever make is destined to crumble to dust and I can't even know if it at least made anyone somehow meaningfully richer for the experience. Which makes me wonder why even bother, and I abandon my efforts. Then, when I inevitably come back to resume work on things, I discover that I have changed and I'm no longer sure if I wish to spend my time working on that particular project or goal, leaving behind more dead stuff that I feel some guilt for even bringing into the world in the first place, only to leave it to rot without even the faintest idea how to give it a proper burial, unable to move on. So in the end I get hung up on dead artifacts, feeling personally responsible for each and every single one of them, and unsure what to do about them. I hate it.

This is my philosophical bedrock. All that I create is predicated on these ideas.
Disconnected.

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