I Want to Write a Book

I want to write a book.

The world is so fascinating, I often feel like I’m looking at it through the eyes of an alien. I look at the bridged roadways that overlapped three to four bridges high, and the buildings with heights I can barely comprehend. I hear all of the dangers of the natural world, and it seems so unreal from the comfort of my home. I picture schools and electronic tests and see a bunch of strangers put in a rectangle room with glowing rectangles in front of them that determine their futures. How can one go about their day and not think that this world is strange.

I am fascinated by dystopian books. When I first read Fahrenheit 451, I hadn’t realized that it was written over 60 years ago. Orwell’s pinpoint accuracy of earbuds, drones, even addictions must have seemed so futuristic and unreal to his friends and family. But look at Today, and those advancements have been exceeded, with self-driving cars and devices that can access worlds of information the size of our palms.

I can’t wrap my head around the fact that I am sitting writing this on a laptop, in an air-conditioned home, with a full stomach, new clothes, and enough free time to do so whilst millions in the world have never had access to any of that. It feels so wrong. I see my day-to-day life as dystopian, but I am sitting in the middle of it and participating in it. I mean, I have time to think about how strange my privileged life is. How pompous.

There’s even more, I could go on. I mean animals. They are so strange, why are they even here. And plants are so numerous and diverse. To think, I will never in my life see every plant and animal on this earth. And zookeepers will never have read this article.

I think a thought that occurs to everyone is that we are all individuals. I am thinking about this paragraph, but someone is out there thinking about how to cure diseases, or how to bake a pie, or how to talk to that one person, or how to land on Mars. It’s already weird that they have one different thought from my own, but they are thinking all of the time. I am thinking all of the time and so are seven billion other people. How did we even discover that number? Someone thought very deeply to figure that out. I would never need to know that, but someone thought that others did.

Ideas too, the fact that so many people have thought of something that hasn’t even been fabricated into existence yet. We can formulate non-existing things. We can advance.

If you, Reader, have reached this point in the article, this is not really a story. At least, it hasn’t been thought through, or revised, and is my most underdeveloped writing. But it’s not my most under-thought. Everything I wrote about; I have thought about many times in my life. So, Reader, I want to expand on these thoughts in a book of my own. You can read this article and leave it be (I hope it sparked some ideas for you, since you are thinking at this moment), or you can read this and hopefully see my ideas. If you would like, I’d love to hear your own thoughts on the world that makes it strange.