What if I fail. Like, forever. I don't think success wasn't meant to be for me, in the sense that I can see these things I come with mattering in some hypothetical sphere. The articles I'm working on right now may be a bridge to greater things, but I don't think it's guaranteed, even if I do well. Games tend to reduce things to systems, and you can reload if you failed. Like some sort of god you can keep rewinding until you win. Can't really do that in real life, although you can be blessed to be interested in a subject that is a big enough field that you can fail and come back later with something evolved from the lessons you learned without being permanently barred because you missed your one chance.

I will be writing something some of you may read in the coming months and it won't be here. But I can't help but think about what comes after that, if anything. Maybe it was always a dogpile, people scrambling to stay on top without being crushed, but even if writing isn't being eradicated it is changing, rapidly. I just hope that I'll be able to endure long enough, and get enough feedback, that I'll learn what I'm doing wrong and be able to make something of myself in a field that actually matters to me.

Not sure if the game mentality helps or hurts, here. On the one hand it gives me an attitude that I can eventually figure out how the system works and master it. Even if I'm not getting younger I can at least learn from what I did wrong, maybe, and build on that. But... maybe there isn't a system. Maybe there's more luck to it than the people who make it let on. Not necessarily because they're deliberately obfuscating, but if you luck out enough to make it it doesn't necessarily clear that that was why you made it. It seems like the attitude is that you have to believe to delusional levels that you're already there, just a few more steps and everything will work out. But people have been believing that for millennia, in one form or another, and most people have it pretty bad. I've managed to avoid a lot of hardship in my life, and what I have endured I had the breathing room to mostly recover from. Maybe I'm already lucky, in that sense. Praise the RNG.