The Steve Perspective

Phil Winston30th of Mar 2022

Reading Time: Around 2 minutes

In my 20's I was genuinely angry at absolutely everything.

I now believe that this was some sort of defence mechanism to manage a deep state of depression during my teens, where I'd walk around on the verge of tears half of the time, wondering what the hell life was supposed to be about.

I don't want pity for this, I'm just setting context for the books.

Sure, we could blame my parents for not noticing, and they didn't, but compassion wasn't their strong point. Besides, these days I prefer to take responsibility for everything in my life as blaming others gets you nowhere except perhaps to a state of anger. Instead, these two people were gifted with highly developed trait of narcissism and the skill of pathological lying. I unfortunately inherited both to certain degrees but thankfully the lying was restricted to an internal denial of the narcissism. A toxic recipe in an adolescent for sure, but the restriction on lying at least limited the damage in some ways.

The anger didn't show up as violence though (much), it was mostly arguments and combativeness, but there was a constant and deep sense of rage flowing my veins that would show up in various situations. Mostly the type that you regret later, and mostly where there were few physical repercussions. The tantrums of a coward, essentially.

What this all led to was a perspective where my "hypothesis of humans" was that everyone in the world was an idiot. Mindlessly floating through life with no real sense of self, no purpose, no utility to anyone except themselves. Like zombies (See, I told you this was all context setting).

Sure, there were outliers, the type of people who seem to grind through granite to achieve remarkable things, but these served as evidence in contrast to the mob, and not refutations.

This hypothesis was the genesis of Steve. The primary protagonist in Fragments. He presents as apathetic to the world, not even bothered to watch it burn, but his descriptions of the drones and his diary entries reveal his true opinions on it. It, and people in general, disgust him.

Now to be clear, this was all an exaggeration of my own true feeling about the world, but I was writing a book, so artistic licence etc.

This utilitarian view of humanity, the "hypothesis of humans", is inherent throughout this first volume, and by finishing it just before my son was born it allowed me to capture it fairly cleanly. As a result of the events that unfold from then on, the transition between the first and second stages of the character development arc play out.