Farewell to the Sweet Melancholy Lad
2025-12-23T23:29:39+08:00
A profound transformation in my life was set in motion from the moment I became involved with the Free Software Fans. My initial aspiration was a simple and familiar one: to forge friendships, much as I had endeavoured to do back in 2020. Yet, despite these intentions, a series of my actions inadvertently caused considerable discomfort amongst the fellow members of the club. Consequently, my association with the Free Software Fans was terminated rather swiftly. At the time, I was left bewildered, unable to comprehend precisely where I had erred. This confusion led me to continue my quest for companionship, often seeking it in the realm of imagination and in other circles.
It was during this period that I encountered Zumfy, also known as Future, another fervent advocate for free software. We discovered a remarkable number of shared interests and convictions, and within a matter of weeks, we had become the closest of confidants. I harboured the sincere belief that ours was a friendship destined to endure. Tragically, this was not to be. An incident involving the compromise of an OpenPGP private key precipitated an abrupt end to our bond, a connection which did not survive beyond five months. The psychological impact of this loss was severe and enduring; it constituted a devastating blow from which I struggled to recover. Despite my most determined efforts to fortify my emotional resilience, I found myself incapable of accepting the harsh reality that I had lost my most significant and cherished friend.
Nevertheless, life, relentless in its forward march, demands continuance. In the aftermath, I went on to meet a great many individuals. Some of these connections were formed on the Fediverse, whilst others originated in diverse communities across Matrix, SimpleX, or emerged from the eclectic realms of the Tildeverse or I2P. However, the nature of these interactions underwent a subtle shift. Our conversations became almost exclusively circumscribed to technical matters—discussions concerning code, protocols, and philosophy. We rarely, if ever, ventured into the personal territories of our daily lives, our hopes, or our private sorrows.
This peculiar distance, curiously, did not initially give me pause. What finally prompted my reflection was a remark from an acquaintance. He mentioned a friend of his own, someone he had known for a full four years, yet to whom he remained entirely ignorant of basic personal details such as age or profession. He observed that this friend maintained a ‘golden OPSEC’, a term denoting impeccable operational security. In contrast, he noted, my own approach seemed, to him, rather ‘weird’. This casual observation acted as a catalyst, compelling me to recognise that a significant change was not only occurring around me but that a concomitant change within myself was perhaps necessary.
Back in 2020, I was not yet a free software advocate; indeed, I was wholly unfamiliar with the very concept of ‘free software’. I continued to use proprietary instant messaging tools, and my friends at that time all engaged with the internet under their real names. The landscape of my current circle is markedly different. The people around me now commonly possess a deeply ingrained consciousness regarding security, privacy, and anonymity. Their operational security strategies invariably lead them to adopt persistent pseudonymous identities and to scrupulously avoid disclosing any information pertaining to their tangible, offline existences.
Furthermore, whilst everyone here curates a cryptographic identity, these digital selves prove to be inherently fragile and ephemeral. Alice might suddenly compromise her private key, upload a revocation certificate, and vanish from the digital ether without a trace. Bob may find his threat model abruptly altered, necessitating a complete and immediate shift to a new identity. In this environment, departures are not exceptional events; they are routine occurrences, expected and unremarkable.
To integrate more seamlessly into this milieu, I have come to understand that I must enact certain changes upon myself. I need to undertake a fundamental reconstruction of my own persona. The objective is to become a being governed almost entirely by rationality, to diminish further the constituent of raw sensibility within me. Even if achieving the state of a completely dispassionate automaton remains elusive, I must strive to cultivate detachment—to view with equanimity the emotional attachments of the past, to accept the inevitability of parting, to regard all transient connections with a measure of philosophical calm, and to value, without desperate clinginess, that which I possess in the present.
There will be no more ‘lads’ in my immediate sphere. What will surround me instead will be ‘comrades’. The connections between us will not be woven from deep, psychological intimacy. Rather, they will be forged in the shared pursuit of a common cause: we shall fight collectively for software freedom, contribute side-by-side to the same free software communities, and pursue with unified purpose the same ideal—a vision of a free software foundation for a free society.
Farewell, the sweet melancholy lad.