![]() Life these days feels like reading the first chapter of a hundred different books and wondering why it’s not adding up to a coherent story. But when hundreds of entities are all doing the same thing, and all in the same space? There are phrases like “death by a thousand cuts” for a reason. There is no need for a pep talk, or another email in my inbox with zero content.Īgain, as an individual event, a pointless email is not a big deal. It’s boring deskwork, and I’m only here because it’s mandatory. I recently had a payroll company email me to say “ Isn’t payroll awesome?!” alongside some quirky illustrations of people partying. In a world increasingly designed around the commodity of attention, even entities that used to be purely transactional are constantly vomiting ad-speak and trying to increase “engagement” (which is just ad-speak for attention). Information comes in at all times of day, and night, and from anywhere, and in such similar packages that it is difficult to discern what’s important and what isn’t. Wondering where my day went happens more often than it doesn’t. It’s pretty damn difficult to stay on one train of thought for very long, and I’ve gotten accustomed to feeling scattered. There are lots of modern conveniences that I couldn’t have even imagined even ten years ago, and some of them I really appreciate. That one resonated because, when I stop and take stock of everything, it really isn’t all bad. After some thinking, this is what I landed on: I think it’s just to build some container for repetitive thoughts, so I can file them away quickly without needing to turn them over so incessantly (I got that one from a therapist, which makes it easier to buy than my own crackpot theories). I notice I do this when I’m dealing with a lot of things that are out of my control. I’ve recently found myself looking for a phrase to encapsulate how modern life feels. I also realize that some of my last year is just a side-effect of getting older.īut I think there has been a deeper problem that coincides with all of this, and it’s one I have been thinking about a lot lately. ![]() And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the pandemic, it’s that I understand people even less than I thought I did. I suspected that the world wasn’t going to slow down, assess what has happened, and gracefully find a new normal. Individually, none of these things (well, other than two) were a huge deal. Maybe to some music that’s upbeat and annoying, played on a tack piano. I could keep going, but that’s enough for a general montage. So where did the year go? The details of what happened aren’t very interesting, so I’ll just boil it down to a string of words: doctors, dental surgeries, IRS, accountants, termites, strangers drilling into pipes/flooded recording studio, injuries, computers dying, construction, diet, address mixups, equipment failure, insomnia, bureaucratic mazes. It makes me suspicious of my own reasoning. ![]() I make things up for a living, and with that comes the ability to whip up theories with little effort. I have no real idea what I’m talking about here. My running theory is that it all revolves around when we first learn how life generally works (from, say, ages 5 through 20) and we are forever comparing ourselves to that particular window of time – to when all those neurons were initially connected. I’m not sure when, or how, I developed that standard. ![]() But this also highlights that I have an expectation about how time should feel. I hear people older than me say the same often. My relationship with time is only getting stranger, but I suspect that’s normal. That’s pretty difficult to wrap my head around. So it’s been a full year since I last wrote here. ![]()
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