Cold Sterile World in anticlimatic

I really can’t express often enough just how disappointed I am with the general direction the world has decided to to go. It’s so strange to remember living when Boomers were still the primary market drivers, in their 30s and 40s, with their craftsmanship hobbies and their politically amicable dispositions. Felt like living in a good dream, even if signs were there at the time that it wouldn’t last. Stranger still, the past- especially the younger years to older folks- always seems more serene and desirable, for reasons that are anything but objective. Paired with the reality that it truly was a better era, in objective terms as well, it really messes with one’s mind- the disparity between how the world felt then, to how the world feels now, is so vast.

I’m glad people are happy that Joe Biden is president. At this point I’ll take what I can get as far as positive forces and feelings in the world go. There’s just too much time biding these winter days. The ability to experience novel things and mix with the world is scant under Covid lockdowns. Today we went ice skating, which normally would be a very lovely activity for a sunday in january, but alas the experience was ruined. The heart of the operation was closed, no warming hut- no hot coco- and we were left to lace up on a wet bench as icy water trickled from the roof onto the back of my neck. The day before I sought high and low for an Old Fashioned, but only found one bar still open- still serving booze- but only into a tiny alcove that was packed like a sardine can with nobody I wanted to be that close to.

Tiktok both renews my faith in the youth and the future, and wrecks it. Some videos have some clear creative brilliance to them, while others make me cringe as desperate appeals for attention, validation, and fitting in. The language of wokeness is extremely hard to listen to as an outsider. It’s hard to describe how offputting it is- but I remember experiencing the same feeling listening to the kids from Beyond Thunderdome tell the story of their ancestors in that half madeup language of theirs.

Technology has destroyed us. I wish I hadn’t seen it coming. I’ve spent decades debating authoritarian idealists who have insisted, for years and years, that the internet was going to liberate the world; that people would “self actualize” through the enlightened awareness that it would bring; that if just given the opportunity via equitable starting positions, that all of our problems of greed and excess and wanton destruction would evaporate. They never saw technology for what it really was- not some great gift, but rather a trade- a bargain- with forces old and new. The purpose of technology is to bend nature to our will and subjugate it, but all it does is make us dependent on those mechanisms, while expecting ever more natural “problems” to be addressed by it next. We are now at the place where we use technology to bend facts about the world itself to our will, objective reality be damned. Surely this will end well.