It is 3:47 PM on Saturday June 3rd, 2023. Today we went to karate as usual, ate lunch and then I took a hard nap. Karate is hard and if I sit down afterwards I’ll always fall asleep. Taking naps is good and I thoroughly enjoy them. Being Saturday I’d also like to stay up a bit and without a nap I’ll be asleep by 8:00 PM.
I guess this is what comes with age and just like when we are very little naps are necessary again. I’m now 46 and am thoroughly shocked by it. I’m almost devastated to realize I’m staring down 50. This cannot be! I must have been in a time warp for the past decade as it seems I was 36 not so long ago! It snuck up on me really quick!
In all honesty I was a bit down for a while but then something occurred to me. I am very glad that I had a childhood in the 1980s and am realizing how cool the 90s were as well. I’m glad I grew up before computers and the internet went mainstream. Playing outside, catching lightning bugs at dusk, going to the pool, sitting in front of a fan on a hot day (no air conditioning), riding bikes, skateboarding, I could go on and on. Kids these days (and with a big push by COVID) spend too much time in front of screens. We thought technology was going to be so cool in the 90s but now I almost wish we didn’t have it. It put a big glaring spotlight on how absolutely stupid so many people can be. Now we’ve got AI on the horizon and if we couldn’t handle social media there is very little hope for civilization with AI. Just like the technology boom our society is going to look very different in as little as ten years.
However, here I am sitting outside, swinging on my porch swing and enjoying the birdsong. Yes, I am typing on a laptop in a blog on the internet but this gets a pass as a life journal is a valuable thing and technology just makes it easier.
The beginning of summer has started and my boys have one week left of school. My life always changes in a big way during the summer as my family goes back to Japan and I’m alone in the house. That is always so odd. I do take advantage however as I have a few trips planned which I’m really looking forward to.
As for my life it is mostly a blur as I work from home everyday. I remember stepping out of my apartment in San Francisco in a suit every morning going to work a few blocks away. I would always think how wonderful it would be to work from home. Well, now I do and I think that I’d like to get out more. Even so, I’m glad I’m not required to be in an office, that is still a blessing. Work wants us to go visit customers in person more but the reality here is less than 50% are still located in the Bay and of those almost all work from home. Work has also changed tremendously in just four years with huge growth, a pandemic which changed how we work and the environment looks very little like the company I joined.
In regards to the news and politics especially the Republicans have gone off the rails and have been for some time. They make up non-issues to incense their base. These days they are targeting gays, transgender people and immigrants. My thought was this is nothing new. One way to gain power is to find someone to blame and then enrage your base towards those people. In the 2000s it was “the terrorists” and with that threat mostly diminished they needed to find someone else and so went with gays. To me it is a move of a dying party, one that is in its death throes and all they have left is rage at non-issues. The sad part for me is people I used to know are caught up in this and they are known as Trumpers. Yes, Trump who caused the capital to be overrun, the one who is selling national secrets to foreign countries for money, the one whose blatant lie about a “stolen election” has bewildered his base. There are always conmen but I’m very sad to see how many people, who I thought would be smarter have been completely brainwashed.
We look back at atrocities in history and wonder how those people could have been so dumb. Yet here we are living through it. I hope that in the future students will look back and wonder the same about us. It is either that or we will have regressed as a society into a new type of dark age. It is kind of ironic that with so much information at our fingertips people can still be so idiotic. Information can be there yes, but so can lies and made up information and people cannot discern the truth.
Anyway, I’ve mostly chased the age blues away, am getting more comfortable with changes at work and am happy with my life. At 46 we’re well over the hill and if we were going to accomplish something we should have done it by now. Unfortunately in this society success is mostly gaged by money and power. But to get money and power most people have to trade all their time for it. Then once money and power are gotten they’ll simply want more. I think this basic human weakness is the reason for the majority of the worlds problems. We now have technology which throws all of this in our face day after day and so for me, the solution is to throw it away. Bye bye social media with more focus on mindfulness and appreciation for simply being alive. Age, politics, world problems such as global warming and the increasing rate of negative change had put me in a funk. Time to rely on stoicism, mindfulness and a focus on enjoying life are my solutions for a world which seems to have gone quite mad.
