Is this any way to live?
©
Yet another week without home internet. It’s a bit of an unplanned social experiment. A few of us go through this, I expect. People who are hospitalized for example, and maybe they suffer some kind of withdrawal.
I have internet at the office, so I can get my fix when I have time. At home it’s different. At home I have to plan my emails, then find a wi-fi base close by, so I can send. Yes, I can use my iPhone as a ‘personal hotspot’ to connect, but I’ve already used up all the data on my plan this month, so I have a few days to wait. So here I sit in the office at 10:45 in the evening typing out tomorrow’s column.
Before coming back to the office tonight, I sat in the living room looking out at the world. An airplane hung in the air, going so slowly it looked too heavy to fly. The wind had died down, the clouds were still. A few birds were moving around in the branches. And the leaves were in bud, showing their green for the first time. It’s funny how the trees are bare one day and then the next day, under a hot sun, everything snaps to life.
There was nothing in my mind as I sat there. It was the first time in weeks that I’d stopped moving and thinking. The room and the world outside were as quiet as my mind. This comes after a working weekend. From Friday evening at 7:00 p.m. to Monday morning at 3:00 a.m. I worked on a project to meet a deadline. I managed to put in a full work week—37 hours—in just two+ days. And then got up and went to work for 9:00 in the morning.
There is nothing heroic in this. Other staff members visit friends on the weekends, take extended trips to concerts in other cities, go shopping. So could I. Other than policing and fighting fires, there’s almost nothing in this world that needs to be done that urgently.
Once upon a time there was no shopping on Sundays. Now there’s online shopping around the clock. Which reminds me, if you’re a young kid today, clocks no longer go around. The numerals simply blink. Everything is going digital. Which, as I’ve said before, is why Amazon, Google and Facebook are among the largest companies in the world. They produce nothing. But they generate transactions—social and financial—like never before in history.
Busy-ness and transactions at the speed of light suit the digital era. Our screens are reshaping our minds and how they process information. It’s predicted that the written word is losing its power. Pictures are more effective on-screen than words. Our concentration spans are getting shorter by the microsecond. We no longer need memory. Everything can be recalled at the press of a finger. Who starred in movie The Swimmer? What year did it come out?
I delude myself into thinking my work is important. Perhaps in some small way it is. But mostly what I do just keeps the show on the road. Whatever show it happens to be this week. And that’s perhaps why we work: to lose ourselves and to avoid the depression that comes from facing meaninglessness or purposelessness. We work so we can feel real. How many of us define ourselves in adulthood by our careers? How many of us defined our childhood by the work we did? It’s interesting how a span of 10 years from being a kid to being a grown-up changes everything.
This is a trap for retired people. They work all their lives to save money to retire and take it easy, and then miss the affirmation and self-definition that work used to bring. So they keep busy at something, anything. Or they get depressed. Or lost. It seems incredibly difficult for modern humans to just ‘be’.
There was a movie about that. In About a Boy Hugh Grant plays a shiftless, purposeless character who lives off his father’s song royalties. His days are filled with dating attractive women, carefully planned shopping trips, self-grooming and idle chatter to himself. Of course the point of the movie is to have him discover he needs a point. And sure enough, he discovers one. But why? Why do we need a point?
Most of our fellow creatures on the planet get by with no point at all, other than existing. Trees don’t seem to have a point, any more than fishes do. Yet here we are, rushing like crazy to get…where? You see it in a simple commute driving home from the office. Today some dude in a small car raced in front of me almost taking off the nose of my car. I tried to swerve to the shoulder, but there was a cyclist beside me.
Then we all stopped for the next stoplight, fuming.
Yet another week without home internet. It’s a bit of an unplanned social experiment. A few of us go through this, I expect. People who are hospitalized for example, and maybe they suffer some kind of withdrawal.
I have internet at the office, so I can get my fix when I have time. At home it’s different. At home I have to plan my emails, then find a wi-fi base close by, so I can send. Yes, I can use my iPhone as a ‘personal hotspot’ to connect, but I’ve already used up all the data on my plan this month, so I have a few days to wait. So here I sit in the office at 10:45 in the evening typing out tomorrow’s column.
Before coming back to the office tonight, I sat in the living room looking out at the world. An airplane hung in the air, going so slowly it looked too heavy to fly. The wind had died down, the clouds were still. A few birds were moving around in the branches. And the leaves were in bud, showing their green for the first time. It’s funny how the trees are bare one day and then the next day, under a hot sun, everything snaps to life.
There was nothing in my mind as I sat there. It was the first time in weeks that I’d stopped moving and thinking. The room and the world outside were as quiet as my mind. This comes after a working weekend. From Friday evening at 7:00 p.m. to Monday morning at 3:00 a.m. I worked on a project to meet a deadline. I managed to put in a full work week—37 hours—in just two+ days. And then got up and went to work for 9:00 in the morning.
There is nothing heroic in this. Other staff members visit friends on the weekends, take extended trips to concerts in other cities, go shopping. So could I. Other than policing and fighting fires, there’s almost nothing in this world that needs to be done that urgently.
Once upon a time there was no shopping on Sundays. Now there’s online shopping around the clock. Which reminds me, if you’re a young kid today, clocks no longer go around. The numerals simply blink. Everything is going digital. Which, as I’ve said before, is why Amazon, Google and Facebook are among the largest companies in the world. They produce nothing. But they generate transactions—social and financial—like never before in history.
Busy-ness and transactions at the speed of light suit the digital era. Our screens are reshaping our minds and how they process information. It’s predicted that the written word is losing its power. Pictures are more effective on-screen than words. Our concentration spans are getting shorter by the microsecond. We no longer need memory. Everything can be recalled at the press of a finger. Who starred in movie The Swimmer? What year did it come out?
I delude myself into thinking my work is important. Perhaps in some small way it is. But mostly what I do just keeps the show on the road. Whatever show it happens to be this week. And that’s perhaps why we work: to lose ourselves and to avoid the depression that comes from facing meaninglessness or purposelessness. We work so we can feel real. How many of us define ourselves in adulthood by our careers? How many of us defined our childhood by the work we did? It’s interesting how a span of 10 years from being a kid to being a grown-up changes everything.
This is a trap for retired people. They work all their lives to save money to retire and take it easy, and then miss the affirmation and self-definition that work used to bring. So they keep busy at something, anything. Or they get depressed. Or lost. It seems incredibly difficult for modern humans to just ‘be’.
There was a movie about that. In About a Boy Hugh Grant plays a shiftless, purposeless character who lives off his father’s song royalties. His days are filled with dating attractive women, carefully planned shopping trips, self-grooming and idle chatter to himself. Of course the point of the movie is to have him discover he needs a point. And sure enough, he discovers one. But why? Why do we need a point?
Most of our fellow creatures on the planet get by with no point at all, other than existing. Trees don’t seem to have a point, any more than fishes do. Yet here we are, rushing like crazy to get…where? You see it in a simple commute driving home from the office. Today some dude in a small car raced in front of me almost taking off the nose of my car. I tried to swerve to the shoulder, but there was a cyclist beside me.
Then we all stopped for the next stoplight, fuming.
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