Day: July 17, 2024

I’m not quite 50 yrs old and my BP is 137/99 after my morning coffee. I’m on blood pressure meds (plural). I need to chill out. The more I look around me and the more I sink into being here the more I realize that this nation is actively trying to kill me. Be it from the food or the media, everything around me colludes to raise my blood pressure. I live in a nation where everything is battling for my attention. Like and Subscribe has become a central tenet, as though I stepped into some manner of dystopian fiction that I myself have already written. It is, in a phrase, Too much.

So, I quit.

Not life, of course. I quit being so dang dialed in. At first (and for a long while) I thought being dialed in was very important to my continued writing. However, it hasn’t really done all that much for the words. In truth, I could download a weekly summary of what is happening in the world, state, neighborhood, house, etc. and be able to passively absorb the information because I would not be so dialed into it. Being stuck in the cycle of consumption is the game plan of every information provider. They need your eyes on them. They want you to watch and listen and to think you might miss something. This is especially true in an era that eschews long-read books for quit burb posts (like this one.. heh). It is how they make their living. It is how they shape yours.

So, being pithy as I am wont to be, I quit rage. I’m rage quitting, as it were. I throw my hands up in disgust at the entire apparatus and refocus my free energies on consuming books (audio or otherwise) and films of non-fiction and fiction alike. I’ll catch the weekly download (perhaps even making my version of a reflection here on this post once a week?) and then moving on. It’s the moving on part that is usually the toughest for me. Yet I believe I have within me the capacity to do so. Only time will prove that out.

Some Thoughts:

1. I just watched a class of 28 students submit final projects for a class. of the 28, 4 did not do the work at all. 20 clearly used a large language model to have the work completed for them. I do not think I can run this creative final project ever again. It is a sad signpost in the slow decline towards education truly not being educating anymore. Even a project designed to test basic understanding of fundamental principles (which they all failed to show as they used a large language model that failed to understand these principles) and be a fun finish is being shat on by an unwillingness to engage. This is not merely a failure as a teacher, but a failure as a system of education bumping up against the monolith of tech designed to make learning less relevant.

I want to begin with a certain level of understanding. To wit: I live in the wrong place and surrounded by people with the wrong motivations. All of this moves me further away from being successful, because it draws me closer to leisure, gluttony, and comfort. There is this theory that writers need to be hungry. It transcends that singular profession to dwell in many corners of reality. The best athletes are the ones who are in it because they came from nothing. The hardest working students are the ones who are fighting to get out of somewhere. The list of such things go on. The flip side of that is the comfort that comes with any plateau of success. Where I live and how I live is a functional plateau. Virtually everyone and everything around me is comfort. We don’t strain or stress for much of anything. I don’t need to write 5 hours a day in order to put food on the table. Food is there. Legs are kicked up. There is a TV in every room. We are too comfortable and we (the Lady and I) work to preserve that comfort for our kids who want for nothing.

This is not the way. The result has been kids who not only want for nothing but do nothing but enjoy the comforts given to them. Again this is not solely about them. This is about how that reflects back on me and my behaviors. I’ve gained back half the weight I lost while overseas and I’ve been here a week. The sedentary level is high and hard to break through. I need to rediscover the willpower to be better.

So far, I’m just treading water.