The weekends, that is: the days when we have more control over our time – when to get up, when to have showers, get dressed, rush to leave the house, catch trains, etc. – are too short for my liking. I don’t want to play the age card, but you get to a point fairly quickly at any age where having more control over how you spend your time becomes a pretty big deal. It gets bigger as you age.
That’s probably why people should have children while in their twenties, not start in their mid- to late-thirties (or even forties), because children are one of the main ways control over your time gets taken away. You’re at their beck and call, they’re not used to artificial schedules nor are they inanimate things to be stored in closets when you want some “me time.”
It will cost you time (yours) or money (hiring a nanny, preferably a live-in, which means having the luxury of enough space in your house) to raise children.
Once they go to school and are put on a factory schedule, their new artificial schedule becomes part of yours, too. It’s like this inextricable web. If you’re also working – or, luxury of luxuries, “pursuing” a “career” – you will mind less because adroitly juggling schedules becomes something you can boast about. It will be in your wheelhouse to be this supermom who gets it all done.
Yeah, right.
Fact is, you don’t own your time, you’re a slave. If you’re a traditional person, you go to work and your boss owns your time. You’ve sold it to him / her. In either case – guy or gal – it’s gone, replaced (if you’re lucky) by good memories.
But something continues to nag, something about wanting to do different things. So we invented “retirement,” an entirely artificial, if perhaps necessary, concept. If you embrace it fully, you’ll die prematurely; of this I’m convinced. But if you continue on in an unfulfilled state where you flog your time to paymasters, you’ll also miss out on something.
In the aggregate, humanity is stupid – I say this because of political developments – and retirement, like democracy and other enyoking schemes, might be the best way to manage people as a mass. It’s not so great at the individual, the sovereign, level, though.
Yesterday I watched a video by Theryn Meyer about Bill C-16 (the “pronoun bill”). I’m glad we still have freedom of speech in the US (which also means no “compelled speech”), although the corporations – playing on a “transnational” field and being private entities anyway – seem not to care. Time to regulate Google, Facebook, Apple like utilities? Perhaps. But they will engage in censorship by other means, just as Canada and most European countries engage it through legislation (especially with laws against so-called hate speech, e.g.) – because, unlike the US, freedom of speech is not anchored in their political foundation.
At the same time, say what you think about a contentious political issue (I commented on Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s dust-up with Mary Beard – in Taleb’s favor) and be prepared for the spotlight of attention – unwanted, in my case. I wasn’t attacked or anything by Beard’s SJW minions, but my lowly tweet response has had well over 4000 impressions, which is as nothing in the social media star world, but is already too much for me. It’s interesting how Beard is keeping this going, though. Maybe she’s an attention-hound at heart, underneath that “scholarly” exterior? And her comfort being called “Dr.”? Jesus, she’s only a PhD (like me), not an MD.
I spent yesterday mostly resting my sprained ankle. The weather was picture-perfect. The traffic noise was intermittently awful. I still see no clear way forward here, with regard to staying in the house. Or moving. But where to?