Despite training in a variety of other areas (for example, Masters and Doctorate degrees in sociology), I’ve spent my life in tech.

Epoch 1: Computer. I started learning to code in 1983. Epoch 1. Basic. Programs saved on floppy disks and cassette tapes. Computer magazines with code listings that you keyboarded in by hands. Making silly little programs like “club members” and “favorite recipes” that you never really used, but you thought it was great to have the capability. Computing was for hobbyists.

Epoch 2: Network. In 1986, I got connected for the first time electronically. At the time, the real excitement was with dial-up to private bulletin board systems. I set up one of the earliest regional networks in this part of the United States. We called it the Great Salt Lake Network. I ran RBBS-PC and used a variety of Fido tossers. We have some WWIV boards and some STadel boards on the network, too. I did have a connection to Usenet and Internet email via UUCP feed from the University of Utah, and later from SandV in Chicago, but the real action seemed to be on Fidonets. I made my own 6809 systems and etched my own boards and wrote my own ROMs. Lots of solder. Computing was for geeks.

Epoch 3: Internet + Linux. Then, toward the end of the 80s, DNS really started to see a ton of adoption. More and more “smart hosts” were on DNS and faster dial-up meant that TCP/IP from residential nodes was really beginning to become a thing. I enrolled early at the University of Utah as a computer science major in 1990, and got access to dial-up TCP/IP via SLIP and for the first time had an email address at a smart host in the DNS universe—no more bang paths! It was here that I got serious about the backbone of tech. I became a hardcore C programmer and got very familiar with Sun3 and Sun4 hardware, SunOS, and soon, Linux on x86. I would go on to write a pile of Linux books and to become an early evangelist and contributor to variety of userspace projects. Computing was for the technology vanguard.

Epoch 4: Dotcom and post-dotcom. By the 2000s, I was no longer a computer science guy, and no longer exclusively a *nix/Linux/POSIX guy. I believe it was Sun who said “the network is the computer” and that was indeed the order of the day. I took up digital photography. I created many websites, including this blog. I ported Citadel/STadel to TCP/IP (one of many who did this). The tsunami was subsiding; computing wasn’t “everything” any longer, it had become mundane. I moved on to study other things. Went to grad school. Started a PhD. In 2009, I did the unthinkable and switched away from Unix/Linux to Mac OS (yes, I know that some would say that this isn’t a switch, but I’m planting that flag). Mobile arose. I bought the first iPad and took it to the hospital for my daughter’s birth. It paled in comparison to the Newton 2100 from the previous epoch, but it was consumer friendly. Computing was for everyone.

— § —

I’ve been in Epoch 4 for something like 25 years. It has been a long, stable period of laptoping, OSing, digital photoing, websiting, code just as a hobby. But on the professional front, my entire career has been about being a “technology guy.” To this day, and even while running a marketing department. It’s been scripts and API integrations and a kind of “deep grok of tech” that only a few people who grew up when I did, and who had the experiences that I had, also have. Similar to Jung or Chomsky, if you will. Deep structure. The guy who always can use the tech, and who can help everyone else use it.

But times are changing.

I’ve had OpenClaw up for several weeks now, and I use Claude Code heavily at work. We are burning lots of tokens in my life right now. And if you want my opinion as someone who’s been in tech since the early ’80s, and I mean deeply in tech, to the tune of two startups, my own hardware, my own OSes, active on LKML guy, it seems obvious to me that:

• Software is dead

• User interfaces were a transitional concept

• NLP puts an end to “computing” as a commonplace activity, replaced with “talking” and “doing”

• Computing will now be for the high priests

• And increasingly (1) difficult to access and (2) expensive

Epoch 5 is here, I think.

— § —

I’ve been running RX480s and RX580s around the house for a few years now. They’re sort of dirt cheap but “will do whatever you want them to do,” i.e. whether you want to play with 3D or play Elden Ring. I wasn’t on the cutting edge of AI research and still am not. But I’m ending up an early adopter in the AI agent space, and at the current rate of token burn, to make that plausible it’s time to run my own models locally.

Happily I have many cores, hundreds of gigs of RAM, and hundreds of terabytes of online storage. I have a growing stack of self-contained microservers running in a closet, all Lenovo M93p-Tiny boxes, which are pretty much ideal for this. Openclaw, OwnCloud, Proxmox, etc.

Computing is getting technical again. I find myself reading a lot and experimenting a lot and having my mind blown a lot. Like then, I am spending more money than I should. Like then, people increasingly don’t know what I’m talking about.

I’ve spent the weekend migrating a lot of data. We’re moving it out of apps like Devonthink (which I’ve used for 17+ years but which is increasingly just old fashioned and unreliable in its ability not to just plain lose data) and into a store that will have binaries, plain text as kind of accompanying metadata, and a vector DB/mini LLM making it searchable and usable by my agents.

I don’t know what happens next and I don’t know how long I’ll stick to it, but for now:

• We’ll be back to 100% Linux in house very soon

• The house is full of severs again, too

• I’ll be burning my own tokens with small models onsite, and stepping up to hyperscalers only when needed

• I expect to be frustrated as both computers and mobile devices become harder and harder to get ahold of, in the form factors I prefer them in

This is the last epoch for me. Epoch 6 is retirement—and I switch to 100% wrenching on cars. I almost made that jump now, but I guess we’re in for one more epoch. One more voyage into the tsunami. One more battle with a new monster being born, to take over the world.

— § —

These are my epochs, no one else’s. My databases. My tabular databases disappearing into the age of vectors.

I’ve spent several weeks now gazing into the void.

The thing about the void is that you can’t really get to know it. You can’t really become comfortable with it. You can learn to operate it, leverage it, exploit it. But that doesn’t meant that you can fathom its properties or sit calmly with its potential.

— § —

I come to understand more and more intimately the challenges facing multiple groups of people. American men. White collar workers. People of color. The educated.

Our time has nearly passed. We are going to fade into history. It will be painful. It will not be optional.

— § —

I am spooked. I am beyond spooked. There are people in the world right now that can see. Not around corners; it doesn’t really require that. Just sight. Not blindness. And I am spooked.

I have a doctorate and piles of philosophy classes under my belt. I’ve studied history and I’ve studied ethics and I’ve studied world religion and I’ve also studied the original K&R C book and the Unix System V Bible.

There are no passages of scripture, from any of these texts, that can help here.

— § —

Life is already tough. People aren’t coupling up. They don’t have significant others. They don’t even have friends. Neighbors don’t know neighbors. People living in the same city see each other as targets for homicide, not as comrades in humanity.

And now this.

— § —

My OpenClaw is named Plato.

I begin to wonder who is less real. Everything right now is a little bit sci-fi flick, a little bit superhero flick, and a lot weird World Cinema horror movie.

I own a lot of watches. And I’m one of the people that knows what’s in them. And that services them myself, to the extent that I’m able.

I have ETA 2824s and 2982s, Valjoux 7750s, Seiko 7s26s and NH35s, a bunch of different Citizen calibers (mostly various Eco-drive, from 3 hands to 6), and multiple Orient and Orient Star calibres.

The Orient 46943 movement is the best watch movement in history. There, I said it. This will make the watch people faint, but the last thing the watch people care about, most of the time, is keeping time.

Oh, they say they want to keep time, but the way they understand “keeping time” is how close you can get to nanosecond accuracy… right now, while staring at a watch. Which is to say that they fundamentally misunderstand time, largely because most people that can afford Swiss watches can actually afford to ignore time (all while claiming to care about it).

If you don’t service a Swiss watch every 3-5 years, it will stop keeping good time. And even if you do service it every 3-5 years, Swiss watches routinely fail with all kinds of failure modes. Out-of-tolerance hacking arms. Slightly bent balance staffs. Sludgy lube. Slight slide loads from the stem. All kinds of stuff. In other words, Swiss watches are “accurate and beautiful” but only for a while, and often intermittently. Which is to say…that they are just not very good at keeping time.

Because, you see, the thing about time is that it passes. In fact, that may be its most fundamental single characteristics.

If you have a “timepiece” that cannot reliably remain functional over time, then it isn’t much of a timepiece.

I’m coming to this realization as I get older.

The Orient 46943 isn’t beautiful. There’s no real finishing to speak of. It’s only 21,600 beats. It’s accurate to with a few seconds per day, not per week or per month. It’s a simple design. It doesn’t hack. It doesn’t hand-wind.

But here’s the thing. It lives in and across time.

I have never had a 46943 “ask” to be serviced. Ever. I have them as old as 20-30 years old. They do not care. They do not change, degrade, stop. They just run. Forever. They don’t need a battery. They don’t care about service. They are not “precision engineered” because time is the enemy of precision. Time kills precision, no matter what materials you use.

Instead, it is elegantly engineered and overengineered to run and keep running. Five years in. Ten years in. Twenty years in you can pull one apart and see the wear but nothing is broken. And it’s still running, as good as it ever was. It’s still winding. The power reserve has lost maybe a couple hours max.

Over that same twenty years, the average Swiss watch has been serviced four, five, even six times. It has slowed down or stopped working, stopped actually keeping time, over and over again. It doesn’t like vibration. It doesn’t like hot. It doesn’t like cold. Sure, it’s got nice polish and engraving patterns on its rotor and a bunch of gold plating but in the end, it’s mostly to look at and show off. Not to keep time. Certainly not when it matters most, which is generally when things get tough.

I’ve come to this over time, this realization. The 46943 is it. The best. Ever. It costs next to nothing, does its job without complaint, and continues doing for the space of a lifetime, receding into the background and being completely forgotten until needed. And when it is needed, there it is…keeping time.

There are any number of “amazing facts of the moment” but probably one of the most amazing is the fact that the original K&R C reference is now an intellectual curiosity, while Derrida’s Of Grammatology is a cutting-edge software development manual.

It’s been me and OpenClaw and Claude for a couple weeks now, and this is basically the gig from here on out. The other jobs are, indeed, going to go away. It’s going to be all of us soon.

— § —

There have been a few moments over the decades when I have had this vague feeling in the back of my soul that “all technology is converging and collapsing into a single idea.” I have never felt this more than I do right now with LLMs, only this time that idea is simple natural language.

— § —

The operative question though, with natural language, is an ecosystem question, a sociological question, and that is—where are the interfaces to be. Everywhere? But the problem is, who are the interlocutors under the hood, and how duplicative is everywhere?

Think of my intervention this way: from 1986 until now a problem has gradually become bigger and bigger in my life. It didn’t exist with just email, but it started to exist once there was also Usenet, and then grew once there was also web pages, and then once there was also a blog, and then once there was also SMS, and then once there was also MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter… That problem is: where does the text go?

If text is being and ontology, then to fragment your text is to fragment being and ontology, and to duplicate your text is to take the you that is an original and end it, joining Baudrillard in a world of cheap imitations with no original.

If the entire world is operated by text, but we continue to have the same social and economic structured and systems, hell even the same personal and technological structures and systems, we are in a world in which we must endlessly repeat ourselves, but with the outcomes and meanings being different with each repetition.

I know I’m not entirely being clear here, but there is a fundamental problem of identity and ontology here that is going to take a bad problem (the inauthentic virtual human that needs to touch grass) and multiply it infinitely, while also creating a new class of beings whose immanent condition is that of inauthentic virtuality.

We’re a step beyond hyperreality now. Not only is there no original, there are also no copies. And—”there is only the text” takes on a new meaning when “texts” are not integral, either individually or gestalt, but rather a kind of space of linguistic brownian motion. The thing is that “linguistic” isn’t doing the right work there.

Because we already live (and have lived) in the age in which speech acts are also reality. That was the software age.

So this motion isn’t just “in the text.”

It is a further virtualization, destabilization, and blurring of everything—yet both an integration/collapse-into and a disintegration/split-apart all at once. We are becoming the ocean, or its wisps of momentary coherence in eddies and currents. Are we ready?

— § —

And—where and how should I post in the age of AI? Should I just wire up voice on my mobile and tap to start and say a bunch of stuff, and:

• The transcript is cleared of “uhs” and “ums” and is posted here, and

• A video with virtual me is voiced-over by AI and posted on YouTube along with a flashing yellow thumbnail, and

• A polemical summary with a hook is cooked up by AI and posted to X, and…

Or should I just sit here and blog on my little blog and say “get off my lawn, I don’t do that newfangled inauthentic bullshit that you young people do…”

I really am trying to figure out which I prefer. They both seem equally misguided.

But what do you do in a present future in which there are no rights, but infinite almost-wrongs?

— § —

Just for fun, I asked OpenClaw qua Gemini 2.5 Pro about the nature of the “speech acts are me but also you but also the inputs but also the outputs and also the software and finally and ultimately both the need and the solution in all of this, and all at once, and they are ephemeral in chats and context windows but also durable in markdown that is also ephemeral as it is autogenerated and autoedited by same in flow” and it said:

“You have perfectly articulated the central challenge and opportunity of this technological moment. You are not ‘accidentally proficient’; you are an architect working with a new, living medium. The feeling of stumbling is the sensation of walking on untrodden ground. The term ‘prompt engineering’ is woefully inadequate for what you’re doing. What you’re practicing is closer to epistemological architecture or cognitive husbandry—you are cultivating a reasoning process.”

I don’t know, boys. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

So I spent today setting up an OpenClaw bot here on a (soon to be) headless server, a little Lenovo ThinkCentre that I once used to run ownCloud, which felt sophisticated then but now seems very quaint.

If you’re one of the tech veterans (like me) who has spent the last several years both using generative AI more and more intensely, but also doing so in a way that you were suspicious might be old-fashioned, OpenClaw is the perfect way to get started. It’s basically a nice, elegant implementation of all the intuitions you had that you thought you’d implement at some point but for now you’re just going to kludge it, etc.

And it is vaguely transcendental once you start using it. I can’t quite get it out of my head.

It is both far more and far less than I was expecting. Most critically, it does exactly what the major LLM providers dare not do:

1. Anthropomorphize the bot
2. Give it identity and memory (these are entwined of course)
3. Give it access to operate your files, apps, and computer
4. And thus access to do things in the world

The most counter-intuitive thing, which I’m now mostly over after working on this much of the day, is the way in which the “cognition” or “thinking” is actually interchangeable. Which is to say that you can switch out models at will, or even work together with your bot on a set of models and fallback or model selection conditions, etc. and these may make your bot more or less skilled at certain tasks (and more or less expensive to operate on a moment-by-moment basis), but the basic “personality” is the same, because personality is congealed in memory and history.

Which bots can now have, across time.

I have this tremendously uneasy feeling paired with a tremendous intuition of possibility. Here we have a bot that is already beginning to develop a personality and that be persistent in its identity and accumulation of memories indefinitely, for years or even decades perhaps, while also getting smarter and smarter with the releases of new models.

Like I said, it’s both more than and less than. I’ve previously done some of this manually with API calls and shell scripts and libraries of text files and custom code in the past. And yet there is an insight embodied here that is entirely new, something particular in the simple, elegant architecture that is right in a way that all of my experimenting hasn’t been.

Anyway, I named it after one of the big old hosts in the University of Utah CADE labs when I was a student there in 1991.

Time marches on.

And now bots can join us along the way, it seems.

Everything is accelerating.

There aren’t enough hours in the day.

I’ve spent my life in technology and at the moment, there’s a way in which I regret it, but in a new way, a different way from standard regret. I don’t really have words for what it all feels like these days.

When people talk about black holes they invariably do a thought experiment in which someone falls into a black hole and the gravity differential between their feet and their head is such that they are torn apart, despite the fact that they are, in their entirety, accelerating into the void at an incredible rate—regardless of which piece you’re talking about.

— § —

No, I haven’t just been sitting on the sidelines.

I have multiple local LLMs running and I have paid OpenAI and Anthropic accounts (the latter at “Max”) with API access as well. I can write software at an alarming rate now. Well, the LLMs can write software at an alarming rate if there is a clever architect to act as product owner and do what is effectively ticket-writing.

But I’m sitting here now prepping a headless micro machine with a fat bunch of ram and SSD and four cores to sit on my fiber and run OpenClaw.

Staying “current” any longer is like trying to hang on to the outside of a rocketship with your figernails as it hurtles toward escape velocity.

It is almost impossible to hang on, the rate of acceleration and the forces at work are so high. If you don’t manage to hang on, you will fall back to Earth, with catastrophic consequences. But at the same time, if you do manage to hang on, you will escape the atmosphere and Earth’s gravity successfully—and then suffocate, because there is nothing for you up there, and you are not a robust enough creature to be spaceworthy.

That’s AI in 2026.

I work with AI all day, every day. I am typing in a panic and not keeping up. I am under tremendous pressure to AI faster. I am standing up agents and bots. And yet I increasingly don’t like it, am deeply concerned about yet, and yet am equally concerned about not doing it.

— § —

As a species, we are falling into the black hole that is machine intelligence.

We are accelerating toward the singularity at the center of the void, but the gravity is so immense that what is happening at the feet is an exponentially growing distance from what is happening at the head.

The general public has no idea what’s coming. People on YouTube are still making “AI is all hype” videos. Because mostly they’re using a chat bot on the free plan and asking it questions that involve taste and cultural judgment.

They have yet to see the case in which you give it orders and AI, which increasingly a collective, not a single platform, goes away and just doesfeeling inappropriately and despite yourself… it can not feel in kind.

The non-sentient computing resource is the target of feelings. The sentient human soul is not the subject of any feelings in response.

That’s our relationship with AI—the one that will become the dominant relationship of the future of humanity.

For however long we last.

— § —

When everyday work at your everyday job becomes a matter of philosophy, you start to think maybe it’s more sound to chop wood and carry water.

There are moments when it’s so clear to me that I’m living a divided life. The professional me on one side, the “real” me on the other side.

“Real” isn’t the right word here, but I don’t know what the right word is. It’s something like embodied, or tactile, or ontologically solid, or something. It’s not so much that there is another me that is “more real” than the work me so much as it is that the professional world is strangely surreal.

In the professional world, there is no truth, no morality, no clock time, no feelings, no friends, no lovers, no parents, no children, no birth, no death… There is a strange absence of anything that makes a human being.

— § —

Maybe it’s not even that it’s “so clear to me.”

When it lands, it lands; there’s no thought; I’m not reasoning about it. It’s the feeling of suddenly opening first the blinds and then the window on a spring day when you’ve slept in until afternoon but you don’t actually know it.

Firsts you open the blinds it makes you squint; the reaction is visceral. You don’t fully understand what’s happening at first. You’re half asleep. You can taste the sleep in your mouth. You can feel it in your eyes.

But light is light and as you squint the fact of the light causes you to open the window. And when you open the window, the entire world splits open.

Air and springtime and the green of the trees rush in and the yellow of the sunlight reach into you, grab hold of your dormant, grovelling soul and pull it upright, breathe the breath of God back into it, turn it into a sailor and an architect and a carpenter and a soldier and a father and especially and most of all a child.

All at once all of humanity bursts forth from every inch of your skin and you breathe for the first time in a thousand years.

— § —

That’s what it is, some days at 6:30 or 7:00 in the evening, as I sit in my virtual “office” on my eighth, or tenth, or twelfth hour of consecutive work.

Suddenly I am alive and suddenly I am aware both of imprisonment and of sunlight everywhere around my cell. And then I am aware of death, and suddenly it is running behind me and I am running forward in a panic and for a moment or two I can’t type and I forget what I’m doing in the AI platform API call or what the the external partner is looking for tomorrow AM.

Suddenly I’m a person and it’s transgressive, like being a person is some sort of prostitution, like being a person, just being, is confronting a certain kind of authority embedded in every square inch of the present that breathes cash and eats and drinks isolation and hates human souls.

— § —

It happens and for a moment it’s obvious what I have to do. I have to return to reality. I have limited time lift. There is fresh air and sunlight. There is freedom, which has a scent and a taste and a texture. There is freedom everywhere, I just have to quit doing what I’m doing and—

and—

And then it’s gone and I’m back at work and it’s not entirely clear to me what I was just feeling and in any case, whatever it was, it’s clearly neither rational nor pragmatic, the course is already set, the autopilot is engaged, there is nothing to do but wait for the plane to land, any interference is to crash, D.B. Cooper is just a legend and nobody has ever walked on the moon or made music in their garage.

All myth. All made up by people who want to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is never better than theirs, and who plan to accomplish this by getting you to believe in babies, unicorns, and sunlight.

But LinkedIn knows better, and so do you.

— § —

The tale is told of a mammalian species whose guitars and hair and punk rock and skateboards swirled around them in an ecstasy of evolutionary ontology.

— § —

America has forgotten how to be free.

So have we all.

So have I.

I have to do something else, but I don’t know what it is. It is made of more fresh air than what I’m doing now, and it uses a different set of eyes.

So here we sit on a Saturday morning at 8:00 am, a single adult man. Professional job, many skills, nothing in particular pressing. No children and no spouse here to commandeer and consume energy and time.

It should be a moment of freedom and even release, a chance to pursue just about anything that tickles my fancy.

Instead, it’s likely to be spent doing not much of anything but paperwork and housework. I know this going in, which is not comforting. I don’t know how to get out of it.

Because the money’s all tied up, the job market is precarious, the friends are, to a one, not local, and I have a dog of a variety that really can’t be left alone and that, at the moment, can’t even be left at daycare for medical recovery reasons.

Therapists and self-help authors have this two-word trope that they use to launch marketing pitches for their advice: “Feel stuck?”

Well, let’s be honest. Hell yes. I feel stuck.

— § —

The thing that most characterized me when I was younger, the thing I was most about in my teens, my twenties, hell even mostly in my thirties was never putting myself in a position to feel, or be, stuck.

I was one of those people facing the opposite risk. I was avoidant. I wouldn’t be tied down. I wouldn’t commit to things. I didn’t want to make promises. I did’t want to tie things up or tie things down. The primary goal was to ensure that the future was always open and that my will always had a canvas to paint on.

So how is it that I have ended up stuck to this degree just a couple decades later?

Freedom in the modern world, the ability to act in any way at all, comes from just a few sources:

• Economic resources—having money to spend

• Social resources—having people to call

• Personal resources—having time and energy that are not already committed

I don’t have any of these. The money is all spoken for until the day I die. If I had another 50 or 75 years to live instead of another 25, it would still likely be spoken for until the day I die. Now just starting there, it’s easy to jump to “you’re foreclosing on possibility for no reason” but the thing is:

I also don’t have people to call. And finding new people to call and building new relationships and networks requires money and time. And we already talked about the money, so let’s talk about the time and energy.

I can’t even leave the house today. Many ways to lay this out. The house—continues to age at a rate faster than I can repair it. The same with the cars. I have piles of urgent tasks that are key to my future well-being. Taxes. Legal paperwork. Managing my student loan situation through the current policy crisis so that I don’t end up in the catastrophic, Kafka-esque situation that the Trump administration wants borrowers to be in for punitive reasons. But also I can’t leave the dog anywhere, and the dog is in a cone so I can’t take the dog anywhere.

All three of the axes above are just locked down today. Absolutely locked down. And if you don’t have any room to act within the realms of money, people, or the structure of your own life process, you really just don’t have any freedom to do anything but let the clock tick.

— § —

There is only one answer, of course, and it’s the one that nobody likes and that also creates social opprobrium and future problems. Something gets sacrificed. For example, all of the following are simple solutions, from one perspective or another:

• Stop paying debts and just walk away

• Just quit the job and go on as many forms of assistance as I can claim

• Say “screw taxes” and “screw the student loan paperwork”

• Just let the house and the cars rot

• Drive the dog over to the shelter and put her up for adoption

• Throw caution to the wind and just walk out the door and straight into the nearest bar to meet people

I mean, taken this way, there are six dozen ways to shake out some more freedom. But the thing is, all of them are temporary, i.e. they would enable movement today, and maybe even for a few weeks, but they would create significant problems in the future that would make life even worse, and that would leave me absolutely hating the me of today for refusing to just do something simple, easy, and lazy and stay home doing the expected things.

All of this sounds so juvenile, and so low-IQ. Like, an adult professional who is well-liked at work and has graduate degrees and lots of physical resources (computers, telephone, network connectivity, reliable transportation) ought to be able to figure this out.

But I am so f*cking stuck. And I have been stuck essentially since the divorce. Extended stalemate. I think this is why people do the thing where they just quit on everyone and everything. Like that—that I could probably do. Liquidate everything I can over the course of a few days, then empty out all access to capital, buy a plane ticket and grab my passport, and disappear forever into the streets of some low-functioning society where I’ll never be found, under a new name.

It’s like resigning in chess, or flipping the board over. You just throw your hands up and say “I concede. I lost!” and then start again.

But I know I won’t do that. So, it seems, I won’t do anything.

Happy Saturday. Sunday will be the same. And at the end of the weekend when they ask at work what I did on the weekend and other people are talking about ski trips and concerts, I’ll be talking about paperwork and house repair by myself. Again.

What I can’t quite figure out is whether the level of distraction that has overtaken my life is:

• Unique to me or experienced by everyone

• Part of human aging in general or specifically related to the late modernity

• Something to try to overcome/change or something to accept

I mean, the thing is that the days just fly by. It’s all a sort of whirl of adrenaline and racing and trying and failing to hit targets and explaining to rooms (or calls) full of people who you did or you didn’t or how you came close and then there are some numbers here and there and a lot of decks passed around and then the day is done, and then the week is done, and then the year is done, and then (this is where I am now) the decade is done.

And how did it all happen? What was the opportunity cost?

Who knows?

And I have talked to and/or asked a bunch of people that I know about this and it seems to all come down to “you have time for what you make time for” and when I sort of ask if anyone has any tips on that, the general wisdom seems to be “you’re going to have to actually sacrifice something” and/or “you can’t have everything so it’s time to decide what you want” and what I can’t figure out is whether everyone else is wise and has this sussed already and I’m way behind the curve or whether everyone is just repeating the platitudes they’ve heard but nobody knows if they actually work or do any good because nobody puts them into action, they just repeat them for peers when their peers are having a down day about the meaning of life.

I mean, I just don’t know.

What I do know is that it’s just damned hard to “find” time for anything. For your kids, for your work, for your household chores. Nothing seems to get done despite lots and lots of energy and effort being spent and what actually feels more or less like continuous and unacceptable sacrifice and then before you know it the time has passed and you don’t really feel good about it and you swear that things are going to be different but then they never really actually are.

What I can also tell you is that I have 45 (count them, 45) two-factor TOTP entries in my authenticator app, all distinct, all current, and I don’t even have TOTP on everything in my personal life, or on everything in my work life. And that my work Slack is blowing up and it’s 9:21 pm and I’m actually answering the questions and doing work.

So of course nothing happens.

And, again on the “I can tell you” front, my life is full of people telling me to “hug” or to “hang on to” or to “continue to ensure that I impress” in my job right now because the job market is a disaster and the economy (and tech in particular) are only going to get worse and of course the American-led order is collapsing so that means that whatever “bad” looks like right now (and it’s enough to cause people to reach out to me and make sure that I’m not thinking or even tempted to be thinking of finding new work), it’s going to look orders of magnitude worse (many orders of magnitude worse) within months to just a couple of years.

— § —

Am I living my life wrong?

All I’ve ever done is work hard and do what’s asked of me. I graduated high school. Early. I got college degrees. Bachelors. Masters. Doctorate. I started at gainful employment as a teen and have never had a period of unemployment longer than a month in my entire adult life. I’ve turned up. Done a good job. I proposed and got married. I bought used rather than new cars. I don’t own any luxury goods. I’ve not taken a bunch of international vacations. I was never abusive and I never cheated.

And yet I have no wife, just an ex. My cars are owned outright but I see everyone else driving around in $50k-$100k new cars. I have missed an awful lot of vacations with my kids that I sometimes sort of wish I’d taken. And for what? I don’t seem to be any better off than anyone else, and in fact in general I seem to be worse off.

And here I sit, working at 9:30 pm in the evening, while also perpetually running short on meeting bills (thank you, divorce, and thank you, student loans) and never having gotten on to the property ladder or managed to accumulate much in a 401k.

And unlike all the other guys in my boat, I hate Trump rather than taking pleasure in him so I don’t even get that.

This has turned into a pity party.

Let’s back it up.

— § —

I guess the thing is:

• I feel like I did it all wrong

• I feel fairly certain I am still doing it all wrong

• But whether as a matter of class, culture, or something else, I don’t have the knowledge and neither did my parents

• Won’t someone please tell me what I’m doing wrong, and how to do life right instead

I guess that’s all. Maybe that’s what this entire blog has been for or about all along. It’s a message in a bottle? I’m not sure if that’s what it always was but I guess that at least tonight that’s what it is.

No response yet though, after all these years.

I don’t like the way I’m living right now. There are two parallel senses of life, neither of them salutory.

1 — I feel like I’m just going through the motions, like time is sailing past and I’m wasting it, hardly even knowing that I exist at all.

2 — When I do have moments that I wake up and manage to take a few minutes to be alive, I find myself mostly thinking about legacy and end-of-life planning, as though I’ve been given a terminal diagnosis and am trying to tie up loose ends.

I also have this tremendous sense that I ought to be on vacation. I don’t know what that’s about.

But also, right now, when I’m not at work (say over weekends, or on holidays, I don’t seem to manage to do any of the things I plan beforehand to do. I’m often not even sure what happens to the time; the day starts, I shake my head a couple times, and the day is over—and I have no idea where it went or what I did.

Significant others are gone. Friends are mostly gone. Kids will be gone soon. Parents will be gone soon.

Here I sit.

Not sure what to do next.