The Miracle of Time

I nearly slipped into another panic attack when I realized I could give myself permission to take my time learning something. It was a new and unfamiliar feeling. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in a hurry the past 4 years - as I started out my career in software after moving to the Bay Area with nothing but a journal and an acoustic guitar. Not exactly a smart financial decision (I had no savings and i clearly don’t like to think ahead much). I experienced the feeling that I had to learn as much and as quickly as humanly possible in order to survive and get a job.

I like to give myself a big hug when I can - I understand. I did so many Udemy courses. I did so many tutorials. I was obsessed with learning the coolest and hottest thing on the front end block. After a few years I started realizing that a lot of these tools were doing similar things. I started to understand concepts by referencing other learned concepts - and after a while- I got more pragmatic about shiny objects. if I took time to understand fundamentals, I could more or less learn everything I wanted to.

The illusion of the need to saturate knowledge comes from our shared experience of compressed time in the modern world. Life after the lightbulb was inconceivable before Edison , yet here we are, trying to find the best tool to optimize end to end type safety with our Graphql APIs. The lightbulb was about 150 years ago. To put this in perspective , it took Homo Sapiens about 40,000 years to evolve into higher cognitive function (between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago). The way we experience time has compressed exponentially. We are tasked with making sense of this insanity. The byproduct of a these things? Isolation, the imposture complex, loss of tribe, and secularized religion.

The shift toward capitalist driven modernity where people left the farm to work at factories in London, where production became centralized , marked the beginning of a bending of time. I wish I could say “man, I miss the good old days” - but I can’t - because I was born in 1993. But my hunch is that much of life was unfair and miserable too under feudalism. Yet when capitalism ran rampant, we created perhaps the most evil invention - the transatlantic slave trade. In order to maximize profits under bended time, we sacrificed morality.

We are more than an hourly rate. AI has introduced the largest shift in production since the factory. The outcome? I’m not really sure. And I don’t think anyone really does. But things are changing. I’m working on prioritizing things that make me fulfilled - music, art, community, soccer. Play. The idea of play. Play as an idea. Play as an abstract concept. Permission to spend time on creativity without feeling like I should be doing something more “worth while”. Breaking out of the confines and constructs of fear. Listen to a full record. I recently watched Stanley Kubrick’s “2001 Space Odyssey,” and what I’ve been telling people is “you know the end of 2001 space odyssey, where the astronaut is in the space suit? And he’s going crazy in there? Having a complete mental mindfuck as he sees time bending? That - that’s me!”