When I was a kid, I would sometimes sit with some of our older relatives, and they would talk about ”how they felt.”
I always thought this was a slightly strange thing, particularly when they started talking about how they "had good days" and then they "had not so good days", and occasionally they had outright bad days.
From the perspective of a teenager, days were pretty much ”days.” Sure, one of my things was running cross country competitively, and the day after a big meet on a tough muddy course I would often have what felt like not such a good day. But that made sense to me, because there was a direct cause and effect involved in the situation.
With my older relatives, these days just seemed to come and go for no particular reason.
As I sit here today, approaching my 65th birthday, I have a much greater appreciation for this whole idea of having ”good” days and ”not so good” days!
I've never really had any particular fear of aging, but I'm definitely aware of the fact that things in my body don't always work as well as they seem like they should.
Lately, I have really been struggling with concentration. Whereas it would be tempting to lay my reasoning entirely at the feet of "aging", the truth is that I've always had difficulties with concentration. Heck, I had difficulties with concentration when I was in grade school!
The thing with not being able to concentrate very well — or feeling like you have to really work very hard at concentrating — Is that it sometimes gets directly in the way of being able to get the things done that you need to get done. Then you start missing important deadlines, and you sometimes get to the end of the day having accomplished very little of what was actually on your To Do List for that day.
One of the primary reasons I always really enjoyed blogging — as opposed to other forms of writing, whether it's technical writing or even clumsy attempts at writing fiction novels — is that writing a blog post is generally a very short affair. There's typically a beginning, middle and an end, and you're over and done with it in a matter of minutes as opposed to days or even weeks or months.
Back when I was at university, I always sucked at projects that had to be built over an entire semester or — in the case of double semester courses — built over the course of two semesters.
I just wasn't able to track anything really well in the long term.
There's something ironic about writing those words, in the sense that I also don't really like change. Even when I was 18 or 21, I would often say that nothing would make me happier than finding some job I could do and then I could just do the same thing for the rest of my life or until I retired and be done with it.
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In a predictable enough fashion, I periodically turn to online searches to help me understand the nature of my concentration issues. Aside from the obvious "it's a natural part of aging", one of the things I recently came across was the assertion that one of the reasons many people struggle with concentration these days is directly related to the prevalence of what we call ”short form media” in the world today.
We are literally conditioning ourselves to digest information from the world in tweets and 10-second sound bites, rewiring our neural pathways in such a way that our impression of the world is increasingly formed by processing thousands upon thousands of tiny snippets of information, rather than fewer but longer and more comprehensive pieces of information.
As I thought about that, earlier this afternoon, I found myself pondering whether it's a "chicken versus egg" situation. Is our diminishing ability to concentrate the result of having short little snippets of information bombarding our brain all the time, or are the short little bits of information a consequence or result of our not being able to concentrate?
Does make me think a bit.
I suppose this is a bit of a self-indulgent post, but I do use this blog from time to time to just record my thoughts and document where I am in life, both for others to read — down the road — and perhaps learn from, as well as a point of reference for myself to look back on and to say "oh, at this point this is where I was."
The challenge I'm trying to overcome these days is the fact that as we live in this world where our cost of living is forever increasing while our ability to earn the income sufficient to meet that cost of living is decreasing, we find ourselves in a situation where we have to concentrate longer even while the environment is set up in such a way that our ability to concentrate is worsening.
As far as I can tell — not that I claim to be any kind of great thinker — if this is in fact a trend, it's going to end up in a very bad place.
So those are my thoughts at the end of this otherwise sunny Father's Day of 2025.
Time for me to end this now, which I will do by wishing happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there and to the father-like mentors or even big brothers who make life easier and better for the people around them.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!
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Created at 2025.06.16 01:58 PDT
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