I wonder how many people in crypto remember dialing out on a phone, or waiting for a dial tone. Do people still "dial-a-pizza"?
Over coffee at work today, we were talking about going grey and I was saying how getting old is strange, because even though the aches and pains are increasing, I don't consider myself old. In fact, I kind of feel young in many ways, until I look in the mirror and see my father staring back at me. The memory doesn't help keeping track of time, as I clearly remember making calls on phones with dials and it doesn't seem that long ago that I got my first mobile phone and I can still feel the weight of it in my hand, though that was 26 years ago.
It feels like a long time since my Hive account value has dipped below 100K, but it also doesn't feel like it was that long ago that it was below 20K. Humans aren't very good at keeping track of time with feelings and because we live mostly in the moments and a little either side, we tend to get lost in time as we become quickly accustomed to the current conditions, assuming that this the way it always was.
While I don't think I have changed much, I wonder if I was to run into a high school girlfriend, would she recognize me - would I recognize her? The other interesting thing of this scenario would be, what would our assumptions be about the person who we haven't seen for 30 years?
In general, we tend to think of people the way we last saw them, even though we know that in the time between meetings, we ourselves have gone through a whole range of experiences that have made us different to the person we were decades ago. In the last thirty years, a high school girlfriend is likely to have had several jobs, been in several relationships, been married, had kids, got divorced, been unemployed, lost people close to her - the list goes on. It would be strange for me to assume that she is the same kind of person I remember, but that is what I would do, because I have no other information to go on.
Yet, even when we live our lives and have information, we tend to still get stuck with time, discounting areas of importance of the past, inflating non-importance of today more than it should be. We overvalue our immediate experience because of availability bias, as it is right there for us to focus on and commands our attention, even if it is of little personal value.
We see the stickiness of the moment in the news cycles, where we are drawn to headlines that have no bearing on our lives, yet seem so important, even while we are ignoring what is actually important. One of my friends was saying how sucked into Twitter he has become, but knows that it really brings no practical value to his life and he would be better off doing something else. Yet, we are made to feel that keeping up with current events are important for us to make it through life and those that do not know about the latest occurrences must be idiots. It is a conditioning that means there is going to be both a market to sell information into, as well as a channel to train that market on what they should buy.
We spend our momentary time on content that brings us nothing, so as not to face the actual conditions of our lives and the things we have some control over. We can know what is happening with our sport of choice, we can know the relationship dramas of the celebrities, we can know about the latest act of violence - yet, we don't know how to improve our finances when we are struggling, we don't know how to fix our failing relationships, we don't know how to take care of our bodies so we are healthy - or at least, we don't know enough to actually do something to improve our quality of life.
A large part of why I write the way I do and about what I do, is because these are things that are actually important to me in my daily life and, are therefore potentially important in some ways to other people too. Most of us are far more similar than we are different and we face many of the same human conditions of life - and all of the same emotions.
Writing helps me deal with aspects of my life by breaking my attention away from the current moments that scream for attention and gives me the time and space to become reflective on things that are within my control, I have some influence over or, I can accept as being outside of my control completely. Considering these things allows me to better focus my energy and hopefully, it helps other people break their own conditioning a little also, even if only for a short time each day as they spend time reading someone else's thoughts about life.
It is a meditation of sorts, a medication of a kind - because when we are acting on conditioned habits, we become blind to ourselves, but when we get to look through the eyes of someone else's experience, we can find so much familiar, but also points of difference that we might have not noticed earlier, or have forgotten we have noticed earlier.
With the speed of information flow and the mass of volume we are "expected" to keep up with, there is precious little time left for self-reflection unless we actively make it. However, with a little creative consumption, it is possible to use the content of our lives to provide micro opportunities to pay attention and see how we fit into this world that is moving so quickly, that we feel like childhood was just yesterday. If we do not take these moments, life passes us by while we continually chase the constantly changing tails of the moment, even though we will not remember them tomorrow.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
