This is exciting.
For me.
The carpenter, plumber and electrician were all here today and while the kitchen isn't finished, there is running water, some lights, but more importantly, fridge, freezer, stove and oven all working!
It was early July when I started tearing out the old kitchen, so we are nearing four months of being kitchenless and my body can feel it. I don't know how some people live off of predominantly pre-cooked packaged food for years on end, but I am glad that we will soon not have to anymore.
It will be a couple days until the electrician can come back and finish the lighting and a few other odd tasks, however hearing things "beep" as they go on felt like a milestone. It is kind of like getting a new car, except it cost more than our car - which is a little crazy, but at least it adds some value to the house for a while to come, rather than only depreciates to zero in a handful of years.
And while literally the only thing I have "made" so far is boiled some water, I am happy with the choice of appliances and am looking forward to actually cooking something, which will have to wait until tomorrow night.
Tonight - it is precooked, supermarket meatballs....
Things are getting hot.
And things are getting cold.
And the other thing I am looking forward to is having food in the fridge, something in the oven, and a glass of wine in my hand. I still have a few cupboard doors to put on, install the integrated dishwasher front and a few more drawers, but this weekend might be the weekend we actually make something proper in a near-finished kitchen.
As said, this is exciting for us and might not be for anyone else, but I believe that this is just the way of the world, much like when parents talk about their newborn children to people who think that all kids are the same. We take interest in what we are close to and when a lot of effort and attention goes into creating it, it consumes the mind. It all seems silly to the people who aren't going through it perhaps, but when they have things of interest in their focus, they do the same.
What I like about Hive is it isn't a place that really encourages showing off what has been purchased like all the other social platforms, but rather it incentivizes sharing the things that are important to us. The reward isn't just in HIVE gains, it comes through being able to share our lives with others, something that is getting more important these days, as social disconnection sweeps through society. What we do becomes a shared experience in some way and while it might not be in the same vein as real-world relationships, it is real-world adjacent, especially since so much of our real lives are lived digitally now.
And, unless there is some kind of dystopian event, it is unlikely that we will ever roll it back that far, which means we will end up having to learn how to live a balanced hybrid life. It isn't just work-life balance, it is digital-life balance too, and just like there are workaholics and those who don't work enough, it is going to be increasingly the same for those who spend too much time and not enough time, in both the real and digital realms.
Rejecting the digital world is like rejecting medicine, electricity or hygiene - it is going to lead to a much harder life in many ways. But, getting too attached to the digital world is also going to bring in its pain, as the disconnection from the physical will leave people stranded, unable to connect in the real world again. If this goes on too long, it becomes a transference into the digital realm, where so much is possible, but also, a lot of what makes us human can't be satisfied.
So what do we become?
I think for many, they are already so disconnected and incapable in the physical world that they are welcoming in the chance to unbind themselves from it, so they are diving further into a solitary life, filled with other solitary individuals, pretending that they are all in it together. Perhaps one day the plane of existence will be crossed and it will be a full shift over, but that is unlikely to be the case in my lifetime at least, though many will try.
It is like with the people who "don't want relationships" tend to be the people who are not able to develop healthy relationships. If they were capable and had experience with good relationships, the bad experiences wouldn't deter them much. But, because they are currently incapable, they make a decision to not develop the capabilities, meaning they will never have the experience to understand the beauty of them.
While tis seems a personal choice in the same way as not having children for many is, I wonder how much of it is uninfluenced decision-making, and how much is through suggestion. I suspect, that a lot of the decisions we make are through suggestions from many sources, and very little of our decision-making (if any) is actually free.
If I trace the choices we have made for our kitchen, I would expect that pretty much every choice has been influenced by an ad of some kind, where we are primed to make a choice. For example, we searched for Miele appliances, not because of an ad we saw, but because we both had good experiences with their products from our childhoods. I didn't choose them then, my mother did, but it has affected my decisions forty-odd years later.
Everything is like this.
Our experiences shape us and cause us to make certain decisions over others, but it doesn't have to be active or conscious experience, nor conscious decision-making. Our conditioning does the work for us. But, doesn't this also affect our preferences for what we think "isn't for us" also?
The people who make the decision not to have children for example, is it that they don't actually want them or, is it that they have been conditioned through various aspects of their consumer experience not to want them? It is an impossible question to answer perhaps, but I wonder if there was a way to know real intention, would the biological desire for having children be static over time, if it wasn't influenced by culture?
I don't think we have evolved physically that much in the last few thousand years, so the changes to our behavior are likely directly attributable to the culture we consume, whether we are born into a set of conditions or, seek out a set of conditions. In the digital world we can largely pick and choose what we consciously consume, which effectively means we are able to build the environment that will shape us into who we are and which directions we will take in life, but we have very little understanding on how that is actually going to affect us down the track of life and whether we will regret the decisions we have made.
But, regardless of the outcomes, we will have to live with the lives we have evolved for ourselves, and it doesn't matter if we choose a fully analog, totally digital or a hybrid life between, very little of the outcome is actually going to be within our control, despite the feelings we might have to the contrary.
When you boil water, the steam rises, but at least in my kitchen, that is no longer the case. The natural order has been manipulated and shifted by technology, and we are yet to see what ripples it will create.
But there will be ripples.
It is exciting.
Scary too.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]