Time is long at the moment

[chess]

I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. A year ago I was a different person in a different world. Every moment lasts forever, although occasionally hours gang up on me.

Every now and again I get hit by a dose of Teenage Philosophy on how I am so very small in a very large world and nothing I do will ever really make a difference on a global scale.

It is a strange time of life. Before now, every year has been very different. The world has changed rapidly but so have I, so I haven't noticed. But now it's settling time, the time when I might do essentially the same thing for the next half-decade or decade, and the time when I am no longer in the first phase of youth and no longer keep up with the world. The children swim through the latest worlds more easily than I.

It is especially strange because normally life does continue changing because at this point you'd be thinking about having a child, and then your life would continue to change rapidly because of the development of the child. But I have no intention of breeding, and this leaves life out before me curiously flat - there is no intrinsic reason that it should change markedly from now until I'm seventy or eighty.

Also, where is my end of scarcity economics? Where is my upload society? Riding on the crest of the technological wave, these things seem so close, almost within reach. There is nothing that I do now which I could not do a lot better as a brain in a box connected to a sufficiently advanced computer system, and the Internet is very nearly sufficiently advanced given appropriate input devices. But some people are still scratching out food for themselves and their family from the ground without even a beast of burden.

This has been a compendium of thoughts which I've been thinking on the half-hour walk to and from work and meaning to write down. I will now return you to your regularly scheduled Goblin Invasion. (We might be having a goblin bash at LARP this weekend, or something.)

Comments

[passage.livejournal.com]

I so identify with much of this. Only a couple of weeks ago I realised there may well not be any big break like the summer holidays of old, to divide one section of my life from another. Instead I might well keep going at this pace for the next 40 years.

I guess I should choose a more sustainable pace than I did as a student.

I also feel that 'can't cope with the world changing' thing. LIke new computer games, I don't really want to play them. I got the old computer games, what I want to do is find some good emulators and replay the old classics.

Mind you I'm still up for new Stargate, so there must still be some hope for me. Shame they're cancelling it.

[http://users.livejournal.com/vitriol_/]

I don't know - it may seem that way, but despite having graduated almost two years ago I still find my days filled with new stuff. There may no longer be the arbitrary boundaries of terms, years and courses, but instead there's a whole world's worth of things like jobs, housing, cars, friends, and all sorts of other things. And I quite like not having so many fixed deadlines for major events in my life - it makes it easier to take on long-term projects, or just decide to kick back for a week or two and avoid working on anything new.

As for an upload society, while we've clearly got some way to go, at least we're taking the first real steps. And in the mean time we can at least make silly, mind-controlled toys.