The continued obsession on COVID19 is shining a bright light on this very fundamental fact: we are asking the young to sacrifice their future calendars for the sole sake of preserving the future calendars of the retirement-age group. Eventually, that light will shine on the massive qualitative difference of those calendars.
The image reminds me of extra-terrestrial aliens in space suits walking in an alien world that has some kind of toxic atmosphere. These are humans. This is no longer their planet. They are temporarily stranded on this alien world and hope that science will bring in their rescue ships, probably in the form of some kind of consciousness upload into an Internet cloud.
I put myself in the chair of the host and hearing someone ask me what they should do about their huge debt. I hope I would have the strength to hide my thankfulness of not being in their position, and instead look at their core condition. Debt is a fact of their existence. The worst advice is to say they need to get that debt to zero.
I suspect this idea has always been at the back of my mind as I contemplated the opportunity of starting a relationship. Even at a young age, I recognized that the project could not last the duration, and the concept of marriage sold to me is defined by going the duration. I was sold on something that I realized is something no longer available to purchase.
I live in a world that I must explore alone.
I anticipate a future where we redefine a work-week as the duration of a specific just-in-time gig, a weekend as the gap between gigs, vacations as opportunities presented by anticipation of long gaps but subject to sudden termination when new opportunities occur. The day itself will have break times that will vary day to day and may arise with no advanced notice, leading us to arrange social encounters with near-strangers who happen to share something in common including the fact that they are free at the same time.
Had you had that confidence at the age of 17, I’m confident I would be in a very similar situation as I am right now but with a memory of a life lived differently. I can’t tell if it would be happier or not, but I do know I would have had more time for doing what I love most: solitude, contemplation, and living simply. I’m guessing I would be here similarly situated but with more stories that I would be eager to tell. My lack of confidence in what I knew to be true denied me those stories of living an authentic life.
Consider the case of a big-data store the was able to store all of the individual answers keyed with sequence numbers, time stamps, and specific individual identification. I don’t think anyone would voluntarily discard that data in exchange with anonymized data consisting of just a few categories. The value of data reduction into categories is for people who don’t have access to big data. Those people are the consumers who wish to have an external assessment of what kind of person they are, allowing them a shortcut to introducing themselves, similar to the 1960’s approaching of introducing oneself as a zodiacal sign.
The delusion of injustice is that there cannot be privately negotiated justice that may be acceptable only to the private parties based on the particular context that they agree to keep private. As a result of this, we overrule such private agreements and require a fresh trial in a public or formal setting based on current sensibilities and on lost information about the full context of the earlier event. In the re-airing of past events, society regresses to a more immature level where every human interaction needs adult supervision and every offense be reported to authorities for a formal justice.
These cases are often described as open-secrets. Many people in the community are aware of the information about individual cases and about the pattern of behavior, but there has been some kind of understanding that the past events are resolved in some acceptable terms, and that ongoing behavior is restrained by certain conditions. The oxymoron of open-secrets can be resolved by defining the open-part as being observed data, while the secret-part is restraints on how this data may be used in future decision making.
