1999

Sometimes songs that are meant to inspire happiness can be the saddest songs of all. The holiday season came and went and with it a cloud of depression descended upon me. I was never like this in the past, Christmas was one of my favourite times of the year. I used to look forward to it, even when I grew up and the season lost its magic, I still found joy and happiness in the decorations and the festivity. I was always a believer in the season of good will and kindness to all, I don't know when that changed. Perhaps it didn't change but rather the darkness that swells in the undercurrent has grown with age to the point where that energy isn't enough to compensate for it anymore.

I'm struggling this year more than I ever have emotionally, the extreme swings have given way to a long slow decline. I was listening to a song that wasn't even a Christmas track just one that Spotify decided to recommend '1999' by Charli XCX, despite the intention to drum up nostalgia for a simpler time, the track had the opposite effect on me. 1999 wasn't a good year for me, it's not something I'd particularly want to repeat if I am honest. The idea of going back to a time of innocence is intoxicating because ignorance is seductive it offers a false promise of protection from the horrors of the world but that's all it is, a false promise.

Autumn Years

I think about time a lot, specifically I think about how much time has passed between two points. I spend a lot of time reflecting on my life, part of the journey you take as someone with anxiety and depression eventually leads you to that point of reflection. When I measure time I tend to think of it as if a child had been born in that moment and how old they would now be. I attended college from 2004 to 2006, it being 2022 now that marks 18 years almost to the day.

I remember my first day of college with clarity for a number of reasons. We had recently moved house and our post was still being redirected. I knew I had been accepted to the college in question but I did not know the start date of my course, I was waiting for that to arrive. I remember my Mum waking me up one morning in September to tell me a letter arrived from the college. Half asleep I opened the letter and read through blurred vision and that grogginess you feel when you're woken from a deep sleep. It was 12:30 and that grogginess didn't last long as panic set in, I was meant to start that morning. I made it to college that afternoon and the course director was understanding, they had wondered why there was no reply to the letter as there was paperwork I was supposed to complete. Everything worked out in the end and the next two years were two of the happiest years of my life despite some very sad moments in their midst.

Ageing vs Ageism

At what point does being realistic about the limitations of ageing become ageism? The opportunities we have in life change as we grow older, we tend to think more about what opens up to us with age than the things that are lost; for example we think of when we can legally drink, have sex, gamble, vote, or the things that are expected of us with age like taxes. There comes a point in your life when you realise that some dreams can only be achieved by a certain age, and that once you've passed that age, it's unrealistic to ever imagine achieving those things.

Although for many of those dreams they are not strictly impossible when you are older, the odds are just stacked so much against you that the effort required to overcome the disadvantage of age becomes disproportionate and the reward does not compensate you for the investment. In other words your pursuit has to be driven entirely by the desire to achieve it, as the achievement itself doesn't actually benefit you, if anything it will come at a net cost.

The Bird And The Snake

One four zero, three numbers in time,
A short sweet verse of astringent rhyme,
Tweet-tweet said the bird from atop its tree,
But alas the snake, it did not see.

If you follow me on Twitter, then depending on how much attention you pay to my profile you may have noticed I've been winding down my footprint on the site. I've unfollowed about a thousand people at the time of writing and I intend to reduce it even more. Like many people I've been weighing my options of how to respond to the future direction of the website. For me personally, right now my intention is to streamline my account then make it private. I don't know whether I will stay on the platform in the long term, that decision all hangs on how the platform changes going forward, but the direction of travel right now feels as if I'll eventually take my leave.

Hopeless

When the world around you seems to be falling apart, and the future is filled with darkness, it's hard to find hope and harder still to find a sense of stability. Life seems to have gone from one catastrophe to another in recent years with no end to the relentless flow of negativity. Each individual cause for concern fails to reach any point of closure. If you've ever had a bad breakup where you never gained a sense of closure then you'll know that mentality takes years to process and move on from.

I've always been of the opinion that every emotion is valid, both positive and negative, and that when those feelings surface, you should not try and repress them but rather allow yourself to feel them in totality in order to process them fully and be able to move on. The problem is that this mentality requires the source or the stimulus for those emotions to be finite. When that source is never-ending, the only thing you achieve is to mainline negativity like injecting a drug right into an artery - which is a very bad idea.

Reboots and Remakes

There was an article in The Walrus which I stumbled across on Twitter titled "I’m Sick of Reboots and Rewatches and You Should Be Too" and I had a lot of thoughts I wanted to share; I was originally going to tweet this reaction in a thread but it grew in length to the point where I thought a blog post would better suit, and the topic touches on the nature of writing and the creative process so I thought it would be relevant to share here.

I have disagree quite hard with this idea of abandoning old ideas and old content and focusing solely on innovation.  My retort firstly comes on the basis that most people who consume old content aren't experiencing it for the first time, but rather they are reliving their past experiences of that content. The vast majority of people don't go back and explore old content they have not already seen - reboots and remakes reach new audiences.

Drawing from my experience of content creation, of which this isn't the first blog I have run, indeed there have been many I have published over the years and their syndication varied. Some reached a few dozen people, some a few hundred, and some a few thousand. There are analytics scripts and server logs that are accessible to the publisher [me] that vary depending on the platform but they all generally provide insight into how you the reader explore the content provided here and one thing remains consistent, old content is generally ignored. You may occasionally land on an old post from a search result in Google but you'll jump to the home page after reading it and read only recent content, the remaining old content is rarely explored.

Peacocking

This post started out as a response to a tweet I saw on twitter - the account is private so I won't post a link, but the gist of the tweet was to ask if you need to impress someone in order to gain their attention, were they truly worthy of your friendship? This is my response which has mostly gone unedited.

Yes and no, impressing someone shouldn't be a requirement, but if you don't stand out in some way you don't get noticed. People use different ways to get noticed, some use their looks, some use brains, and some use wealth. What you choose says more about you than who you try to impress. A friendship can be initiated by superficiality but it can't be sustained by it, what really matters is where the interpersonal relationship goes and whether there's a depth that develops. How the friendship was initiated in time will become circumstantial and almost entirely irrelevant. A true friendship will last if that depth comes to mean more to them than peacocking that was employed to gain their attention in the first place.