Renovatio

We should all pour one out for the cool project ideas that never got off the ground, or were never completed in 2020.

One of the benefits future AI technology is said to bring about is the end of having to work just to pay bills for a lifestyle that at best makes having that job bearable. *that’s a lot of b’s. The actual economics of such a system are still Star Trek levels of fantasy, and I have no desire to play someone else’s game on that issue. Of interest to this post is human leisure. The utopian vision of mankind (don’t @ me) where every individual has the time and resources to follow their own dreams and aspirations.

We didn’t exactly get that in 2020.

What we did get is a lot of people on “lock down” with at least an implied freedom to spend more time on personal growth. I have yet to buy an Arduino and code some clever contraption, mostly because it’s part of a last mile problem, as I call it, where that cool AI thing isn’t just about working backwards from the end result (you really need to build a massive foundation for even the tiniest gazebo, as it were). One idea that has persisted is to gut a digital radio or even retro boom box, shove a controller inside, and use it as a dedicated media player. The clever thought was Network Attached Radio. Super easy (after all the hard work) to take a recent podcast, drop the mp3 into a folder, and let it just play thru the device.

You know who does those kinds of things, all the time? People who have made a career out of it. Not sure if that is a spiral of despair or some universal truth we just need to accept. Regardless of whether the circle completes itself or spirals endlessly, we’ve at least had a large scale (though not very scientific) study of life with fewer social and economic constraints. Did we all just fill that time with busy work? Where there “new jobs” to keep us occupied? Could it just mean that some people are going to go the starving artist route regardless, and there is no external force holding the rest of us back? That would suck.

I didn’t want this to be some self-help tripe about learning to manifest or an eye rolling “you just need to believe in yourself.” This is also not meant to be a traditional New Years resolution. We seem to know what we want and what we’re not doing, but just can’t figure out the invisible string holding us back part. Less time contemplating on fears and limitations is more time for just taking that first step, or even a wholehearted leap outside of the comfort zone. That’s what it means to change. Not that my back of the room advice even matters, but from a cognitive standpoint, change is going to happen with or without your input. If you can look back a decade or more and see how experience has altered your mind, then you should be able to look forward with the confidence of bringing your awareness of self along for the ride.

Let 2021 be the year of renewal.