Hey. As the title implies, I’ve failed! I didn’t manage to write the news breakdown for today, but I’ll try my hardest to have it done tomorrow. Still finagling with setting up news sources that I want to regularly read, so as not to get bogged down in countless pointless articles. It’s a bit harder than I expected, but to be frank I should have expected that it would be quite a bit of work. Still, I won’t renege my promise to deliver at the very least a blog entry every Friday. That much is for sure doable.
2022 is at its end. Today is the 30th of December. What a year this has been! Good? I’m not so sure, at the very least talking strictly about myself. A few successes, but also mounting failures and difficulties. I find myself ever wondering, “what’s gonna happen next?” To take an example: I believe most people didn’t expect, a year ago, Twitter’s current situation (what looks like its death knell). Now, I don’t like Twitter in the slightest, but it is quite stunning that such a central fixture of online life can just be dying like this. This, of course, is nothing new; we live on top of the cadavers of Myspace and the like. The internet is lightning-fast, but its structures and inhabitants cannot outrun the inevitable decay that the mere fact of existence produces.
In a sense this all feels a little bit liberating, in a perverse sense: a few years ago I used to talk with friends about the way events seemed to be accelerating, the catastrophe of climate change fast approaching, and often I was stared as if I were a madman (not entirely inaccurate). The world, even after Trump’s election and the like, still felt somewhat stable? Like it was the world we always knew, but a bit worse for wear. So we could be comfortable in our expectation that yes, times are bad, but they’ve been worse, and we’re here after all. But the years kept on piling on, and our certainties revealed themselves to be what they actually are: assumptions. Nothing more than the things we believe must be like this, which is nothing but a certain sense of temporal and geographical parochialism. There is nothing timeless about the world in which we live; therefore, there is nothing that guarantees that it’ll stay the same—in fact, if there is one singular certainty is that it will change, inevitably. The fact that things are as they are is nothing more than the direct effect of each person’s (and institution’s, corporation’s, etc.) actions, the causality of all choices. I by no means intend to say that this world is “our responsibility”, as if the phrase had any significant meaning. But I intend to say that, perhaps in a microscopic sense, our choices add up, be it strictly within the domain of our personal lives, or perhaps on a greater sense, depending on how much power a person has.
The future, in this sense, is the result of both inevitabilities (the phenomena which already are in motion and which cannot be stopped, merely dealt with) and uncertainties (how will each person act?) How will I act? I don’t know, of course, since I don’t know what will happen and in which circumstances. But overall one can look at this present moment and perhaps think about their decisions in this exact instant. I have decided to make this website, and to write in it (though not so much to keep the schedule I proposed myself…) What will be the consequences of this decision? Probably small. I can’t see myself having a particularly large readership, or my words having meaningful influence. But maybe by writing I can make a small impact on someone? Perhaps tiny, but still, something is better than nothing. This is enough. Success is knowing that one decided to do something and did it. No more, no less. What comes of it remains unknown, until the moment it reveals itself in glorious, terrible, spectacular, disappointing, or whatever other adjective, fashion.