I have recently set my personal laptop back to Kubuntu, after running Mac OS on my own machines since switching from Linux in 2009. Why the switch back?
Because Apple is killing Mac OS, bit by bit, and stopping its participating in computing. Or at least computing for my generation. Apple is a phone company, not a computer company, and all of the things that they sell that claim to be computers are increasingly really just phones.
I can’t blame them much, it’s smart business; today only the high priests of technology can compute. For the young crowd, there are only phones.
That’s not to say that I’m happy about switching back to Linux either. For example, I sat down to write a post, found that part of my setup (espanso) was broken by some recent software update, and then ended up on Github and trying to build rust code from a git repo, which of course involved many recursive dependencies.
Two hours later, the rust build fails with a panic, which I take to be something rather like a segfault, and because I don’t rust, and rust is way after my time, I throw up my hands and will just work without espanso.
This is all why I left Linux in the first place. But now Mac OS is dying and Windows remains what windows always was, which is: a way of getting abused.
And I am not a fan of abuse.
So here we are. The worst best option is back to Linux, and eventually no doubt I will be cursing trying to get computing done at all as computing dies entirely and Generation X with it, because that is the way of generations—they develop their habits and keep them until they die, at which time their culture and artifacts are forgotten to history.
But none of this is what this post is about.
— § —
Long day. Long few days. We dog-sat two additional dogs (for a total of three) and had a very busy weekend (multiple events, hours long) which was going to make things complicated.
But what really made things complicated was when I felt ill enough on Friday to take the day off, and then when I woke up on Saturday with a fever of over 102 degrees.
By the end of the weekend, two sick kids plus myself, fevers all around, we had done the events (in a daze) and managed to watch the dogs but someone had been kicked in the head (one of the things we had to do was sparring in Taekwondo) and there was vomiting and nausea and disorder all around.
But that’s not what I’m really writing about either.
What I’m really writing about is what happens after all of that is over, which is a return to normal, and normal is the problem.
— § —
Right now, normal for me looks like:
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I am in a house alone
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With a dog
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It’s quiet
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And that’s it
I admit it. I am lost. And lonely. And frustrated.
Basically, I’m a stereotype.
None of this was nearly as obvious as it is now until I got this dog. Somehow, having a dog around revealed all of the above in a way that hadn’t been obvious to me before. But now it’s clear as day.
It’s just me here. The cashiers and the service providers that I see as I got about my life are not my friends or my family; they are not real social interaction. Bloggers and YouTubers the same. And co-workers. None of these people will give a shit if you drop dead, and none of them will help you if you lose your job and end up homeless.
With startling regularity over the last year, people from my past have reached out to me to reconnect, but these people are not my friends or family either, by and large. There is a reason we stopped interacting in the first place, usually, and those reasons haven’t gone away, even if people are starting to take stock of their lives and find themselves where I am.
This feels like such a first-world, bloody-mindedness problem.
If you have no friends, make some. If you’re lonely, talk to people. If people are actually coming to you wanting to be your friends and you turn them away, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
If you also have the rare insurance that covers therapy 100 percent without co-pay, yet you don’t want to actually get a paid-for friend that way either, then who the fuck can help you?
— § —
The thing is, our society and our culture are broken in this way. Late middle age and/or the entryway to old age are not times to be “starting” things. This is not natural.
At this stage, you should have your friends and family and have large histories and long memories with them. If you don’t, nobody new is going to fill that role. It’s too late. It’s not the right time.
I don’t have an answer for this, but to say that I think freedom is the problem. The older I get, the more I begin to think that what freedom is really good for is giving people the illusion of positive choice while they’re young, only to fucking destroy them when they’re older.
There was a time when you were born into a social circle and that was it, that’s your lot, those are your people, even if this one beats you and that one steals from you and the other one is a dirty liar. And likewise if they hated you—maybe you are the biggest asshole on earth, but they were stuck with you.
What freedom forgets is that people die, and that before people die, they spend the last third of their lives as a drooling pre-corpse burden. Freedom is like buy-now-pay-later.
You may have a good time in the moment, but when the bill comes due, you left with “suffer” and “seppuku” as options while reality—and the young (and foolish who are busy embracing their own “freedom”)—laugh at you.
— § —
Basically, life is a jerk, time is a bastard, and this Generation Xer is increasingly bitter (but still doesn’t really want to talk to all the people he broke up with, broke with, or left behind in the past).
When the kids are out of here (which is soon—having teenage kids is like preparing for or carrying out a slow divorce; you see less and less of someone and more and more of their life and possessions disappear from yours until—you know in the end—you won’t “have” them any longer as real intimate relationships), I think that’s the practical end.
Sure I’ll sit around for another couple of decades metabolizing, but that’s basically where life ends for a divorced dad in the west in this epoch.
— § —
As a side note (and irritatingly I think I’ve said this before here, possibly more than twenty years ago), the reason I write stuff like this here is because—essentially—this blog is my best (and, at times, it feels like only) real friend.
Yes, yes, you can go and make friends, but we’ve just been over that and there’s this whole other post that I’m not making right now about how some people feel comfortable with and nourished by everyone (extroverts are this way, I think, my son being one of them) and other people really struggle with that, and are kept afloat by a few strong relationships with similar people who fade over the years.
I think there’s a gendered component to this too, in bell curve terms, but who knows. Yeah, yeah, woah is me and first world problems.
Every now and then I think for a moment I’ll do the therapy thing, but that just seems so hollow—because the only reason I’m doing it is because I don’t like any of the other people I could make friends with, but therapy gives a nice introvert-friendly relationship for a fee. It’s cerebral, and tremendously intimate, and also naturally contained. So I’m not really looking for help, just buying the kind of friend you can’t actually have or make in the real world.
My ex-wife used to get angry and tell me that I needed to learn to like people. She may have been right on the theory (I mean, who can argue?) but in practice you are what you are.
— § —
I don’t know, maybe I should buy a friend or two.
Paid friends vs. parasocial relationships vs. silence vs. get a dog.
I guess I went and got a dog.
And here we fucking sit.
— § —
Final side note, the thing that really gives me a headache is trying to understand how it is that I sit here and post stuff like this (and have my entire life) even though I suspect it does me damage, both intrinsically and with respect to career, relationships, and so on—while others post all day on LinkedIn and it increases their stature and earning power.
And yet I can’t bring myself to do it an never have been able to, even when I was in academics and they were telling us to “nurture a social media identity” as an important career task. And when people message me on LinkedIn, which happens a fucking lot, I generally ignore them even though:
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That is cutting off social interaction
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That is harming my career
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If my bosses find out, I’ll probably be fired
I just can’t do it. Yet everyone else does. My whole world is full of people messaging happily on LinkedIn and building their “network” and doing lunch and doing golf and seeming to have a grand old time. But I can’t do it, and I’ve never been able to do it.
Because that’s not just buying a friend, that’s adopting an entire worldview in which people and friendships are commodities for trading. Which of course is 100 percent the truth, but fuck if I can cope with that, so I act like I’m still 19 and pretend like it’s not the case.
Like when I got my bachelor’s degree and said I wanted to do anything but work in marketing or sales, knowing full well underneath it all somewhere that there are only two jobs on earth in the free-market parts of the globe: marketing and sales; there is literally nothing else.
This post has gotten out of control, but maybe I should end on:
I’m old. I’m Generation X. And fuck all this shit. I’m still bitter about it, decades later. Oh, and I’m a stereotype and I might buy some friends because my insurance will cover it.
THE END.