- 15 poems posted here
- 393 essays/rants posted here
- 4 prose/stories posted here
- 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
- 1 piece of compositions/rearrangements posted here
That's an average of 1.134 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.134 last year. While seemingly dramatic in the increase, I would file it under ``understood anomaly'' due to it occurring during the year in which I was on sabbatical.
So much has happened in 2021. For starters, I have read a stupid amount of books/articles, with the last item completed being The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew, and the first item completed being They Spent 12 Years Solving a Puzzle. It Yielded the First COVID-19 Vaccines.. It was to be expected: reading has always been one of my core activities when not doing anything else that involves other people (or sleeping, for that matter). I love reading because it allows me to live more lives than the one that I have, and it is a relatively cheap way of obtaining more experience in general.
And in the middle of yet another year of the COVID-19 nonsense, it is a great way to save money and be safe as well, while not going absolutely insane.
As noted also in an earlier retrospective, I have also rediscovered behaviours and habits that had kept me alive before I started falling into the delusion that I was going to be some kind of family man with a stable income, a spouse, children, and all the other trappings that would make any government/capitalist salivate at the amount of labour capture. After all, the more debt a person has, the more that person is motivated to keep on working, and will continue to keep on working even if the environment is absolutely toxic to work in, because all that toxicity is apparently preferable to failing the dependents that one has? Such a nonsensical statement...
Now that all said, I still have not committed myself to a spouse-less life just yet---I don't think nor do I feel that I have enough information to make a decision. Childlessness is definitely high on the list---I cannot, in good conscience, bring in another life who never asked to be born into a world that is heading towards ruin. Let the more worthy/ignorant be the ones who take on this fecundity requirement---if I had more ambition, I would follow them considering that my history is considered unencumbered no thanks to things that had happened in the generation before me. Alas, I'm no ambitious fellow---I just want to contribute my bit to society to avoid being a bum, and then call it when the time comes.
But still, I don't think I'm ready to start another relationship with anyone just yet. Unrich and unattractive middle aged men like me are among the lowest priorities for people seeking a spouse, so I've got that going for me, which is fine.
Enough of looking backwards---I've done lots of that throughout my 2021 blog entries.
What I have not done much is looking ahead, and for good reason: the crystal ball is murky as hell here. SIN city as a whole has no obvious forward trajectory---there is nothing inspirational, nothing aspirational, and nothing good to look forward to, especially for the low/middle socio-economic class folks. COVID-19 is one major factor (it's a global pandemic for crying out loud), but it is what I would say merely the straw that breaks the camel's back. It unearthed the insecurities of SIN city in ways that are harder to keep under wraps, and exposes the many ugly hacks that are being used to prop things up that used to have a thriving-ish economy as a fig leaf cover. Tactical errors were definitely being made, but I will not go as far as to claim that strategic errors are made for the simple reason that I don't have enough information. The power play of the superpowers at the global scale are messing up the international order in ways that make keeping to an obvious strategy hard---I don't believe that it is in SIN city's interest to be seen as taking anyone's side other than our own, though that is often easier said than done given the massive partisanship that was developed over the past decade as personality cults start to become in vogue again.
It is almost as though everyone is trying to compete to see who can best distract their population away from the really tough problems that need decades to concerted effort to truly resolve them.
At a personal level, I'd like to take things a little simpler---just a day at a time. In many ways, I've already made that choice a decade ago when I decided to return to SIN city to serve out my bond instead of making a break for it to carve out my own path through the fabled Silicon Valley. Spite is a very powerful motivator to push oneself outside of one's comfort zone to achieve great and crazy things. But spite is not sustainable---I would end up killing myself. Inasmuch as I had all those weird suicide ideation stuff (and how I still find that life really isn't all that meaningful), killing myself because of unsustainable spite towards external factors feels a little... dumb.
And so I've told myself quietly that I would treat myself a little better and do things in a sustainable way so that when I die, it's not on other's terms but on my own. I don't need to get the latest luxury just to feel good about myself---the mere fact of existence should be its own reward, with everything else as a bonus.
That's probably the closest thing to a ``new year's resolution'' that I will write, I think.
2022 is probably going to still be a year of large amounts of personal introspection as I start to mull what kind of old age life I would live, assuming that I haven't tapped out before then.
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