I've never been a big fan of being out in public.
I was an outcast the first moment I found myself in a group of people numbering over 30 who were not my relatives.
I have to qualify 'public' meaning 'where there is potentially more than 30 people watching you'. I don't mind being watched by farmers as I pass by their fields.
Well, now when I am out in public what anyone thinks of me is the last thing on my mind. I watch all the 'for rent' signs on shops as I walk down the streets, the people walking around with mask on all the time, and the absence of conviviality. I see a world headed for dark times.
There is something wrong with the world
I dunno about you, but it's hard to do this hope thing while I see the first signs of an economic catastrophe on a scale never before seen.
It's not gonna look like 1930. Tech has raised the lower margin of 'poor' so high that the depth of the collapse being equal will not be the same. Productivity of agriculture is now several orders of magnitude more efficient than it was 90 years ago. But people are still going to starve and suffer.
We are still in the growing season. The wheat crops are coming soon. They haven't been destroyed by excessive rain yet, but unless the sun starts poppin' out sunspots again, on a regular basis, soon, pretty much guaranteed next winter is gonna be a hungry winter.
The younger half of the population doesn't probably really have any idea, not just because they never saw this before but the trends leading up to it have been obvious to see if anyone had been asking the right questions.
In a solar minimum, epidemics, social unrest and war are the norm
It's not possible to say, at all, exactly how long the sun is gonna stay so dark. Part of the reason why it's dimming is because we have orbited our way to a spot where there is a very thin scrim of stuff on the galactic disk between us and the centre of the galaxy. The sun is being blasted by stellar winds that have been in motion for some 28 thousand years. This blast is affecting its magnetic field and suppressing the bursts of energy that normally would keep things warmer here.
As a programmer, my experience has been that emotionally, I have to be feeling pretty calm and settled to write code. I have to have hope for the future. Yes, I said write not write good.
I am having writer's block of epic proportions since the lockdowns began.
If I had enough money that I could wash away all this mental pain in a nice hot bath every night, that would probably help a lot. A big fat Volcano vape and all the high quality organic skunk homegrown.
But the reality here on the ground is I stopped smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee because I was getting heart-attack level hypertension. I have stopped smoking, and of course in times of stress like this, I keep thinking 'maybe if I smoke my mind will be calmer and I can code'.
No, didn't work before and won't work now. Weed, tobacco, caffeine, alcohol. None of these things touch the malaise I am stricken with right now. I need hot baths, good sex, and to not hear ANYTHING about the world outside my village, for an extended period, before I am gonna get over this.
Or at least, the baths, not hearing anything, and being in a village.
I'm not so disturbed about the prospects of a future being hungry. I don't think that will be a thing outside of 100k+ sized populated cities. The big cities have been isolated the most from the rural produce. In Serbia, I observed that there was no passenger trains within 50km of the big cities.
but everywhere else, business as usual
Watching the people herding their sheep and goats, tending and picking their crops.
I'm not going back to the city
Things won't be so bad outside of the bigger cities.
Anyway, I feel good about the prospects for this platform and the people who have helped make it happen, and that includes me, I have done quite a lot of hours to make this happen, for what it's worth.
It's just very hard to think code when poverty and literal insanity and the long predicted results of fiscal profligacy and the ongoing delusion that we are just one election away from utopia, are at play.
Teetering on the edge of the abyss, I just want to jump, but actually,
I hope they all jump
If that happened it would be the first time in over 10,000 years that humans finally started to shake the shackles of the tyranny of clever psychopaths.
Where the world is headed is scary. I look normal but i can say that i havent really seen sunlight for close to 4 years now. I have practically been in isolation, one can say 'a prison' and i don't envy the rest of the world that manages to move around. As for 'change', i think the world can only 'adjust' and i build my projects to that effect. However small the code is that you can manage to write now, it is a timely form of code. I think it will do more impact in these very times, than times later. May that calm your heart a bit and relief you of some depression. You had these 'depression from the state of the world and etc from long ago, i saw it and it is similar today, for 'where the world is headed is scary'.