All right, 50° day means brainstorm blog.
I think this is actually the third Christmas season in recent years where we're gonna have a 75-degree Christmas Day. We had this a couple of years ago, and I remember taking the kids out on Christmas Eve to put reindeer food out, and my kids were out in shorts and t-shirts. It was almost hot. I feel like it was that same year, or maybe before that, we went to my in-law's house and it was in the 70s—maybe upper 60s—again. I know that whenever I was a kid, we did not have that. This is going to be the second or third time that it has been this warm on Christmas in the Midwest. It's very strange.
Christmas kind of sneaks up on me anymore. I still feel like time is moving faster than it did whenever I was a kid. I mean, I feel like even my kids feel like time's moving faster for them. Let's see, I have one of them in elementary school, and one of them not. It doesn't seem like yesterday they were babies, because we can look back at old videos of them and think, "Man, that was a long time ago. Look how much they've grown."
But I feel like days go by so fast anymore. I feel like I just got to work, and now I'm on my lunch break writing this. I feel like I just got there. So, even the weeks go by fast. The weekends go by even faster, but I do like my job, so it's easy to come back to work. It's never a slog being there. I never get partway through the day and look at the clock, trying to get out of there. I am happy with my job because it's easy enough for me to do, I know how to do it, and I've been doing it for 10 years.
Anyway, is time being weird for anybody else? I think there's a way to comment on these things, so if you have any opinions on whether or not time seems to be moving faster, then let me know. Maybe all of our perceptions of each day are getting to be quicker. Who knows?
So, does time feel like it's moving faster? I can watch a three-hour-long movie anymore and I'm like, "Oh, that was quick." It’s almost like it started with The Dark Knight. I vaguely remember watching that for the first time. I remember it taking forever to come out, but once it got here, the movie was finished and done in what seemed like maybe an hour and a half. There are lots of movies that are three hours long, and you get done with it and it doesn't feel like it was three hours long, you know?
I don't know if it's the repetition of doing a lot of the same things every day. Maybe whenever summer rolls around, even mowing seems like it is a little bit faster. Granted, I don't do it to get paid as a chore anymore, I just have to do it. It's the relativity of doing something like that. I've always got podcasts to listen to and more than 12 songs on a CD to listen to when I'm mowing. Even during the summer, I can tolerate being out in the heat.
I feel like a lot of stuff just doesn't take that long anymore to get done, or the days just don't go by that fast. Anyway, I just woke up, five hours ago? Woke up at 7:00 today since I didn't have to get anybody ready. I got dressed, didn't even eat breakfast, combed my hair, brushed my teeth, and just went to work. And it's already halfway through the day.
I could possibly even stay up longer. I went to bed at 10:30, whereas sometimes I'll stay up till 11:00 on weeknights and have to get up at six to make everybody breakfast. Today I woke up at 7:00 and felt like I didn't sleep as long. Of course, I woke up at 1:00 in the morning with heartburn because I ate a bunch of junk food last night. Oh man, did I have weird dreams last night. So weird. I feel like I can't really remember what they were, but they were weird. That's another thing, I can't remember half my dreams anymore.
Just thinking about that, time is feeling strange, and maybe it's because, as a society, we're never bored anymore. Boredom has been cured. You know what I mean? Isn't that weird? If we didn't have phones or anything... I think I've gotten to the point where I don't necessarily need my phone. When we were on vacation, I didn't look at my phone. I just sat with my own thoughts.
Is it just me? Or does everybody else have that same feeling? Do you have to be on your phone all the time? Can you just sit with your thoughts and brainstorm? That's what I just did. I was just talking to you, just sat and brainstormed. It's a good feeling.
I think that I have people in my life that don't have the ability to sit with their own thoughts. They have to be entertained. They have to have stuff change constantly. I don't know if it's a certain kind of ADD I might have, but I can sit and entertain myself just doing nothing. Like, I can do that at the beach. I don't have to be on my phone at the beach. But I know people that can't do that. They have to have something in front of them that stimulates their brain. And at the same time, they have to have a second thing to stimulate them when the first thing isn't constantly stimulating them.
Is that attention deficit disorder? I heard that they have a term now called "second screening." You do it with stuff like sports on TV or American Idol. Like on American Idol, they do those dumb interstitial things. Like, I'm here to see the person singing their silly song. Get to the singing! And then get to the judging. I don't want to see the "I did this and this, and this is where I grew up." Nobody cares. Move on. So that's what they call second screening. If you have no choice but to watch it in real time, your phone comes out. You look up the weather, you look at Reddit—Reddit is constantly an information trove of all your interests.
Now you can AI things. You can create stuff instantly. It's so strange. And it's only been two years where people have been able to use these AI things to make and change stuff. What's it going to be in the next two or three years? As soon as somebody makes infinite energy and infinite food, we will not have to rely on each other for anything. Isn't that strange?
What if we get to the point where you can 3D print whatever you want to eat? And it tastes exactly like what you think it would? You can probably even say, "Hey, surprise me with this. Make it taste like something I haven't programmed into this machine before." What's stopping us?
You know that these companies that make cars and stuff, they're choosing not to advance them because why give somebody something that has infinite fuel? Why not have to have them keep coming back to get more? Same reason why there are no cures. There’s no money in the cure. There's money in the treatment. There's money to be made when you have to keep coming back to refuel. They'll never come up with a cure for diabetes because why do that? Why clone a better pancreas and give it to a kid? Why not just have them keep coming back and getting more insulin? It's ridiculous. And they have to live with it their entire lives.
If we can make these silly machines do what we want them to do, we can make a process for healing stuff. It's not hard to do.
Anyway, that's a brainstorm for today.
