Lost Time

I thought that the internet was supposed to bring on a new information age, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. It truly feels less like an age of information and more like a grand age of messaging. Our habits lead us away from discernment out of a profound desire for convenience. And it feels like there are predators all over the interwebs looking to take advantage of our laziness.

You try to search for information, and your query get compromised by SEO tactics, to where all you find is sponsored content that meet the needs of advertisers rather than your own. You go on Google and feel like your needs are secondary, and they are, since you are not their customer. You query a brand on Amazon, and they pop up sponsored content for competitors, because they clearly don’t think you want the brand, but the product the brand makes. Search engine optimization does little to optimize your search. You find yourself working your way through links and thumbnails that aren’t helpful to you.

It’s hard to trust the gatekeepers of the internet. I find myself looking for new employment, and the online job boards are horrendous. It’s not like you have much option outside of the internet to look for work opportunities, as print media isn’t really there anymore to check the classifieds of your local paper. I don’t know what happened in the decade that I hadn’t looked for a job online, but online job boards are landfills of suspect postings of scammers looking to tell you about an “ideal” opportunity to get your information. The bogus remote work postings feel about as credible as those emails you would get back in the day from a rich African prince that would like to give you money, except those emails back then were one in a thousand and these remote work scams are a dime a dozen. I have been wasting my days unfortunately reading incredulously these scam postings hoping that maybe, just maybe, I can stumble on a legit posting. I don’t want to be sold on a dream; I just want a job.

At least with the job scams, they just mess with your soul temporarily with their messaging. And it’s easy enough to work through Google SEO to see if a potential employer has a physical address and contact information.

It’s the belief systems that get you the most in trouble when it comes to internet messaging. You can work your way around the inconvenience of messaging when it comes to shopping or job hunting, since shopping and employment are not a matter of faith. Politics are the most brutal of the belief systems, since they can just spam their messaging over and over on social media and on traditional media to suck up the time needed to gather information to debunk the messaging. The messaging doesn’t have to be tethered to facts or reality as long as the messages keep coming. The gatekeepers of social media are even less interested in gatekeeping than search engines or online market places. If there is a steady flow of messaging, that is more than enough for them. It is what makes the Trumpism of the republican party since 2015 so effective. Their folks are always on message, even if the message is “derp.” News organizations would put in all this time for longform journalism to illustrate that it’s not derp, only to be drowned out by even more “derp.” Derp economy, derp public policy, derp immigration, derp family values. Derp, derp, derp, derp, derp. And you can’t find your way out of the echo chamber with “derp” ringing in your ears to hear something real.

Soundtrack for the day on Spotify, 08082024:

1. Need A Favor – Jelly Roll
2. Reunited – Wu Tang Clan
3. Day Dreamers – Adreya Triana
4. River Of Deceit – Mad Season
5. Everyday People – Sly & The Family Stone
6. Time After Time – Cyndi Lauper
7. spring kiss – GOOD BYE APRIL
8. PROVENZA – KAROL G
9. IZ-US – Aphex Twin
10. Unreal – UNKLE
11. The Jaunt – Makaya McCraven
12. Sur l’autoroute – Miles Davis
13. Little Child Runnin’ Wild – Curtis Mayfield
14. The Sweetest Taboo – Sade
15. Mayonaka no Door/Stay With Me – Miki Matsubara
16. She’s Gone – Daryl Hall & John Oates
17. Black Connection – Camp Lo
18. Easy Fraction – Breakbot
19. Sweet Refrain – Perfume
20. Just A Friend – Biz Markie

After I graduated from high school, I had decided to write a journal. I thought I would do it as a daily exercise, though that plan lasted all of a day. I wrote sporadically, then even more so, then rarely, then never. Not that there was much to reflect on in my youth. In hindsight, I hadn’t lived much, so it would have more or less been a chronicle of the mundane minutia of late childhood. Two decades later, the desire to reflect on a life poorly lived seems more appropriate than the teenage desire to write of a life unrealized.

Back then, I reacted to the particulars of a life just started that embarrass me in hindsight. I hadn’t had the time in to make an assessment of my own foolishness, but I sure felt inclined to get all up in my feelings at the time. I suppose that comes with the territory of youth. You think you know shit when you don’t know shit. Being ignorant coming out of the blocks is predictable and expected. You think the feelings are profound only to realize that they are fleeting. Every experience and its accompanying emotion are grains of sand building up to a sandcastle to be washed away by the waves of eternity.

What experiences I had contributes to my essence, but recalling them all is a challenge. Dates are easily lost, then the names go, then all I can remember is just the vague emotions that I felt at the time. Looking back feels stunting and somewhat self defeating, as it doesn’t help you move forward. Each time I look back, the sight gets blurrier and I wonder why I flipped my head back for the view.

But hell, I will keep flipping my head back anyway.

Soundtrack for the day on Spotify, 08072024:

1. What’s Golden – Jurrasic 5
2. Loud Pipes – Ratatat
3. (Hospital Vespers) – The Weakerthans
4. Passin’ Me By – The Pharcyde
5. Killing Me Softly With His Song – Roberta Flack
6. Roundabout – Yes
7. Day Dreaming – Aretha Franklin
8. Paupau New Guinea – The Future Sound of London
9. Missing (Todd Terry Remix) – Everything But The Girl
10. SWEET HEART MEMORY – SHAZNA
11. Wake The Dead – Comeback Kid
12. War – Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
13. Sir Duke – Stevie Wonder
14. 夏暁 – WANIMA
15. Spoonman – Soundgarden
16. Apache – Incredible Bongo Band
17. It’s A Better Than Good Time (Walter Gibbons Mix) – Gladys Knight
18. I’ll Be Around – The Spinners
19. Livin’ On A Prayer – Bon Jovi
20. Starboy – The Weeknd, Daft Punk

We operate under the assumption that we have a decent grasp of concepts. ‘Consumer’ and ‘labor’ being two concepts that we have a general understanding of. Often terms change slightly in meaning with the passing of time, but for the most part, they hold solid, so we view these terms in the same light as that of yesteryear.

In general, a consumer is the last purchaser in the supply chain and the end user of a product or service. Take for instance a box of cereal. A manufacturer makes the cereal, then sells it to a distributor. The distributor then sells the cereal to supermarkets. You get hungry, buy the cereal at the supermarket, take it home and eat it. Simple enough to understand. Then broadcast media happens, and now, the consumer is not the last purchaser in the supply chain, as the last purchaser in the supply chain is the advertiser buying ad time/space within the broadcast. You, however, are still the end user. So we still view the consumer in the broadcast media model as an end user, and thus still a consumer.

We also have a general grasp for labor. There is unpaid labor, like volunteers, slaves, and family. There is paid labor, individuals that are compensated financially through salary, wage, tips, commissions, etc. We understand what labor is. Whether it is paid or not, we still equate to it being work with an expectation of compensation or lack thereof.

But what happens when you break the mold?

There’s that conservative talking point of “nobody wants to work anymore,” but I think it is more like “nobody wants to work more than they already do.”

You look at tech companies and what you would consider their users, and it is a wild reimagining of labor. Silicon Valley sneakily challenged the notion of consumerism. They present their users as consumers despite the fact that they are neither the last purchaser or the end user of their services. They provide lip service about privacy, as though the data is yours, and then you get people like Senator Elizabeth Warren getting young people fired up about privacy rights. Except it’s not the users’ data. And the users are not customers. And they are not end users.

Much like the broadcast media model, the last purchaser in the tech model is the advertiser buying ad time/space. Unlike the broadcast media model, the end user in the tech model is also the advertiser buying ad time/space. The advertiser is not buying ad time/space willy nilly; tech companies leverage their data sets to get advertisers that want to advertise to a specific clientele. The advertisers want access to clientele that most likely will respond to their advertisements. Online advertisement is not the predictable one-size-fits-all truck ads during a football game. Silicon Valley created software portals, and dropped consumers into their production environments, and collected their users’ continuously expanding data sets in their data warehouses to attract ad revenue. Whether it’s simple GPS tracking or straight up “NetSuite for Marks,” tech is putting you to work. You might as well put on a sandwich board with a sign saying “Will Work for Ads.”

And it’s not like tech is paying you for your labor, or trying to suggest that you are working for free; rather, you get pimp tactics. And the Silicon Valley pimp game is strong. Tech companies try to get you to love them. They use peer pressure from their users to get more users. They get you addicted to the dopamine from using their portals. And you turn digital tricks and keep turning digital tricks for them. And they receive all the financial gain while they smile at you disingenuously and pretend they love you.

But we really should know better. We know about free software. Forget the tech analysts on the news broadcasts warning you about when you get something for free, you are not the customer, you are the product. That’s silly. We all have received free access to software. Whether it was on the company laptop at your remote job, the tower in your cubicle, the headset at your retailer, or the POS system at your bar, you’ve had access to free software before to get you through your day. And you knew where you were.

You were at work.

Soundtrack for the day on Spotify, 08062024:

1. Becoming – Pantera
2. Insane in the Brain – Cypress Hill
3. Keeping the Motion – DJ Krush
4. A Bright New Life – Escort
5. Unfinished Symphony – Massive Attack
6. Simon Says – Pharoah Monch
7. St. James’ Infirmary – Cab Calloway
8. No One Knows – Queens of the Stone Age
9. Beggin’ (Pilooski Re-Edit) – Remix – Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons
10. 硝子坂 – 高田 みづえ
11. Jolene – Dolly Parton
12. Stolen Car – Beth Orton
13. Bola de Meia – Seu Jorge
14. Je suis venu te dire que je m-en vais – Serge Gainsbourg
15. Take Your Mamma – Scissor Sisters
16. Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie
17. Far Behind – Candlebox
18. Pusherman – Curtis Mayfield
19. Aquele Abraço – Gilberto Gil
20. ZOOM UP! – Kahimi Karie

I have come to realize that I have overexaggerated the difficulty level of tasks through the course of my life. Granted, there are complex operations in life, but not every task has elaborate procedures and high risk. I just spent a life time thinking that things were more complicated than they were. In hindsight, it was pretty foolish to punk myself out of handling all matters of simplicity.

My parents and I are of agea where roles are being reversed, and I find myself making meals for my mother after a lifetime of being fed by her. She never taught me how to cook. Back when I was a teenager, she got frustrated at how slow I was in prepping for curry rice that we both realized she didn’t have the patience to suffer with my foolishness. She did teach me how to eat though, so I know what tastes like garbage, and what would potentially taste like garbage, and more importantly what tastes and would potentially taste good. I was throwing out ideas for lunch, and we settled on an egg salad sandwich. I can’t recall ever making an egg salad sandwich before, but I figured I could fake my way through it. I make more complicated meals, I figured I should be able to knock it out. Boil eggs for 8 minutes. Cool, peel, and mash. Squirt some kewpie mayo. Splash some dashi shoyu. Stir and drop that mixture between two pieces of whole grain toast. Boom.

I probably scared myself out of the kitchen early in life watching cooking shows and reading recipes. I got overwhelmed with multitudes of hows and not a lot of whys. I stopped reading recipes for the most part after a 4 year stint making cookies at a cookie factory. After my four year stint was over, I understood the basics for what makes a cookie work, but I didn’t feel the need to continue to know the exact recipes, and that sentiment bled out to the rest of cuisine as far as my attempts to replicate them. I know what fat, salt, sugar, and alcohol do. I know basic vegetable combinations. I can work my way through ratios of miso/shoyu/mirin/sake/dashi to make different dishes. That feels sufficient for my needs.

It’s amazing how simple things can be if you let them be. In my late twenties, I stopped drinking sugary beverages and started to drink sencha and genmaicha instead. I couldn’t bother with the specifics of a diet. Lost a decent amount of weight on a simple strategy. At the time, I didn’t take that life lesson and apply it to other facets of my life like the fool I am. I finally appreciate that I don’t need to overthink things. I don’t need to keep reading exercise routines, I just need to be less sedentary. I am not competing for Mr. Olympia; I am just trying to be less of a fatty. I don’t need to be a Michelin star chef; I just want to avoid eating bowls of regret. I just need to let simple acts lead to simple favorable results.

Soundtrack for the day on Spotify, 08052024:

1. Even Flow – Pearl Jam
2. Super Stupid – Funkadelic
3. Paranoid – Black Sabbath
4. I Wanna Be Sedated – The Ramones
5. Just A Girl – No Doubt
6. Let’s Make Love and Listed to Death From Above – CSS
7. RYDEEN – YELLOW MAGIC ORCHESTRA
8. Stress – Justice
9. Shook Ones, pt. II – Mobb Deep
10. In The End – Linkin Park
11. STELLA – MAN WITH A MISSION
12. Stay – The Kid LAROI, Justin Beiber
13. I Loved The Way She Said L.A. – Spitalfield
14. Wouldn’t It Be Nice – The Beach Boys
15. Ain’t It A Shame – Fats Domino
16. オトナチック- Gesu Wa Kiwami Otome
17. On and On – Gladys Knight & The Pips
18. I’m Housing – EPMD
19. Rock Steady – Aretha Franklin
20. Block Rockin’ Beats – The Chemical Brothers

The internet can be characterized by a lot of things, but I think the easiest characterization is crime. The internet has grown and flourished through the normalization of crime, and one of the most pivotal moments was the development of .mp3 distribution. Prior to the .mp3, creative work manifested in tangible objects: paintings, sculptures, records, tapes, film rolls, what have you. Those objects would require financial compensation for acquisition. The .mp3 file was an opportunity for society to answer the question of what is the true value of creativity when it is not tethered to the physical realm. Distracted by the excitement and novelty of new software, society answered that creativity has no value, and thus could be taken at will. Napster offered users a vehicle with which they could obtain what they found didn’t carry monetary value, a digital record of a musician’s work.

There was this nonsensical idea being pushed by internet enthusiasts backin the day that ‘information wants to be free’ as though information was self-aware and had desires. It was a cute jedi mind trick. The internet allowed for a transmission of data, and data and information are not a perfect one to one. This shared delusion allowed society an out to view data unhoused in material did not require financial compensation.

The success of the .mp3 file would lead to other data file formats that would continue this devaluing of creativity. Much like how the .mp3 file removed value from music, the .mp4 and .avi files removed value from film and television, and the .iso file removed value from games. Creative works got insanely easy to obtain at no cost through bit torrent and Megaupload and its like-minded competition. There were repeated opportunities to confirm, as a matter of principle, that creativity was truly worthless.

Intellectual property has lost its sense of property, and with it, its worth. With streaming replacing physical media, it’s hard to gauge overall value. You can just jump from one file to the next for a low, low price. Gone are the days of losing your shit on a bad purchase, like sad-laughing through the unironic absurdity of Avenged Sevenfold’s City of Evil as you roll out of Best Buy. There’s no more risk of spending $15-$20 on potentially hot garbage. Streaming is cheap, and if it’s not cheap enough, you can always prop your Jolly Roger and sail the high seas.

Soundtrack for the day on Spotify, 08042024:

1. She Wants To Move – N.E.R.D
2. Don’t Mess With My Man – Lucy Pearl
3. CUFF IT – Beyonce
4. Jupiter – Earth, Wind, and Fire
5. Duality – Slipknot
6. Dreamer – GANG PARADE
7. Nightmare (Sinister Strings Mix) – Brainbug
8. Why You Treat Me So Bad – Club Nouveau
9. Suddenly – Billy Ocean
10. Tonight, Tonight – The Smashing Pumpkins
11. Walk On By – Isaac Hayes
12. Roads – Portishead
13. Baltimore – Nina Simone
14. Three Little Birds – Bob Marley & The Wailers
15. Walk of Life – Dire Straits
16. 離れていても- WANIMA
17. 20 Eyes – Misfits
18. good 4 you – Olivia Rodrigo
19. Waiting Room – Fugazi
20. Luka – Suzanne Vega

I have a message board from a decade ago which has the fewest objectives listed on it. A daily objective of 7 hours of sleep a day. A weekly objective of reading one book and one tankobon a week. I do not do well with the quantitative objectives I have for my self. I also list habits I need to break. They bend, but they don’t break. I also have three life objectives: 1. Keep objectives simple and practical; 2. Keep perspective with objectives; and 3. Value time over all. I handle the first two fine. The third, which is the one I try to build my life around, I do not handle well.

I really should do better at valuing time. It’s the one commodity I know I am losing out on daily. Money ebbs and flows. Sometimes I have little, sometimes I have a bit more than little, and those sometimes are followed by times when my money goes away. Time, on the other hand, I know I am never gaining more of that, and time keeps slipping through my fingers.

I do a good job of valuing time as far as work life is concerned. I spent 15 of the last 25 years working in town to avoid losing hours of my life commuting. 5-10 minute commutes are gold. The other 10 years, I would get irritated daily about getting stuck in traffic for half hours and hours at a time. I hate to wonder how many years that adds up to. I have tried to avoid overtime, since it feels like failure that I have not achieved the tasks at hand and am being punished by even more time being drawn from me. I have tried to be on point and on task so I can leave when my time is up.

My personal life is another matter. I’ve lost so much time to unnecessary and trivial nonsense. A gym membership, doing low-intensity exercises that I didn’t need to leave home to do. F2P, P2W games that have no endings. Watching review videos on YouTube as though pre-internet I was chasing people for their opinions. Bouncing around a mess of reddit posts that leave me shrugging my shoulders. Going through yet more seasons of isekai/tensei anime like the plots would ever deviate. Going to the bookstore to buy books that I fear I will be too lazy to ever read. I just keep stumbling into ways to waste my time.

I find myself looking back at all the time I have lost to my own foolishness and being overwhelmed by impotence. It is not as though there are corrective action plans to recoup the lost time; the time is long gone. Do I dwell on this failing just to add to the lost time? Do I say “never again’ only to see again come several times more? Do I try not to dwell on this failing and pretend the time hasn’t gone? I can’t chase what is already vanished. It’s not like time will come back to me and be like, “yeah, son, you want another shot at me?”

Soundtrack for the day on Spotify, 08032024:

1. One – U2
2. (There’s Gonna Be A) Showdown – Archie Bell & The Drells
3. Sell Out – Reel Big Fish
4. Love Makes A Woman – Barbara Acklin
5. Doing It All For My Baby – Huey Lewis & The News
6. Wizard Of Finance – Parliament
7. Untitled (How Does It Feel) D’Angelo
8. ブーツを鳴らして – SHISHAMO
9. Doll Parts – Hole
10. グラデーション- Super Beaver
11. I Wanna Be Your Dog – The Stooges
12. Halftime – Nas
13. Who Got Da Props – Black Moon
14. Modus Operandi – Photek
15. Mood Indigo – Charles Mingus
16. Rainy Day Women #12 & 35
17. Mannish Boy – Muddy Waters
18. Duke of Hazzard – Blockhead
19. When Doves Cry – Prince
20. Head Like A Hole – Nine Inch Nails

The pandemic, as horrific as it was, provided the opportunity for reflection and retrospect, as society was withdrawn in an act of self preservation. Remote work, social distancing, risk mitigation, and the rest allowed for all kinds of time to reconsider one’s existence. I wonder if many took the opportunity to do so. I did, though mostly on the most superficial of matters.

I realized I like shoes a little too much, and not for attention grabbing. No attempts to look fresh. No chasing complements. I kept buying shoes to not wear outside. Silly. I also realized that I love shoes, but not shoe laces. Put deadstock knots on any shoe that I could, then flipped them inside to make most of my shoes into slip-ons. I don’t need a snug fit since it’s been forever and a decade since I’ve pretended to be athletic (outside of one foolish foray into indoor soccer, which reaffirmed my lack of athleticism and my absolute disinterest in it).

I also realized that I wasted so much time and money at the gym. For the little I was trying to achieve with a gym membership, I could have just used one month’s worth of membership to buy a set of exercise bands. I regretted going to the gym to speed-walk on a treadmill, when I could have just been home to walk my dog. I do not miss the gym TVs being set up for the primetime commentary on Fox News and MSNBC to rage bait me into more time on the treadmill or recumbent bike. To think, I passed up on all the opportunities to watch my dog shake his ass from the sheer force of his tail wagging as he sniffed all the scents that were released from the rain for mindlessly staring at whatever talking head was on at Fox News pretending to lose their shit. I did my dog dirty.

Unfortunately, the pandemic also lead me to reddit, the internet’s version of a book club for cliff notes. I was experiencing weird symptoms for months, and google being a shell of itself, lead me to the covid longhaulers subreddit when I tried to see what the symptoms were about. That subreddit got a little depressing after a while, so I moved on to the Herman Cain Awards subreddit, and then to non-covid related subreddits. I had avoided most all social media up until the pandemic, mostly to avoid pretending to have friends I don’t have. I didn’t realize just how short my attention span would become, or how low the bar would be dropped to pass for acceptable entertainment. Posts of tiny tweets. Posts of short Tiktok clips. Quick quips and quicker critiques of quips. Just a quick stream of drips taping my dome like a perverse water torture.

If social media is designed for instant dissemination of media, with algorithms rewarding a steady output of short content, where does discourse go from here? Can intelligent discourse be achieved when we are all trained to move onto the next, then the next after that, and then even more still? I find that I no longer have the patience to read longform articles in the newspaper, because I want a quick payoff. I also can’t fuck with commercial breaks anymore, especially now that YouTube is putting every ad under the sun for a five minute clip. It’s already a challenge to power through the low-bar short-form content on YouTube, and then they go squeezing in all the advertisements. Stringing sentences together takes so much work. Watching people string sentences together takes so much work. It’s simply too easy and convenient to move on to something else. Because there’s a blitz of quick-hitting jabs from throughout the internet. And I keep finding myself punch drunk with little to show for it.

Soundtrack for the day on Spotify, 08022024:

1. I Wish – Stevie Wonder
2. FICTION – POLKADOT STINGRAY
3. Cowboys from Hell – Pantera
4. Head/Off – SebastiAn
5. 99 Problems – JAY-Z
6. Rhythm Nation – Janet Jackson
7. Super Freak – Rick James
8. Careless Whisper – George Michael
9. Volume Up – 4Minute
10. Moving Out (Anthony’s Song) – Billy Joel
11. Saddest Song – No Use For A Name
12. Name of the Game – The Crystal Method
13. Funky Worm – Ohio Players
14. Nothin’ but a “G” Thang – Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg
15. Smooth Operator – Sade
16. 悲しい歌 – Pizzicato Five
17. Up The Ladder To The Roof – The Supremes
18. Home Is Where The Hatred Is – Gil Scott-Heron
19. Would – Alice In Chains
20. Up All Night – El-P