This Planet, Earth in Elephant Architecture

I passed my Psych class with a B. It should have been an A but I’ve learned to juggle the bowling pins life throws at you. It was an easy class. These types of disciplines have always come easy for me. But, I worked both my jobs this semester and was able to pay some things off and get ahead in that venue. It was an emotional class. We went over some sensitive material pertaining to childhood, Emerging Adulthood and eventually picking one’s burial plot, funeral and arrangements. Some classes were exceptionally emotionally exhausting.

Progress

In one of my more recent entries I was lamenting about the prose of old and how today’s world is severely lacking compared to the titans of the Late 19th c. and Early 20th c. This is both true and untrue. It is similar to the Double Slit Experiment in quantum mechanics. Do the particles act as waves or tiny marbles or both? My English Advisor once taught in a nature literature class that Emerson and Thoreau believed that Progress is like a blanket. If you pull it over your head your feet will stick out, be cold and vice versa; that any progress we make we will also lose something on the other side. My good friend from my early college years has the most beautiful penmanship I have ever seen. It’s similar to the old fashioned Southern Gentry of the Old South or the time-period the Constitution was written in. With the mass production of typewriters and eventually computers and email the artform of great penmanship began to wane. In The Old South and I am sure plenty of other times and places, penmanship was a valuable component to conducting one’s business and household, thus you have the old paradigm: The pen is mightier than the sword. All throughout History, with any progress, we have lost amazing things which became obsolete in the light of new inventions.

So it is with smartphones. Without a doubt a marvel of the new world and as much as I loathe the thing, I also revel in’t when used correctly and proportionately. And it gives a perfect excuse to not have to talk to weird old people at work I really can’t handle at that second. What an amazing time to live through. I can watch the most educational videos of the coolest techniques, inventions, restorations, woodworking, life hacks, engineering, physics, creativity, survivalist tactics and all other sorts from all around the world. I watched a Chinese guy make paper from bark he hacked, boiled, mashed, washed, mashed again, washed again until he finally made fine stationery. And it was awesome. What truly a magnificent thing the world has never known before now. Humans are, or can be an amazing species on this planet, Earth.

However, it does detract from concentration and actually living your own life. I find myself watching videos occasionally like watching a television set which I swore off many moons ago at age 13. And sometimes, when I’m watching people do cool things I forget that I do cool things or I feel like what I do isn’t cool enough because it isn’t getting 1,000s of likes. We were all being cool before smartphones just for the sake of doing something. And generally, you wouldn’t want to broadcast it what we were doing. We sort of had an underground venue to broadcast to by word of mouth or signage like a trail leading off the main path and you would know to go down that trail that may have been hidden. Or another hidden waterfall beyond the main waterfall that the average traveler didn’t know about or some bluff you could climb up to a cave and perch in.

Last updated May 03, 2024