works of wanderlust

Tag: overthinking it

  • who cares

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Explain a valuable life lesson you learned in 2025.

    No one cares.

    Hold up. Wait. Listen.  Whoa: I don’t mean that in a sad-sack, pity me kind of way.

    What I mean is that figuring out some perspective on the attention of others is actually, factually something that has taken me decades to put into a simple clear idea and to internalize, nearly half a century of work to break out of the patterns of my youth, and to materialize in my own mind a thought that—tho rational and clear and obvious—will still be something that it will still take me the rest of my life to ever feel comfortable settling into as a firm belief that I live by without constantly reminding myself, really: it is figuring out that no one really actually cares…

    No one is looking.

    No one is actually paying attention.

    No one is paying as much attention to you as you are.

    No one is concerned about the choices you make (inasmuch as long as those choices don’t get in their way and cause them harm or cost them money or whatever.)

    People will judge, sure. People might gossip, of course. But at the end of the day no one really actually cares enough to even think much about those things let alone put in the effort to try to stop each of us from doing and being the things we want to be.

    That can have a net negative result if people get lost down rabbit holes of weird or dangerous pursuits, sure, but the upside is that IF no one actually cares, then hell… we can all be pretty much free to create what we want to create, to draw the thing we want to draw and to sing the songs we want to sing. Anything. No one cares.

    People will pay attention, glance in our direction, leave comments, maybe even talk behind our backs, possibly orbit in our lives for a time and disrupt each of our effort to be our true selves, but no one ACTUALLY cares… at least not as much as we each think everyone does, and not with anything comparable in scale to the focus each of us puts upon our own lives.

    I spent a lot of years hesitating to make or do or say because I was brought up to think that the nattering of external commentary on the things I chose was as valuable—if not of vastly greater value—than the value I put on it for myself. But that’s not true at all.

    The reality is that unless someone has a weird sort of toxic obsession with us, which is probably way more rare than most people assume, the average person out there doesn’t really give a spit about any other average person… or us.

    Our coworkers acknowledge our value. Our friends may even like us. Our family possibly loves us. Whatever. But…

    No. One. Cares.

    Not what you choose to do and not who you choose to be.

    (And anyone who might care a bit too much isn’t worth listening to actually… so in my experience they don’t f-ing count. Micromanaging bosses. Overbearing partners. Terrible governments. Fuck em all. )

    The point being is that it is easy to get hung up wondering what people will think or say or how they will react to a job change or a life choice or the colour of your new car or the fact you stopped at the drive thru for a hamburger after work… but no one cares.

    It’s easy to assume that if you spend your evenings pursuing a hobby that you love or learn a second language or study something wild in school or write weird niche fiction online under a quirky pen name that everyone is out there is just judging and talking and wagging their fingers… but actually: no one cares.

    No one cares.

    No. One. Cares.

    And that’s a good thing. It is freeing. It leaves us to pursue being the people who we want to be.

    A lesson worth caring about. At least little. 

  • poetic war

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in politics, culture, and the universe?

    No.

    Ugh.

    Ok. 

    I’ll bite …a little bit, for the blog.

    I was doing a little experiment the other week. I had a perfectly good reason to post a pointless video clip on social media the other day, but I didn’t want to use my main account. Nor did I want to use any of my other side accounts. So I did what any sane tech savvy nerd would do and I created a brand new account, followed no one, gave it a stupid profile name and pic that pretty much no one would associate with me, and posted my video. I did nothing special, did not share it, followed no one and did not tag it or add any meta data. It was not clever, funny, or controversial. I was merely posting it as a random clip I’d filmed to check how some function of the system was appearing. Within two hours it had received 12 likes.

    For context, we just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and I posted a few dozen curated photos representing some of my best work and amazing photography in that country, and my best post, with five hundred and fifty odd followers, got 8 likes. Eight. Just eight. Total.

    Somehow, this temporary burner account had received 50% more attention in the duration of our car ride home for a (completely random and the content was not the point) jittery eight second video of a snow plow out the front window of our car (what I just happened to be looking at while I was plotting this technology query) than for something I had purposefully shared for beauty and enjoyment …and to put a little of both out into the world. A fucking snow plow. Twelve likes.

    This really isn’t a bitter post about not getting any likes on my content. I don’t actually try to promote my stuff. I just put it out and whatever. And I really don’t even care. I’m not posting for validation. Or money. Or to be found. Or anything other than curating my own public collections of my creative work and personal giggles… whatever.

    But “likes” represent something else entirely. They represent exposure. They represent voice. They represent the attention and interests of others. They represent the choices made by programmed, unthinking, not-human algorithms, choices about who gets to see what …and when …and how frequently.

    And what most people are sharing these days happen to be things that largely represent culture and politics. And we all kind of understand that those folks… well, they are not trying to represent anything in a balanced or nuanced way. And same are even working and designing content to divide and anger us.

    Put those things together into one big brainy thought and you might get a glimpse of the major imbalance and deep illness in our culture this past year (and probably even further back). 

    I have this (probably controversial) notion that I’ve spoken aloud to a few people this past year about our culture and our political reality in 2025. It basically posits that while were all standing around here in fear of some nuclear world war three, what has happened is that the third world war has come and gone and most of us missed it.  That is, WW3 was a war of misinformation and the western world, democracy specifically, has been attacked and has lost …and now most people are wandering around in a state of post-psychic shock trauma not really wrapping their heads around that they and their families have been under literal assault and a kind of emotional and propaganda-based warfare for the last decade or so.  It didn’t ravage bodies in the physical sense, but it has destroyed institutions, collapsed trust in each other, broken relationships, and turned our path forward into one strewn with debris and rubble. It was launched by foreign states who understood that they could not win a conventional nor a nuclear war. It was fought on Facebook and Twitter and a list of other social media sites. It was launched through the traditional media who played their role as unwitting vectors of informational violence. It was bolstered by algorithms that we trusted had our best interest in mind but were really just blindly amplifying whatever seemed to be popular or match a narrative that made us each uniquely cozy and comfortable. The truth was shattered. Reality was broken. It weaponized the minds of the weak and easily-swayed. It turned friends and family into dirty bombs of radicalized falsehoods and conspiracy-laden mistruths. And even now most of us, nearly all of us, are simply in denial that it even happened… all while we keep scrolling through the same militarized platforms that caused it all in the first place and each in our own pretending that it is still all ok. 

    The battle rages unfortunately.

    That was 2025.

    Does 2026 look better for me right now? For any of us?

    Like and subscribe to find out, I guess.

  • actually right

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What was your biggest achievement of the last year?

    Here it is again.

    I find I’m often getting tired of writing about my professional pursuits. And after all, sitting here penning out another post telling you all about them and how great it is going with the tech jobs is the so-called “right” answer. I’m supposed to have a shiny perfect resume. I’m supposed to have academic achievements under my belt. I’m supposed to rack up contract wins and be out her bragging about other business-type successes. At least… that’s what I’ve been railroaded to believing my whole damn life. Make lots of money. Have the perfect LinkedIn profile. Nine to five with benefits, right?

    Yet, I’m so very much realizing that I’m not that person. Not anymore, at least. Or, maybe it’s that I’ve never been him. It’s almost as tho I’m faking it most of the time, doing a solid enough job being a guy who can get shit done in technology or all the related bits and bobs in which I’ve worked for most of my life. I’m not half bad, and that might just be twenty five years of tallied up hours in that field playing out as raw experience, yet… it’s all a mask.

    See I left that world two and a half years ago… even tho the gravitational pull of it almost daily makes it seem like I will never fully escape. I walked away from “The Career” and tried to be something else, and after two and a half years I feel like I’m still explaining that to everyone, even myself.

    I panicked in my transition and I took a University program in Business Analysis last spring, finishing it up as the summer arrived. It looks nice on the resume, but until I actually lock a job in it it doesn’t mean much more than that I passed some tests and did well on some assignments. And I never really knew if it is actually what I wanted to do, but it seemed… again… like the “right” thing to do. 

    I started a small business, too, and most people in that position would be exclusively occupied with making that work and finding new customers and building and growing and on and on. I do work but it’s more just like a part time job I have, sitting over here on the desk, that makes me feel less disconnected from the world in which I was mired for multiple decades. It felt like the next “right” step in whatever this adventure was, but now it’s just there taunting me.

    But then what did I accomplish this year? Actually.

    I didn’t sell any art.

    I didn’t finish my novel.

    I didn’t complete the code for my game.

    I could give you a very unsatisfactory answer to all this tho and it goes as such: this year I’ve broken down the problem even further and revealed the raw skin under the lifetime of metaphorical wounds. I am starting to get it. I am starting to actually understand myself and the purpose of where I need to go, what I need to do, and who I need to be: it’s more than the “right” answer of a professional such and such or a guy in this or that job. It’s bigger, at least for me from my perspective it is. It may mean almost nothing to anyone else, but then everyone has their own to worry about don’t they. But I am figuring out mine… which has never been entirely clear even though I’ve always been told what the “right” answer is.  But then the right answer was never a very good answer, and figuring that bit out might just be my biggest achievement of the last year.

  • puppy love

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Without asking how would
    people describe you in 2025?

    We all want to viewed favourably, don’t we? 

    I mean I’m sure there are exceptions out there, oddball folks who thrive on division and get off on people hating them. Just look at the internet after all: it’s like a zoo for people like that, all coming together to troll out in public and we all clutch our pearls at the things they say and write. They love it. We love to hate it. It drives the death spiral of our society and we keep trudging. 

    But I mean moooost of us want people to think favourably of us, right?

    But I hate this question. Hate it. I wrote this list a long time ago and I’ve used pieces of it on multiple iterations of this blog and each year I ask myself why I keep including it. It’s a dumb validation-seeking terrible question.

    I guess I’m just getting old or something because each year I see this question and I feel less and less inclined to give it a serious answer. I just don’t really care… in that I don’t care to explain any personal need to be validated as a good honest person in the same way that I think we all feel.  And I shouldn’t need to. So essentially this question (and my answer) just becomes yet another whiny self-affirming therapy session out in public, doesn’t it?

    How do people describe me? Hell, I wear a different hat with virtually everyone I know these days so what does it matter, then? I’m generally a mishmash of who I need to be for the people who I need to be that for, and all of it just shades of who I really am and what song I happen to be dancing to on a given date, time, or event. It’s ninety percent performance, isn’t it? Really? When you think about it? Are you the same person for everyone you meet? Or do you act differently around family versus coworkers versus close friends versus the people in that club you belong to versus a waiter at a restaurant? And which one is really you? Or do you save yourself for just you, when you are alone and are listening to music or playing with your dog.

    So I guess in the end that’s probably the better question and answer: Without asking how would your dog describe you in 2025?

    For me, that’s both easier and far more meaningful that the other question: the dog is laying a few feet away opening her eyes just enough every minute or so to peek through her sleepy haze to confirm that I haven’t moved from my keyboard. She follows me around and seems to feel this doting affection for me. I feed her. Walk her. Let her outside to pee. And she looks to me when she wants something… so through her eyes I guess I can’t be such a bad guy, huh?

  • fear of stupid

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What do you wish you’d done less of this past year?

    I have a terrible case of something I’m going to call FOGWI… or fear of giving the wrong impression. It is awkward to admit it, but I really find that I (often subconsciously) make stupid choices about even the most mundane choices because I over-think the impression it could have (but almost definitely does not have) on others. I do this in particular in reference to what I consider to be my professional persona. 

    I know, I know… we probably all do this to an extent but let me use an example to make it more clear.

    Imagine you are waiting for a phone call about a job interview. You applied for something you think you’d like to get, you know the deadlines of the application and the approximate timelines for their HR department to get back to you. So for a span of about a week you live in this cloud of knowing that (a) the phone might ring at any moment during work hours about said job and (b) you want to answer it when it rings and make a good impression… or at least not the wrong impression.

    YOU might turn the ringer on your phone and (rationally so) go about your life.

    I probably would turn the ringer on and (irrationally so) overthink everything I do for the next week. Should I go out for a walk because I don’t want to ever be out of good cell service range? I definitely shouldn’t run or go to the pool. Should I drive to the store because I would feel weird having that conversation on the speakerphone in my vehicle. Or in the grocery store aisle. Or sitting in the mall food court! Hell, should I even leave the house, get distracted by a video game, have a shower, or mow the lawn because what if I get THAT call just then and in doing so I give the wrong impression, buff the opportunity and ruin my life forever, GAH!

    I know, I know… it’s one hundred percent irrational. But in moments of vulnerability any of us is at risk of making stupid choices to reduce the perceptual imbalance of the circumstances. And rationally, I know it is all silly. I should just get on with my life, do what I need to do, and deal with the hypothetical phone call in a more existential, take it as it comes sort of way.

    And to make all this worse, the multiple times I have got calls from various HR departments or potential contracting customers can you guess what they did? Yeah, they emailed me or texted me a “can we chat at such and such a time” message and we set up an appointment.

    I did too much of that irrational overthinking and FOGWI this past year. And honestly, when I caught myself doing it I worked to correct it. But I definitely wish I did it less. Maybe I would have gone for more walks, logged more klicks on the running trails, or focussed my energies on other more productive and creative tasks. Or maybe I would have just played more video games. Either way, any of that beats pacing around the kitchen thinking the phone might ring, huh?