Half-life

I’ll be 40 in about a month. Nothing serious, I feel 25 still. Some would buy a Porsche at this moment, I guess; I decided to start a blog. Not particularly groundbreaking either, but definitely cheaper. Mine’s a mild crisis, you could say.

Cue Faith No More.

I’ve been single, married, father (still am), divorced, civil partner, separated and multiple times boyfriend or ex-boyfriend. The only things missing appear to be widowed and dead. So where does that leave me?

Well, interestingly (or perhaps worryingly), my present life pretty much resembles what it was like fifteen years ago. Living on my own, with frankly no idea what it will be like in a year’s time, and having a somewhat hard time reconciling myself with the person I was in the prior decade and a half. In this latter interim, I’ve lived mostly through (long) periods of what I’d call orthodox normality. It goes without saying that I was never particularly successful at being conventional.

Furthermore, my ever passionate convictions, nerd-like profusion of interests and unhidden distaste for mainstream banality, have always left me hanging in a rather strange place, socially speaking. For all I know, I was invariably perceived as weird. To be fair, I’d rather think of myself as merely hard to grasp. Perhaps intriguing or, at most, slightly peculiar, but who am I to say? Maybe I am weird!

Lately I’ve become obsessed with the way technology has profoundly changed us as individuals and as a society, and how it keeps doing so in an ever accelerating fashion. How, in the words of Douglas Rushkoff, “we tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored”. In particular, I’ve developed a genuine worry and perplexity toward the ceaseless devaluing of culture and art by newer generations.

So I believe there’s a much bigger crisis out there than my own. And, not unexpectedly, most people are somewhat aware of it, but not really making an effort to act against it. On the contrary, they’re letting the deluge of triviality reshape their innate curiosity. By lowering the bar of their expectations, they’re losing their sense of wonderment. They’re becoming dreamless sleepers.

It saddens me, for instance, having always been delighted by the art of putting words together, to live at a time when most people’s writing is ephemeral and of little or no consequence. There is - there must be! - an unquestionable appeal in striving for something with a little more lasting value than the endless stream of one-line thoughts fostered by today’s social networks.

So this is an attempt to bring back the pleasure of writing (and a sense of purpose) into my life, by sharing my thoughts on the things I love, like technology, art and some of the in-betweens. Mostly the in-betweens. Hopefully, at least a few of you, dear readers, will find it worthy of attention. If nothing else, I’ll enjoy myself immensely whilst doing it.