shanen's Journal: Tough time of year for reflecting on stuff?

End of year funk? Where should it be filed? Some sort of journal thing?

Breaks the jokes, but I'll lead with the punchlines: "You don't care what I understand" and "We can't get there from here." Both of them probably involve projection, but I already have to clarify a couple of terms. The "understand" is supposed to be about deeper knowledge based on lots of data and careful reasoning, even though it started with the famous Richard Feynman joke (and book) about not caring about what other people think. The "there" in the second punchline is referring to any better place. That might be any better place involving human survival, most recently as triggered by The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar.

You know a joke is dead when you have to explain it, so let me kill those jokes right proper. Have to start with the projection, however?

For the first joke, the more I learn, the more things I am supposed to understand, right? Wrong. The more I learn the more I feel uncertain about things I thought I knew. And yet the evidence shows that I should have learned more than most people, at least by the metrics of schooling and books and perhaps a couple of others. Yeah, I'm sure you can't tell from my poor writing, but that's a different joke. So it's hard for me to care too much about what other people claim to understand because most of the time when I probe their understanding I find out the foundations are weaker than my own--and I rarely think I understand whatever we're talking about. So now we get to the projection part and conclude that they probably don't care much about what I (might claim to) understand.

The second broken joke started with the actually funny joke about asking for directions. After several attempts to describe a route, the wannabe guide finally says "You can't get there from here." In my twisted version, the problem is actually time. The process of life is about making decisions, and each of those decisions can be compared to choosing a road in life's travels. So the problem is that you may sometimes need to go backwards to correct mistakes, but after you've made too many mistakes you're going to run out of time to fix them. The "good place" has become unreachable...

So I hope I can figure out a way to feel happier about the new year--but running out of time for that turn... There's another joke about the paving on the road to heck, but I think (dare I say "understand"?) that the road paved with bad intentions is not leading to heaven. Right now we seem to be on roads paved with the worst possible intentions by people who really do not care at all what other people think (or understand). They only care about what they can make other people do for their selfish advantage--and they are not worried at all about the future because their vision of the future is only about dying with the most toys. (Actually, there's a new worse case there. I think some of them have probably secretly cloned themselves and they plan to give all their toys to "themselves" when they die. Just one of my conspiracy theories...)