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For too long, I have been obsessed with the passage of time, day by day, one week to the next, one month to the next, year on year. This temporal fixation has encompassed seemingly endless ruminations on the days of the week, which can be quite debilitating. Reluctant to talk about this, since this is in public as it were, but so what?

Allow me to elaborate here: On any given day, I have given thought to what day of the week it is, whether the week starts on Sunday or on Monday, what day of week it was x days ago, etc. This looks as insane as it has felt to me, now that I see it written out. In any case, lately I concluded that the day of the week doesn’t really matter.

Now that I have outed myself as bona fide crazy, we can proceed to things that are actually important—such as current events, which of course are keyed to the days, and that is why dates were invented. I often read the newspaper, in fact, and every time I do I have to tell myself I am looking at yesterday’s news. And so much for all that.

Looking back at 2011, the year in which I last blogged here, it does seem clear that it was a more optimistic time, a simpler time. That was the year of the “Arab Spring” and Occupy Wall Street, and in those relatively halcyon days... Well, people believed they had the power to change societies for the better. Now we’re in a wasteland.

Maybe that’s hyperbole, but in a lot of ways things did not exactly get better over the last several years in terms of the world situation, as it were. The annals of foreign affairs were increasingly filled with chaos and barbarity, but perhaps those are one and the same. The rise of “social media” amplified and propagated all of it.

People seem to have a tendency toward overcomplicating matters and oversimplifying them, which I base on nothing but my own sense of intuition and the little I know about our shared reality, a world that is less and less something held in common and more an atomized simulacrum that passes through filters and distortion.

Over the past eight years we have witnessed enormous changes that have happened at a pace that has whipsawed mass consciousness. The underlying foundations of social control remain much the same: for the most part we remain servants of capital, resource extraction is firmly entrenched, and the body count keeps going up.

Yet it is, as the song goes, getting better all the time, which is not so apparent since the news media have a pronounced bias toward conflict, disturbance, or aberration that shocks the conscience, and then people interpret that picture as a mirror of the real world. That is one reason I left twitter after starting to use it back in 2011.

Although I sometimes miss seeing a real-time flow of events from everywhere in the world, as someone said on that medium infinite scroll is a public health crisis. The human brain did not evolve to be able to process all of this, in your correspondent’s opinion at least. Perhaps it’s not true, but who knows? You won’t get certainty here.