Euan Semple's Blog, page 58

Sixty

It feels like a big number. It is a big number. But I don’t feel my age, and I don’t act my age.

My Dad is ninety and, totally illogically and unreasonably, this encourages me to believe that I have another thirty years to go. Much can be done in thirty years.

I’d best get on with it though.

The ghost in the machine

By far my favourite widget on my iPhone’s Home Screen is the Photos widget. Each day this presents me with a photo from my library that was either taken on that day in the past or was chosen for some other algorithm of predicted interest.

Since my mum’s death last month there have been an uncanny number of photos of her appearing in this feed. It may just be a heightened awareness, in the same way that when you are thinking of buying a new car you seem to see nothing but that type of car on the road, but for whatever reason it has been very moving and a real delight to be prompted with so many fond memories nearly every day.

Driven

It’s not often that I am on the road during rush hour these days, and I haven’t been since more people started to return to work. But I was this morning and I really noticed a difference.

All these pushy shovey drivers jostling for pole position at every junction. It reminded me of Amersham station in the mornings where the same sorts of people vie for the optimum place on the platform to secure the best seats.

I imagine this is the way they behave in the office. Keen to be in front, keen to be seen to have impact, desperate to be driving change.

All this “driving” is overheating them, overheating the people they work with, and overheating society and the planet.

Maybe if more of us were less driven…

Flickr

The magic of having online spaces in which to share our perceptions of the world around us is that we start to notice more. Having a blog makes me more aware of the situations and people that I encounter each day when life presents me with things that pique my curiosity and hopefully the curiosity of readers when I write about it.

The same is true of the things that I see around me. One of the biggest upsides of modern mobile phones is that they have amazing cameras in them and I have never before been more able to capture and share the landscapes, artefacts, people and animals that surround me.

Sadly over the years this piquing of interest is what has become the engine of commercial social media platforms. The innocent desire to share what interests us become distorted by algorithms and peer pressure.

My recent inclination is to pull back from these increasingly distorted online spaces and to revert to the older tools where it all started. Part of this is to turn my back on the advert ridden world of Instagram and to resurrect my very old Flickr account.

I was one of the first users of Flickr when Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield set it up all those years ago. I stuck with it through various changes of ownership and periods of neglect but have really enjoyed opening it up again over the past few days and am more than happy to pay the annual fee to enjoy other people’s images in an ad free and less pressured environment.

Bullet Journal

Over the years I have come and gone so many times on various systems to capture, organise, and share my thoughts. I have learned not to feel awkward about this to and fro because all systems become stale over time and there is no shame in believing that a change of system will bring renewed focus.

One thing I find frustrating about having so many tools is that things can become scattered – “Where did I store this?”, “How can I connect these two bits of information?”, “Is this a to-do or a note?”. The idea of having everything in one place. The fact that a Bullet Journal is an analogue place is a plus not a minus. The friction of getting this into the system and moving them around gives pause for thought and pausing to think is a good thing!

So, my new Bullet Journal notebook arrives tomorrow and I am currently re-reading Ryder Carroll’s book on his system. I feel suitably re-invigorated at the prospect of, yet another, fresh start.

Ripples

Every change in the rules from the government about lockdown causes ripples into society out of all proportion to the facts.

Different interpretation of what the rule “means” depending on your political leanings; personal commitment, or otherwise, to adhere to the rule depending on your sense of individual liberty; increased or decreased worry depending on your confidence that things are under control and will get better.

Apart from the original statement everything is under our own control. Our reactions and all of the subsequent consequences are up to us. It is worth remembering this rather than letting anyone yank your chain.

Technological predeterminism.

I was talking to my dad yesterday about technology, how clever it is, where it is heading, and how important it is that more people get involved in making informed decisions about what we do with it. He asked me “If you had a seven year old child now what would you tell them?”.

I said that I would do what I had done with my two kids already. Talk about what I know, notice the things I notice, get excited about the things that I believe will make the world a better place, and let them watch me using the various devices to their full capacity.

He had expected me to tell the seven year old what it all means and what they should do with it. But I am very wary of this sort of idealism. I have no idea what is going to happen. I have no idea what technology will be used for. I would have no idea what aspirations and skills my child might have. Any attempts I might make to “steer” them in any particular direction are almost certain to backfire.

Sadly as societies we are still driven by the idea that we should know, and should be in control of, our futures rather than arming ourselves with as much knowledge as we can and training ourselves to react in the moment to the situations that present themselves.

Mental Clutter

I have written before about my addiction to buying books and how this regularly outstrips my ability to read them fast enough. Part of the issue is that I have so many books that I start, see another one that catches my eye, buy that, start reading it, see another one and on and on.

I have bookshelves of “real” books glowering at me as I sit at me desk, chastising me for abandoning them. I have Kindle apps on my iPone and iPad which have “downloaded” sections groaning under the strain. I have Audible apps testing the storage capacity of all of my devices.

I haven’t got around to nuking the bookshelves in my office but this morning I reduced the downloaded or currently reading queues on all of my devices to one each. In addition I have resolved to neither buy a new book nor move onto another previously purchased one until I have finished the one I am reading.

I am anticipating that this new found resolve will last about 24 hrs

Video fetish

One of the upsides of lockdown has been the rapid, albeit forced, adoption of remote working technologies. One of the downsides has been the obsession with video calls.

So many people’s endless meetings have migrated to endless Zoom calls – and it is knackering. Staring at that screen for call after call has become the norm for too many, and all in the name of “face to face” communication.

But is it really so important?

For three years in my first job at the BBC, as a clerk booking editing and lines facilities, I conducted my entire job on the phone and never met most of the people I worked with. It didn’t cause a problem and we built up some great relationships and trust.

During a recent Zoom call someone started banging on about the importance of eye contact and I had to point out that because he had his Zoom window in the bottom corner of his screen, and his camera was top centre, he hadn’t “made eye contact” with me once during our call and as a result looked decidedly shifty!

Don’t be bullied into turning your camera on. If you think better walking round the room, if you are tired of arranging your seat in front of your carefully selected rows of books, if you are getting back problems maintaining that unnatural newsreader position, do yourself, and the rest of us, a favour, turn the bloody thing off!

The passage of time

My sense of time has been changing. Since lockdown began there have been less junctions, less demarcations, between different periods of time. One day merges into the other. One week merges into the other.

This feeling has become more extreme since my family went on holiday on Friday. Within my days the only “events” are feeding myself and the cat, and letting him out. But it isn’t boring, far from it. I am quite content with each moment as it is. I have no expectations of the next moment. It is what it is. And it is now.

Each day my iPhone presents me with a photograph from my past. Very often these are photographs of the children when they were younger. It fascinates me the degree to which they are different people. The people in those photographs don’t exist now. The person I was doesn’t exist now.

In fact the person I was five minutes ago doesn’t exist now. I only exist in this moment now, and now, and now – and each moment is ok.