Days Slipping By

The days slipped away without my paying attention, until suddenly, it’s not midsummer anymore, with its intensive heat and bright sunlight, but is now mid-November with its cool days, cold nights, and creeping darkness.

Even worse, I’m not snug in my insulated life, with no real knowledge of the world around me, but have been slammed into the middle of a lot of confusing issues.

It all started with Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Because of my mostly sequestered life (and even, admittedly, because of my age), I didn’t know who he was, so I started watching snippets of his talks. Which led me to more snippets of controversy. Which led to more snippets of life and how scary it is out there. No, not “out there” beyond Earth. Just “out there” beyond my own horizons.

Which has left me absolutely lost and confused and so very ready to go back to my cloistered life.

For example, there is a lot of talk about microplastics and how dangerous they are both to us individually and to the environment. The underlying message seems to be one of blame to us consumers, which is nuts. At least in my case, it is. Whenever there was a choice, I always bought products in glass jars or bottles. Not only did the food taste better since there was no leaching of plastic flavors or plastic particles, but the containers served as food storage containers, which cut down the use of even more plastics. But now almost everything comes in plastic. Whose fault is it that there are no glass containers anymore? Not mine, certainly, and yet there is that undercurrent of finger pointing. Well, point that finger elsewhere.

Then there are crises in energy, as well as crises in water management, with again, the undercurrent of blame on the consumer. If that were all, it would be understandable, but here’s the deal — one generative artificial intelligence data center uses as much electricity as a small city and millions (no, billions!) of gallons of water.

Climate change. Yep. That’s our problem, right? Yours and mine? We have to be economical and conserve water and power, even to the point at times of dealing with rolling brownouts and unpalatable water in our faucets. But oh, yes, those people foisting generative artificial intelligence on us (in many cases, the very people who are screaming about climate change) can do whatever they want, including building their data centers in fragile ecosystems like water-deprived deserts. (Although “water-deprived deserts” is redundant, because what makes a desert is water deprivation, I used the phrase to emphasize the stupidity of it all.)

And oh, yes. Artificial intelligence. For decades, we’ve been told that AI will remove the back-breaking and demeaning jobs leaving us time for creativity. You know, like writing, composing, and art-making. Yeah, right. Generative AI is making inroads into all those creative endeavors. In fact, using Gen AI you can write a book in just a few minutes! Yay! Well, not yay. I’m being sarcastic. The whole point of writing is to write what you need to write as a unique human being. The whole point of reading is to connect to the human experience via that author’s unique perspective. In no way does “artificial” enter into the process. (To be honest, going by a lot of new books on the market, there’s not a whole lot of intelligence entering into the process either.)

I’m sure there are other areas of confusion. Actually, I know there are, but I don’t want to go into the gaslighting that seems to hold true in today’s politics. Nor do I want to get into the whole indoctrination thing and the conformity of thought that seems so prevalent. (When people mention Orwell’s 1984, they always talk about “big brother” but more important are his ministries: the Ministry of Peace propagates war, the Ministry of Truth spreads lies, the Ministry of Love dispenses fear, and the Ministry of Plenty creates scarcity. Seem familiar to the shenanigans going on today?)

Of course, I could be wrong about all this. Maybe it’s only the contrast with my quasi-hermitage that makes the world and its inhabitants seem so insane. With any luck, by writing this, I have excised these dichotomous thoughts from my head, and can go back to my normal, so very quiet and unconfusing life where the days slip by unnoticed.

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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.