Always Finding The Love In Things
I'm a 52-year-old dad in a second marriage that's also falling apart. Despite this, I'm pushing through and doing what I can to drive my kid home before the 1:30 call. I'm an optimist who believes in putting love into things and creating a narrative that normalizes my own experience. I'm hopeful that with the help of machine-learning and AI, we can create better realities for humanity. Read my blog to learn more about my story and my thoughts
Finding Hope and Love in the Face of Adversity
By Michael Levin
Monday, October 17, 2022
The kid stayed over an extra night. I will be driving them home before the 1:30 call kicks in. It’s coming up on 11:00 AM so I should stay on top of it.
Part of putting the love into things is to turn everything into a story. The story right now is of a 52 year-old dad on his 2nd marriage which is also falling apart keeping it together enough to keep earning good money and enjoying what he does, so can pull it all off. But it’s a system with small caches. No big savings. Empty out the resources having made good use of them as fast as they come in, because settling is stupid. Once you settle, you stagnate and go stale, spiritually and growth-wise, that is. Some who sweep such character attributes aside as fufu are probably some pretty empty souls.
But so what? Relativism, am I right? So my next project must be made loveworthy in order to be playing the game the way I like to play it: enjoying it all the while. Because if not, what then? Are you living excessively in and for the past? Or are you living excessively in and for the future? I once thought I was going to be such a saver, starting early and squirreling it away for a comfortable retirement. But the reality of my life veered farther and farther off-course until today when I consider everything worth having internal, and maybe a hand-full of relationships, none of which are permanent.
Permanency is an illusion, and life adapts. New normals are the always-been normal. Every generation or two views the world differently–so differently that the older generations always thing the world’s going to hell. However, we can always generate a new narrative to normalize our own particular time and place we were put into this world, feeling that our normal today is some static eternal bliss that’ll just keep going.
I’m glad NASA did that asteroid deflection test. Humanity is stepping up to the challenges before it. People like Elon Musk become forces for good rather than evil. Entire industries and their dirty old ways can be stared-down and new-realitied into submission. Reductionist thought can improve almost any process if someone’s willing to front the capital to retool the factories. That just doesn’t happen on too frequent a basis… until now.
We are at or nearing the inflection-point at which new creations can by virtue of machine-learning, AI (dare I begin using the term) incrementally improving route everyday procedures bit by bit so that with little more cost than maintaining the status quo, we will also be improving. Little by little, bit by bit, better at all things, collectively. Decentralized free and open source systems should be at the heart of it like mesh networking, else the big corporations and their stockholders will be their main beneficiaries. If we do this right, it can be distributed a little more fairly.