life

Day 2475, pipe dreams.

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My resolution last year was to write more constructively. I want to write a book, but I have difficulty focusing on one goal. Instead, I get distracted fast and follow many small ideas while never following one to the end or stringing them together.

I also struggle with doubt. I doubt my ability to learn how to write, and I doubt my message.

I know I have to be patient. I sometimes write longer pieces on my blog and re-read them once or twice before posting it, but I always notice many more mistakes when I re-read it a couple of days later. I also know that it is important to plan ahead and not, as I do, just write what comes up and see where it ends. Anyone that writes knows that it is not easy to delete an hour’s worth of work when you know it’s going in the wrong direction or nowhere.

But writing is one thing. In a couple of years, you can just tell your writing program what you want the text to be about, and it does it for you as GPT-3 does now already in a certain way. My biggest problem is that I want to write about life, and not just in a cold way how I see it but in a way that you can get some meaning out of it. I struggle with the thought that for thousands of years, people have written about life and what it all means, and though we have come a long way in understanding it in the sense that life for more people is now much better than it was 3000 years ago, we still have not come closer to a possible answer. Thousand of really smart people have written and preached about it, but with little effect besides some more tolerance for each other’s differences. After all, we don’t burn our witches anymore with fire but on social media, and we also no longer advertise the slave markets as they did before. Now you can at least say that you are free no matter where you come from.

I feel like a musician who hears a cool tune in his head but is unsure if he has heard it before or if he has the time to learn a musical instrument to let others hear this song so the listener can decide the value of it.    

 

Day 2465, wanderer.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Human, all too human II
The wanderer and his shadow

297 Do not wish to see prematurely. -As long as we are experiencing something, we must give ourselves over to the experience and close our eyes, and thus, while still in it, not make ourselves already the observer of it. That would, of course, disturb our good digestion of the experience; instead of a bit of wisdom, we would take away a bit of indigestion.

Day 2461, understand.

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Intel Core i7-920 @4Ghz
ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 DDR3 Socket 1366 Intel X58 Motherboard
OCZ Vertex Series SATAII 2.5″ SSD 30GB (2 stk in raid)
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870X2 2GB GDDR5
Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 CPU cooler
Tagan TG900-BZ900W, Pipe Rock, Modular
Ram unknown, 3x4GB DDR3                                       

For everything in life, some people understand what it means what you say or, in this case, what I have written above here, and others don’t. It’s not a judgment call, just a call to realize that there is much we don’t understand what is clear to others. For the people that understand, this computer was pretty cool in 2009, and I could run Crisis in all its glory…just.

Day 2459, I don’t know if I make it to the end.

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Let’s say that you start working when you are eighteen and stop working when you are seventy; then, you have fifty-two years of work ahead or past you, or you are somewhere in between. Fifty-two years times fifty-two weeks is two thousand seven hundred and four weeks of work in an average lifetime. Where I live, we all have roughly five weeks of vacation, so in fifty-two years, that is two-hundred sixty weeks of vacation. If you take that of two thousand seven hundred and four weeks, you end up with two thousand four hundred forty-four weeks of work. Two thousand four hundred forty-four weeks of work times seven days is seventeen thousand one hundred and eight days. Divide seventeen thousand one hundred and eight by seven and multiply that by five; you then have twelve thousand two hundred and twenty days of actual work, without the two days weekend. Well, work… we are also sometimes sick, and though I couldn’t find good statistics for a worldwide average number, I will use five days each year, so that is two-hundred sixty days in fifty-two years of working. So twelve thousand two hundred and twenty days minus two-hundred sixty is eleven thousand nine hundred and sixty days of work. We don’t work twenty-four hours in a day but eight (to make it easy, for many years, I have worked seven and a half hours a day). So eleven thousand nine hundred and sixty days times eight hours is ninety-five thousand six hundred and eighty hours or five million seven hundred forty thousand and eight hundred minutes as in three hundred forty-four million four hundred and forty-eight thousand seconds. During that time, my heart has beaten four hundred thirty million and five hundred sixty thousand times, and my body made three trillion nine hundred eighty-six billion six hundred sixty-six million six hundred sixty-six thousand six hundred sixty-six and six hundred sixty-seven thousandths red blood cells, and not to mention the fifteen billion nine hundred forty-six million six hundred sixty-six thousand six hundred sixty-six and sixty-six thousand six hundred sixty-seven hundred-thousandths epidermal skin cells.

Day 2458, yes.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

The Gay Science
Book one

45 Epicurus. Yes, I am proud to experience Epicurus’ character in a way unlike perhaps anyone else and to enjoy, in everything I hear and read of him, the happiness of the afternoon of antiquity: I see his eye gaze at a wide whitish sea, across shoreline rocks bathed in the sun, as large and small creatures play in its light, secure and calm like the light and his eye itself. Only someone who is continually suffering could invent such happiness – the happiness of an eye before which the sea of existence has grown still and which now cannot get enough of seeing the surface and this colourful, tender, quivering skin of the sea: never before has voluptuousness been so modest.