Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today. ...Benjamin Franklin
Of course, ol' Ben didn't live in today's bustling culture of digitalization, where technology that was supposed to liberate us is actually shackling us into more and more commitments to fit within a shrinking available time period. Tack onto that the fact that, while in Franklin's time the concept of a "day" was closely tied into the cycles of the sun with the daytime's lightness and the nighttime's darkness, the day, at least in the cyberworld, is "on" for 24 hours, nonstop...including streaming entertainment and video games. I wonder whether this is a contributing factor to the tendency for formerly late-night businesses operating in the real world to shut down much earlier...of course, Covid got the ball rolling in that direction with a subsequent shortage of available staffing that hasn't since completely abated. It can be a struggle to try and keep one's calendar clear amid the many calls for commitment to different things, while at the same time that this digital bombardment is happening never before have people felt so disconnected, unrecognized and irrelevant. Maybe you're an exception to this trend...good for you. But I don't see this going in a good direction as the concepts of "news" and "reality" have become so digitally twisted that our democracy and freedoms may be in dire peril during the next few years while autocratic demagogues run rampant and unchecked. But back to Benjamin Franklin: it's coming down to having to be a bit of a jerk around others to assert myself and live my life in today's allotted span that I have set out for myself. Otherwise, today will turn into tomorrow and then the next day and then the next week, month, year, decade...until I am no longer around to look back with regret on the wasted past...
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