What’s a man to do with the last few hours of 2024?
Hilariously enough I forgot to mention one of the things that has really plagued me this year. My memory.
I’ve been getting a little freaked out about how poor my memory has been getting. I keep forgetting simple things, like… words… names… places. I keep forgetting to do things. I keep forgetting entire portions of my life, almost like there’s a black hole slurping it all up and waiting to pull me down with it.
2024 is at and end and I thought I would sit and write, stream of consciousness-style, about things that I remember. Some of this is going to be pretty raw emotion and if you’re not up for that, please tap out now.
Overall it’s been a pretty good year. I’ve been at peace on a great many things and struggling with others. Technology-wise I am still rolling with four main devices: An M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32gb of RAM (Devika), an iPhone 16 Pro 1TB (downsized from a 15 Pro Max and don’t miss the size one bit), an Apple Watch S10 (gave my Ultra 1 to my middle daughter who frustratingly doesn’t use it… I should have just traded it in), and an M4 iPad Pro that I absolutely adore and am forcing myself to use more often. I’m trying to understand the decisions and trade offs that were made with iPadOS and lean into them rather than letting my old age muscle memory take over. I find myself asking questions like… “do I really NEED a professional file manager or should I just let the apps take over their space and manage files on the apps themselves?” That seems like the way Apple wanted it. I’m trying to adapt. I very much love the focus afforded by the device and opportunities for creativity.
Warning: rambling and useless post.
I don’t know why. I cannot sleep well Monday night and into Tuesday morning. I almost always wake up too early. I can’t go back to sleep. I’ve tried various methods to shut my brain up when this happens. None of them work.
Instead, I just succumb to the screaming mental state and get out of bed. This morning I woke up at 4am after a mere 5 hours of sleep. I laid in bed for at least an hour, trying to get my mind to shut up again.
A long time ago I decided to stop making New Year’s resolutions. I instead made goals. I felt like this was more attainable and a better fit for the human condition. I didn’t punish myself for missing a goal, I just readjusted until I tried to attain them.
2023 ended and I found that I wasn’t even thinking about goals for next year. I do have a physical goal of losing weight and getting more fit, but I’m not going to put metrics around it. I just want to generally feel better. Aside from that, I didn’t even think about what other goals I should have in 2024.
It’s the day after Christmas 2023 and I’m trying to wind down for the year. I’ve been reflecting on 2023 and all of its glory and horror. My morning reading started with this fine article:
https://thebaffler.com/latest/its-all-bullshit-tan
While I don’t work at Google (and never aspire to), I identified with many things in this article. It seems that over the past 20 years we’ve really lost something… a lot of things, actually. I’m not able to pinpoint what all of them are, but I guess I could sum it up as innocence.
Electron owns way too much of my disk. It’s time to move on.
I find that one of the primary reasons I never finish any of my little one-off projects is because I have a complete inability to break things down into smaller chunks. I can see the end state, and I just want to skip forward to that.
Apple has a knack for building things under our noses over the course of years… actually, even decades. They’re really good at building onto their technology when it works. When it doesn’t work, they throw it out and start over, only to build it up in the way that matches their final vision. We saw this happen with the M1 chip. It took them more than a decade, but they finally cashed in on their vision. I think we’re about to see that happen again at WWDC 2021.
