“Can you explain this gap in your resume?”
“Yes. Life is about more than constant, meaningless toil for 40-50 years resulting in a desolate twilight of failed ambitions. The social contract is broken, and the system is a lie. You and I are both trapped in the same Sisyphean hell where no amount of working harder or longer will ever truly grant the rewards we were promised. The real question is, why are there no gaps in your resume?”
I find myself thinking back to the early days of Covid. There were weeks when it was clear that lockdowns were coming, that the world was tilting into crisis, and yet normalcy reigned, and you sounded like a loon telling your family to stock up on toilet paper. There was the difficulty of living in exponential time, the impossible task of speeding policy and social change to match the rate of viral replication. I suspect that some of the political and social damage we still carry from the pandemic reflects that impossible acceleration. There is a natural pace to human deliberation. A lot breaks when we are denied the luxury of time.
But that is the kind of moment I believe we are in now. We do not have the luxury of moving this slowly in response, at least not if the technology is going to move this fast.
—Ezra Klein, This Changes Everything
“exponential time”
Home is where people notice when you’re not there.– Alexander Haymen