All the Single, Old, and Childless Ladies

This article is from "The Best of Al Fin" collection. It was originally published on Al Fin October 14, 2011. It is re-published on the occasion of the ongoing national political campaign season in the US.

Where Does the Time Go?
Writer Kate Bolick has published a long piece in celebration of women choosing to grow old and single, without a man, and with or without a child. Titled "All the Single Ladies," it is actually about one specific lady -- Kate herself. It is about choices that Kate made or didn't make, back when she was still young enough to make those choices.

The article reveals more about Kate's regret and sense of loss than she is likely to comprehend. But it is actually a tale of an entire society's loss, percolating slowly across its length and breadth, in all the single, old, and childless ladies passing through time like sleepwalkers.

Today I am 39, with too many ex-boyfriends to count and, I am told, two grim-seeming options to face down: either stay single or settle for a “good enough” mate. At this point, certainly, falling in love and getting married may be less a matter of choice than a stroke of wild great luck. A decade ago, luck didn’t even cross my mind. I’d been in love before, and I’d be in love again. This wasn’t hubris so much as naïveté; I’d had serious, long-term boyfriends since my freshman year of high school, and simply couldn’t envision my life any differently.

Well, there was a lot [we] didn’t know 10 years ago....We took for granted that we’d spend our 20s finding ourselves, whatever that meant, and save marriage for after we’d finished graduate school and launched our careers, which of course would happen at the magical age of 30.

That we would marry, and that there would always be men we wanted to marry, we took on faith. How could we not? _All the Single Ladies

But after going through the sad tales of turning down exceptionally fine men so as to give herself more time to "find herself," and discussing how hard it is to find men who are worthy of her at this stage in her life, Kate decides that she sure as hell doesn't need a man anyway. If she wants to have a kid without a man, who's gonna try to stop her?

But who is she kidding? If she couldn't "settle" for a man when she was younger because she needed to sow more wild oats, or because he wasn't perfect enough, is she really going to take a chance with parenting a child? Because the child is sure enough not going to be perfect, and if she finds herself needing a little more time to find herself as a parent, the child is not going to go away for a few months or years to give her that opportunity.

When too many people in a society grow old and childless, the potential -- the future -- of that society withers on the vine. The generations of the unborn begin to haunt the false over-cheeriness of the singles gathering in bars and pubs.

There is a sense of oddness I often feel in the presence of large numbers of gay or lesbian folks. Good folks, cheery folks, happy and friendly folks. But usually childless, and too often needing to make up for that, subconsciously. I am starting to see the same thing whenever in the company of people who are like author Kate. Childless, aging, spinsters in denial, who must at all costs compensate for their lack of a child.

And so all the spinsters -- male or female, gay or straight -- must be the children they never had -- or never acknowledged. Cosmetic surgeons certainly never had it so good. The youth fetish becomes a lifelong pursuit, until it grows into an obsessive and expensive obscenity.

There is a flip side to the coin, which we have discussed here previously. The "Parents of a Certain Age" who make the decision in their late 40s, their 50s, or later that "dammit, I'm gonna have a baby," and follow through with it. There are many more of these than there used to be, but not nearly enough to make up for the childless Kates that our culture is spinning out into the void. Reproductive technology is making it easier to make such late life decisions, and freezing your youthful sperm and eggs -- along with surrogate mothers -- makes it even easier.

Of course, there is the child (or children) that must be raised properly. We can always hope that the midlife crisis survivors have acquired at least some wisdom along the way, compared with how they were when they were younger and more vital. Their time on Earth is growing shorter with every day, and most of what they have not learned by now, they will never learn. Ah...except for the lessons that come from parenting itself. Those are perhaps the most important and poignant lessons of all, and they are learning them so late!

Lionel Tiger described this developing phenomenon best in his 2000 book, The Decline of Males. Neither Kate Bolick nor any other writer since Tiger, has revealed the basis for the phenomenon so accurately, nor revealed the future of it so clearly.

The core advanced populations, the ones that have made so many advances in science and technology, are fading away. They are becoming old, and childless, like the ladies one sees...

Can Affordable Sex Robots Save China?

China is facing an existential crisis. Due to government policy and societal preferences, China has a large excess of unmarried young men -- all juiced up but no women in sight. In fact, China is in extreme danger of a fatal society-wide testosterone poisoning.

It's a tough, competitive life for men in China these days, in part due to the aftershocks of the one-child policy, which has left the country with a gaping gender imbalance of 120 boys for every 100 girls. Author Mara Hvistendahl reports in her book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, that by late 2020, 15 percent (or roughly one in six) Chinese men of marriageable age will be unable to find a bride. She predicts that China will see an increase in what's already happening in Taiwan and South Korea, where men doomed to bachelorhood as a result of gender imbalance are boarding planes to Vietnam. Roughly $10,000 covers their flight, room and board, and the price of a Vietnamese wife, according to Hvistendahl, and this practice has become so common that the imported wives "get a booklet translated into Vietnamese explaining their rights when they get married at the Taiwanese Consulate."

Although instances of bride-buying and bride-napping are often reported in China, men are also turning to the web in the face of increasingly heavy competition to attract a mate.... the most disadvantaged are the country's poor male farmers, who now live at society's rock bottom in rural villages devoid of women their age (as females tend to leave in search of better jobs and marriage prospects)... _FP

None of the conventional approaches to getting a wife are likely to help China's poor and lowly farmers, living in womanless villages, at the bottom of the society's hierarchy. China needs for its farmers to produce food for a vast and still growing population, but the women have all moved to the cities in search of factory jobs. So what's a poor farmer to do, when he can't afford a mail order bride, and is not up to the job of stealing another man's daughter by force, to take as his wife?

Image Source

Perhaps the answer for China's future, is the development of an affordable sex robot. A sex robot capable not only of satisfying a poor farmer's male urges, but also willing and able to help do the chores around the farm.

Many scholars of sex who have studied the topic now believe that realistic sex robots are inevitable. Most experts assume that sex robots will be used as private sex toys for the financially well off, or as a substitute for prostitutes in the sex trade.

They don't spread disease and they can't be sold into sex slavery.

Those are just two of the advantages of [sex robots], which will be edging out their human competition in the sex tourism market by the year 2050, according to an article published in the journal Futures. _HP

Robots will be taking on quite a wide range of roles in the near future. Robots are spreading from industrial applications to home applications -- cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, serving as robo-nannies and private tutors for youngsters, and yes, serving as intimate companions for lonely hearts.

But such robots are likely to be too expensive for China's poverty-stricken farmers, stuck in China's female-free back country. They need an affordable sex robot, that can also help around the farm.

Humanoid robots may also be able to assist China in dealing with its rapidly developing pensions catastrophe. New robotic workers of all types could help support China's productivity, and boost revenues into China's flagging pensions systems.

Perhaps instead of building new stealth bombers, nuclear submarines, and giant aircraft carriers, China needs to develop and build affordable helpmates for its lonely and long-suffering farmers, and pension-friendly worker robots -- before the entire nation collapses and starves to death.

Cross-posted to Al Fin, You Sexy Thing!!!

From Monkeys to Muslims: Excitable Primates

The differences between the minds of monkeys and the minds of men are differences of a graded evolutionary nature. Natural selection follows a forked and winding pathway, diverging and converging unpredictably. The range of primate emotions is remarkably similar from monkeys to humans. All primates -- from monkeys to higher species -- are excitable to a greater or lesser degree.

Monkeys Attacking Automobile

Monkeys are excitable, like all primates. Monkeys experience rage reactions -- like apes and humans -- but they do not typically organise in up close and personal group attacks like common chimps and people are wont to do. When they flock together, it is more likely in search of food or out of curiosity.

Evolving Apes on Rampage

In an evolutionary sense, apes are much closer to humans, and ape behaviour has many more parallels with human behaviour. Apes have been known to carry out sustained genocidal wars against competing groups of apes. The superior size and organisation of the ape brain makes it capable of organising and sustaining rage for longer periods of time on a larger scale.

Excitable Muslims

The human brain is larger yet, and formed in such a way to allow for even more complex levels of societal organisation than is found in ape societies. Human groups have been aroused to violence and warfare for as long as there is recorded history.

Human excitability -- particularly in groups -- can be a serious problem for human societies, and for the ability of humans to get along in non-violent ways. Religious excitability and violence has been a problem ever since disparate human tribes began to assert the superiority and dominance of their particular tribal gods over the gods of rival tribes.

Some forms of relgion - instigated rage appear indistinguishable from caricatures of rage as portrayed in feature films such as "28 Days Later." In that film, a "rage virus" escaped from the lab to infest human populations, leading to cataclysmic violence.

Human rage will often build in normal circumstances -- as in "road rage," "computer rage," and other common situations where other humans may act to frustrate or oppose the wishes of a protagonist (that would be you).

Opinions vary widely, as to what should be done to manage human excitability and rage, to prevent out-of-control violence. Would it be better -- for example -- to release one's anger in a real life "fight club?" Or is it better to salve one's anger in meditation, yoga, or even a "laughter club?"

One interesting suggestion is the creation of "rage clubs," as a means to purge the inevitable anger and rage that tend to build over time.

This is how they would work. People first gather together in a large open space (a barn or warehouse type area – incidentally, no alcohol would be allowed), then several passionate speakers incite the crowd with stories of injustice and exploitation inter-cut with biased news reports (there could even be a standard canon of examples; Bhopal, Gaza, The Crusades, Big tobacco. For ‘light hearted rage’ the subjects could be narrowed down to, poor user interface or badly designed electronic equipment or non existent customer service). The speakers would then lead the crowd into demonstrating their wrath and frustration with screams, tears and rending of shirts (bought specifically for the event from charity shops). A percussion ensemble or rock band will create a throbbing soundtrack of primitive trance like rhythms building in volume. The crowd will simultaneously produce various implements of noise making capability and commence to create a cacophony of sound so powerful it would even make Lemmy from Motorhead stop his ears.

Areas will be set aside where crockery seconds can be hurled furiously at a brick wall. Effigies of slippery political criminals will be stuck on poles and aggrieved victims given fifteen minutes with a baseball bat to put their point across to them (this is contentious I know, but it is meant to be purely symbolic. The signal sent out will be that such behaviour will only be tolerated at the Rage Club but at the same time it will also be a reminder to the authorities and multinationals: “we people know of our power, so don’t screw with us and ignore us at your peril.”)

Ultimately, an energy of pure rage will be created and each individual will experience a catharsis which will lead to exhaustion, reflection and a reasoned course of action to methodically change those things which enrage them. _Rage Club

Would this work? Consider that some of the most spectacular rage displays put on by groups of Muslims often occur immediately after Friday noon prayer at the mosque. Religious clerics often learn to work a crowd into a righteous frenzy. If the group is then released directly onto the streets in the form of a mob, the results can sometimes be quite photogenic.

But what if these excitable primates were steered into a rage club instead? Allowed to vent their rage in a controlled and relatively private manner, such frenzied zealots might gradually ease into a more controlled mental state. Their internal rages may even be satisfied -- at least until next week's Friday noon prayer at the mosque.

It is something to think about.

American Labor Day Holiday Cancelled Due to Insufficient Jobs: National Empty Chair Day Celebrated Instead

Empty Chair?  Empty Stool?  Empty Suit?  Empty Skull?  Obama's Many Faces

America Celebrates National Empty Chair Day

Barack Obama: The Empty Stool

President Obama has consistently been absent, more concerned about branding than leadership, with image and atmospherics than truly rallying the troops and harnessing our resources and solving our most pressing problems.

...According to most accounts, even friendly ones, President Obama is haughty and surly. To those with eyes to see, he is an act. A vacuous promise. An illusion. An empty stool. _EmptyStool

As a legislator in both the Illinois Senate and the US Senate, Obama became known as "Senator Present," even though he was most often absent -- out campaigning for his next election. Perhaps he was warming up for his role as "the empty stool" even then.

Even when he appears to be sitting in the chair, there is something clearly missing. It is not exactly that the emperor has no clothes. . . It is more that the clothes have no emperor. "There is no there, there" as Al Fin once remarked to Gertrude Stein, sitting in an Oakland cafe in a previous life.

Perhaps America should send out an expedition of scatologists in search of "the real Obama." The fate of the next century may just depend on what is discovered.

Outside observers may blame American voters for electing this mystery man, but if the American media failed to do its job of investigation, it deserves a large share of any blame to be placed.

It is not entirely clear as to why America replaced the Labor Day Holiday with National Empty Chair Day, other than the general lack of jobs. Some claim that it has something to do with what is depicted in the photograph to the left.

Since the image depicts only a single person -- an American cinema star -- it is possible that it is a scene taken from a motion picture. But if so, where is the rest of the movie? Historians may fight over the question for decades.

No matter. The change may represent a coming trend of changes to American national holidays. It is rumoured that up until now, efforts to change the Christmas Holiday to "O Holy Bama Day" have been rebuffed. But now, who can predict such things?

One thing is for certain: If US President Obama is re-elected in November, Thanksgiving Day will receive some serious scrutiny for change, if not hope.


Photo credits: Top, Bottom

Should Prostitution Be Legalised to Help Coeds Pay for A College Education?

This article is cross-posted from Al Fin, You Sexy Thing! blog

Mes chères études (2010)

Making ends meet while going to college can be very difficult for young girls, who have often not lived away from home before going to university. California coeds have long discovered the working opportunities available in and around Nevada communities such as Las Vegas and Reno. But in parts of the world where prostitution is less accepted, college girls who utilise their innate assets for raising tuition money are often hassled by law enforcement -- as well as by criminal gangs and pimps.

College aged girls are at the optimum stage of physical development for using their natural charms to entice salary men to part with their money. And as long as the girls use the money to better themselves, who can argue with their choice?

"Over the past few years, the number of college students using our site has exploded," says Brandon Wade, the 41-year-old founder of Seeking Arrangement. Of the site's approximately 800,000 members, Wade estimates that 35 percent are students. "College students are one of the biggest segments of our sugar babies and the numbers are growing all the time." _HP

Several internet sites exist to match college girls with older men with money.

At least one university president is known to have run a large prostitution ring, no doubt using some of his university connections to recruit girls. University professors have been known to recruit girls from their classes to work as strippers and exotic dancers.

The main obstacle to developing this opportunity more widely for college girls, appears to be the legal difficulties. As long as college girls have to operate outside the law to pay for school, they must risk losing everything they have worked so hard for.

If prostitution were legalised, girls could organise for security and protection from all types of predators -- on both sides of the law.

Legal status might also help prevent more girls from falling prey to drug abuse and addiction -- one of the many hazards of the occupation.

There is no denying the allure which college aged girls hold for men of all ages.

Educated, debt-ridden 20-somethings happen to be an age demographic that intersects nicely with Jack's preferences. "I only go out with girls 25 and under," says Jack, whose thick head of white hair and bushy eyebrows form a halo around a red, flushed face. "But I can't walk into a bar and go up to a 25-year-old. They'd think I'm a pervert. So, this is how I go about meeting them."

As he continues, he repeatedly glances over his shoulder to make sure no one is listening.

"Most of these young women have debt from school," says Jack, who finds most young women also carry an average of $8,000 in credit-card debt. "I guess I like the college girls more because I think of their student debt as good debt. At least it seems like I'm helping them out, like I'm helping them to get a better life." _HP

College girls simply have what most men want -- youth, vitality, naivete, and that certain je ne sais quoi, which everyone knows what it is.

We all know that this kind of thing has gone on for ages. In modern times, when US college student debt is over $1 trillion dollars, we all know that those who can find a way to get out from under all that debt will tend to use it -- if they think they can come out unscathed on the other side.

Polite societies have long made activities such as prostitution and gambling illegal. But doing so only seems to drive these activities further underground, where they become the province of criminal -- often violent criminal -- elements.

Of course, the philosophy that everyone should go to college is more than a little insane. But if society is willing to live with that little fiction -- to the tune of $1 trillion in college loan debt -- perhaps society might need to learn to live with a bit of blunt reality in terms of the available choices for paying the debt.

Should society be willing to face that reality, it might make things safer for everyone.

We Are Marching to Utopia, We Will Soon Be There...

...optimists and idealists -- with their ignorance about the truths of human nature and human society, and their naive hopes about what can be changed -- have wrought havoc for centuries....instead of utopian efforts to reform human society or human nature, we [should] focus on the only reform that we can truly master -- the improvement of ourselves through the cultivation of our better instincts. _OUP Review of "Uses of Pessimism"

Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. _Captain Malcolm Reynolds

There is something deep in human nature which has resisted change -- despite the best efforts of crusaders, utopians, religionists, and wishful thinkers -- for many [tens of?] thousands of years. After countless failures to reform the human spirit, most utopians are unfazed. If they can only grab enough power and control over how resources are distributed, they are sure that they can bring perfection to the land, under their own benevolent leadership. "The land will heal, the sea levels will begin to subside, and every man will say to every other man, you are my brother." And so on.

Philosopher Roger Scruton -- author of The Uses of Pessimism -- takes a somewhat more reluctant view:

The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent to which selfishness and calculation reside in the heart even of our most generous emotions, awaiting their chance. Those who invest their hopes in the moral improvement of humankind are therefore in a precarious position: at any moment the veil of illusion might be swept away, revealing the bare truth of the human condition. Either they defend themselves against this possibility with artful intellectual ploys, or they give way, in the moment of truth, to a paroxysm of disappointment and misanthropy. Both of these do violence to our nature. The first condemns us to the life of unreason; the second to the life of contempt.

...In order to see human beings as they are, therefore, and to school oneself in the art of loving them, it is necessary to apply a dose of pessimism to all one’s plans and aspirations. _GloomMerchant

In another piece, Scruton presents a paradoxical recommendation for how to teach children to think for themselves, logically and clearly:

...children are drawn to magic...they spontaneously animate their world with spirits and spells...they find relief and excitement in stories in which the heroes can summon supernatural forces to their aid and vanquish untold enemies – these facts reflect layers of deep settlement in the human psyche. But they also remind us that, in the life of the child, belief and imagination are not to be clearly distinguished, and that both serve other functions than the pursuit of truth.

...humanists should wake up to this point, and be careful when they seek to deprive their children of enchantment, or to replace their spontaneous fantasies with the cold hard facts of empirical science. It could well be that religion is a better discipline than pop science, when it comes to shaping the rational intellect, and that [we can offer our] children more in the way of a solid foundation, by anchoring their imagination in sacred stories and religious doctrines, than they are likely to be offered by those “Darwinian fairy tales’” as David Stove has called them, which have gained such currency in the wake of Dawkins and Hitchens.

In response to a child’s metaphysical curiosity grown-ups can say that everything has a scientific explanation. But they will know that this is a lie. The proposition that everything has a scientific explanation does not have a scientific explanation – it describes an amazing fact about our universe, a point where reasoning falls silent. There are many such points, as anyone who has children knows: why is there anything? Why should I be good? What existed before the Big Bang? What is consciousness? You can wrestle with these questions through philosophy, but science won’t answer them.

Children have an inkling of this. They also recognise that behind these questions lies a huge void – an emptiness which must be filled with love and reassurance, if their existence is not to seem like an accident. _Art_of_Certainty

Utopians try so hard to purge their children's minds of falsehood and "error", to create the perfect children of rational thought, capable of seeing through all the corrupt fables of the past. Except...children will be who they will be. You cannot make boys into girls or girls into boys without destroying who they are. And you cannot make humans into angels without ruining the essence of what they are. And still the utopians continue to try -- until they finally throw their hands up in complete exasperation at and condemnation of the utter evil of those who do not think along the same lines as themselves, the utopians.

The disgusted dismissal of homo rapiens and all his works that we find spelled out by John Gray in Straw Dogs is not a form of pessimism. It is an attempt to dismiss humanity entirely, as a kind of plague on the face of the earth. That kind of misanthropic nihilism is of no use to us. It removes the ground from all our values, and puts nothing in their place. _GloomMerchant

At that point, they often begin to plot and fantasize the great dieoff, to cleanse the otherwise pristine Earth of the incorrigible human demons who infest the lands and oceans. Fortunately, utopians are as incompetent in planning the great dieoff as they are in most other aspects of their lives.

The point is not to resist all change or improvement of humans. But any lasting change for the better is likely to happen from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Nothing illustrates the different approaches to a better world than the contrast between the French and American revolutions of the late 19th century.

The primary difference in causes that led to the American Revolution and the French Revolution was based in the world view of the innate goodness or innate evil of man. _Hyperhistory

Not all utopians believe in the innate goodness of men -- sometimes they only believe in the innate perfectibility of men. But utopias born of such ideas all come to a bitter end.

Every child has to learn to think for himself, from the beginning. But he must have a beginning from which to start.

The need for foundations is quite clearly an adaptation, and these foundations must provide the promise of protection and love, if they are to fit the new organism for its brief time in the world. If that is so, you are not going to eliminate the need for faith: the best you can do is to withhold all objects of faith, so that a child goes hungry into the life to which he or she is destined. More often than not, a humanist education will leave a child exposed to massive and mind-clogging superstitions of the Harry Potter and Star Wars kind. But these superstitions contain far less in the way of insight than is contained in the first chapter of Genesis.

Religious stories are also the result of natural selection – though selection at another level: they have come down to us because they have fulfilled a moral need. They have survived refutation because they contain, beneath their superficial falsehood, the moral truths that people need, when they must order their lives by good examples. _The Art of Certainty

This is true not only of religious stories, but of all the mythology and lasting moral fables from antiquity. Children must have some kind of foundation that transcends deductive logic, because that is how minds begin. Then, later, when they choose to either reshape or reaffirm their beliefs, they will have a sense of having decided for themselves, and feel stronger for it.

Yes, humans can make choices that make them better. Improved nutrition of mother and child can make humans stronger, smarter, taller, and sometimes capable of clearer thought. But a power structure that attempts to legislate morality, to engineer the moral and ideological purity of the human souls of its citizens -- that power structure is morally bankrupt, and deserves to die quickly. If it is allowed to continue, its leaders will eventually decide that the recalcitrant citizens do not deserve the benefit of the leaders' great wisdom. Then, beware.

This question has been acquiring an ever greater urgency over the past century -- even longer. It is now coming to a head in the demographic and economic crises of many of the world's most advanced nations. A culture that has rested on its own laurels, that has comforted itself with mental images of its own progressive improvement, is soon to be reawakened to a coarse and unruly history.

Hobbling Time

There is a quantum of time for every thought. Our bandwidth of thought lies well under one hundred bits per second at best. In spite of our ability to chunk information and utilise massive parallelism of cortical columns. When we are tired or otherwise indisposed, our bandwidth is reduced accordingly.

Our consciousness is arranged so as to focus our attention on one thing at a time. Women manage a limited type of multi-tasking due to better balancing of the cortices, but men are confined practically to one thought at a time. That is one limitation, the real time limitation of thought rate.

Within hours after waking, the human brain requires nutrient and fluids, and periodically through the waking hours this must be repeated. For many humans, periodic infusions of nicotine, caffeine, ethanol, and other chemicals are required in the waking time. For most modern humans, the waking brain requires a period of rest and rejuvenation, so it watches pre-digested "information" or entertainment content, or reads or listens to particular sounds. After around fourteen or sixteen hours of "waking", human brains require rest, so they sleep.

Humans can, of course go for much longer times without chemicals, sleep, and recreation. I myself have worked for periods of up to and longer than sixty hours without sleep, with little food or fluid, and no chemicals except the rare and treasured caffeine. That is not something humans will do willingly, unless given strong motivation. In general, the preceding paragraph applies.

When humans are born, they cannot think, not like adult humans. It requires years to acquire language and the forms of thinking that adult humans use. Up to half of each day of those early years is occupied by sleep and other non-thinking activities. If the child goes to school, well over half.

The frontal lobes do not fully myelinate before the early to middle twenties. Judgement suffers during this time prior to brain maturation, and very often the brain is well indoctrinated and innoculated against independent thought before the brain has grown to dynamic completion. In many of these cases, there is no amount of time that can remedy the loss. In other cases, the coming of full brain function allows a growth out of childhood and university indoctrination.

In all these years, particularly if the child is in school, most hours of his day are spent in non-thinking activity, even allowing for the limitations on thought in the immature brain. These hours of non-thinking become a habit not easily broken after the hobbles of childhood and youth are removed.

We think very slowly, when we think at all. Much of our time is devoted to performing duties of various types in exchange for currency, currency that gives us choices in what we do with our "free" time. We would rather talk on the cell, watch a film, relax with a cigarette or cup of coffee, drink a fine wine, and exchange non-thoughts with our friends. This is life, this is time.

Grasping for companionship thinking this will stop time this will be forever this eternal moment. Attending weddings, our own, our friends. Surprised by time by babies by new emotions. Surprised by strangers with the names of our spouse and our children. Gray hair and wrinkles time sneaks strange.

All too soon, we are spending time at the clinic, at the diagnostic center. Visiting the hospital or being visited. Attending funerals for those whose time elapsed. Seeing ourselves in the casket reflected in the bathroom mirror, seeing ourselves in the hospital bed from the medicines inside the cabinet. That is our time.

What is the bandwidth of thought when one never thinks? When what passes for thought is pre-digested hyper-processed slurm? A lifetime of it and then nothi

All the marvelous ways we have of forgetting the passage of time. We say we are killing time but really we are just ignoring time while time is killing us. What can people do? Is it enough to be wise and to age gracefully, to achieve balance and peace of mind? Yes, that is preferable to suffering. Most humans never think, never think about this except in bad dreams or tragedies, but if they did they would not accept the buddha's answer.

Humans would want to hold time rather than to be held by time. Perhaps it comes down to the daily conflict between the will to act willfully when awake, and the will to sleep in peace. Understanding this, understanding one gulf between people. Further dividing among those who want to act while awake, those who want to achieve primacy over others, from those who only want to act out their own lives free from unnecessary hobbles.

Time hobbles when hobbling time, when hobbling time comes. Which will it be?

All of this will still be operative when "the singularity" hits us. If you understand the terrain, you can trace the future of the watercourse after the deluge.