May 12, 2017:
Tiny ambitions.
Pass on your DNA, own a tract house, declare victory.
Maybe they've known the secret to contentment, I dunno. My point is it's the wrong life for me.
Not just wrong, but alarming. It's too patterned, where your path forward is mapped before you promotion-by-promotion from high school to retirement. It's a fast-drying concrete that grabs your ankles and keeps them. I'm too restless for that.
I'm shocked by stubborn ongoing outreach from high school acquaintances who mysteriously want to be in touch. Why? If I'd wanted to live in their world I would have. Four decades later it's like a horror story where sentient roadways have grown hands, reaching out to pull me back.
For a few weeks I accepted social media requests. I found a strong tendency to opinions: advocating ignorant or semi-informed points of view with full intellectual commitment. In regions of endeavor where I live, working alongside people who are genuinely expert, in certain instances alongside people who invented the damn thing. Even some infinitesimal instances where I invented the damn thing. So that their opinions were not just wrong, but arrogant. The Dunning-Kruger arrogance of mediocrity thinking it isn't.
I dropped them. When they continued to pester me I blocked them. When they followed me from FB to IG to Snap to LinkedIn I blocked them some more. It's like being stalked by a monster whose purpose is drag you into a shallow trough.
I just won't.
I'll continue to struggle, if need be kicking at the hands grasping. Their world is fine if it makes them happy. I hate it. I won't join them there.