Immediacy

 I read this tweet a few days ago: 

Quit news. Quit political media. Create things and try to be around people who create things instead.

Try to improve your world. To lay a single cobblestone path is to have more virtue than a million hot takes. https://t.co/J8FL3eyzGv

— Simon Sarris (@simonsarris) February 12, 2020

 

I've followed Simon Sarris on Twitter since about the summer when I briefly ventured into investor/hustle/libertarian Twitter. 

That's a story for another day. 

He wrote another tweet, which I can't find now, about how people need to be more involved in their own lives. It felt directed at me, at people like me. It wasn't directed at me specifically because he doesn't know who I am. But it was directed at people like me; people who are too lost in the day-to-day movement of the geo-political news cycle. People who consume that stuff for fun. 

It's not fun. It's debilitating. 

I told my wife yesterday, I think news is a scam. 

Not journalism, but news. 

Covid comes to mind as an area where news is important, but even that doesn't seem especially tied to news persay. Someone would have told me about covid even if I never spent hours reading about it and being scared I'll die from it. 

Somebody would have said, hey, wear a mask, asshole. 

Maybe my neighbor. Except she wouldn't have called me an asshole. She's in her 70s and really sweet. 

You get the point. 

So I think I'm going to do a project where every couple of days I'll choose something in my life; in my vicinity or neighborhood; something in my city. And I'll learn about it, and write about it. 

I want to be more involved in my own life. 

I want to be less involved in the world's affairs.

I want to be less manic and depressed. 

I want to be grounded in my immediate surroundings. In my city. I want to be local and present. 

I hope this helps with that. I think it might.