Difficulties

The difficulty in forcing myself to write something every day, or more specifically, every work day, is that I'm often mentally exhausted at the time that I'm writing. And usually, the type of humor that I have is reactionary - a glib reaction in response to some stimulus or outside force. But left to my own devices, I can't create new material easily.

Someday I will devote a post to Nero Wolfe, which is the series of books that I have been escaping to lately, as well as to an era in general of an idealized past. I wonder how many other generations looked at the world of their youth, or of their parents or grandparents, and pined for a simpler time - even when times were simpler.

On the one hand, I look forward to some aspects of the future. In my lifetime I think we will reach a singularity, that is some point where suddenly scientific progress is built upon itself in an exponential rate, probably as a result of artificial intelligence that is capable of improving it's own intellectual capacity. I envision a future when society is radically altered - where world hunger is no longer a concern, energy is limitless, work is optional, and immortality (at least the defeat of the aging process) is achieved.

Which leads me to wonder if my generation is the lowest generation - that is, we will have been accustomed to all of modern society's worst ills - isolation, materialism, and moral ambiguity - before the advent of a new age. Most literature and fiction in general, when confronted with the possibility of a utopia, seems to reject the concept outright - the more common story is of a utopia cracking at the seams or Utopian society post-collapse. Which suggests to me that people do not want to believe it's possible to escape their moral failings - perhaps if they're irrevocably tied to them then they are justified in having them.

I'd like to think I can be perfect. Just because it hasn't been achieved, that doesn't mean it isn't possible.