Children and Helical Time

i basically never had to work (EU privilege + luck of being born the skill of knowing how to sell to people well) and only worked on stuff that i enjoyed and not a lot of hours (and that turned into millions fast) and my 20s/30s flew like months instead of years and didn't have the intensity of my teen years. I think it's because despite technically travelling and living in different countries a lot, going to a new place is not really a new experience after you visit 7 very different ones. The same with women and a lot of other experiences. Having kids was the only think that surprised me. Making money got old fast (i mean trying to get to the "next" level)

This is the paragraph that grabbed my attention. I wasn't expecting to find something so human.

I remember coming to the realization during my more challenging school years that waiting all week for Saturday to come was literally wishing my life away. I didn't know what burnout was at the time, but an angel of a friend recognized it and helped me understand.

It's a perception thing --- a given period of time is related to one's total life experience/recent memory --- to a toddler, a week is a long time because at that age one cannot remember many weeks and the weeks which one remembers are full of new experiences each of which is vivid and fresh, while to a person in middle age, there are many, many weeks accumulated into many repeated years, and the experiences are much the same and repeated.

The big thing which we need to change and solve is education --- I have memories of going to a school in Mississippi which my perception of was that it was quite well run, and that classes in it were divided between academic and social --- social classes were attended at one's age level, while academic classes were attended at one's ability level (4 grade cap up through 8th grade) and that students who progressed beyond high school courses were able to take college courses, some teachers being accredited as faculty at a local college, or instructors from that institution being brought to the school for classes at need.

Maybe AP classes offer a similar facility in public school systems? Though one wants to cue the _Doonesbury_ cartoon of the college dean who after being told that his entire Freshman class is taking remedial 051 level _everything_ is running a glorified pre school.

Roger Zelazny made much of college education becoming quite a different thing when Samuel Eliot of Harvard made the conceptual leap of dividing education by the college credit hour and allowing customization beyond the rote repetition of previous generations in his wonderful novel _Doorways in the Sand_ --- perhaps that should be extended down on some sort of skills basis? The school I attended after Mississippi did reading with a pair of boxes of Scholastic Reading Assessment (SRA) booklets, which, not understanding that one was supposed to do a two or three at each level and get approval on before moving to the next level, I did _all_ of in a matter of weeks, which left me with nothing to do for the balance of the school year but go to the (meager) elementary school library.

Thanks for sharing insight. I also feel like a couple decades ago, technology was also reasonably simple and understandable. Right now, everything is obfuscated and complex. Maybe that's natural, but makes it harder to get excited about seeing new things.

Similar to you, I don't care about mobile phones anymore. Instead of fancy hardware or features what I care is simple, secure, and private phone (open-source OS). I used to get excited on new models.

Recently a couple of my friends were talking about "Telegram vs Whatsapp." One is better because it has this feature, etc. They asked my opinion too. I don't care which is better, I only use them because I have to use them for contacting family and some friends. I just need the send text and image functionality (and I don't use it for private / secure texting).

Amusingly enough, one of the easiest way to serve yourself curveballs is to have children of your own.

You then are no longer in control of your house, schedule, or really much. And you have someone to cheer on.