It’s Monday, the start of another “work week”.  It’s interesting, isn’t it, how we divide time into both arbitrary and non-arbitrary measures?  A day is a sensible division of time, as is a year, and even a month is not pushing things too much.  But weeks are thoroughly arbitrary, and rather bizarre in that they are comprised of 7 days, a prime number—not that I’m complaining about that, since I’m a big fan of prime numbers.

Anyway, that’s what we’re dealing with, this arbitrary thing called a week, which gets further narrowed into the “work week” which is nominally Monday through Friday, though in fact many people’s actual work weeks are nothing like so well-constrained.  More’s the pity.

It would actually be rather nice if everyone worked the same work week, but then, of course, grocery stores and other shopping places would be closed just when people had the free time to use them, and people would be forced to be more thoroughly idle on the weekends, which would have some advantages but also some disadvantages.  I could see such a thing happening briefly, but cultural evolution would more or less guarantee that something would adjust to fill the niche of open commercial time on the weekends, and other things would have to compete with such newcomers or lose ground and perhaps perish.

Indeed, that is what has happened, such that now, even on days that are official or national holidays, or big holidays, like Christmas and the like, one doesn’t see all that many things closed, other than those few remaining factories and big businesses in the US.  I don’t know how it is in other nations.  But I suspect that they fall into similar cycles of competition leading to mutual erosion of quality of life, in a truly maddening feedback loop, because anyone who tries, individually, as a company or whatever, to focus on reasonable time schedules and the like will be outcompeted, and they will be forced out of the market.

Of course, our various legislative bodies are supposed to make laws that will curtail the excesses of such situations, artificially as it were, but they are subject to similar competition of funding and marketing and donations and so on, and they will almost inevitably fall into one form of corruption or another.  There are also feedback loops that support divisiveness, since one way to rouse one’s own supporters is to treat those who disagree with one politically as immoral, as the enemy, as a literal threat—which is all nonsense, of course.

One party is only rarely much more moral (or immoral) than any other in politics, or in nations.  They’re all just made up of people scrambling locally to survive and thrive, responding to local forces, like anything and everything in the physical universe, and producing larger effects and patterns without any deeper thought or intention, as epiphenomena.  And almost none of them ever stop to take a look at themselves and the forces to which they respond as phenomena, to think about what changes might affect those local forces, and in what ways.

It would be nice if “political science” were approached like an actual science.  I guess that’s not likely to happen any time soon.

Well, it’s the start of a new week, as I said, although yesterday was literally the start of the “calendar” week.  I have not yet made my new video, though I had the time to do it.  I simply didn’t quite have the energy to make it, so to speak.  Though the intention to do so at least led me to transfer notes from my previous phone to an email to myself, and to download a new note-taking app to my new phone.  It’s the first “smartphone” I’ve bought that didn’t just come with a note-taking app built in, which surprises me.  It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would cost the manufacturers anything to add, and it might be a selling feature.  But there may be forces at work affecting this of which I am unaware.

I’m not looking forward to going back to the office, though I may at least try to start making a new video once there.  But last Friday, my already high-stress state, which has been getting steadily worse over time—not that this is anyone’s fault but my own “faulty” machinery—was worsened further by a particular idiot and related, peri-idiot idiocy in addition to the usual chaos and nonsense in the office, and some other parallel idiocy, and I literally both shattered my coffee mug and banged my head on my desk until I gave myself a bad bruise and possible minor concussion, knocking some things off the desk from the force of my head banging.  I did other things as well that were harmful to myself, but I won’t get into those as they might be troubling to readers.

Also, the trains are boarding all on one side of the track at my station again, though I’m not at all sure why—there’s no sign of any construction or maintenance on the other side that I’ve discerned, but of course, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any going on.  But it does stress me out a bit.  I suppose to a normal person it would be just a minor thing, possibly not even an inconvenience.  After all, the side on which we’re boarding is nearer the entrance, so the change in sides means I didn’t have to go across the tracks in the overhead bridge.  But it does make the one side of the track more crowded with people—urrgh, bleah—and it just kind of messes up my expectations, or my usual pattern, I guess.

It’s stupid, I know.  I have mentioned that my machinery is clearly faulty, but unfortunately, I have only limited access either to the hardware or the source code.  I do my best to tweak things as I can, to try to improve them, and I’ve been working on that since at least middle school, with autosuggestion, with self-hypnotism, with trying to enforce personal habits, with simply learning about how such systems work and behave, and trying to pay attention to the way people around me—particularly my older brother and sister back in the day—behaved that worked well for them, and the behaviors and activities that seemed not to produce good results for them.  I think that was a real advantage, having people from whom to learn by example, even indirectly.

But there’s no one from whom to learn, now, or nearly no one.  I mean, there’s something at least to be learned from everyone, there’s almost always some tidbit of skill or knowledge any given human has that I don’t have.  But it’s hard even to tell which ones might be useful, though seeing which ones are definitely not ones to emulate is clearer these days than it was with my siblings, neither of whom did many very counterproductive things relative to the great mass of humans.  I’m very lucky that way.

But I’m not lucky enough to have been hit by a meteor or to have a sudden lethal heart arrhythmia or hemorrhage or be struck by lightning or whatever, so I’m headed to work again today.  As I’ve long suspected, I’m just going to need to be more proactive.  It’s annoying, but there’s a reason for the cliché, “If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”