23 February

I plan to retire at 60. Not to stop working, I’ll probably work more after retirement than before. But work that I choose myself. I’m not happy with the world my kids are growing up with, it seems increasingly meaningless, no collective effort towards any sort of worthwhile aim. People focused on personal career goals, improving their personal appearance, curating their social images online, focused on their personal happiness. Marketing has replaced building actual things, at the core of society, and not just in business. We market ourselves too. Anything to make some individual person or organisation or thing try to stand out from everything else, rather than doing something together, collectively. My best years of working life were in an organisation that actually created things, built them. It then disappeared up its own arse, as 5-year careerists took over and refocused it on marketing the increasing absence of anything at its core. Life is now where we never leave high school. I finished high school years ago, and while I enjoyed it, I don’t want to go back. But now it’s everywhere. People increasingly have the same thoughts, habits and behaviours at 50 that they had at 17. I’m a happy person, but grown up society increasingly seems to not exist. You’re supposed to talk about your favourite bands, drinks and travel destinations well into middle age. People have seen how the pandemic has angered me, the absence of collective will and effort to beat an existential problem, together. It’s been used more as a platform for more individual marketing, ‘visibility’ for every individual gripe and grievance. We’ve spent more time prosecuting causes like freedom and gender and racial equity in the past 2 years than on beating Covid. Covid was only used as a launching pad. We can’t even conceive any more what it means to work together, as grown ups, to fix problems. To build things that will last for generations, not just some person’s career. Home is my favourite place in the world. Not because I’m anti-social, I like social things. But because our deepest relationship in life is to the ground underneath our feet. Why I hate travel culture, which never settles anywhere. The constant adoelscent need for distraction and new ’sights’. Society is on one giant unending gap year. That word - ‘home’ - should be the foundation of our whole culture. It means a lot more than we think it means, I reckon. Aborigines know it.