PhiloPsycho Freedom

The experience of driving is evolving; It started as a boring, silent burden and is slowly  becoming a near-meditative state, both outwardly and inwardly focused. It toggles back and forth. Today, I saw a herron flying and smelled the fields as the wind whipped through my hair at 80km/h - all of which I would have missed if I'd been listening to music or the radio.

•  10: Wake up
• 10:30: Renew health card
• 10:45: Buy new chess board from value village to replace the missing one ($2.00!)
• 11-3: Bum around, read, play chess, lift weights.
• 3:30-6: Leave house, hang out with a friend at a coffee shop. Play chess. Walk around town for a bit, then head home.
• 6:15: Hang out with relatives
• 6:45: Swim
• 7:00: Pick up food
• 8-10:30: Eat, play piano, read, play more piano, journal this. 

Today has been rather difficult to maintain the solid front of no digital tech, mainly because I have no plans. Pushing yourself while lifting weights in silence is quite a challenge. It's difficult to maintain the energy between sets. A major challenge today has been my parents leaving the TV on, even when we're visiting with relatives. It's on in the background! I shut it off and they ask me why I turned it off. I've realized that it's not just our generation (*Generation Y) that would find it difficult to unplug, that's for sure. Lately, I've been noticing these insurance company bill boards around that seem to encourage an OCD frame of thinking: "Did you leave the iron on?", "Have you checked your tire pressure lately?", Did you forget to turn the lights on and off 3 times before leaving the house?, Forget to check how many ceiling tiles in your living room? It's like: "Here! We'll cause you to worry about your things, then replace them when you fuck up!". As if that's entirely reassuring after you just worried for a while whether you left the garage door open or your house is potentially burning down. It's such a ridiculous ploy that it would cause me to change insurance providers, or never choose them. The sad thing is that I'm pretty sure that this marketing strategy works. Again, today's been a tough day and being forced to read writings on cognitive science (for an upcoming exam) is not helping. At all. Time to leave the house again.

 

• 10:30: Go into town again.

   

*=That's right, I'm not a baby-boomer. Some person attacked me for criticizing Generation Y-ers, saying that I must be a baby-boomer because they are the only ones who write those kinds of articles. In their eyes, the article was shifting all the baby-boomer's blame to generation Y. It was very ironic that they were getting mad at the baby-boomers for blaming everything on someone else when he was blaming everything on them. He even went so far as to say that he's never met a baby-boomer he liked.