Too much

how is your head not exploding?

I was crossing the road and tram line in front of our flat one day this week, on my way to the pharmacy to pick something up that I had ordered the day before and almost forgotten about, and half way across the road, between the up and the down tram lines, having just remembered to look to see if a tram was coming, I thought “why do we have to do so many things just to exist? Wouldn’t it be nice to live in the bronze age, and just have a couple of things to do? Find/farm/make enough food to live, fight off marauders.”

Later, while Luís watched a dour German crime drama whose subtitles I couldn’t be bothered to read, I opened my macbook and made a list of all the things that I have had to do in the last couple of weeks: things that I have to do to stay alive, to be a functioning member of society, to make people not hate me, to make my life not that of a robot, to have goals to fulfil.

I turned my list into this. The first version of which inspired my friend Simon Littlefield to get to his keyboard, and turn it into a majestic piece of horror. I would like it projected, VAST, in Turbine Hall, with the music full blast into your ears. Society might collapse when everyone realises how much stuff we have to do every day.

Obviously, bronze age life wouldn’t have been fun, and would have been quite short, but if I were a bronze age woman I wouldn’t have had to sit once a year filling in overcomplicated tax return forms, answer the phone to scammers, remember to floss, or worry about my moustache. I would have spent most of my days pounding oats or wheat or cassava into usable pulp and worrying that the next time I got pregnant it might kill me, but I wouldn’t be juggling 150 things I have to remember to do and/or be, for 17 hours a day, and sometimes for the remaining 7 hours, in my dreams.

I’m looking out at the tram stop right now, looking at all the people and wondering why their heads aren’t exploding with all the things they have to remember to do. They’ll all have a list like mine that exists somewhere in their head, yet they’re not paralysed in the middle of the road with a stupid thought about the bronze age. My list doesn’t even contain any of the big stuff… it’s just quotidian blah. It doesn’t include birth, marriage, divorce, illness, death, completing on a house, going to court, being burgled, watching a fire spread up the mountain towards your house… theirs might, and they’re going about their day. I marvel at their calm.

Sometimes, my paranoid conspiracy theorist self pops out and tells me that all this is on purpose, that we’ve been given all this stuff to do and think about so that, while we’re all too busy worrying about dishwasher tablets and, like I said the other day, arguing on the internet (guilty), big scary organisations, conglomerations and governments can do any old shit while we we’re not looking.

But my inner conspiracy theorist is an idiot. If this was all a conspiracy, then the big scary organisations, conglomerations and governments wouldn’t be going all in on AI, conducting an arms race where the weapon is AI not bombs, because AI is going to leave us all with way too much time on our hands, with many of us unemployed, and not enough to do or worry about.

Luckily, I am quite fickle. Some days, probably most days, I forget about all of this, and I do just exist, doing my own version of pounding oats (i.e. making pictures) and avoiding marauders (i.e. by paying my bills). Today, though, I would quite like to go and live in a field.

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This got me thinking of other things where I had used Simon’s music, and went and found this from 15 years ago (!) Find him at bandcamp.

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