Mourning

I am currently deep cleaning my apartment. It's slow and gives me time to reflect in a way few other things do other than a good walk through a city. I reflect that the entire time I've lived in this apartment, I've been in mourning. For a myriad of things - deaths of people I know, the end of friendships that should have ended well before they did, and the end of an entire period of my life that encapsulated a certain career, a certain way of life, and in a certain kind of place.

The deaths are personal things that I don't want to discuss in depth. I will merely reflect that once a person is in their 40s, the death of those you know seems to happen more frequently, often unexpectedly. When you meet up with old friends for gossip and conversation, it's no longer a surprise that you hear the news of a death of a person you once knew. Dealing with that takes a different kind of resilience, an ability to grieve as you move through life, because the grief can just become too frequent and could paralyze you from living.

The end of friendships? I've had to step back and think about that. I would think I was incapable of handling friendships from long ago, but no. Most of the people I am closest to I've known for 20-25 years. But yesterday I had a two-and-a-half hour conversation with one of these old friends who lives far away, who will always remain a good friend, when we reflected on how different we are now in our 40s than we were in our 20s, and how so much of our friend circle back then consisted of young adults from dysfunctional upbringings and no clue how to lead healthy adult lives.

I realized part of the letting go was I could no longer deal with other people's darkness if it just was a permanent resident of their being that needs to come out all the time. I really don't want to be friends with people who demonize their children and blame them for the problems these adults have they themselves been the cause of (two friends have been doing that). I no longer want to be friends with people who blame everyone else but themselves for the issues they have, whether just circumstantial or due to their own bad judgment. There's probably other reasons for moving on from broken relationships with people. And I don't wish these people ill will: I actually wish them all the happiness in the world. I just don't want to be dragged back into things with them.

Then, there's the other bit of mourning: my career in corporate AI, the tech world, all of it. There's no improving or reforming a broken system with absolutely no moral or ethic center beyond hubris and the amassment of wealth. Part of leaving San Francisco was the beginning of that. Leaving my last full-time job was the end of it. There's a plethora of posts on LinkedIn by others on this topic, so I don't need to rehash so much of it here, but working in that industry is a waste of one's talents. I don't think that was always true, and I've had a couple of jobs in the tech industry I've really loved because it wasn't a waste. But all that's left anymore in much of the industry are sycophantic followers of effective altruism and believers in the singularity. Maybe there's a lightness I need back in my soul. Last weekend, I was hanging out with two friends here in Seattle who were reminiscing about the 90s. I really don't want to reminisce that much: there are good times that I like remembering, but I don't feel so old as to not contemplate and look forward to a future that's uncertain but maybe with hope if one can dare to imagine such things as a better more just world in times like these. (And as a note on the times in the U.S. these days: The failure of the country I live in is an amazing combination of half the population somehow believing everything has been great before now and should continue exactly the same as it has been and the other half seemingly to believe that everything was wrong with the country and that everything in it needed to be destroyed and overwritten.)

So I will continue cleaning. I'll work on a project for a friend. I'll go feed a friend's cat. The end of mourning begins with doing, and I have a lot to do.