Calculating the number of hours I had left on Earth, and realizing that every hour I spent fretting about shit that doesn’t matter is an hour I won’t spend having the best possible time on this dirtball with my family and my friends before I kick the bucket.

Once I “let go” and decided nothing really mattered, it felt like my whole body finally deeply relaxed for good.

No, it’s the smell at the pump. Nothing to do with how the engine feeds itself. Yeah, leaded gasoline smelled different. “Sweeter” or something. Maybe it wasn’t the lead, and maybe whatever replaced the lead inside modern gasoline is what smells different, but it definitely isn’t the same.

It’s not like gasoline smelled better, it’s just that I remember smelling that smell when the entire family went on summer holidays and we kids were allowed to stretch our legs while our dad gassed up the car. Good times and good memories!

I’m way past that point.

Missing your youth first hits you when you start having small health issues you didn’t have before. And then it gradually gets worse. There’s no crisis about it.

Nah. I just miss my youth.

Come to think of it, I miss school and I miss the military. They were both godawful, but I was young.

Don’t.

Because what he left out is that for those 5 minutes of peaceful enjoyable smoking, you have to endure the rest of the day craving, smelling like dog shit, getting an earful from your supervisor at work because you’re constantly out for a smoke, spending your life’s savings at the tobacconist, and driving 20 miles in the middle of the night to find a pack of smokes in a convenience store in the middle of the night when all the other stores are closed. Not to mention long term health issues of course.

That’s an expensive 5 minutes of enjoyment, trust me on that one.

The smell of leaded gasoline.
The smell of a fine cigar: I quit smoking 14 years ago but I miss that.

And I’m 200% sure they were awful.

Newsflash: the kids never invented anything and everything that’s old is new again.

All new technologies eventually displace obsolete jobs. But crucially, they usually do it slowly enough that the workers whose jobs are being obsoleted aren’t all sacked virtually overnight (i.e. society has the time to evolve relatively peacefully) and more of the new and better paying jobs are created for newer generations.

The internet is no different. My Grandpa was a telegraph operator. My Father worked for AT&T installing landlines and I’m a computer guy. Both their jobs are virtually gone and mine will be soon. But I did manage to make a career out of it.

The first real, violent disruption is happening now however: AI is on the verge of obsoleting a MAJORITY of all jobs within a few years, and no new jobs are really created to replace them. Society will be deeply uprooted and won’t have time to prepare for the shift. A lot of people will lose their jobs with no alternatives to put food on the table. That’s a recipe for war.