thoughts

It seems to me that the "no man ever steps in the same river twice" thing is quite true, but also incomplete. I'm mostly thinking of the phases that we seem to go through as we advance in age. This thought came to me listening to someone a few years younger, hearing ideas and directions of thought that were so familiar from when I was roughly that same age but which I don't really support or believe in right now. True, they might move in a separate direction with their ideals than I did, but in a sense it made me think that we're a lot more like others with a similar background at the same point in their lives than we are like ourselves in past or future.

The amount of variability in my response or interpretation of various ideas across time is insane. In a sense, the idea of bigotry across time seems pointless if I'll react so differently to very similar stimuli.

The likelihood of developing AIDS from what are (in my mind) the main avenues of transmission is way, way, waaay lower than I ever thought. Seeing those numbers blew my mind.

I find it odd just how detached we are from matters that don't touch our lives directly, even those on which our lives depend in a great measure. This applies to many of the "essential worker" (and especially healthcare workers) during this pandemic, but what made me think of this was a short "report" from the company that delivers fresh fruit and veg from local farmers: the harvest this year has been quite blighted by both weather (too much rain in May) and pests (particularly ones that are difficult to get rid of without wide-spectrum pesticides). Yet I don't remember reading anything about this in the news, even though many people presumably consume products from farms that have been hit by these issues. I'm also thinking of just how distant all the heated discussions about privacy issues in tech, about how bad social media is, etc., are from people like my parents. The bubble is real.