Antoun,
At first I tried to figure out how to relate to this, but my mind just doesn't do boredom. Even the hint and it changes gears, finds something else to think about.
The irony here is that as much as human civilization has run you over, to put any Kafka protagonist to shame, you still value civilization above all.
Yet I, who has skated around the edges of some of the more well to do, old money sectors of society, am out to autopsy human civilization.
Not to say if I was to write an autobiography, it would be particularly engrossing, as I do just putter along. For example, I spent much of the morning running around one of the back corners of my boss's family estate, in one of his telihandlers, collecting and loading logs on a logging truck, because they never lumber the place, so he, at 75, goes out with one of his bulldozers in the evenings, cutting down and dragging out old dead trees. The older son got the Mercedes dealership his father set up after WW2, so he uses the farm to trade old farm equipment. Then this afternoon, I was over on the next farm/estate, starting to fix the fences for the Maryland Hunt Cup, which runs the last Saturday in April.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland_Hunt_Cup
So I should be the one out to protect and preserve civilization, while you should be the one trying to tear it down.
The fact is, as I see it, the current set of boxes we have been building and patching for the last few thousand years are to the point of a teardown and rebuild. The religions, the politics, the economics, the academics, the public spaces, the private rabbit holes, etc. are well past their use by date. It's getting beyond necrotic, to being manifestly putrid.
It's boring. Soul deadening.
As my mother would put it, "trip the light fantastic."
A good article on the social necrosis at work;
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/rules-rules-rules
The only fiction I read was the usual action and mystery stuff as a kid. Then the pot worked its magic on my attention span and after that, it was mostly history, politics, science, etc, that could hold my attention. Then the internet came along and sucked up all the reading time.
One of the last books I distinctly remember was Stephen Hawking's, A Brief History of Time. That was when I realized how much modern physics is GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. The specific point made was, "Omega =1." Essentially it means the cosmic expansion of space is inversely proportional to gravity. Yet what these people who spend their lives staring at chalk boards got out of it, was that it was a constantly increasing expansion, as opposed to one increasing or decreasing. Yet for someone like me, who operates on simple logic, if expansion is inversely proportional gravity, then they cancel out. The space between galaxies expands in inverse proportion to the rate it collapses into them. Basically it is Einstein's original cosmological constant. What keeps gravity from collapsing the universe.
While my mind was still wrapped up in the geometry, that what fell into the black holes, traversed some additional dimension and came up in the space between, one of my early haunts on the internet was the NYTimes forums, where they had a Mysteries of the Universe section. I raised this observation and one of the other commentators said I didn't need the additional dimension. It works simply because the expansion is based on measuring light, while the contraction is based on measuring matter. A bit more complicated that that, but he had studied cosmology at the University of Chicago and was going to do his senior thesis on it. To which his advisor advised that if he intended to pursue the idea, he might better consider a field other than astronomy. He followed his advice.
Getting a bit off topic, but books....
This is a bit over the top, but it's a memorial to one of my cousins. About living life on the edge;
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=481027
