I've not posted for a while. I've been waiting for the chance to have something valuable to contribute. I've been busy with work and busy with life. I've been waiting to start up my NCUK project again. I've been waiting and while I've been waiting I've been living quite fully. Usually I feel alive from some sense of achievement, some sense of progress towards some sort of goal. Recently I've felt alive just living and carrying on living. I've not felt this way before... Just being able to live my life and not really care too much about anything. I suppose through this, living, this contentment gained through not caring too much, just living in the moment more, I've realised I'm overcoming my depression. With it, I'm quite sure I've gained some negative self destructive tendencies... but overall, although I don't feel like the happiest guy alive, I don't feel pressure on myself or like I'm pressuring others or being a burden or burdening myself or anything... I can't really explain it but I guess, apart from knowing I'm myself, I feel kinda normal. Like a knew understanding and empathy about the world and people. A fresh perspective gained from what I don't even know and a new contentment with it- I guess this is what makes me feel normal the most. I've always wondered why so many people can be so apathetic or content in their own worlds. I suppose that could also explain why I've not been active here, I come here to learn and share my progress and goals and for once, now, my thoughts and ramblings just for the sake of sharing something. I could share this with so many others but I don't think a lot of them would understand or care to read something so long, and possibly pretentious as the post continues...

I've just come back from a short walk. An extremely short walk. Just along the alley behind my home, in between the rows of terraced houses. It's a clear autumn morning, crisp, fresh, cold but not harsh. I wish I could say it was beautiful. I don't know why I walked up and down there, just stretching my legs after watching a film with my gf who couldn't sleep last night while I was working at a club. As I walked I looked around the world we live in.

How the fuck did we get to this place now? It's amazing and scary and it's always fascinated me to think that this rock flying through space at ridiculous speeds is now home to so many "intelligent" beings. I just look up and down the alley, the cobbled path, no grass anywhere, behind all the houses are little yards with concrete floors, all seperated by brick walls. A giant wooden post in the middle with wires connecting all the houses. The phone/power lines I assume. It's kinda sad how we're all connected via this one post along our street. I know the names of a few of my neighbours but that's all. I don't care about them and they don't care about me and I'm fine with that. I wouldn't turn down the opportunity to get to know any of my neighbours better but it's just not what happens nowadays. I wonder if back in the really old days when neighbours actually knew each other and cared about the neighbourhood or community, was it the social norm, expected of people, or was it just something that happened because us humans crave social interaction. Is it more that we have developed our own interests and personalities into so many variations that we have grown apart or maybe gotten picky about who we choose to interact with, or is it just that now we don't care about each other as much. I hate to think that the latter is true because I do care about my fellow man.

Looking around from that alley the only natural thing I can see is the sky, with wires obscuring lines that connect houses. I wonder if before we got to the point of having rows of houses, people saw that we were connected by the sky, not by the wires now obscuring it, even if only slightly. I see all the bins behind the houses and think about what they're there for. All the shit we throw away in brown plastic, in bin bags for our convenience, just so they can be taken to some random place we don't think we'll live on in the future, so we can just dump it and hide it, just to be forgotten. I wonder what the first guy who decided where to dump our rubbish was thinking. Did they know that most of the rubbish wouldn't decompose and it would be left there for generations?

Recently a friend told me a story. He went to the seaside with some friends and there was a "merry go round". He told me about how all he could think about was how much he hated it. He hated the crappy music. He hated the crappy plastic. He hated the crappy way that all it was is a fucking plastic horse that goes round in a circle while shitty music plays. He hated the premise that it was done to entice naive children into getting the parents to give money to a man to let em go on the stupid plastic horse that just goes round in a circle. It's pointless. He didn't hate the man though, nor the kid, nor the parents. He just hated how that's how the system works. He hates the system of course.

Standing in that alley reminded me of that story. It made me ask myself, how much of this world is really necessary and how much of it is just a product of the system. There are so many cool things we have that are essentially products of the system, but so many bad things that ARE the system. But they are just the world we live in. I guess with my new perspective, my new contentment with life and living I've come to accept that this IS the world we live in. I'm still not ok with it and I want to change it but for so long while I was trying to change, save, help the world change, I was refusing to accept just how bad it was anyway, even though I know it's a lot worse than most people do. It's just the world we live in. Once we accept that, we're more free in the prison of the system than when we try to refuse. I suppose I've been in the transitional stage of waking up from the matrix when the person can't accept what they see, but in reality it takes a lot longer than the few minutes or seconds it does in the film.

Real shit:

Doing my online course in interactive programming in python

Working at a nightclub and KFC

Living with the gf

Making friends and doing stuff in plymouth