AI is really at the centre of everyone's concerns. Funny how we never saw it coming, though it was predicted! the real problem is that we invented this incredible thing, but couldn't get our social infrastructure to keep up. For thirty odd years I've been dreaming of housing developments that are built around community - a central green space with people sharing labour or other kinds of resources that maintain food growing spaces etc - you know the sort. Some exist, but largely we're just building urban developments to squeeze people in with no thought to their mental health and how they'll survive adversity eg extreme temperatures, old age, loss of work. We used to have this right - local communities that'd look after the village. Then they made us workers to fit in a system that would change so irrevocably, so massively, that we can no longer fit in this system. Some of us were never systems people anyway, so we've gained personal and other resources to exist outside it, even in just small ways. But even then, how do we feed ourselves? Put food on the table? Pay for Lisa's dental plan for her braces?

I have to catch myself all the time. My neighbours, one on $160,000k a year teaching. I think we should go back to work, earn in a profession that'll never be replaced by AI (many reasons for thinking this, particuarly because a lot of education is pastoral care) so we have money to retire 'comfortably'. Then I slap myself, remind myself that's just the brainwashing at work. But it's a constant battle against what we should do according to society/culture and what our hearts know is better.

I also hear you about travelling and ticking things off. It drives me wild. Again it's just buying in to the tourist economy. Pensions are geared to that too - have 'this' amount of money and you too can be one of those smiling happy pensioners on a cruise of the Danube or whatever. How about we live now? I loved how I traavelled back in the early 2000's. No one telling me what to see, where to travel. Hanging on in one place for ages because I felt like it. I'm not going to work my ass off to pay thousands for a trip because 'that's what one does in retirement'.

It's bloody hard work seeing everything as a social construction.