General Thoughts

Property of Stormberry

 Today I felt like writing here a little. I scrolled around the photos in my phone and I realized I probably don't have that many photos as a lot of people do. I mean, I do have a lot of picture - which I would like to tackle to reduce and "clean up" -  but not nearly enough to be able to retrace through them what had happened in a given day, if I don't write an entry in my journal (and I don't write everyday in my journal), or if I don't have anything noted for that day in my planner (which also does happen). Before I even opened the tab to write, I had some ideas of things I would have liked to develop in a post - as I usually do - but by the time I've got here, I forgot what I had thought to write about - as it so often happens.

However, this matter about the pictures stuck in my mind.

The idea came from a video I was watching, from this guy called Job, who journals beautifully, and who mentioned he, sometimes, "backlogs" entries. This means that he completes notes or entries from days past in his journal. I have seen videos of people doing this with their planners, where they not only write down things ahead of time, but also fill in the planner with things that had happened. The point of this is to give the planner a double use: as a future tool, to plan out our time ahead of time, but also to serve as a memory keeper or a record of how have we spent our time. This is quite useful in order to be able to reference things that had happened, without having to rely solely on our memory's strenght. 

I have done some "backlogging" here and there, both in my planner and in my journal, but it's not a regular practice of mine, and I only do it if it's something I definitively don't want to forget. In previous journals I have had even spent months recounting in detail a meeting or an event, and in some planners I have added annotations of meetings to which I had been called at the very moment, when I feel I need to write them down to have a better recollection later on, if I need it.

Now, this youtuber was mentioning the backlogging as a process he does in his journal sometimes, and here he mentioned that, when time has past and he forgot much of what had happened, he goes to his phone and checks the pictures he took that day to jog his memory. That's what got me thinking.

I remember the days when photos were made with a camera, using a film that usually gave you 12, 24 or 36 pictures. You had to use them wisely, and usually a roll lasted you a while before you carefully removed it from the camera and took it to a photo store where the film was developped. Pictures were like babies before ultrasound: you never knew what you would get. Pictures were precious and few. We kept them in photo albums. Years could go by without your pciture being taken. If you were a child, well, probably you could get your picture taken every year, on your birthday, and maybe on Christmas. Yes, some people could afford to take more pictures, but not everybody. You could certainly not backlog the events of any day based on pictures.

Now pictures are different. They are free and anyone can take as many as they want. They don't need photo albums or old shoe boxes to store them, but they stay in the same device that took the photo in the first place, and from there they can be sent and stored anywhere, and can even be printed, if one wishes so. Now you can chase the perfect picture by taking a thousand pictures of the same thing, then eventually going through every single iteration of the picture to use the one that looks better. The photo albums of a phone can look almost like a movie film, where rows and rows of pictures seem to look exactly the same, with only slight variations between one frame and the next.

It seems to me that pictures start to lose their value for us. The photo album can become a dumpster, or just a monotonous collection of photos taken, giving each moment the same value. How many times in a month do we scroll over all of our pictures, the way back in the day we would take out the family photo album and look at all the pictures, ask and comment the photos, ask about those old pictures of people we don't recognize of didn't get to see alive?

Checking in

 

Property of Stormberry

Sometimes one has ideas for a blogpost, but not the time or the energy, and other times you have the time, the desire... but just don't want to write about the topics you have already penciled up in a notebook or a notes app. One such a topic is "Opinions". How can you define an opinion and how to differentiate it from other forms of believes and communications, is something that has been consuming my thoughs. In a world so full of gaslighting, as we have today, where the truth is no longer true, and the biggest defendants of the "truth" are the ones that distort it and abuse lies the most. However, that's a topic for (maybe) some other time.

One other topic I've been thinking about is how people's communication skills seem to be shrinking. Maybe it's not everywhere, but where I live, the amount of people who can't stitch together the words for a decent sentence is mindboggling. Does it happen everywhere else? People speak Spanish where I live, and in written Spanish some punctuation symbols have an opening and a closing symbol. This way, you don't write "hey!", but you write "¡hey!". And it's similar with questions. You don't write "huh?", you write "¿huh?". I know it looks funny, but it's pretty basic. Or so you would think.

In "message writing", oftentimes people use only the closing sign, under the understanding that it's not to right way to write things. However, in the last couple of years I have found people closing exclamation or question phrases with the oppening symbol (what do you mean¿), which is disturbing, as these people consistently use the opening symbol at the end of the phrase as some sort of twisted trend. Then, there is the people who don't use any punctuation symbols at all. In a work setting this can be particularly problematic, as sometimes there's no way to differentiate between a question and a statement. And this grinds my nerves. And this doesn't come from young people, or people with lower level education, but often this sort of faux pas comes from managers or directors who are supposed to read many more memos and official communications than other people.

I don't really buy the excuse that "these people are too busy to type down a punctuation sign", because if they have the time to type down all the other signs, why would't they just press the question or the exclamation mark? If they are so busy, wouldn't it be better to get understood from the get go? Sloppily formulated questions also add to the issue.

"The invoice is in accounting".

Shall we understand that as a statement, that the invoice IS in accounting, or as a question? In the Spanish vernacular, the structure of the sentence allows for a question and a statement to be built up exactly the same way, being only the intonation the difference between one and the other. In a text, without an elusive punctuation sign, how is one to guess the correct intent?

What's happening is more than laziness, it's a trend toward the eroding of the written communications. People don't read, and much less write. Messages are mainly sent in audio format and received as audios. The reading exercise is reduced under the extent of a "tweet" of old, but probably no more than what you can fit in a traffic sign desiged for a highway. People don't read nor they care to read. People don't write either. And so, those who don't care allow their skills to fade, and even celebrate the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI), as a way to pass onto someone or something else the pesky task of taking the care to properly communicate. AI reads up for them, takes dictate and slowly but surely, writes the entire communication up. No, I don't envision a machine uprising, but I see a generation of humans degrading, giving up their intelligence, becoming little more than ruminating herds who lose even the hability to check if what the machine did is correct.

Human ennui, human disinterest, and the penchant for posturing as well as the penchant to leave every pesky task to anyone/anything else will lead loads of them to self fabricated problems due to miscommunication.

Language is a delicate thing, and there is people abusing it. Knowledge is the most valuable treasure, and yet many allow their fistful of knowledge to get poisoned, rot, fester and eventually fade out of their skulls, the same way a negligent person would leave an open carton of milk out on the kitchen counter (assuming this very person has no idea how to make cottage cheese out of it).

I'm disheartemed at how stupid people is allowing themselves to become. Because nowadays people can't care less about being intelligent, they only want to look like they are.