Musings from Ballantine 666
A recent message titled Start 2023 on the Right Foot on a pub run mailing list that I'm subscribed to started out with the following observation:
I feel like this year should be a bit more normal, if only because it's the first time the year isn't a play off of 2020 repeating itself. There was 2021: "twenty twenty won" and 2022: "twenty twenty too". Three years in and I think we've achieved a new normal,
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...“Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions. Your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administering stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”
― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
When you last heard from us over a year ago, we were writing with a spirit of optimism as we seemed to be emerging from a pandemic that had stolen a year of our lives.
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...In the spirit of taking time to reflect on New Year's Eve, we want to present two sides of reflection: looking back and looking forward.
...We see fate unfold in complex and interesting ways in all kinds of stories. Whether showing us how a complex series of events can lead to one crucial moment, persuading us that our actions - no matter how small - have true meaning, or just entertaining us with the fantastic hypotheticals of time travel and the web of consequences that it might weave, Destiny clearly plays an important role in the stories we tell.
...We are what we do. The world, be it our closest friends and families or the general public, will remember us for the impact that we have on it. When people meet and ask each other "what do you do?", we tend to answer with our career, not a description of our hobbies and personal activities. But what if you're all meeting in the context of a new job, or a new academic program? For example, when I started working at UNC Chapel Hill in 2011, my new coworkers didn't ask me "what do you do". They asked...
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