I am a millennial. I think this confines me to be cursed with a particularly strong tendency to give up on new hobbies before they become, well, actual, consistently practiced hobbies. Before starting this blog, I had a desire to create some place where I could write what I wanted without being forced to conform what I wanted to share to the platform I was sharing it on. I tried a couple of different things, from downloading fancy word processors like Scrivener so could I try the program through a free trial to creating a Medium account where I could publish in the format I preferred to create in, which is long form narrative, on a social media platform designed for that type of content.
While I thought using Scrivener was intuitive, I couldn’t get past the thought that using it for just letting general thoughts on every day life transform into readable text on a screen felt a bit like having a race-tuned Porsche as my daily driver. It’s really pretty, but the upkeep is intense and I feel like an outsider using the program. Medium felt a bit like a strange melding of LinkedIn corporate jargon bloviation and scripts for YouTube how-to videos, but the site’s primary purpose functioned well enough for me as a platform to post my long-winded thoughts. But because I was aiming to detach myself from social media, eventually I lost interest in the “groom your algorithm” game. Ultimately I did not decide to stick with either one of them.
Why did I do this? I mentioned my generation in a somewhat hyperbolic-but-not-hyperbolic way in my introduction. I figure if there are any millennials reading this, they’ll understand what I mean by this through my explanation. I don’t truly believe this is confined to one generation, however. Whether you’re a Boomer, Gen X, a Millennial, Gen Z, or Gen Alpha, there’s probably something you can use to show the generation you grew up in that will be almost universally understood by people your age. in the region you grew up in Anyhow, what this means is that we all went through our childhood consistently being reassured by adults in church, in school, even in the dentist’s office, that if we just try hard enough and put our minds to accomplishing something, we will be successful and get all that we want out of life.
Starting the year 2000 and the course of the collective world economy off in the right direction for the new millenium, we had the dot com bubble. Similar to how the market is currently reacting to news on the artificial intelligence front and the benefits this revolutionary technology is purported to bring humanity, the markets kept going up and up and it seemed to everyone like the possibilities were truly limitless if we just put our minds to achieving our goals. This was a technology that fundamentally changed the way we consumed the news and the way we conducted business. Instead of relying on distribution of news through daily newspapers and nightly television news, these news companies could host websites on the internet where they could keep their readers informed on events as they happen in real time. Instead of investing in premium airline tickets to board jets that propel people faster than the speed of sound across the Atlantic Ocean to attend business meetings in places like London, companies could now invest in information technology and tap into existing telephone lines to transmit correspondence via data back and forth, alleviating the risks in unforeseen delays that inevitably accompanied physical travel. No matter how you looked at it, the speed of light was faster than the speed of sound.
The events of September 11, 2001 happened and the subsequent Patriot Act and imminent military campaigns to topple the terrorist-funding regime in Iraq permanently altered that can-do mindset. As far as I was from ground zero in Oklahoma, I could easily and vividly recall details of that day, details like where I was when I heard the news the World Trade Center was being attacked, for many years after. I started high school in 2003, and those imminent military campaigns became ongoing combat operations, starting with the invasion of Iraq. Those overseas combat operations had a human cost associated with their successful execution, and my hometown was one such community that was affected by soldiers killed in action doing their part in the armed forces. With the economy still reeling from the corrosive and radioactive effects of the tech bubble, the American people were subjected to increasingly aggressive security and surveillance measures in the name of fighting the global war on terrorism, and the American economy also charged with footing the bill for an expensive, extended foreign war. Look at the US Treasury yield curve from 2000 to 2025 to see how this actually played out over a quarter century.
I remember spending a lot of my free time in high school playing video games like Need for Speed: Underground and Gran Turismo 4. I gravitated towards racing games as a young boy would if he likes cars but didn’t have the means to have one of his own. I became more and more interested in cars because of the Gran Turismo franchise, a driving simulator published exclusively on the Sony PlayStation platform. The amount of time I spent in my childhood playing GT4 and learning about the effects of suspension’s camber and caster on a car’s handling, an engine’s bore and stroke and how they affect the engine’s performance, and how to correct oversteer and understeer behavior during cornering influenced me to want to pursue a career in mechanical engineering for a while. I made it through high school with average grades. Early 2007, just before I graduated, Steve Jobs shows off the Apple iPhone. Just after I graduated high school, the 2008 financial crisis was in full effect and prospects to reach that pie in the sky goal of becoming a mechanical engineer were taking a turn for the worse. It’s easy to get focused on the negative stuff, like unbridled (and in some cases extra-judicious) expansion of electronic surveillance and the fast rising cost of living, but at least we had our smartphones and this new website called Facebook to keep us distracted. I ended up enlisting in the US Air Force at the end of 2008.
While I won’t dive into my life after I left for basic military training in this post, I wanted to begin painting a backdrop that helps to explain why I tend to abandon hobbies before they become things I enjoy. Multiple global financial crises, multiple foreign wars fought and dragged on into perpetuity, multiple global health events, omnipresent and heightened security measures and increasing suspicion about everyone everywhere, and a dramatic increase in the cost of living make it difficult to commit my mental efforts to something not solely dedicated to helping me just stay afloat. I want to focus on why I hesitated doing something just for fun. But what is fun for me? What is meaningful to me? Must I always modify my hobbies, the things I really like to do, into something that becomes another source of income? I can sardonically answer these questions, but I’m more introspective than that. I want to know what is fun for me. I want to know what is meaningful to me. I want to know why I tend to abandon new hobbies before they become actual hobbies. Is it because I cannot immediately determine their financial benefits for me in the long run before I get started?
Until next time. Chop wood, carry water.
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