I love to work while standing up. However, it would seem only partial attention tasks can be done while standing up. When I need to truly focus, I must recruit the attention that has gone into my body and take it back to the mind, and I will hunch like a gargoyle to do intellect intensive work.

...

I keep on reading Husserl and find myself surprised I can follow along such a dense text, I wish I had the book in print so that I can peruse at will, at the same time lamenting my fragmented reading habits because I have already a bunch of partially read texts which are important.

...

I've told my best friend I'm going to Mexico, it's confirmed except that when I tried buying the flight I saw they were charging me taxes as if I were a Spanish national flying to Mexico. It took me like 48 hours from the time my best friend told me about the wedding until I settled that there was no other option other than attending. Such loyalty will overcome any impediment. Gosh I love my friends so much.

...

V. initially told me I had three options for my birthday present: a trip, a session of acupuncture, or something else which I don't remember. I initially said acupuncture, but later on said I preferred the trip. The difficult truth is that I didn't want either (and the third option was so irrelevant that I forgot it). Some minutes ago she transferred some money and said it was my birthday gift. I sense she is realizing I'm trying to keep distance.

In the group of friends we share in common there's a recent joiner, an attractive-ish woman around my age, single, and practices yoga. I don't know if I like her, but it would be common sense to get to know her better to figure that out. However, I keep myself at distance knowing this would be hurtful for V, and I settled on myself not to date people in the circle we share in common. This is a concession I do willingly.

I'm reminded of my girlfriend at uni (now one of my best friends). We broke up but she'd still come to me for sex. After months of this happening, I told her: you can't come and we can't have sex anymore. Why? she asked, have you met someone? On the contrary, I replied, I haven't met anyone because I have no need for it. I need to stop seeing you so that my need for intimacy is greater than my aversion to people.

I think I can speak with V. clearly about this. It's not healthy for either of us to act as friends while she is infatuated. We've been stuck in the same pattern for a year. It's time for it to hurt enough so that we may go find what we seek in someone else.

...

Seeing how fast AI is advancing and how it's transforming roles in my own workplace, I know I'm seeing the future in realtime. Ten years from now, the world will have changed more than it has changed in the past 30. We will do much more with less, for the good and the bad. We will look back at this time and wonder how we would afford so much the luxury of human labor (by paying miserly wages, I would retort).

What I do not know yet is how we will earn our living. Buckminster Fuller used to say the most important thing for this era would be getting rid of the notion that we must "earn or living", those of us whose skills will be eaten by AI will find ourselves in a terrible existential crises, where our identity has been displaced by an intelligence greater than ours.

I extrapolate from my own experience as a designer who suffered a prolonged creative block, I had to re-evaluate my identity without creative abilities and it was a mind bending experience. A large part of humanity will go through this at the same time, and I think there will be a backlash, even if we are paid to not work.

I recall an issue of National Geographic I read decades ago. The article was about a town in Spain in which the inhabitants were suing the government because they wanted to reopen the mines that had sustained them for decades. The problem was not that they didn't have money, they were given a stipend equal to their salary for the rest of their lives, for doing nothing yet they wanted to work. Work is a huge part of our identities, we must shed this baggage because—if we are not made redundant, our activities will look nothing like what we are doing right now.

It's utterly mind boggling.

...

I've long held the hunch (not belief) that aliens are observing us without revealing themselves. Some people call this the zoo hypothesis. My theory as to why is that they know revealing themselves would collapse our civilization. It's been done before and it's gone very wrong for civilizations that have not developed enough.

What would be some markers that indicate a civilization, alien or human, has advanced enough to be contacted? I theorize the absence of war is one of them. We would have to learn how to be in peace between our nations before we learn how to be at peace with our neighbors.

I also believe a mature civilization has found a stability point in its growth. Like a human who stops physically growing after reaching maturity, a planet remains more or less static in its number of inhabitants and the land it uses for its sustenance. A growing population is a sign of ongoing development.

The third pre-requisite for alien contact would be the certainty that such contact would not destroy us, because it's unlikely there is just one alien race out there looking at us, there ought to be a network of alien races cooperating and they must have an amount of knowledge that truly would make us feel like ants. We need a local (AI) intelligence to manage and understand what the alien network knows and transmit that to us in a non-threatening way.

The human race is gestating a gift for the universe, but we don't know yet what it is. I sometimes wonder, what would they think of us? we have no reference point. We don't know if we are too sentimental, or too rational, or too violent, or too self-interested, becase we don't know of any other race rather than ours.