Walked: 0 Km (79.3km total, not pilgrimage walking)
The day was spent in leisure with Françoise. Idleness after the long walk caused a strange surge in creative restlessness. I'll begin work tomorrow and see if the feeling is smoke or substance.
During lunch I overhead a conversation at the next table. In a town of 1,000 people in rural Spain, three women and a man were discussing if robots would put us out of jobs. Then the topic changed to overpopulation, then to environmental catastrophe, then to greedy rich people keeping us in abject misery, then to tech corporations stealing all our data.
I ground my teeth not because I differed in opinion, but because I could see the game they were playing was "let's try to find out what sucks the most about the world we currently live in". Offering solutions or hope is misreading the rules of the game. It would be walking into a stage and telling the actors that they are not the people they are pretending to be. If they truly believed everything they said, they would either violently revolt against the status quo, or commit suicide. Life as they paint it would not be worth living.
Why people play these games? I truly don't understand. I've asked "well, that's terrible. Something should be done about it, where should we start?", but they wave their hands and blame politicians.
--"Ok, so nothing can be done, so is this like discussing team sports?"
--"Oh, it's not the same, we're dealing with much more important matters"
--"So, if it's important, shouldn't we take matters into our own hands?"
--"We're powerless, and besides, we're already fucked"
--"So, if this were the cold war, it would be like the nuclear warheads were already in the air"
--"Yes, exactly"
--"So what are we doing here chatting about the missiles in the air. Shouldn't we be doing something meaningful with whatever time we have left?"