In 1993 I could have been involved in a terrible car accident. I was the second car in queue at a big intersection. When the light turned green, the car before me hurriedly crossed and cleared the intersection. I followed suit: it was one of those high-volume traffic spots in the city where you’re subtly (or not so subtly) encouraged to move quickly and not dawdle too much. The moment I cleared the intersection I heard the loudest screeching and banging behind me. It startled me so much I struggled to maintain control of my car. I looked in the rearview mirror and more or less realised what had happened: another car, coming from the road crossing the one I was on, didn’t stop at the red light, cut through the intersection at mad speed, and hit the car right behind me with such force as to push it against the external brick wall of a factory about 300 metres off the intersection.
I saw that in my rearview mirror. But it took me about a minute to fully process what had just happened. That’s when I had to stop at a petrol station nearby because I was shaking so much I couldn’t safely drive anymore. It could have been me, the thought kept echoing and rippling in my head for a good while. I don’t remember where I was going — it’s been so long — but I’m pretty sure I forgot where I was going right then and there on that almost-fateful late afternoon. For months thereafter the sound of an ambulance siren gave me chills and flashbacks.
I know that, in the grand scheme of things, going from 31 December of one year to 1 January of the following year is just a convention following a calendar established by someone a few centuries ago. Anyway, there have been years where this symbolic passage has reminded me of that near miss, 28 years ago. At times it’s not a perfect equivalence, because it’s like saying I nearly avoided a catastrophic year, when in fact 2021 did hit me rather forcefully. But it still remains like a shocking image in my rearview mirror, a mess I’m thankfully leaving behind.
Explaining why, in detail, is something that goes beyond the scope of a post on a blog. It’s something that ultimately becomes long-winded, uninteresting, and enters personal levels I don’t really feel like sharing with strangers on the Internet. As for what I can share, I’ll say that 2021 is starting to feel a lot like 2017. In 2017 I lost my father, rather unexpectedly, and that loss didn’t hit like a car — it hit like a bullet train. It destabilised me. It confused me. It crippled my creativity. It blocked me. And as I was starting to recover, here comes 2021 where I lose my mother, in a different way than my father, but again in an unexpected manner.
When one of your parents passes away, you grieve, but you grieve together with the remaining parent, who also helps take care of all the bureaucracy and ‘business’ related to someone’s death. When you’re an only child and the remaining parent passes away, the overwhelmingness of it all feels even heavier. Even though I wasn’t alone in facing this terrible event, and had the help and support of a few dear people, I still had to go through a self-discipline routine to focus and tell myself I needed to do whatever had to be done one thing at time, one thing at a time, because you feel the sky falling down, falling down.
You can’t stay on top of everything
The fundamental thing that 2021 made me painfully aware of is that — unless you live a very simple life, or your life is made simple by the constant help of others — you can’t stay on top of everything.
I have resisted this for years. For years I’ve told myself I can take care of everything my work as translator and localisation specialist throws at me; that I can stay up-to-date on so many things related to technology, photography and other several interests I have (either for personal or work-related reasons); that I can carry out my day-to-day duties in the household; that I can stay creative and cultivate my fiction and literary projects; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
In order to try to do all this, to serve this illusion, I’ve sacrificed hours of sleep, reconfigured my priorities on a daily basis to be malleable and versatile and adaptable. I’ve tried to do this smartly, not with that mindless relentlessness that sometimes overcomes you when you want to achieve a goal at all costs. The only thing I have truly achieved is getting this close to burnout. Or maybe I actually entered burnout territory for a while without realising it. I don’t know. But this — this really feels like the flashback I told you about at the beginning. This feels like a near miss where I’m watching the aftermath unfolding in my rearview mirror.
Age is a factor you can’t just ignore
There’s one aspect that especially baffles me in the way Internet and social media have impacted people’s behaviour. Today, I increasingly feel I’m interacting with fewer and fewer adults and more and more eternal adolescents. It’s like people have found this great, global, big toy in the Internet and related technologies, and don’t want to let it go because it gives them so many dopamine kicks; it gives them the illusion that they’re in full control of their lives and that they can stay on top of everything all the time; that they can hack the world and their own lives to fulfil a sense of forever-young-ness. It’s their own Matrix, their own blue pill.
But age is a factor you just can’t sweep under the rug because it’s not making you look cool. With age, the biggest thing you have to consider is the way you spend your time. Because sooner or later the thought will hit you, and hit you hard. Your time is finite, and when you stop and think of all the time you frittered away, you’ll tell yourself it felt like a good idea at the time, but that won’t really make the taste of regret fade away.
And here’s the thing: today, so many things are designed around us to keep us involved in this big global toy, in this time-wasting Matrix where a lot of people seem to live in a state of eternal adolescence, of forever-young-ness, of ‘it’s all a big exciting game’. Before you think I’m being a holier-than-thou Morpheus who tells Neo to ‘wake up’, know that I myself have fallen for this illusion for a relatively long time. And that it’s not just an illusion that touches on silly things and gamifies our lives only in the leisure department, but it also (and more dangerously) impacts our sense of productivity.
In other, simpler words: if you’re in your late forties you can’t expect to be productive and stay on top of everything like a twenty-something. You may be in good health, you may feel up to it, you may even manage to do it for a while, but the truth is it’s unhealthy. The whole culture around the idea of being a productivity rockstar, of being this relentless productivity machine fuelled by workaholism is simply destructive, and not even in the long run.
Another area where the age factor is overlooked is in the design of user interfaces. (You thought I couldn’t find a way to talk about user interfaces in this context, didn’t you?) I keep seeing this: user interface elements, targets, designs, paradigms that require users to have perfect vision, flawless reflexes, constant adaptability, and time to waste readjusting their workflows and relearning how to carry out the same stuff they were used to carrying out in an operating system, application, device, 2 or 3 iterations ago. Some designers keep making the same error I think Donald Norman talked about in his book The Design of Everyday Things — the mistake of thinking that their target users are like them. They’re not. Often, they’re people who just need to get things done without losing an entire morning trying to figure out how and why the application(s) they rely on for work have changed after the last update. Or they’re people who really need tooltips in an app’s interface in order to understand what that control with the obscure icon does; who really need obvious interface cues and affordances you’re desperately trying to spirit away because your application or environment doesn’t look clean, trendy, or minimalistic enough.
I’m not saying applications, interfaces, and operating systems shouldn’t change and evolve. Only that they should do so by actually taking into account that end users aren’t this homogeneous mass that moves in perfect sync with your fancy designs and redesigns. But the kind of approach to do things right by many different types of end user involves more work and a generally slower pace of development, which is a big no-no for the stupid breakneck pace technology wants to move — and wants us to move today. And this seamlessly brings me to my next point.
2021 left me weary again, tech-wise
I wanted to write more articles here in the past year. On several occasions life and work got in the way. But I’ve also realised that many of the articles I would have published would have ended up being rants about how disappointed and unenthusiastic I feel towards an increasing number of tech-related things.
Lately I was afraid I was losing my enthusiasm for technology in general, no matter what, but that’s not true. There are still things that excite me and pique my interest, so that’s a good self-check. It means that I’m not becoming a bitter curmudgeon after all (though I know I sound like one every now and then). But today everything seems to revolve around Big Tech, and that’s wearing me down. I’m tired of Big Companies having an increasingly deeper control of our lives, I’m tired of people stupidly letting them have it, tired of arguing that no, Apple are not the good guys you think they are, only maybe the lesser evil.
And speaking of Apple, I’m tired of arguing with people who will defend the company whatever stunt they pull with their products or designs. Tired of being considered the crazy one because I think a computer display should not have a fucking notch in the middle of the top bezel. Tired of being considered averse to change only because I dare point out that a new design in an application just does away with years of usability research and tried-and-true practices that used to make the application very intuitive and self-evident in use.
This of course doesn’t mean I’m going to stop talking about these subjects and these issues. Only that I won’t pay too much attention to people whose interest clearly isn’t to be open-mindedly engaged in a conversation, but to just waste my time. And time is getting ever so precious to me. It’s an age thing, one day you’ll understand.
New Year’s resolutions
I have none. Nothing specific. I just want to move at my own pace, not at the pace dictated by someone else, or by some vague notion of ideal lifestyle, or of how to be a rockstar of productivity. Have you looked at actual rockstars once they’re past their prime? Yeah, not a pretty picture, generally speaking.