Recently my wife picked me up a Nintendo Wii at a thrift store.
I plugged the component cables into the back of my TV and turned it on. When I was met with the Wii homepage, I got hit with a wave of nostalgia. I was incredibly excited to boot up Super Mario Galaxy and relive my childhood. The game is dripping with charm and innovation on every single level. I loved this game as a kid and I still very much do.
So there I am, being productive, getting work done, listening to music.
I like to listen to rock while I'm working at a computer. YouTube Music has a feature that will shuffle songs from different up and coming artists that it thinks you will like. As I'm working this realization kind of dawns on me. The song that I've been listening to for the past minute is A.I. generated.
I mean, I hadn't even realized it at first, I was just focusing on my work. But then the lyrics didn't make any sense. And then I realized the singers voice sounded all static-y. And then I looked at the album "art" and it was rife with AI artifacts.
When I was in elementary school my mom took us to the pool.
It was a typical summer day, and the pool was packed with people. I guess we weren't the only ones with the brilliant idea of jumping into a giant tub of cold water to beat the heat.
I have fond memories of this pool. I would frequent the twirly tube slide, float through the lazy river, and attempt flips off of the diving board. This particular trip, however, provided me with a different kind of memory. One of great panic and fear.
Yesterday my wife and I started watching a new show called Mom. The story focuses on Anna Faris' character and her stuggles to be a good mother. Ofter she blames her bad parenting on her own mother, who has just recently come back into her life.
The show is, at the end of the day, a sitcom. It does tackle themes of addiciton, drug use, and becoming a better parent, but it does so in a comedic, sitcom-y way. Sometimes this works really well, but other times it falls flat.
Recently I've been feeling the tiring effects of burnout.
Whenever something like this happens I like to drown out my feelings with noise, usually in the form of YouTube videos. I have a sneaking suspicion that that is more common of a response than any one of us would care to admit. It's uncomfortable to marinate in negative feelings and really get to the root of why they're there in the first place. The much easier path is to put the entertainment box in front of our face so that we can forget, even for a moment, that they exist.