LIVING TO WATCH LIFE It occours to me that these days that most of my recreational time is spent on some sort of observational task. At home, constant stream of TV documentaries, old documents, news, and Gopher phlogs, even Usenet where my active participation in discussions is dwarfed by passive observation. Away from home my travel goals are all about travelling to look at things, lately mostly water reservoirs. None of this is particularly unusual, lots of people are into these general passtimes, but there's a certain circular pointlessness to living effectively for the sake to watching other things live. It also seems pretty out of step with the product of my 'work', which I supposedly do to support this passtime. I mean right now I basically have plenty of money to indulge in all these observational activities. In comparative terms I'm quite poor, but I'm not entirely sure what more I'd do with an average income. At the same time I'm quite keen to pursue much greater income just for more physical security, to make sure that failure to earn money later on doesn't cause me to lose my current lifestyle. Yet the irony of all this is that if the sole point of this lifestyle is observation, and it's certainly not socalisation or children because I don't enjoy either of those, then it's actually damn cheap. Although petrol for my drives and my new shipping container for my darkroom (I'd class photography as one of my observational activities) certainly add up somewhat significantly, at under $5/month for me the internet basically allows an unlimited amount of observational content for very little money at all. Moreover, plenty of people go backpacking and the like, touring around for observation without generating any significant income. Then they go on to a normal boring job, so they can raise children and hang out with their friends. I'm sort-of following the boring end of their lives without any actual attraction to the recreational activities they take from them. At heart what I'm struggling with here is the idea that I'm trying to emulate a lifestyle that allows me privaleges which I don't want to use. The only part of those lives that I really envy is sexual. My dislike of socalisation (at least besides internet monologues like this), plus disliking long-term close proximity to people, is certainly more of an obstacle for that one than finances. The physical manifestation of this realisation would probably be me buying a second-hand vehicle set up as a camper and go off touring the country. That's not a new thought, my first car was going to be a van except all the ones that I could find under my $6K limit at the time were rust buckets worn out my tradesmen (I discovered later that ex-fleet vans sold at car auctions are a better source than Ebay), so the Jag was actually the cheap option (cost of ownership (the yearly major breakdown) aside). Over the last few years I've been going back to that concept of a purely observational life, where I give up on, or at least pause, the quest for lots of money. In theory it makes sense if my only real aspiration is to enjoy observing the world, but I also suspect that this is really a bit of a false goal. Increasingly I wonder whether this unrealised pursuit of observational recreation time is really more of a goal in itself. I'm actually perfectly happy as I am, and even fulfillment of my sexual frustrations would likely be counterbalanced by new social annoyances. As I mentioned in 2022-03-21Are_Sights_worth_Seeing.txt (which is somehow a broken link at the moment, damn!), observing the world can easily seem pointless to me as well. But as a false aim it forces me through the frustrating points of other activities I enjoy with electronics and computers, doing them for business purposes. So really it's just a pleasent objective through which I force myself to do other things. It's the getting there that's half the fun. Anyway I've used the narrative of this post to justify my running into work time and not stopping like I do every other time I try and fail to complete one of these posts in a weekday morning. Now that I've reached that conclusion, I guess I'd better do something productive. - The Free Thinker.