Forty One

Note: I wrote this item right around my birthday a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t post it at the time because I took some extended days to myself for a change. -KtE

Twenty years ago or so, I found myself at a crossroads in my life. Where was I going, what would I do with myself? The Wars in the Middle East were amid some of their worst times. I worried after I graduated high school at one point about whether I was going to get drafted to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I would have made a poor soldier, in all honesty. Probably for the best that didn’t happen.

The world was in the midst of sweeping indecision amid the shocks of conflict and tragedies still fresh wounds across the American landscape. I made it through Auburn and entered an economy that was falling apart. The generation I fall in – now Xennials, or the “Oregon Trail Generation” depending on which social scientist proscribes to the definition – has been plagued by some of the wildest events to happen in a 20-year time span. A younger me had no concept of a pandemic, of a globe in such great turmoil. A younger me thought for a second we might all come together and start solving our problems.

I am aggressively anti-nostalgic, but even now I look back and wonder who is this college Junior getting an education in Humanities amid a time when the world is moving toward the rule of technology.

I thought to myself then “be a Jack of All Trades, Kevin. You’ll never know where your skills will take you.” It was my belief in those days I could take control over my work life if I were flexible.

How did that work out? Mixed results, I’m afraid. Some good, some bad. I’ll say for those considering a job doing anything writing-related at the moment they do so at their own peril. Entering the publishing fray at any level under current conditions is not for the faint of heart.

Now I look back on the totality of events that have transpired – personally and globally – and wonder how in the world we’ve made it this far without destroying ourselves.

Ultimately I fear as the wounds from the American experience over the past two decades have started to truly fester as I watch the world unwind, and I am once again living through times where the whole of my own personal value is being broken down by the winds of change. I am to blame for everything on a personal level, but who can control economic forces, AI, a few companies dominating entire industries and a government truly unconcerned with the little guy. How do I take back control? How do any of us?

I know how to do a lot of time-consuming creative tasks, which are now being replaced by computers. The value of creation is being boiled down to zeroes and ones, processed in data centers to all people who aren’t as creative or don’t wish to spend their time having to use their imagination to generate absolute slop. Trend-chasing cartoon images, e-mails that strip all of the humanity out of communications, and videos of various lengths that make me want to pull my hair out for the repetitive scripts and visuals that don’t have anything to do with what a faceless speaker has to say – or if they do it is usually uncanny sarcasm.

All made for people who don’t truly value what the creative workforce out here has been doing for thousands of years, because AI is in their eyes generating good enough results, so long as it doesn’t cost.

So I’ve watched as the world has shifted under my feet, and changes in family and personal life (I wrote about this more extensively in Dad Time the other day) force my hand to try something, anything different than what life has been for the past two decades.

What does one do with a B.A. in English? Apparently not as much as one would have done two decades ago. It turns out in the meantime that priorities shifted on me before I had the opportunity to allow myself to change with them, and spent these past years chasing a dream that always seems deferred on others’ timelines. But that doesn’t stop me from getting into something where my skills remain useful.

Writing doesn’t just happen magically. Creation – even AI-based, as everyone is learning the hard way – comes with a cost. Much of my life, that creation in various ways came at the expense of relationships, of family, of time for breathing and being a normal human.

Journalists don’t get days off. The stories are still there waiting to be shared no matter what is immediately in front of the person who is writing them. News doesn’t care if I’ve slept enough, if I’m feeling ill for various reasons, whether I’ve been on vacation in over a decade, or anything other pursuits I might want to undertake. It is a cruel taskmaster, and the consumer doesn’t care about who is generating the content. They just want the content. Creatives to the consumer are typically seen more like the corporation and not the human, thus they believe it is OK to take and take and never have to give back. The creative suffers loss in the process in various ways – financial, emotional, physical come to mind – but then you try and explain this to the consumer? They don’t care. They ‘ll turn to someone else if you complain about the theft of our efforts.

The burnout is real. The toll is heavier than I could have imagined when I started down a career path as a journalist two decades ago, naively thinking that truth shall set us free. Facts and truth are not the same thing, it turns out.

It has come down to understanding that if I continue further down the trail without making any different changes in my life, the cost is going to catch up and consume what’s left of me. The sacrifice so far isn’t worth the price tag I pay in my personal life in the long run, as I have learned the hard way. But I’m not here to complain, or wallow in regret. I’m still pushing the rock up the hill, but maybe without trying to do it all in a single day.

So as I continue down the path of my life’s journey heading into a new spring, I know one thing for sure – change is in the air. The world within my own immediate orbit still turns despite my internal despair over how I have spent the most recent of my 41 years on this spinning rock. I can’t change any of the things that have already happened, but I am able to maneuver in new directions.