My last few runs have been painful. I’m not sure how to describe the pain – it’s a burning tightness type of pain. I’ve felt a similar pain at the beginning of runs, but that’s usually just my body getting warmed up and stretching out. That pain usually goes away between half-a-mile and a mile into the run. This is different because this sets in a little later in the run. When it does, I can feel my body adjusting my stride – shortening it. Sometimes, I can feel my body trying to adjust how my foot is landing and I can feel myself beginning to run more on the balls of my feet as though I’m tip-toeing. As I run, I can’t help but to mentally analyze what’s going on. Unfortunately, the more I think about it, the worse it gets and the more awkward it feels.
I’m not sure what happened or changed. I’m taking fewer cross-city walks which means I’m doing fewer hills. It’s been damp lately which means the roads have been slicker. I’ve had a number of recent runs where I’ve had to adjust my stride to avoid tripping over dogs and I had one where I almost wiped out because I had to run in some muddy grass when some walkers wouldn’t make room.
This could easily be a metaphor for life… everything is going well and then something comes along and breaks your stride. It might take days, weeks, months to figure it out and get back to normal. There’s a good chance you’ll never figure it out. This might be one of those things where some time off would help or where I’ll have to practice not overthinking things and letting go.
I tried to look up how to fix a broken stride. My browser wasn’t cooperating. At least once a week, the browser I use, Firefox, seems to stop working. By stop working I mean I type something in to the search bar, it looks like it’s searching, but it stops and doesn’t return any results – it’s just the same new tab I had recently opened. The only fix for this seems to be to close the browser and open a new one, or restart the computer entirely. Neither of those options seem like great solutions. I’m pretty certain it’s not a hardware/computer issue because it’s a new machine. I’m pretty sure it’s not an out of date software issue because I have plenty of mornings when I wake up to a rebooted PC and a slew of “recovered” documents. No, if I had to guess, I’m pretty sure it’s an “the internet has turned to garbage” issue. In this respect, it feels as though fewer and fewer things seem to work the way we expect them to.
I haven’t slept very well these past few nights. Two nights ago, I tried to go to bed early. I woke up at 11:00, 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:30, 5:00, and finally 7:00. The 2am wake up was because the guy looking after my upstairs neighbor’s dog came home and stomped around for a solid fifteen minutes. If I had to guess, he was breaking in a new pair of lead boots. Last night, I woke fewer times, but still far more often than I would have liked. At around 2am, Alexa said “I’m having trouble connecting to your internet.” Me too Alexa, me too. I’m not even sure why I have Alexa plugged in – I don’t use it. Maybe I like the security of knowing that I have yet another device listening in on me – you know, in case there’s trouble or I need help. In such dire circumstance as an ax murderer breaking in, Alexa can record my demise while also recommending that I might want to put underwear on an auto-purchase subscription “would I like her to do that for me?”
A recent scientific study has demonstrated that the internet is actually getting worse. SEO and spam sites have clogged up search results. I know when I try to use Amazon, I struggle to find what I’m looking for. Quite often the same product, or something very similar, is being sold at dozens of seller sites and it’s difficult to know which is legit or good or reliable. There used to be a time when the reviews were real reviews – now, it’s all garbage and spam. Google has gotten to be the same way. Search for something as simple as how to change the time on your 2017 Honda Accord and the top ten results are videos on why you should buy a Honda Accord, why clocks are good, how to make over $100k using your Honda Accord… eventually in the second page of results, there will be a video related to changing the clock, but it’s ten minutes long and the first five minutes are about how to open the door and where the key goes.
This is when I say welcome to late-stage capitalism. Everything’s for sale. Everything can be monetized. Nothing is real. AI is only making it worse – mostly because AI, like influencers, seems to lack ethics and guardrails. With AI, everything is for sale even if the rightful owner isn’t aware of it. The New York Times has recently sued ChatGPT over copyright infringement – it’s using their material to train AI models. Even more recently AI has been used to create fake picture of Taylor Swift to sell products, and now Twitter is being flooded with AI generated pron of Swift. It would be easy to blame tech for all of this, but even the old guard has gotten in on the game of trying to make a buck anyway you can. That same venerated newspaper, the NYT is guilty of pumping plenty of clickbait articles about what products influencers love. Who knows, maybe the two groups (generative AI and the charlatan TikTok tastemakers) will go head-to-head in some mutually destructive cage match. Even in my own little world, I’m seeing a lot more web traffic than I’ve ever seen, and I can only assume it’s some AI program ripping me off to produce content for some high school English paper on the paradox of wanting to be seen and also wanting to remain anonymous while trying to get over a breakup.
If the end of times seems near, (or if I just seem soured on everything) it might be because one group of billionaires is trying to build their own town here in northern California, while another billionaire is cruising around on a $500m yacht that has a $75m support yacht, while another billionaire has bought 1,600 acres in Hawaii in order to build an underground bunker. These people have unleashed all of this on us. They control systems and platforms that deliver information to us, and so long as they can monetize clicks and views to sell ads (using real or fake celebrities) they seem to have little interest in truth, accuracy, diligence, or decency.
In these cranky moods – when my stride is jacked up, the internet is broken, and nothing is what it seems, I tend to want to pull the plug and drop out, or at least find the reset button.