Author Archives: Joe

FOMO and FOHMO

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As always, late to the picnic, but I recently encountered the acronymn FOMO. It’s not a new type of washing powder, but short for Fear Of Missing Out.  It’s defined in Wikipedia as :

Fear of missing out or FoMO is “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent”. This social angst is characterized by “a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing”.

Some commentators and researchers have laid the blame for FOMO firmly at the door of social media – http://time.com/4358140/overcome-fomo/ – and I think that they’re probably spot on the money. I know from my own experiences that it’s easy to portray a totally different lifestyle on Facebook than actually happens.  One gets to be able to interpret the status posts you sometimes see : “Another Saturday evening partying hard.” translates to “After watching Strictly I went out but couldn’t get in any clubs. I ended up drowning my sorrows sitting on the kerb outside the cheap off-license”

I’ve been lucky – I think I’ve a bunch of friends on facebook who put over quite an accurate view of the world they inhabit.  Maybe they’re all as ‘stay at home’ as I am, or maybe they’re mature enough to not have to post every aspect of their lives online to try and create envy.

It started me thinking about whether a similar phenomenon existed when I was a teenager and a young adult, and I THINK that it probably did.

It was the Monday morning debrief, when you got together with friends and colleagues and actually talked about the weekend just gone.

It was the stories you told when you met friends about what you did the last time you were out without them – often exaggerated, frequently for comic effect, occasionally to big yourself up.  The concept of ‘what happens in Vegas (or more likely Skegness) stays in Vegas was not stated; discretion (at least amongst my friends) seemed to be expected.

I think it’s safe to say that FOMO doesn’t bother me anymore; I think it did once upon a time, and even now there are the occasional times when I see a social media post and think ‘You could have invited me’ or ‘I wish I’d been there’. I have seen posts where people are doing something of a ‘party hop’ to ensure that they get to multiple events that are taking place at the same time – definitely the ultimate in FOMO generated behaviour!

No, I think as an older man I’ve noticed a new source of angst in recent years, but one that I think I can keep under control.  And it’s probably as old as the hills, in one form or another – FOHMO.

Fear Of Having Missed Out – that feeling you get when you see younger folks that you know taking part in social activities that are now past you due to your age, or that you’d have loved to have done when you were that age but that didn’t actually exist!  I think it’s related to the things that lead to mid-life crises, which are never good to have.

FOMO and FOHMO are both polite ways of saying ‘envy’ – the difference is that FOHMO is you being envious of things and situations you can never have; FOMO has within it the possibility that by keeping in touch, keeping watching the statuses, hopping from event to event you can become one of the ‘in crowd’, the social elite of your world.  FOHMO has within it the past tense; it’s gone, that’s it. You can break yourself against it but the bottom line is that if you suffer from FOHMO you’re on a hiding to nothing as you’re basically railing against lost time – and hence your age.

My name is Joe; I’m an occasional sufferer from FOHMO; I hope to soon grow out of it!

The girl with the parasol

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I’m a bit of a film buff – probably not as much as I once was but I love old films, and unsurprisingly Citizen Kane is up there in my list of favourites.

There’s a scene in there which I’ve always loved – it’s between the reporter researching the life of Charles Foster Kane and Mr Bernstein, one of Kane’s business colleagues. Of much more importance than the sparse information that Bernstein gives about Kane, is the following monologue:

“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

I used this as the start of a sermon recently (I’m a lay Reader in the Church of England – you might like to take a look  here…) about the importance of memory.  I’m often staggered by the way in which tiny incidents seem to stick in our minds – I’m one of these folks who can barely remember my own phone number, but a tiny event from 40 years ago will often spring in to my thoughts as if it had happened 5 minutes ago.  Maybe it’s the onset of dementia – I don’t know.  But I expect ALL of us have our own ‘girl with the parasol’ –  a person that may have engaged us for but a few moments but that we remember for decades afterwards with such strong memories that they can generate powerful emotions.

I wonder whether these moments are some sort of pivot point in our lives? A point at which we came to a significant fork in the path and had a split second to make a decision. And somehow, our sub-conscious mind, or God’s grace, or the collective unconscious of the world puts a marker in the page of our lives and says ‘Well, you might not have realised it, but THIS moment was very significant”

Would Bernstein’s life have been different had he somehow managed to leap back to shore and catch up with the girl? Could he have come back at the same time over several days to see whether she showed up again? Or does that way lead to obsession?

Or when we have these moments, are we getting some sort of insight in to how important this person would have been to us had a different path been taken prior to that split second?

I have no idea. Maybe our desire for control over our lives stretched backwards in time as well.  Perhaps we look through our life and try to spot those moments when our future would be defined by a few seconds of at the time apparently chance and subtle events. Science Fiction writers are keen to take us to those BIG moments in time and say ‘What if…’ – What if Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt (take a look at Stephen King’s 11/22/63 as an interesting take on this idea) or if Hitler had not invaded Russia? I guess that we can easily see that such events might have a massive impact across the world and on lives, but what about the ‘small stuff’?

I think that it might be the small stuff of our lives – things like the meetings and near misses indicated by our ‘girl with the parasol’ moments – that are often the most influential. Like steering a massive container ship, a small tweak might not seem like much when it happens, but 40 years later a whole life pattern has been changed.

Maybe when we remember those split seconds, we’re getting to see the highlights of our journey.

Just don’t get any ideas about building time machines and fixing things differently – we don’t know where we’ll end up!

 

 

Hope springs eternal…

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One of my favourite films is ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. There are a number of reasons for this – one is that I’m a big fan of the novella it’s based on – ‘Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption’ by Stephen King.

The story was originally published in a book of 4 stories called ‘Different Seasons’. Each story had a subtitle based on a season.  If you’re interested, the other stories were ‘Apt Pupil’ – subtitled ‘Summer of Corruption’, ‘The Body’ – eventually filmed as ‘Stand By Me’, with the subtitle ‘Fall from Innocence’ and the final story was ‘the Breathing Method’, subtitled ‘A Winter’s Tale.

And ‘Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption’?  That was the story for spring, with the subtitle ‘Hope Springs Eternal’.  And that is another reason why I love this film – because it is about hope in a major way. Indeed, one of my favourite quotations about hope comes from this film:

“hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”

I’m a Christian, and in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, there’s the lovely line ‘These three remain; faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.’.  Well, I sometimes beg to disagree with Paul – sometimes I think the greatest thing we can have is hope, especially in times like the ones we’re living through right now.

This is the closest thing you’ll get from me to a comment about the Paris terror attacks.  I’m not a soldier, not an intelligence operative, policeman, counter-insurgency specialist or witness. Anything I say about the attacks would be second hand – gleaned from mainstream or social media – and I have no answers.

I want to comment more about the reaction of people; I think it was barely 24 hours after the attacks when someone pointed me at a video someone had put together as to why the whole thing was somehow related to the Illuminati and the Knights Templars. (King Phillip IV of France suppressed the Templars – to whom he owed money – on Friday 13th October 1307)  As Saturday unfolded, I was regaled with ‘the truth’ from all and sundry on the wilder regions of social media – it was an inside job, it was the Jews / CIA / NSA / Boy Scouts (one of those was made up…), it was fault of the refugees in Calais, like Charlie Hebdot the attacks were stage managed (I assume the dead bodies are all some sort of dummies, or is the french government now slaughtering it’s own people?) There’s also the expected reaction from the bigots of ‘Throw out all the refugees and close the borders’, which is interestingly counterpointed by the conspiracy theorists with ‘Ahhh…the EU WANTS the refugees coming in to allow them to blame them for terrorist attacks and hence bring in more totalitarian measures…’  Oh, and it’s all been done to start WW3.

My take on this whole thing right now is that people are dead – and this week it’s been Beirut and Baghdad as well (whether those attacks were part of the same conspiracy or not I don’t know)  – and that the rest of us need to have some sort of hope that things will get better.  Does the whole conspiracy thing – with it’s endless proselytizing of unproveable ‘truths’ – give hope to anyone? I don’t think it does.  I’ve written on this blog before about this issue – 3 years ago – and it’s sad that nothing changes – here’s the previous posts, and I don’t intend to re-hash my thinking….

Oops Apocalypse – or get a fricking grip
Whoops! No Apocalypse!
Seven of Nine and the Illuminati

I think that it causes despair. I think the active conspiracy theorists are at best overly imaginative or suffering from problems with fact finding and elucidating cause and effect. At worst they’re just plain evil, and a major problem.  There are undoubtedly some conspiracies around – but sometimes, most of the time, Occam’s Razor Rules.

A friend put it well today “the thoughts and attitudes of people that I like and love even more scarey than the awful things that are happening in the world“.  When folks you regard as good, intelligent people start spouting this crap, or start becoming bigoted fascists, or start losing their common humanity – what do you do?

On Facebook today I posted:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” – Fred Rogers

Today is a day to be a helper for humanity. Be compassionate, hug your friends, bury a few grudges, share food with family, pray, meditate, kill your hate.

Be good to yourself. I’m engaging with the world for a while as social media is going to be full of anger, hate, conspiracy theories and bigots, and I just don’t need that right now.

Peace.

I think I should have added…be a hoper. Keep that good thing alive. Don’t succumb to despair.

This morning as I pondered this stuff, I looked out of my study window and to my great pleasure saw a rainbow arcing across the sky.  That was a hopeful sign.

 

I think I’m officially decrepit…

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The other evening I dropped in to the local Asda on the way home from the office in order to purchase the stuff that I was advised at my ‘Well Man’ appointment this morning to avoid; bread, danish pastries, sausage rolls…the stuff that makes life life and not existence…

Anyway, there is a problem with the way in which shelves in the fridge are filled up; they’re so tightly stuffed that it’s almost impossible to get things out. Whether this is a genuine problem with the shelving process or whether it’s a further symptom of my inability to cope with the modern world, I have no idea, but for whatever reason I decided that I could extract a a pack of Enchiladas one handed.

I realised that this was an error of judgment on my part when I managed to extract the Mexican fast food goodness…and break the front of the shelf off as well. I decided that two hands would be required to put the store back together before I was ejected for vandalism, and as I was putting my basket down to wrestle the 4 foot shelf facing back in to position, a young woman took the end of the shelf fitting that I wasn’t holding and started to help me put it back on the shelf.

Between us we managed to get the shelf re-assembled, with a little banter and chat. I thanked her profusely and she said ‘Well, it looked like you needed some help with it….’

There you have it; I’m 54 years old, a geek, and being labelled as unable to re-assemble a plastic supermarket shelf by a woman half my age.  At least she didn’t add ‘Things get more difficult as you get older, don’t they….’  I think I’m on the down hill slope to dusty death.

I encountered her a couple more times whilst I shopped, and whilst we acknowledged each other she didn’t need to check that I was able to manage the basket…

I have since decided to rescue my dented self-image by thinking that she may have been flirting with me. However, the sensible part of my brain suggests that that WOULD be the sign that I was losing it, and having delusions….

Now where’s my Werther’s Originals…

Michael Meacher – another of the old school leaves us

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I was sad today to hear of the death of Michael Meacher, left wing Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton. He was one of the last of the ‘old school’ Labour politicians who showed true Socialist conviction, having been first elected in 1970 and serving under Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and Tony Blair, and was once even suggested as a possible Labour Leader.

I remember Neil Kinnock referring to Mr Meacher as ‘Tony Benn’s Vicar on Earth’, such was the latter’s support for the left wing firebrand. He was also a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn, being one of the Labour MPs who nominated and supported JC at the start of his campaign to become leader of the Labour Party.

That he died so soon after the election of a party Leader that he admired and supported wholeheartedly is a great and sad irony, but it isn’t the only irony around the timing of his death…

In late 1985, the BBC broadcast one of the finest thrillers they ever produced ‘Edge of Darkness’.  If you’ve never seen it, treat yourself and try and find it online or on a DVD – well worth 6 hours of anyone’s life, and still astonishingly relevant.  In it, a detective investigates the death of his daughter, murdered when she finds out that Plutonium is being stockpiled illegally in an underground facility in Yorkshire owned by a massive US energy company.

Meacher plays himself at a political meeting, speaking on environmental issues. And I’m sure he’d appreciate the irony of his death on the day on which the British Government allowed a foreign power to take a substantial degree of control over parts of our nuclear industry…

 

 

Mid-life crisis? Don’t mind if I DON’T…

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I’ve recently concluded that I couldn’t handle a mid-life crisis.

midlife-crisis

Apart from the fact that I would have had to have had an arithmetically accurate mid-life crisis about 14 years ago, I just don’t think I’m cut out for the role and nor do I want to be, if this list of behaviours is anything to go by.

The NHS describes a mid-life crisis as follows:

“A male midlife crisis can happen when men think they’ve reached life’s halfway stage. Anxieties over what they’ve accomplished so far, either in their job or personal life, can cause a period of depression. In men, this usually happens between the ages of 35 and 50, and can last for up to 10 years.”

So in principle I still have time – I could start at 50 and not finish to 60!

To be serious, I probably had a mid-life breakdown in the late 1990s, picked myself up in late ’98 and then spent the last 15 years or so just getting on with life.  I have to admit that I’ve done a few of the things on that list, and would have liked to have done a few more, but I have to say that having gotten to 54 I’m delighted to still be alive, with a job, with a roof over my head and with most bits in working order.  I’ve occasionally joked that I’ve been kept on the straight and narrow through life by debt, a sense of duty, lack of imagination and laziness….but seriously, I actually LIKE how I’m turning out as I’m getting older!

I’m something of a fan of Jung, and he had wise words on the subject of aging:

“Jung’s view was that the second half of life must not be governed by the principles of the first half of life; that the afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning, only its meaning and purpose are different.”

This has been a really useful approach for me to take – I have to say that from about 45 onwards I’ve been more inward looking.  There have been odd wobbles – I think like most people I sort of think that I might be missing out on more exciting stuff ‘out there’ (I’ve another blog post on that particular topic brewing, so watch this space) – but when I sit down and think about stuff, I actually realise that I am quite content. I’d like a bit more money, and a bit more security….but mainly so I can carry on peering inwards.

Well…peering inwards…and outwards.  I’m a trainee reader with the Church of England, and it struck me that I might actually be having my crisis after all. As Christians we’re told to cast our cares on Jesus – and maybe that’s what I’ve been doing.

 

Ideas mean shit…it’s doing it that counts!

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product-ideas

In my last post I described how my mortality had snuck up on me and dumped a rather large poo in my living room in the fact that in 15 years time I’ll be pushing 70.  See here for my thoughts…they have some relevance to the origin of this post.

I carried on thinking about 30 years ago – and back in 1985 I’d just moved to Sheffield and was living a mile from where I live now; I was doing a lot of writing for various computing and electronics magazines – this was pre-Internet, and pre-Email for most of us. Writing and publishing articles involved wordprocessing the copy, adding a separate sheet with drawings or diagrams on – if you needed photos you had to get 10×8 prints, or slides, and then sending the whole lot off to the magazine editor (or if things were desperate, you faxed them…)  Some magazines were quite advanced – you could actually send stuff on floppy disc or cassette tape as well!

I just had a look through the magaines piled up here at Pritchard Towers and realised I was producing about 1 or 2 pieces a month for different magazines.  And those were the days when you got paid for writing…soemtiems the editors would ring up and say ‘Can you do 1000 words on xxxxx’ or ‘There’s a box going to be delivered to you tomorrow – it’s a Bambleweeny 350-Z with extra Zoinks – can you write me a review by Friday?’

I didn’t quite imagine my editors with bottles of scotch in the desk drawer, but it sometimes felt like that.   The odd thing was I never seemed to be short of ideas. I occasionally worried about not having ideas, but was usually able to deliver on demand.

As well as writing articles, I also did books, and by the mid-1980s I was producing a technical book at the rate of about 1 every 10 months or so – these were practical programming guides, and I was also writing short stories ‘for fun’. The ideas that I couldn’t use immediately got written down for future use.  And so it is that I have a yellow manilla folder in my filing cabinet drawer, dated 1986, that contains drawings, notes, chapter list, book outline, clippings, some photographs, photocopies…everything I need to get started on a book project.  And yet…despite the interest I had in that idea…I never got it started.

I must have opened that file up every 6 months for the last 29 years. I have seen 3 other books published by other authors with reasonable success that skirted the topic of my idea, and I watch the publisher’s lists for similar stuff. If I see anything, I get worried…but I still haven’t felt motivated enough in all those years to do something with this project.  I think that I’d like to do it, but clearly something stops me.

And it’s not just this one off; I have a little pile of half finished good ideas and at least one idea that had I taken it to market at the time I had it would have made me a fair amount of money.  Ideas have definitely never been a problem for me. It’s actually doing something with them….

I hope that my recent ponderings on my mortality will kick me up the arse and get me motivated!

Where did all the time go?

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clock The other day I was sitting, drinking tea, thinking of nothing in particular when the following thought entered in to my head.

“In less than 20 years you’ll be 70 years old.  When did THAT happen?”

I guess the unspoken ‘other shoe dropping’ of that thought was ‘…assuming you live that long.’.  The thought that despite my best efforts the army of old age has put a small tank on my lawn is quite sobering.

I expect to live to my early 80s; I’m taking in to account my parents age at death, my own lifestyle, etc. Various online tests suggest that I’m right but that there’s a chance I might push it out to my 90s or so with more exercise and less pies. Unfortunately the usual vices of drinking, smoking, fast cars and loose women are not available for me to give up, so it looks like asceticism is going to be my way forward….

So…sobering thought…assuming I don’t get hit by a bus, have a stroke, get cancer, fall prey to all the ways that the modern age has of nailing you, I might have just under 30 years left.

Thirty years ago I had left my first job and was freelancing / writing full time. I was a successful magazine and book author, had moved from Nottingham up to Sheffield, and in those wonderful pre-Internet days had hobbies that were nothing to do with computers, although I was writing articles for the home computer magazines.  Looking at my radio listening logs, I did a lot of short wave radio listening in ’85 – something I rarely do now.  I also ‘tinkered’ with electronics and general ‘stuff’ more than I do now, and I’m only in touch with 2-3 people from back then…

I don’t recollect having any plans for my future then – which perhaps explains why I’ve rather ‘meandered’ through life and how I’ve ended up where I am now.  I was really happy doing a bit of freelance programming and teaching but mainly writing – it was the one time in my life that I earned most of my income through writing – good times.  It was also just before I started working for a few places where I met people I AM still in touch with…albeit with gaps in contact!

So…sobering…some insights, which I’ll probably be blogging on, and something of a kick up the arse.  I’m on the downhill slope, and I’m still not sure how I got here…

 

 

The Ring of Gyges and the cat’s backside

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ring1

The Ring of Gyges is a magic ring discussed by the philosopher Plato in his Republic. It granted the wearer the gift of invisibility, and was used by plato to explore what would happen if an intelligent,  moral and upstanding man were to be given this gift.  After all, he’d be able to go anywhere, do anything, with the absolute minimum risk of being caught. Would such a man be able to stay morally and ethically upstanding, or would his morality stretch as far as “I can’t get caught, therefore it’s party time!”

In other words – would such a ‘gift’ corrupt even the most upright citizen.

Sounds familiar? Well, HG Wells’ ‘The Invisible Man’ certainly features this idea, and it’s been suggested that the ‘One Ring’ in The Lord of the Rings is a more forceful version of the Ring of Gyges – one that actually corrupts the wearer rather than allows the wearer to corrupt themselves.

I started writing this post – OK, I wrote the title – about 3 years ago, back in 2012, just before I fell away from blogging. Back then I was pondering whether the relative anonymity of the Internet was acting like a Ring of Gyges that was available to anyone online who chose to operate behind an anonymous account or an alias. At the time I was still recovering from spending a few years as Admin of an online forum with a few folks wearing such rings and acting like idiots.

What’s surprised me in the meantime – and what triggered me to finally write this post – was that it’s now possible to see people being total arses under their own names, often with a photo visible! Online anonymity in some places has fallen by the wayside, and I have to say that I expected people to behave more like they would in ‘face to face’ discussions.  It’s a sobering experience to look through the posts in discussion threads on Facebook – where real names are at least in principle required – and see just how belligerent, aggressive, and abusive some people are, even under their own names.

I have to say that I’ve been surprised. I’ve always used my own name when publishing online; part of this is that ‘once a writer, always a writer’, and I just love seeing my name out there, but there’s also an element of removing the temptation to behave badly!

So…is the Ring of Gyges an outmoded concept? Are people just more shameless? Do folks just not care when they’re being badly behaved and everyone can ‘name and shame’ them for it?

Or, is it what might be called the ‘cat’s backside’ syndrome? Just after we adopted our cat Jarvis he was quite nervous for a few days, and would try and hide in various places around the house.  Unfortunately, his approach to hiding was to hide his head so he couldn’t see me, whilst leaving his backside out in the open.  Not a cunning plan….

Maybe all these folks just think that because they can’t see us, we can’t see them?  And if so, just how dumb are they?

Back in to the fold

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From the mid-1980s until 1995 I was a card carrying member of the Labour Party.

Not NEW Labour – old Labour – the Red Flag singing, Socialist leaning, nationalising party that I grew up with as a child in the 1960s and a teenager in the 1970s.  Warts and all.

I joined Labour in about 1986, after the Miner’s Strike and after I;d come to live in Sheffield. I did stints as Ward Chair, Constituency Vice Chair, District Labour Party delegate as well as learning the valuable skills associated with leafletting and typing Gestetner stencils to produce the Ward Newsletter.  this was in the pre-email, pre-social media days when agendas were delivered by volunteers through the letter box… I was proud to belong to one of the more Left wing Wards in Sheffield – which considering how left-wing Sheffield was in those days was quite an achievement.

I left when Tony Blair took over the Party and never expected to return, but have done so since the election of Jeremy Corbyn to be leader of the Party again. Actually, I signed up as a supporter so I could vote for him, so felt honour bound to join properly when he won.  I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t ‘blackballed’ as several colleagues from Occupy and other grass-roots groups were – I clearly haven’t been a bad enough boy in recent years…

I saw Billy Bragg on TV today commenting that he too had recently re-joined the Party after a similar long absence.

It’s nice to be back in the fold…I wonder if the protocols in meetings have changed much? Do people still call each other comrade? Or is that something I’ll have to try and initiate?