Getting Through The Big Dark

It's been a long couple months.

Once again, I have to apologize to those of you who have subscribed to this channel expecting to experience regular scintillating political and cultural insights, only to hear only the distant chirping of crickets.

It’s been a long couple months, including three weeks of the worst flu I’ve had since COVID, and there’s been a lot on my mind. For reasons to follow, it’s been difficult to find the time and mental energy to sit down and write anything of substance, so this is more of a catch-up post than a deep dive into topics of general relevance.

As you may remember, I was laid off from my job as a technical writer at the end of July, just after my spouse graduated with her BA in business management/entrepeneurship from an esteemed local institution. While I’m still laboring to find work, my spouse has hit the jackpot. Guided by her innate ingenuity, she found an ad on Craigslist (remember Craigslist) for a toy store in our neighborhood that was looking for “Christmas elves.” So far the experience has been much more Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory than The Santaland Diaries. The toy store is an institution, having been in business since 1977, and is owned by two ex-professors from my spouses’s institution. In their 80s with no kids, they’re looking for someone who can take over management of the store and maintain the legacy they’ve established, and it looks like that is going to be the spouse. We can imagine no better job for her than being the general manager (and potentially part owner) of a toy store, and I’m thrilled by the prospect of going to toy shows in far-flung locales. It’s been a little odd, however, being shown how they make the gobstoppers and being tempted by fizzy lifting drinks, since it seems like the owners are seeking an anointment more than employee. We will see what transpires in January.

The job hunt, meanwhile has consumed most of my mental energy. Our financial situation is stable, but precarious - fortunately a close friend is covering our rent, and my unemployment and severance has sustained us thus far. However, my unemployment runs out in January, and from there I think our savings should get us through another two months. If my spouse becomes the Willy Wonka of Seattle Toys, then I should be able to get us back to stability with a minimum wage job like being a budtender, but that is an honestly depressing outcome to contemplate, and depression has been the main inhibition for my writing output over the past weeks. I turned 60 last May, and it’s taking an emotional toll to think that no matter what I have accomplished in the past, it all comes down to this. If we get through another 18 months or so I could take early retirement and finally be done with this BS, but, again, that’s not really what I was expecting at this point in my life.

AI, of course, is what’s wrecking my professional life, as it is for so many others. For reasons I might go into on another occasion, there have been significant shifts in the world of technical writing over the past several years, where there’s a lot more emphasis on being a technician than a writer than there was when I started in the field some twenty years ago. My LinkedIn feed is now awash in AI slop, and Patrick Boyle’s analysis of how AI has ruined the career ladder and job application process is dead on. It seems that Marx and the Frankfurt school’s analysis of how automation would eventually elimate the need for labor was also dead-on, but nobody seems particulary interested in taking the next step to a Democratic Socialist utopia to support the now-unemployed legions of workers. My one substantial article over the past couple months has been on the topic of “The Limitations of AI ‘Writing’” on LinkedIn, where you can see some of my other commentary on the subject on my profile (and, uh, you know, I am looking for a job, so if you know a guy . . . ).

I’ve gone through a lot of soul-searching over the past momths. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a pre-teen, and when I was 8 or 9 years old I presented my first publication to my school librarian, “Tales of Mystery, Suspense, and Intrigue,” in handwritten cursive with crayon illustrations. She accepted it into the collection, and told me she would make up a card catalog entry for it. At the time, nothing made me happier. Throughout high school and college I wrote fiction and had another moment of pride when one of my short stories was publised in Dragon magazine, the print publication of TSR Games. I shifted into academic writing when I was in grad school, and then I got into The Age of Blogging. When I started my career in technical writing I thought I had found a way to sustain myself as a writer and have a comfortable middle-class existence and I took some pride in knowing that I brought some “thought leadership,” as they say, to that role.

Now I’m facing a reckonging, in which it seems that none of that matters any more, and I have to re-invent myself from the ground up for the last third of my life, which seems like it will be far less comfortable and secure than I had been hoping for. It’s great that my spouse has a big opportunity in front of her, but it also seems to emphasize how little I have for myself at this stage in my life. I have throught back over the great adventures and moments of personal transformation in my past, and wonder if that’s it, and all that is before me is a growing senescence. But then again, it’s been a grim few weeks of The Big Dark here in Seattle, with another week until we emerge on the other side of Solstice. Maybe once we pass through the dark delta-t of death and life, that vantage point will offer a different perspective on the future.