This is the first year that I've finished early. It is still the twenty ninth on my time when I started this. It will probably be after midnight when I finish it. I think this is my least enjoyable Iron Noder. I believe that has more to do with me personally than with the noding itself. I've been doing things to make myself miserable all year and it's working. Guys, it may surprise you to hear this, but leaning into the neuroticism was probably a mistake. Though, I have to say it has been a learning experience. My life or the internal narrative that frames my life for me has a couple of themes running through it. One is the desperate need for and impossibility of meaningful communication. I try to act in service of the former and disbelieve in the latter. I think I'm achieving modest success in that service but any sense of accomplishment just dissolves in the hopelessness. It Sisyphean and not in the fun way.
A major counter point to my hopeless bleak despair is a practice of gratitude. I go looking for really bad, upsetting things like the Belgian Congo and thank God that I didn't have to live through that. I don't know if the world is good but it is getting better along a lot of metrics. Any serious perusal of history will show that we could be in a hell of our own making and we aren't. At worst it's a limbo of our own making. That's a lot better than hell. People look at the past and they're like "oh no, people can be so evil, all hope is lost" and I'm just looking around like "but we aren't there now, good things do happen" and wondering what the disconnect is. I'm low grade, cautiously whiggish.
I'm hoping to get more of those thoughts out in the future and hopefully not just next November. Iron noder gets me to write but I have to keep things fairly shallow. Okay, public commitment time. I declare that I will write thirty whole write ups between now and next November. Wish me luck.
IRON NODER XVII: ALL'S FERROUS IN LOVE AND NODING