Remarks on the 2020s

My Internal World Game

Five hundred and twenty-five days ago I published a piece on Medium titled, 3,000–5,000 Days. I saw that amount of time as a reasonable personal planning horizon for a healthy seventy year old person with cancer in remission. I still do. Not that I assume I will live within those precise parameters, just that it feels like a useful frame for looking at what I have left and what I want to do with it.

3,000–5,000 days is ten to twelve years. I’m basically looking at the 2020s. My thought process might be of some value to other people wondering about the third decade of the 21st century no matter how old they are.

I know that any plans I create are likely to be made irrelevant by external events. The reason to have a plan, I’m finally realizing, is not to guide me at some future time, but to strengthen my sense of purpose right now. If someone else’s purpose gets strengthened while I’m at it, so much the better.

Reality disrupts plans. We are living in times when disruption is widespread, much-discussed, and accelerating. Sometimes it is welcomed, even embraced, for apparently making life more convenient. Often it is feared or hated for destroying ways of life.

Mostly, disruption is denied. Even though disruption is manifest in the past and present, we pretend that even…