Reality In Exile

When you pass the midpoint of life, time becomes a paradox. The days themselves move faster, slipping past in blurs of repetition and routine, yet within that rush, certain moments grow impossibly slow, heavy with awareness. You feel years accelerate behind you while single afternoons can stretch wide with memory and meaning.

In youth, time is a vast, abstract future; in later life, it becomes a finite, felt presence. You start to measure it not just in birthdays and calendars, but in distances from things you can no longer return to: the age your parents were when you were born, the year your children first called you “old,” the friends you’ve already had to bury. The horizon, once infinitely far away, has quietly shifted position. It isn’t here yet, but you can see where the sky begins to bend.

Paradoxically, this is when time both shrinks and deepens. There is less of it, but you live more inside each piece. A morning coffee is no longer just the start of a day; it is one more morning in a finite count. The walk around the block is no longer just exercise; it’s a brief, fragile contract with your still capable body and a world still willing to meet you.

The acceleration comes from familiarity: you’ve seen so many Mondays that they begin to rhyme with one another. The slowing comes from clarity: you finally understand that none of them will ever repeat. You start to feel time not as a straight line, but as a layered thing...childhood, youth, and age all present at once inside you. You carry every age you’ve ever been, and on certain days you can feel them all speaking at once.

Past midlife, time stops pretending to be endless, and in doing so, it becomes luminous. Its cruelty is that it runs out. Its gift is that, knowing this, you are finally invited to be fully present for it.

So I follow this guy in gemspace and really like his writings, his tidbits, and just an everyday guy kind of vibe. One of his gemlog posts (which he has tied to a lot of other small web things, including the web) I had heard about but never really tried until I signed up for an account at envs.net and got my firsthand look at BYOBU and tmux.

Sava gives some really good exmaples of how you can truly live inside the terminal. 

So I tried it, and yeah, it's possible, but it seriously takes a reformatting of my brain. I think, like what everyone says about vim, if you use it regularly, it becomes second nature. I just need to ween myself off these other gadgets.

I'm going to keep spending time in the terminal. I think it is something that, while maybe nostalgic, actually could slowly become where I live all the time as I dig deeper into the small web.

Here are the links to his posts:

gemini://sava.rocks/blog/living-in-the-terminal/ gopher://sava.rocks:70/1/blog/ https://sava.rocks/blog/

In an age where headlines are crafted to provoke before they inform, media “jackals” thrive on fear, division, and emotional manipulation. This piece explores how propaganda spreads through outrage-driven narratives, shaping public opinion by repeating distortion until it starts to feel like truth. https://www.djoinerbooks.com/the-role-of-media-jackals-in-spreading-propaganda/ #MediaManipulation #Propaganda #CriticalThinking #DigitalMedia

https://www.djoinerbooks.com/the-role-of-media-jackals-in-spreading-propaganda/

I like the small web the way it is. Quiet, a little rough around the edges, not trying to sell me anything every five seconds. It reminds me of how the internet used to feel before everything got optimized and polished into the same shape.

That said, there are a few things it could use without losing that spirit.

First, better ways to read. Not fancier, just smoother. If I’m following a handful of gemlogs, a couple Mastodon folks, maybe a Lemmy thread here and there, I shouldn’t have to juggle three different apps and a dozen tabs. Give me something simple that pulls it all together and lets me just sit and read. No ads, no tracking, no friction.

Second, a little more durability. Too many good sites just disappear. I get it, people move on, but it would be nice if there were easier ways to mirror or archive things so the good writing doesn’t vanish overnight. The small web has a memory problem.

Third, discovery that doesn’t feel like an algorithm breathing down your neck. I don’t want “recommended for you.” I want “here’s what someone else thought was interesting.” Old-school blogrolls, human-curated lists, maybe even random links that actually surprise you. Let people point to things they care about, not what performs well.

And maybe this is just me, but a bit more cross-connection wouldn’t hurt. Gemini, Gopher, the web, the fediverse all feel like neighboring towns that don’t always have good roads between them. You can get there, but it takes effort. Smoother bridges would go a long way.

None of this needs to be big or complicated. In fact, it shouldn’t be. The whole point is to keep things human-scale. But a few small improvements could make it easier to stick around, read more, and maybe even contribute something back without feeling like you need to build a whole platform just to say your piece.

That’s really all I want out of it. A place that’s simple, a little more connected, and worth coming back to at the end of the day.