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Hello, friends. This is probably, in fact, quite possibly the last episode of this podcast that I'm recording in 2024. You will be listening to this sometime in the middle of January because I, you know, schedule episodes in advance these days on account of the fact that I need to get rid of the tendency in me that has to do everything now. And I'm trying to bring more order to the way I make things and the way I work.

But, you know, new year resolutions are a dime a dozen. I think I did fairly well on the resolutions I made last year. I had promised myself that I will cook at least a full meal all by myself for my entire family and I did not do that. But I did promise myself that I will have some more discipline in my personal life as far as social media is concerned, as far as waking up and going to sleep is concerned and I did do that fairly well. I failed on occasion, but by and large, I did fairly well. And I also promised myself that I just spoke about social media. I promised myself that I will reduce my reliance on social media tools, etc. And I did that really well. I really quit Instagram and Twitter and Instagram. I'm now social media free and that I'm very happy about.

So 2024, as far as my personal, as far as the things that I can affect in my own life, I did okay, I think. But then there comes another year and you think, what other changes do I need to make? Do I need to make any changes at all? And the answer to that is usually yes, because we are never satisfied. But I was looking at the year and it is 2025. And what struck me about it is that I grew up in the 90s, where the 21st century looked like a very optimistic place to be. A great, nice period of time where a lot of problems will be gone. We were optimistic about the future, even as far back as the 60s and 70s. Science fiction used to imagine the 21st century as the promised land of some sort, where when we get there, it'll all be great. And of course, things are not great, but also things could be worse. And maybe that worse is yet to come. Maybe it is still in our future and we are not there yet, but we are heading there and we will get there. Who knows?

But what struck me about 2025 is that we are almost 25 years into the 21st century. That's one-fourth of the 21st century. That's 25% of the 21st century. That's where we are right now. There is only three fourths of the 21st century left. I was looking at our lifespans, like, you know, 70, 75, 80 years. And with some help, maybe a hundred years. I was looking at our lifespans and wondering why we pay the century so much importance. I think it's because it is the closest round number that can correspond to our, to our idea of a lifespan.

But if we lived for as long as a fruit fly does, our youngest people, our most enthusiastic hormonal teenagers, for lack of a better word, adolescents, will have been born this morning. And our most respected elders, the champions of our community, the thought leaders, the kings and the emperors, etc., will have been born last Friday. And then maybe every weekend would be a time when we wonder if we have lived our lives in a virtuous manner. Maybe every weekend would be a time for us to leave lessons for future generations. It's Saturday. I'm about to die. I hope that people who were born this morning are kind to each other, that are people who will grow up by Monday to be good, humane beings and that they will contribute meaningfully to our society and that our society will continue to live on and prosper. And by society, of course, they mean the little group of larva that is in a puddle of water by the corner of a algae-covered pond much as we do.

For us, that algae-covered pond is a planet and we have dreams of reaching out to the edge of the solar system and beyond, maybe. But for the most part, as far as reality is concerned, we are only concerned with this little rock on which we live. And it's not even like we don't think about the weekend. We do think about the weekend. Half our life, if you are an urban professional keyboard worker of some sort, then your life is spent waiting for the weekend. Even during the week when you are working, you are thinking about the weekend. You are thinking about how nice it would feel to have a day or two in a seven day week when you can do whatever you want. When you can not work, when you don't have to reply to office emails, when you don't have to give details of your work done that day to your superior and you can just spend it sitting quietly or reading or drinking or traveling.

Of course, the weekend is only two days, if that, and it is not sufficient time to do anything, really. Anything meaningful, that is. I've spoken before about how we assign value to things on the basis of how much time they take, as in letters take time to write and to send and to read so they have more value than your average WhatsApp message which isn't really limited by time and space so we use it for anything really. A letter is, a letter has more value in our eyes because it takes time and effort. Things that don't take time and effort have less value. And because we measure value through time, unless you take a proper vacation and spend the time and effort on doing something that is valuable to you, you will not be able to get that kind of value from the weekend because the weekend isn't enough time to do anything, really. Except to, I mean, the one good utility that a weekend has is recovering from the week. The week was hard and it took a lot out of you. The weekend is the time when you heal from the weak before jumping right back into the next week and suffering until the next weekend.

I was reading this report in a newspaper about film critics talking about how influencer culture is affecting them, how influencer culture is reducing the value of the film critic and I don't disagree with them because film criticism is an art form in and of itself. It's a proper discipline. It's a proper genre of quote-unquote content. But influencer culture where these days we have videos, we're reviewing movies, etc., those reviews don't really go anywhere. And you can tell the difference between a review done by someone qualified and a review done by someone who's just a fan. I mean, no disrespect to fans, fan culture has its own value, but it is not a replacement for the critic or a review done by a proper critic.

So there is something to be said in favor of what is generally described as the snobbish critic. But I was thinking about how the critic's position has also changed over time, right? Because there was a time when fewer movies used to come out. And to watch even one movie in a movie theater was a luxury. Families used to make it a special occasion. These days you can just drop into a cinema hall on the weekend by yourself even and just watch a movie and leave because you can afford it. But there was a time when maybe five movies come out and you can't afford to watch five because they're not all streaming online because there is no online. There's only the movie theater. And you have to decide which one to spend your money on. And the film critics, the reviewers job was to tell you what they thought of these movies so that you could make a decision about which one is worth your money.

These days, on account of the fact that every movie is available everywhere all the time for very cheap, although that is also something that we need to talk about at a later point because streaming itself is becoming something that is unaffordable. You cannot possibly subscribe to every streaming platform because it ends up costing you more than your TV connection did. And streaming was supposed to be the antidote ...