I am not restful, and it bothers me. There are a lot of exciting things happening, but at the moment, I am spreading myself too thin. I don’t see being busy as trait worthy of admiration. Focus is far superior, and I am not able to focus as much as I would like to due to time and money constraints. I know this is a transient period, and this fact is going a long way to how I am able to cope with it and rationalize it.

I recently finished Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome podcast, and have now moved on to his Revolutions which I find just as enjoyable. cgod have you listened to either?

At any rate, I guess I read history more than the average bear. In A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman wrote:

Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times.

I can’t shake the feeling that we might be within what will be later perceived as a period of disaster. It’s not a disaster for us in the here and now, but there is upheaval occurring about us, and I think the output of this century is going to be significantly dissimilar to the input. Don’t get me wrong, Trump and ISIS are not on the list of things that make me feel this way; central bank balance sheets, workforce participation, machine learning, and global warming are on the list.

I just added Jim Corbett’s Man Eaters of Kumaon to my reading list.