Announcement Of A Cultural Update As Per 7/17/24

 This Is An Announcement Of A Cultural Update As Per 7/17/24.

As of the above date, this culture is now in Tropical Soul.  This is the time when the time has come around from Nadir Day 10/1/15 mentioned below, and through all the milestones up to now.  The phrase "this culture" is how I refer to how I've rolled as one person differently from everyone else.

This light of Tropical Soul is the culmination of time and efforts for all those years.  This announcement I made similar effort on over a number of days, so that's why the announcement is for an arrival moment in time very recently in the past rather than the exact present.

My previous announcement was in 9/20/21, and depended on the completion of a DIY audio player.  But even though a DIY player is still being worked on as of this current announcement, there are factors that made completion less urgent, and enabled this culture to achieve musical independence.

The biggest such factor was when I successfully reutilized an older reminiscent radio as a loudspeaker for my current player on or about 5/4/24.  I also now have in place scripting technology on an open system laptop to allow me to update content easily on a regular basis.  Both these factors helped me come to feel that my current off-the-shelf player and the storage capacity of the storage card I'm using for it are adequate for Tropical Soul.  Also helpful is the fact that more audio players have come out onto the market that I believe can step in for the one I'm using if that ever becomes necessary and if the DIY isn't available.  Where storage capacity is concerned, I decided on a more zen approach to decide how much and what types of content I wanted for the player, so I don't crave a capacity above the moderate one I'm using.  These were the things I decided to focus on to decide when a new cultural update was appropriate.

As a result, it's also not urgent for a DIY to be in place as "proof" against tech's marketing rhetoric that one thing should replace another, but I fully expect a DIY to materialize in time.  I had also found in 9/21 that trying very hard to "build up" a DIY was too similar to the type A mentality in the 2010s I wanted to debunk.  That's why I expect a DIY to be as simple as my storage content plans as previously stated.  I will also continue to work on open system scripts and gathering content and buying music.  The ability to do so in the way I want is part of what made the arrival to Tropical Soul possible.

My previous announcement in 9/20/21 was then an announcement of indignation on things.  This Tropical Soul announcement announces getting to the finish line of achieving technical independence.  That said, the indignations from my last announcement bear relevance in the present, and hence, just announcing getting to the finish line is not enough.  The finish is in the spirit of those things I was indignant of in 9/21, and still indignant of this day.

The basic facts and circumstances of Ed Snowden's leaks of the metadata program, and his conspiracy theories were when I started seeing the beginnings of the personal corruption of the 2010s.  Throughout that time, I've done my best to adhere to values such as endurance, humility and conscience, but these values get to the idea of principle.  I try to adhere to principle as much as possible.  My thinking is, you don't have to be perfect.  You just have to not go corrupt.  This is in contrast to what I see as the personal corruption of the larger culture around me.

General examples of that corruption were attitudes like the-ends-justify-the-means, and an Ed Snowden style radicalism.  A third one was a reckless social immaturity at large that I started noticing after Sandy, the morality based social inhibitions against which the apparently unbridled social media lifted.

This was all personal corruption, and was bad enough, but even worse was the resulting adversity this immediate culture suffered starting in 2015 for not going along with that corruption.  The tech company I worked at didn't believe in forced obsolescence, as neither did I, and hence couldn't compete at a time when a focus on forced obsolescence was expected in tech, and it went out of business.  When I lost my job at that company, this is why the other tech-based companies simply didn't want me, and in 2016 I ended up taking a lower paid job not related to tech.  Nadir Day 10/1/15 was my first day after I lost my job at the previous company, and it was around that time that I made the point of looking to a then future point in time when the time will have come around, hence my announcement to that effect above.

But where the corruption is concerned as it's been said countless times in history, you reap what you sow, and the chickens come back home to roost.  So here are the eventualities of Snowden-style radicalism, forced obsolesence and the type A "power of positive thinking."  This is a reminder of what I also announced in 9/20/21, but these are all part of the continuum of time.

Firstly was the then arrests of Ed Snowden associates Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, which placed their credibility in doubt that was previously unquestioned in most of the 2010s.  Related entities such as Infowars and The Epoch Times also met similar karma recently to this announcement.

Secondly was Senator Elizabeth Warren publicly proposing the breakup of big tech.  This move reflected a larger emerging healthful skepticism of tech that eventually helped us deal with the emergence of artificial intelligence, and is the main reason why the writers' strike and the actors' strike were able to make their cases.

Thirdly, there was the answer for the "power of positive thinking" type A breeziness of the professional environment I unsuccessfully tried to find a job in, and most unfortunately that was the economic fallout brought on by the pandemic.  No-one is going to be insensitive enough to tell hundreds of thousands of people worrying about making ends meet in a healthfully safe manner to pretend to have a "power of positive thinking."  The pandemic brought out the importance of essential workers, and it just happened to be an essential work job I ended up taking in 2016, and as of this announcement I've been there for years.  I just happened not to be a match for a "love your job" job, which as far as I'm concerned still jibes with the jobsearch notion of "best match."

The pandemic in general presents a grievous and tragic form of the chickens coming back home to roost for a personally corrupt larger culture, but it's the hundreds of thousands who died in the pandemic who subsequently died for the sins of that larger culture.

This above is part of the long-term narrative that has led this immediate culture to this point in time.  The reasons why I used a narrative stream here is to historically illustrate the reasons why I make this announcement, and I used the same narrative method in my cultural update from 9/20/21.

Since Nadir Day and the start of the recovery on 1/13/17, through various milestones including the cultural update of 9/20/21, I had been looking forward to getting back to some things in the past for the sake of an older familiarity for the recovery to have made sense, as well as unfinished business.  As an example, something I want to do some time shortly after this announcement is to make a visitation to the general neighborhood where I used to work just before Nadir Day.  I don't feel I made a proper goodbye for that work place at that time.

Up to about 9/20/21, I had also thought about getting back to some more adventurous lifestyle choices.  But I saw in 2023 how the larger culture went back to its corrupt ways after a vaccine became available for Covid-19.  I decided that I myself couldn't go back to those choices.  This is why I also decided to critically think about how much of something is enough to have, and not to keep gathering and building in near perpetuity, hence among other things, my decisions about how I was going to go about using a music player as above.

Generally speaking, the fact that the above past events had later eventualities effectively justifies my ongoing criticism of the ongoing personal corruption in the larger culture, until and unless the larger culture cleans up its act and makes amends.  Now I see that that's simply not going to happen, so even more so I have no intention of ceasing criticism of such corruption where I see fit.  It's a fitting phrase that the unexamined life of that larger culture is not worth living.

I'm also fully aware that this immediate culture now being in Tropical Soul by itself does not mean the larger culture would change accordingly.  On the contrary, I've come to regard the larger culture as one big immoral bully making it necessary for me to take a don't-spare-the-rod-don't-spoil-the-child stance on that culture.

This was 2024 when I made this announcement, and in some ways I see similarities to 2014, ten years previous.  One of those is a current mass form of self-confirmation bias subsequently opposed to the value of truthfulness.  My observation of the past, even going back multiple decades, was that it's often in mid-decade you see both this biased thinking and social pressures to "get with the program," and had wondered why it's necessarily mid-decade.  As I near a close on this announcement, I figured that among possibly other things, it's about money and business, often mid-level retail, which should have been obvious but by themselves those things aren't necessarily bad.  I myself, after all, am in a job helping to find that edge in making extra profit for the business I'm employed in.

That said, my observation and experience indicates a need for moral boundaries to retain a sense of sanity for ordinary citizens, a sense of right-and-wrong for our young people, and a sense of National Principle for the country, and perhaps the world, over the long term.

Even now as events tentatively continue to unfold in the very short term over the struggle between truth and biased thinking, and over morality and ethics versus personal corruption, I had chosen the "lifesaver" moniker to symbolize both National Principle and right-and-wrong.  It's a lifesaver meant to save the lives of those drowning in the pools of personal corruption.

I end this announcement in the middle of history in the making, not sure where it's going to go.  But for the sake of both the physical and moral survival of humanity, my hope is that all of us try to get back on the righteous path, and return to the pursuit of principle.

This Immediate Culture,
7/17/24