Venkatesh Rao

P. G. Wodehouse did not deal with WW2 well. He was unjustly smeared as a Nazi collaborator (that reputational damage took decades to undo) but there is no doubt he made dumbass, clueless decisions. Almost certainly because he tried to navigate grim times with a comic mindset.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately. Even though I’m not a comedian, I do mostly think of myself as being part of the light comic relief crew on Spaceship Earth. Any other value I may add to people’s undertakings is incidental/side-effect.

There’s something you might call personality-era fit, PEF. The grain of your personality meshing with grain of the times. Eigenvectors of personality aligned with eigenvectors of the era. I have this sense that I have poor PEF for these times, beyond Great Weirding effects.

The main reason this era is trying for me personally is I thought by age 43, I’d have Taken Care of Business passably well, done my 20y or so of time helping keep world turning, and moved to the slow lane do fun stuff. All kinda true, except play time seems to over for planet