journal features

young no longer

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2014.06.19

There was a time when I was young; I recognize that those days are long over. I noticed this photo of myself, taken while in Fiji shortly before my 29th birthday. I forwarded it to some coworkers, all in their late twenties to mid-30's. One of the older ones said that he would never have guessed that it was me. I told him, "Let this be a cautionary tale."

I can't really complain. That was 14 years ago, more than 1/3 of my life!

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)