A Me day is a day all about you. Where you take the time to enjoy life as you do best. No work, family responsibilities, or chores. Just pure unadulterated laziness or activity that entertains you. With your favourite foods and drinks.
Now what would your best Me day look like if money was no object? What would you do if you were filthy rich and wanted a break from it all?
How about a house on a tropical island with no one around. There’s a tiki bar on the beach with self service. A pile of your favourite books on a stool by a lounge chair by the pool. A personal chef delivering whatever you want to eat by boat when you call.
Or maybe flying on a private jet to a far away country to dine at an exclusive restaurant followed by a play or movie?
Maybe a luxury cruise or train journey?
Or a remote cabin with a laptop so you can work on your writing with no interuption?
What would your best Me day look like?
Author: Dave VR
What is a career anyway
A career doesn’t have to be a detailed plan or focused path. It is a series of jobs not necessarily connected. You receive remuneration in return for your time and skills. You don’t have to work on the job title and description so that it perfectly matches what you are doing so that your CV and LinkedIn profile look good. Essentially someone needs someone else with a particular set of skills and amount of experience to work for them and are willing to pay an amount that you both negotiate. The role is then executed under a contract or agreement of some form with taxes and insurances paid in the process.
Simple?
Somehow we have made it more complex than it should be. Recruitment agents, headhunters, job boards, CV profiling, keywords, AI matching, career consultants. Sigh. All wanting their cut for services rendered.
There are career days, career planners, and career mentors. Thinking of changing careers to something completely different? There are role transition experts, CV tailoring to highlight your transferable skills, career conferences and seminars, and industry experts to tempt you to work in their field.
How’s your career looking so far? You can rewrite history adding skills and tools you have encountered but not used, connect to people you met over a coffee and biscuit for a minute’s chat five years ago on the off-chance their connections may be of use. You can take free or paid online courses to enhance your skills and profile. They do come with shiny badges and rarely any substance. How about some accreditation from a company you’ve never even heard of? No one will check.
You could make a career out of making a career. Or you could just enjoy what you do and look for fun jobs without caring too much about how your ladder or path looks. But if you do there’s someone for that too.
Upscaled nostalgia
It’s weird how we remember computer games from our childhood being better than they actually were. I recently started playing with emulators and played a few of my favourite games from my bygone years such as Attic Attack and Turbo Esprit on the ZX Spectrum, Alien Breed and Dreamweb on the Commodore Amiga, and the first Tomb Raider and Fear Effect on the original Playstation. The graphics of each game was very blocky and the sound effects and music wasn’t as smooth as I recall. It’s almost as if my memory was upscaling the graphics and sound quality. A kind of upscaled nostalgia!
A kid from the city
One of my favourite books as a kid was A kid from the city by E.M Watkins. I grew up in a concrete town and this book made me dream of a life in the countryside with nothing but rolling fields, farm animals, and plenty of fresh air.
When I was old enough I would ride my bike out of town to the nearest stretch of countryside and spend many an hour cycling down country lanes and up and down hills stopping for ice-cream or fudge at the country stores sitting by dry stone walls or winding streams.
At the end of the day I’d always have to return home, vowing that one day I would live in the countryside.
I finally achieved my dream and I now enjoy every minute of it. I still go cycling, exploring further afield taking in churches, ruins, and the odd manor house. I bought a copy of A kid from the city for my kids and read it to them but they didn’t seem to appreciate it like I did. I guess they already live in the countryside so maybe they’ll have different dreams of adventure.
A nostalgic mind
I have a nostalgic mind. When it wanders, it likes to explore the past. A style of house I’m passing may trigger memories from my student days: LAN parties and the computer games we played. Old cars will remind me of my first car, working on it with my dad. Something else may trigger memories of loved ones that are no longer with us.
The point I’m making is that my mind seems stuck on nostalgia and although it’s nice to recall memories on occasion, too much looking in the past is not healthy. You need to be looking forward to the future.
I’ve been trying to train my mind to think about the here and now or the future. It is hard though as I go for a lot of walks and practice mindfulness. My mind will wander without direction and inevitably will become nostalgic. Yet I endeavour to keep it on track looking forwards.
The subtle art of finishing
Unfinished jobs, projects, tasks on your to do lists, just sitting there like a virtual weight around your neck. Constantly reminding you that they are still there unfinished. That thing you started with zeal and enjoyment that petered out over time or was paused for some long forgotten reason.
We all have them. Unfinished furniture or classic vehicles in our garages, artwork or manuscripts in the study, or scale models and faulty electronics on the dining room table or windowsill awaiting attention.
We should all practice the subtle art of finishing. Either make time to finish the thing once and all or if we no longer want or need to, to take a leaf out of Marie Kondo’s book and just thank it for the experiences and memories and let it go. Discard it, gift it, donate it, turn it into spare parts, or even burn it.
The aim is to remove the unfinished from our life and move on with one less weight on our shoulders. Go give it a try. Finish it.
Reducing alcohol this summer
I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of alcohol I drink. With the warmer weather it’s getting harder as it’s nice to sit in your garden with a good book and a cold glass of your favourite tipple.
I tried the non-alcoholic versions of popular drinks. Most don’t taste anything like the original and contain too much sugar. You are effectively giving up one vice for another.
In theory we should all just drink water, ensuring that we consume the required three litres a day to remain healthy. But this is boring, taste wise.
My latest tactic is to have cold filtered water with ice with a little something such as a slice of lime or lemon, or even cucumber. It gives the water a little something making it slightly interesting while hydrating.
What are you drinking this summer?
Broken Sword
Occasionally while out walking or passing through high streets I catch brief snippets of conversation. Nothing interesting. Walking by a couple in their 60’s I hear the man say the words “Broken Sword”. I pause, trying to work out if I heard that right and what the context could possibly be.
They continue walking away from me clearly having a conversation about classic point and click graphic adventure games. Cool. Nostalgia triggered from an unlikely source.
As I continue on my walk I thought more on this and realised that we all age and the gamers of yesteryear are now well over 40, like yours truly. I’ve seen people in their 50s sporting Zelda T-shirts, others carrying Atari and SEGA bags. One lady had a Psygnosis T-shirt. Remember them?
So why should I be surprised to hear someone talking about Broken Sword? Anyone can be a gamer in this day and age.
Thinking about Agentic AI
I’ve been thinking about Agentic AI.
Essentially it’s similar to other AI but with a focused knowledge area, capable of making its own decisions based on the knowledge it has and the ability to learn and reason without human intervention. It gathers data, processes it, makes decisions based on that data and its assumptions, then learns from feedback. Try try and try again and mae changes based on your failures.
It is generally tasked towards a specific function such as event planning, task scheduling, predicting something, etc.
It’s used in self-driving cars, supply chain management, cybersecurity, healthcare, financial services, and anything that can be automated.
Concerns range from data handling, privacy, to replacing humans.
Don’t forget the milk
Many moons ago I did a stint at a computer shop building personal computers to customer specifications. Not to show my age but one of the jobs I had to do was to configure the jumpers so that the seven-segment display worked correctly when the turbo button was employed.
Anyway, during this particular period of employment one of the boring jobs that I was tasked with was to take all the cardboard and packaging out to the trash bins down the alley. This alley was shared with one another building, one that was a burned-out shell of a house. It was long abandoned and each day that I had to take the trash out, passing this building, I would wonder what was inside. This was long before urban exploring was a thing or excuse for trespassing.
One day I decided to venture inside. Everything was charred and the upstairs was pretty much gone. But the staircase was intact. On one of the staircase spindles was a note, taped. In neat penmanship was written “Don’t forget the milk”. The building has been uninhabitable for many years and I don’t know what became of its occupants but I often think back to the time I found that note wondering if whomever the note was addressed to remembered the milk.