{"id":20171,"date":"2026-01-05T14:33:48","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/?p=20171"},"modified":"2026-01-05T14:39:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:39:12","slug":"no-time-like-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2026\/01\/05\/no-time-like-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"No Time Like the Past"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

On Saturday night, we watched a movie set in 1970, and the spot-on art direction gave me a comforting sense of nostalgia for the period, the homely simplicity of everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This inspired me to spend all of yesterday pretending it was that year — which meant not using any technology that hadn’t been invented yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Okay, the heat pumps were running, our house has solar panels, I drove our electric car, and I made popcorn in the microwave and ate that while we watched a television that’s connected to an infinite stream of content choices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But you and I both know what really mattered: the devices<\/em>. I kept mine turned off for the whole day, and I got so much done!<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good-intention project materials that have been sitting in my basement studio for months suddenly turned into finished objects. Time elongated, and my day felt centered on me<\/em>, instead of me being caught in the orbit of an infinite galactic garbage island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a workout for my mind, which kept reflexively wanting to turn on the dopamine firehose whenever I hit an in-between moment. But instead, I read, worked on things, and — heavens! —<\/em> paid attention to my family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to make a practice of this — not as ascetic self-flagellation or one-upmanship, but just because it felt really healthy and was so darned nice<\/em>.

(Well, except I’ll make it 1976, because I actually have memories of that, and it’s before my imagination got swallowed whole by Star Wars.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Saturday night, we watched a movie set in 1970, and the spot-on art direction gave me a comforting sense of nostalgia for the period, the homely simplicity of everything. This inspired me to spend all of yesterday pretending it was that year — which meant not using any technology that hadn’t been invented yet. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}