Matt's Journal

You don’t know what you don’t know. On our coffee walk, Greg mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect where people overestimate their competence. I looked it up and it seems the studies are more ambiguous than that, and that people do in fact estimate themselves pretty well. But in the spirit of knowing what you don’t know…what don’t I know?

• How long I will live. It would make it easier to plan if I knew this. I can guess: my parents made it to 84. I’m likely to live till then – another 20 to 30 years. I can plan for that. One could say “10 years” and end it then, making planning easier, but what a crazy idea that is.
• How long Laura will live. Same. She could die in a year. Terrible. So could I, though. I don’t want to think about it. Good to have our wills up to date. She could last another 25-35 years, being younger than me and being female. Plan for that.
• Whether I could get another job and whether I should. It would fill my time and give me some kind of purpose and companionship and place, but it could also chain me to something unnecessarily. The job I had did that and I’m glad to be free of it. I have found some volunteer things and can pick up and drop them at will, which is nice. But in fact I tend to stick with things. Covid-19 made RTS and LF and LPVC go away.
• If God exists, and if so what is God like – and what should I do I can guess: I haven’t seen a God, heard from a God, or asked for something and got it immediately from a God. I asked for a good marriage and got it, but it took a really long time and it was when I stopped asking that it happened. I don’t think there’s a human-like God, out there. Sometimes I’ve wished there was. I can and do “pray”. What happens then? It’s a kind of thought, self-observation, unifying-of-in-and-out. People who weren’t brought up with an addressable God; what do they do that one would call praying? And I’m a practicing Catholic. It helps me/us structure life.
• How to backpack like we’re going to do in late August. Guess: I’ll need to carry something on my back. I can practice. I can ask friends for advice, which they will likely be happy to give me. A few dry runs would help and probably be enjoyable.
• What I could be doing that would make me better off, among all the possible things I could be doing. I have sampled many things. Many have been dropped, some have been good and I’ve kept them going. Covid-19 has killed some of them for now. Guess: keep looking and keep trying and assessing things. Take more hiking trips? Get a backpack.

Today, I’ll fix the back tire of Will’s old bike, try it out, maybe do some more adjustment of it, then give it to the Bings. I’m better with brakes now. I have my RE session tonight – a little too long; I’m getting tired of it. I dislike the scolding ideology. For me real change has to start within and it has, but it takes time. I’m not a policymaker. Maybe I should be. It’s not just “black lives matter”, it’s deeper, but recent events have pulled the discussion towards just black rights. This is important – we are tied at the waist because of our long history, especially as a New Orleanian with slave-holding ancestors. “They” are in fact another flavor of “Us”. But, again, it’s bigger than that.

• Who and what am I? Why am I not an academic or a business owner or a bum? Guess: my parents are middle-class; so were their parents; they lived in nice neighborhoods and had some but not a lot of education; I am but a natural extension of that. We want to think we are in charge, but we assuredly did not create ourselves.