Navel Gazing Narcissistic Ruminations of a Bully Regarding our Place in the Universe to Complete 2021

Aweh dearly beloved fellow Ruminants & Groupies in day 647 of Re-Modified Lock Down Level 1 with Alcohol, no curfew, and slowly decreasing Omicron Hysteria.

Period as a semi-retired pensioner: 274 days

My last blog of 2021 merits some narcissistic navel-gazing. So why is it that I write this weekly blog? Some years back for reasons I can no longer recall a tradition arose at work called Pink Friday which involved wearing an item of pink clothing on Fridays. I appointed myself as chief bully and cheerleader of Pink Fridays. To maintain momentum, I started circulating a short e-mail on topics I thought were interesting to a handful of colleagues. Slowly, over time, these e-mails were forwarded to others and people asked me to add them to the distribution list. Since the e-mails were generally headed as ruminations on this and that one of my devoted groupies proposed that pink Fridays should become, “Ruminant Pink Friday” and so it began. This became a weekly ritual for me. As my corporate career started approaching its long-overdue sell-by date the notion of continuing Ruminant Pink Friday by means of a blog took shape.

The more astute amongst you, dear readers, will immediately realise that I have not answered my own question. I have explained how Ruminant Pink Friday ™ arose but not why. The why is a lot more disturbing than the how. Recently the author, Joan Didion, died and there were many tributes to her, and reference was made to a New Yorker article about her. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/joan-didion-and-the-opposite-of-magical-thinking. I confess that up to now she was not someone I had read or was aware of but the quote about why I write this blog hit home as the truth:

“In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space”.

So, there you have it I have been outed, I am a narcissist and a bully and that is why I write this blog. My blog mansplains the world to you. I am however a stable genius and therefore have much wisdom to impart. This makes it ok. If only you would listen. I am also not nearly finished, and I have a great deal more mansplaining to do. So, brace yourself and stay awake during 2022. There is no topic except, perhaps, the ever-evolving issue of gender identity that as a cisgender male I can mansplain to you. All you need to do is ask.

As holiday reading I read Joan Didion’s book published in 2005 entitled, “The year of magical thinking” which is an account of the year following the sudden and unexpected death of the author’s husband. The reviews on Amazon were both glowing and witheringly critical. The critics called the book self-indulgent and narcissistic. Entirely true but that’s the whole point. Life is temporary and can change forever in an instant. A good well-written book but not light holiday reading.

As you know apart from narcissism, I am generally also a grumpy old nihilist misanthrope and have rather a dim view of humanity. There are too many of us and there are very few stable geniuses. And yet there are aspects of humanity that fill me with awe and reverence. In the last 100 years, we have finally understood our enormously insignificant place in a truly vast universe. There can be nothing more humbling than what cosmology has revealed about our insignificance. This should be compulsory training for every young narcissist.

The launch of the $10 billion James Webb space telescope (JWST) on Christmas day is an awe-inspiring tribute to what we are truly capable of. From the conventional commercial and project management perspective, the project is already an abject disaster. It is 14 years behind schedule and 20 times over budget.  https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-matters-so-much-20211203/.

The launch is just the beginning of what the astronomer Natalie Batalha called “six months of pins and needles,” as the staggeringly complex telescope will attempt to unfold and focus itself in hundreds of steps. If it goes badly wrong the telescope will be too far away for us to reach it and fix it. It will become an expensive piece of space junk.

The referenced article provides a wonderful overview of what the Hubble telescope accomplished and the development and scope of the JWST. Read this and be humbled and proud of what we have achieved. Although many criticise the JWST as an extravagant waste of money when there are pressing issues at home I beg to differ. The progress we have made in understanding the universe ranks as one of humanity’s finest achievements and there is still so much for us to learn and be humbled by.

The JWST has the potential to answer one of the most fundamental remaining questions regarding whether we are alone in the universe. It is my hope that we are not.

I wish you all the best for a better 2022 and it is my fervent hope that we learn to live with Covid-19 better as a species. It’s not going away anytime soon. I am due for my booster shot in February and will have it as soon as I can.

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions and please keep them coming.

Regards

Bruce