The 10's - The Step Aside Decade

It's 78% over this decade. Round up to 80%. What decade did we just live? The digital decade I suppose? Music went from electric to electronic. Books went from paper to digital.
For me, it was a decade of intentionally slowing down. Going in reverse. Saturn in retrograde.
I had some psychological upsets this decade and realized Life was passing me by, right there before my very eyes.
PEOPLE. That's what it became about.
I learned BASIC programming in eighth grade. I worked on TRS-80s, Commodore 64s, the first networked computers and PCs, and became a digital draftsman. I learned technology pretty well.
But somewhere along these lines, I suffered soul loss, folks. There was no ghost in the machine. It all became lifeless pixels and binary chaos.
But people, who were they? Who was I?
This was my existential crisis decade. My ontological quagmire decade. The decade I realized I didn't know dick about what I really cared about. The people around me and my own wellbeing.
I discovered the Humanities, the glory of the Western Liberal Tradition. Titus Burckhardt, Umberto Eco, Robert Bly, Carl Gustav Jung, Freud, Plato, Seneca the Stoic, Epictetus, on to Kant, Rosseau and Heidegger and Camus, back to Pythagoras and Heraclitus, now with Richard Tarnas and even some metaphysical stuff thrown in to boot, I realized how rich a western tradition I was a part of, and how little of it I knew.
I became a young man this decade. Van Morrison sums it up best. Had my congregation, had my initiation, had my talking with the profane....How can a poor boy get through to you, when you don't think nothin's true....I made the painful step from boy to young man and now am settling in for another 20 years until I become an old man.
So here is some young man wisdom for you for this coming decade....
While corporations busily go about devouring each other, while technology mindlessly, truly mindlessly propels forward into a future it creates without understanding, step aside and let the train roll through. Look deep inside yourself, as deep as the starry night sky, and ask, what do I know, for certain? Little ol' me....personally, that some schmuck in a white coat hasn't told me. Do I even know for sure the Earth revolves around the Sun? Or have I just accepted what I've been told because the white coat convinced me? Then begin to ask yourself....how does WHITECOAT know? What makes him so sure? Why are we smashing particles at CERN when we can't get along with our neighbor? Further ask yourself about QUALITY. You've been told your quantities...your bank account, your savings, your home equity, your life expectancy, your on and on and on. But what is your QUALITY? I leave it to you to begin to discover QUALITY and what it means to partake of something that so far (THANK GOD) cannot be measured by length, mas, charge or time, else it would be TAXED! The IDEAL is alive and well, and is waiting to serve you, dear friend!
Make this coming decade your awakening.
My came a little early, but not too early, and I'm just giving you a heads up.
It's time for sweethearts to hold hands under a black velvet sky with twinkling stars again. It's time for lover's lane, for making out, for caresssing and caring. Heavy petting. It's time for troubadors and poets to usurpe rockstars. It's time for your REALITY to usurpe reality t.v.
You heard it hear first. The 10s are the step aside decade. The juggernaut must be slowed down, perhaps even thrown off course.
Join me in going backward just a little.
I dare you.....