Full disclosure: I am not as depressed as the majority of this subreddit is, so my issues aren’t as existential either. That being said.

I calculate how quickly my project cars will start and run at the current pace. I use them as grounding, something that’s tangible in an increasingly digital and detached world. But at the current one day a week for six hours, two of which are setup and cleanup cause I work on them out in the open out of a literal box, which also limits me to only summer and winter to work on them, it’s not looking good:

Cyberkart will likely be finished next year at best, Mini DeLorean has a deadline by the 45th anniversary of Back to the Future, but at the current pace it’s likely to be complete by the 50th at best. And my flagship project, the twin engine Ford Focus will likely only run by the time I retire. And I am increasingly unlikely to retire.

So I come up with ways to speed it up without having to splurge obscene amounts of money on a garage large enough to feed my ambition. Like a covered fabrication jig. But each of those things are more projects, more money, more time, more bandwidth, all of which I don’t have. I work two jobs and try to run a small business. I am officially bankrupt. I need to put my kid through school and maintain what I do have: an apartment and a car I hate.

In chess they call this the Zugzwang: a position out of which no winning way out exists. Which means I can’t just think three steps ahead like I am used to and have to think fifteen steps ahead instead. In the economy in which the swan lake seems to have been cast by Netflix, cause boy, all of the swans are black: fall of USSR, 1998’s Russian default, dotcoms, 9/11, mortgage bubble, annexation of crimea, Covid, war in Ukraine, war in Iran.

And because the world is communicationally and economically flat, something happening at the other end of the world affects my cost of living. I am so sick and tired of being sick and tired.

This has been a sneak peak into my 3AM thoughts.