I haven’t got a substack account, or I would have subscribed, but I hope you keep writing. You’ve given me a lot to think about. While I don’t quite know what to do with these questions yet, or if there is even something I can do about them, they’re salient and framed extremely well.
It’s a wonder people haven’t started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that’s not a trend?
I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.
Excellent job on taking care of Lester. I can tell he’s in caring hands and I hope you both have many wonderful (and URTI-free, fingers crossed for that) years together.
I’d say never feel silly about a vet visit. Even if why you booked it is no longer an issue (which is definitely something that can and does happen for any pet owner), you can always use the time to pick their brains, learn new things and build a good relationship with them.
Lots of snuggles.
It seems like you already have a good handle on the rest already, even if 3 URTIs in 5 months is no fun for anyone.
It might be worth giving your house a thorough clean to see if that helps. Maybe there’s a source of irritants (molds, pollens, that kind of thing) that is only really problematic for someone with a weakened immune system, and therefore more prone to secondary infections.
I have a few issues with substack, but truth be told, I dislike requiring handing over information to multiple services without seeing value upfront - and getting rid of obtrusive pop-ups does not qualify as value. Their willingness to platform Nazis just sealed my unwillingness into a conscious refusal.
In a similar vein, the corporate relationship adjustments you mentioned are also steps I’ve taken, but I’m inclined to agree with Naomi Klein’s perspective on consumer boycott being insufficient to address systemic problems. The general advice is to change what is within your power, but when you have close to zero power, does that advice then imply that you should try to do nothing or that you simply can affect nothing?
My substack qualms and the corporate relationship adjustments topics tie in quite nicely with a phrase from your substack that has been bothering me all weekend. It critiques my usual instincts for what to do as first steps, but it also articulates a problem I’ve struggled with for a while: “Documentation without transformation”.
Now I’m not of the opinion that we’ve ever truly been able to trust the information we consume as being objective truth, but AI has certainly suddenly increased the scarcity of reliable information.
The larger issue for me is that transformation is clearly necessary, but the scale of transformation required is so immense that it’s not something I’ve seen happen historically without also incurring immense suffering. This is not to say that the majority of humanity isn’t hugely suffering now, just that this kind of systemic change is one of those “this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better” type situations - in an acute way.
The usual trigger for change at this scale seems to be when realised losses of resource scarcity for too many exceeds the risk of setting what’s left on fire.
So we’re left with a situation where there’s potentially neither reliable documentation nor positive transformation. This does not spark joy.
I suppose my questions for you are then:
“I don’t know” is a totally valid answer to either too, in the spirit of acknowledging honest uncertainty.