Worrying About Schrödinger's Cat

I always enjoy Julian Simpson’s writing; in whatever form it takes. Last week, he shared a piece from his website about how we might cope with the looming 2026. The piece has now gone back behind the paywall. Julian is well worth the cost of getting through the paywall so, if you fancy it. Here’s a link:

https://www.cartoongravity.com/how-to-cope-with-2026/

In the middle of the piece, he says, “Whether it's a global pandemic or an issue at work, the moment we're inside a problem, we're not worrying, we're acting. Worry is not the response to a problem, it is the anticipation of something that has not yet happened and, crucially, may not happen.”

I do that. I worry about things that haven’t happened yet and that may not ever happen. I worry about some of them a lot. I think of the various ways these things might go and what I will do if they go one way or go the other. I give it all a lot more time that I should.

In my head, I call it ‘Worrying About Schrödinger's cat .’

Like me, you probably know a little bit about Schrödinger's cat . It’s a thought experiment in which a hypothetical cat in a closed box may be considered to be simultaneously both alive and dead while it is unobserved, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur. I lifted some of that out of Wikipedia. I’m not that smart.

The key takeaway from the above spiel is that the Cat may be simultaneously both alive and dead. Hold onto that. I know I do.

If I had a hypothetical box and Schrödinger's hypothetical cat was inside of it, I would worry the shit out of that situation. There it is now, on my living room floor, right in front of the telly. It’s the size of a shoe box – no, wait, a box that had knee high boots in (more room to breathe in there). The box is wrapped in brown paper and there’s twine around it and it’s sealed with a blob of red sealing wax. And there’s a cat in there. And it may be alive. And it may be dead.

Shit. I’m worried now about this hypothetical non-existent cat. She’s alive. Does she have water, enough room to move around? Is he stressed? Lonely? He’s dead. Will he start to smell. Can I throw the box out as it is or do I need to open it and take the deceased moggy out? Do I have to bury it? Will the council or perhaps a vet take it away?

This box doesn’t exist. There is no cat, no alive or dead. Yet, here I am, worried about it.

I’m being silly to make the point but I really do this quite a lot. I love a problem, to a certain extent. If it’s a choice between having a problem or no problem, I’ll take the no problem option every time. Who wouldn’t? But if it’s a choice between a problem and a potential problem with more than one possible outcome then give me the problem. Please, the problem.

It’s like Julian said, the moment it’s a live problem, I’m off trying to solve it. That I can do. But I have a lively and rather vivid imagination and, before the potential problem becomes an actual thing, I can practically exhaust myself by worrying about it.

I’ve being through a rather earnest bout of this recently. The problem hasn’t materialised but, if it had, I had it sorted in fifteen different ways. It just never arrived… well, it hasn’t yet. Maybe it will… (stop it, Ken, just stop).

I manage these tendencies. I try to be mindful in a half-arsed sort of a way. I notice the trees and the quality of the air and the sunlight when there is some. I tell myself that, “at this moment, everything is all right.” And all that helps and works to a certain extent.

But the ghost/non ghost of Schrödinger's Imaginary Cat is never very far away. Lurking around some corner or leaning stiff again some wall. I’m never sure which.

But I worry about both.

I’ll be fine though. I’ve been doing this a long time now and I just need to keep reminding myself not to.

For the week that’s in it, can I wish you, Dear Reader, a warm and pleasant Christmas without too much worry and stress. And if it’s a bad time of year for you, I get that. Just remember that Winter will pass soon and better, brighter days will be with us again.

Thanks for coming by this year and all the very best

Ken x

Losing Touch

I’ve been on Social Media for a long time and, along the way, I've come into contact with a lot of very fine people. That was mostly on Twitter. I would go so far as to say that I made good friends there. For a considerable number of years, it was really great and, sad and all as it may sound, it was an important facet of my life. But these days, I find that I’ve largely lost touch with most everyone I used to interact with back then.

That’s the blog post for this week. There’s no real need to read any more. I may expand on the above couple of sentences a little bit. I may waffle. But I don’t expect to reach any meaningful insights or conclusions beyond that which has been set down in the lines above. It just is what it is.

I could make it easy and say that my giving up on Twitter (or X, as at became) was the primary reason for losing touch as I have. I had to leave. A critical point was arrived at, where I could no longer countenance sharing my words on such a spoiled and demeaned landscape. I went over to Bluesky and found some lovely people to chat to, some old Twitter renegades, some new delightful folk. But the loose interactive cohort of old Twitter days was gone from me.

I could certainly pin all this on my departure from Twitter and wrap everything up nicely that way. But that wouldn’t really be the truth of it. The truth is that the cohort had disbanded long before Twitter descended into X and it all fell apart, for me at least.

So I ponder sometimes what happened. I am well capable of dreaming up scenarios and reinventing history to suit some creative narrative of my own making. So, I have to keep all that in mind if I ever embark on a flight of fancy as to why so much contact was lost. In truth, I’ve only ever come up with a total of two part-meaningful theories, both of them probably incorrect.

My first fanciful theory is that the death of my friend Simon Ricketts marked the end of something substantial. That he was a glue that held it all together, a beacon towards which many people sailed. I think there’s some truth in this but I don’t think it’s a final reason in itself as to why the fellowship broke. If Simon could, I think he would be aming the first to pour a trickle of cold water on the idea. He might remind me that he was just a fella and that was all there was too it. As a bonus, he would reassure me about the niggle I have about using the word ‘friend’ about him in the first line of this paragraph. We only met a few times and Simon was famously friends with most everyone who came into contact with him. So how sad am I to still apply the word friend to the rather passing acquaintance I had with him? But, like I said, Simon would soon straighten me out on that, if he were here. He would assure me that we were indeed mates and that that will never change. He’s not here to do it, so I do it for myself, in honour of him. Simon was my good friend. Deal with it, Ken.

Was his passing an end of something? I have no doubt in my mind that it was. But was it the end of everything? That, I’m less sure of.

My second fanciful theory is best summed up by a line from a Neil Diamond song, “… as though I’d done someone wrong somewhere, but I don’t know where…”. My over-active mind could easily conjure a scenario where I did or said something wrong and, even though I have no idea what that might have been, my involvement in the loose cohort ended as a result. Somewhere, on some remote electronic interface, all of the old friends and confidants are still there, chatting away to each other as they always did. Once every couple of years referring briefly to the terrible faux pas that Armstrong made, shuddering briefly, then moving on.

I don’t believe this. Not at all. But I feel it’s worth mentioning because I bet I’m not the only one who could think like this, if I permitted myself to do so. Sometimes it’s a long trek across Social Media without a drink of water and one can get to wondering where the hell everyone has got to. So I set this notion down, not to make myself look foolish, which I fully realise I am doing, but to show other like-minded people that they are not alone if they ever think like this.

And finally, to quote another song, Tom Waits this time, “Charlie, for Chrissakes, if you wanna know the truth of it…”

The simple truth of the entire affair is that time passes (“listen… time passes"). We move on and we move away. We slip apart. No one, two, or three things made it happen. No horrible incident made it happen. It just… happened.

I run into members of that Old School all the time, on the electronic highways. Someone likes something I typed or sends me a warm little message or I do the same for them. There was never any dissolution or break up of fall out or loss. There is only time and moving on.

And the final truth, if one could face it?

There never really was a cohort.

There was a lively, warm, engaging, occasionally messy, juxtaposition of messages from a time when a lot of good people were all in the same place at the same time. It never really existed and paradoxically, it could never really last.

So, as you can tell from all of the above, I don’t really know what it was, let alone where it went.

And, if I miss it now and again, from time to time, well that’s okay too.