I subscribe to Garrison Keillor’s substack.  I’ve always liked him, and he writes now about being old.  A recent column of his was entitled “I can’t help it, I’m a happy man“.  I commented on his commentary, and also noted another comment, which elicited his personal response.  The three comments (of 43 at the time I’m writing this) follow:

My comment: I’m senior to you [Garrison] and for many years I’ve had a personal mantra to myself every day, including right before I read the post: to “be an optimist and share my optimism with others”. It’s how I try to live. But, optimism aside, we are in glum times, and as our 250th birthday approaches we need to personally engage to save the country that we and many others have nurtured, albeit imperfectly, for our entire history.

Solvay:

It’s nice to live in one’s golden years if one has money. In Project 2025 America, being old without money is pretty scary.

I’m happy it’s good for you. Me, I’m considering the high bridge in my town. So are many others, considering the spiking numbers of jumpers.

Again, I’m very happy for you.

Tra-la!

to which Garrison replied: Don’t even think about jumping. talk to people who. care. about you.

If you read the post, and however many of the comments as you wish, you find that we all see the subject in different ways, depending on how we were feeling at the time we wrote the comment.  And of course, not everybody comments.  This one, at the time I reread it just now, had 182 ‘likes’ which in itself is not a reflection of how many actually read the post, since “like” depends on an individual affirmative act – clicking on a heart icon.

So, my takeaway from this column, and the comments, especially Solvay’s and Garrison’s reply, is that we are all different, and we all have fluctuating moods and circumstances and feelings about many things.

At this moment, I’m closer to Garrisons mood than to Solvay’s, but that’s a matter of ‘moment’ and a subjective judgement at the very least.

I suppose my judgement at this moment was directly affected by another column I read a dozen hours or so ago in the Minneapolis paper Business section for June 9, 2026.  The column, by Alex Vega and Bernard Condon of the Associated Press, was titled: “Elon Musk: World’s First Trillionaire?” and subtitled “SpaceX’s IPO , set to be the biggest ever, would put the company chief executive on the path”, and went on to describe the potential outcome on Wall Street when SpaceX goes public this month.

Solvay, myself and Garrison (most likely) are not players in the predicted Wall Street feeding frenzy.

Then comes the matter of realism: Among other things SpaceX pitches the “need to build “a permanent human colony” on the red planet [Mars] with “at least one million inhabitants” as existential threats loom that could consign man to “the same fate as the dinosaurs”.

Oc course, what is not stated in this dream world prospectus is the concern of Solvay, and probably billions of people already on planet earth who are subsisting from day to day, if they can subsist at all; twinned with the fantastical notion that there will ever be a permanent town of any size on the moon, much less on Mars.

Best we figure out how to get along and help each other out here on the planet we’re stuck on…which isn’t too bad, if we can work together to keep it that way.