I hope you are well as you read this bog post.
Thank you for dropping by!
“Asleep At The Karmic Wheel” is a song I wrote many years ago after I stumbled upon a particularly satisfying chord progression on my ukulele.
My understanding of the concept of karma is that each of our actions has consequences.
I love combining the idea of a karmic wheel with the idea of us all (or many of us…) being asleep at the wheel — which is, of course, an extremely dangerous situation both for the person who is driving and also for all the other beings who are on or near the road on which this drowsy person is driving!
Because I have set up my daily life to be walkable, bikeable and/or busable (as dictated by the weather), I almost never drive a car.
Every time I am able to walk or bike from point A to point B (such as from home to Music Together classes or from home to Trader Joe’s), I am happy that I am not adding to the ever-more-precarious imbalance of greenhouse gasses in our planet’s atmosphere.
But I do ride to gigs at retirement communities in either a hybrid car or a regular gasoline-burning car — depending upon which accompanist I am working with on that day — which can leave me feeling like I am part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Deep breath in.
Deep breath out.
I remain aware that advertising agencies, the companies who hire them to inspire/hypnotize us into buying lots of things, and our various media who feed those messages (hundreds per day!) to us have created a completely misleading narrative about how to find happiness and meaning in our lives.
And now we are living in a period of reckoning — both politically and environmentally — for all of the untruths and PSYOPs to which we have been exposed.
Here’s a fascinating example of how maddeningly f–ked up things have become here in the 21st century.
Apple, a company which prides — and markets — itself on protecting its users’ privacy recently settled a lawsuit which alleged that it, in fact, was recording its users’ conversations and sharing them with advertisers.
What???!!!
I do not have an iPhone or iWatch, but I do own several Apple laptops (going back twenty years), a couple of iPods (also going back many years), and I continue to love Apple’s GarageBand musical composition program.
What a disappointment…
Here’s an AP article/explanation from 1/2/25 by tech writer Michael Liedtke:
“Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the privacy-minded company of deploying its virtual assistant Siri to eavesdrop on people using its iPhone and other trendy devices.
The alleged recordings occurred even when people didn’t seek to activate the virtual assistant with the trigger words, ‘Hey, Siri.’ Some of the recorded conversations were then shared with advertisers in an attempt to sell their products to consumers more likely to be interested in the goods and services, the lawsuit asserted.
The allegations about a snoopy Siri contradicted Apple’s long-running commitment to protect the privacy of its customers — a crusade that CEO Tim Cook has often framed as a fight to preserve ‘a fundamental human right.’
The proposed settlement filed in an Oakland, California federal court would resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit revolving around allegations that Apple surreptitiously activated Siri to record conversations through iPhones and other devices equipped with the virtual assistant for more than a decade.
Apple isn’t acknowledging any wrongdoing in the settlement, which still must be approved by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. Lawyers in the case have proposed scheduling a Feb. 14 court hearing in Oakland to review the terms.”
Yowza!
I just checked online and learned from BloombergLaw.com that on 2/20/25, “A federal judge gave his preliminary approval to a $95 million settlement that would end a five-year class action over alleged privacy violations by Apple Inc.‘s Siri virtual assistant.”
It truly makes one wonder how one can trust any company whatsoever…
And it confirms what my brother-in-law Andrew had started noticing many summers ago when we were camping on Cape Cod — that conversations we were having within earshot of his iPhone were triggering uncannily specific ads (directly related to what we had been discussing) on his Facebook feed.
Another deep breath in.
And deep breath out.
G-d only knows what our individual — and shared — karmic reckonings will be in the hours, days, weeks, months and years ahead…
Thank you to Doug Hammer for playing so elegantly and engineering/mixing so patiently on this song.
Thank you to Stephen C. Fischer for his beautiful graphic design work.
Thank you to the talented and generous photographers at Pixabay.
And thank you to everyone who has been streaming my music on Pandora, Youtube, Spotify, Amazon, Apple Music, and other digital music platforms.
Slowly but surely, my total number of streams continues to rise.
And so do the tiny amounts of money I receive each month from my music distributor.
You can click here if you’d be willing to stream “Asleep at the Karmic Wheel” once or twice (and maybe even give it a thumbs up or add it to a playlist…)
One final THANK YOU for making it to the end of yet another one of my blog posts.
I will end with a deep breath of gratitude in.
And a deep breath of gratitude out.
I welcome any strategies about how YOU are not falling asleep at the karmic wheel in the comments below.
amusicalifeonplanetearth 
Hi Will, I streamed and liked your song. (Well, I do like it. 😊)
Yes, it’s disappointing about Apple, though I’m not surprised. I never use Siri, but she’s occasionally chimed in.
I wish public transportation was better outside of cities.
THANK YOU for your streaming efforts on behalf of my music!!! The public transportation in the Ithaca area, where a bunch of my relatives live, just experienced a strike by workers for better pay and better shift schedules (if I understood the gist of their desires correctly from skimming a few newspaper stories online). And after a couple of weeks they won. I need to explore the early history of the automobile industry. I have a vague memory of reading that many extensive public transportation systems in/around major cities (such as Los Angeles and Detroit, perhaps?) were deliberatively bought up and put out of business by auto tycoons to encourage/force people to buy their products. If that is accurate, that might provide an historical context for why public transportation is still poor in many parts of the USA. As a comparison, my mother tells stories about how she traveled all over the UK when she was in college (the 1950s) by riding public busses from one town to the next… I wonder if it would still bbe possible to do that in England, Wales and Scotland?
In the US, post WWII, there was a boom–both baby and building. The suburbs expanded, and they were designed for a car culture. In South Jersey, it’s difficult to get around without a car, and that’s true of most suburban areas, I assume, and even more so for very rural areas. A blogger friend of mine in France tells me it’s true there, too. You can travel to cities and within cities, but there are no direct routes to rural areas like where she lives.
I guess our car-centric norms of behavior were well-entrenched/promoted when that expansion to the suburbs transpired… Interesting to learn that France has a similar challenge…
I think they went hand-in-hand. Unlike Europe, the economy was booming here. Servicemen and women were having families, and the companies that had been making tanks and other war-related items could go back to producing cars, houses, lawn supplies, etc.
I think public transportation is probably lacking in a lot of rural areas.
Either lacking or very limited (which can make it useless for some people’s schedules…)
Yes, true.
Thanks for another caring post and song Will. Google and all the big tech companies snoop and collect endless data about us from our phones online activity. I’ve considered moving to private email, browsers, etc. but it seems too late. I’m sure they have all my private info. Ugh.
A company is advertising a VPN option here in Boston on the side of a lot of city busses. I just looked up VPN to get a better handle on what this might entail. Google’s AI tells me “A VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a secure connection that encrypts your internet traffic, making it harder for others to see what you’re doing online. It essentially creates a “tunnel” between your device and a VPN server, protecting your data from snooping on public Wi-Fi, hiding your IP address, and potentially bypassing geo-restrictions.” Might be worth pursuing even if it does feel like closing the barn door after all of the animals have escaped out into the world…
Yes, I’m considering closing some barn doors, but seems pointless!
Who knows? Maybe if enough of us close some barn doors, the economic powers-that-be will notice. Unlikely, I know. But, I repeat, who knows?
Who knows. Kudos on keeping room for hope.
I so enjoy your posts, Will. Shame on Apple and Siri. Sometimes I just shake my head.
Yes. It is shocking and disheartening to discover that even one oof the most trusted tech companies was doing something so intrusive and sneaky. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. It’s another reason why I am happy to live without a cell phone!
😀
It has to be a good thing for the universe when someone turns pain into music. But I worry about how sad you sometimes feel. We need to take comfort in the things are are actually able to do to counteract the bad stuff, I think. You do an awful lot.
Thank you, Caroline! I appreciate your care and concern very much. It is true that I am sad/depressed/disheartened about the state of the world a fair amount of the time. But I also remind myself to savor the flowers I encounter… and I love (and am grateful for) food every day… and I have a minimum weekly amount of music-making in my life to keep me from becoming too numb and dysfunctional. And there are family and friends — in person and via email, blog posts, FB comments, LinkedIn remarks, etc. — to savor as well!!!
I really enjoyed your song Will. Thank you!
Like you, I walk or TTC wherever I go. I got rid of my wheeled beast. Hubs has one, so if needed I am not SOL.
I trust all to be who or what they are by their nature. I trust a liar to lie, a singer to sing, a bird to chirp and tech to steal.
Thank you for the music, and your thoughts!
Thank you for your warm feedback, Resa! I love your comment — especially “I trust all to be who or what they are by their nature. I trust a liar to lie, a singer to sing, a bird to chirp and tech to steal.” Let’s keep doing what we can to help keep everything somewhat in balance/harmony here on planet earth.
Balance/harmony – is spotty.
Yes, let’s each do what we can in our own small ways.
Some will do fab things in big ways.
Sometimes it feels like I’m living in an old song – a protest song – sung to a shut tight mind.
Agreed!
❦🌹❦