We were witnessing the spectre of a whole planet heading for ruin. To people like me for whom time had always seemed like a constant, eternally moving train which people got on and, seventy years later, got off, it was the end of innocence. It still does. Your life veers off in strange new directions. It's very exciting and a little scary.
Ideas blossom into obsessions.
The imperative to live life differently keeps building until the day it breaks through the surface. I was in my neighbourhood supermarket parking lot. I was plugging a coin into a shopping cart when it suddenly occurred to me just what a dope I was. And when I was finished shopping I'd have to take this cart back to the exact place their efficiency experts have decreed, and slide it back in with all the other carts, rehook it and push the red button to get my damn quarter back. A little internal fuse blew.