(Most of these are not very original, you could probably get them from reading Taleb, but I still feel like writing them down.)
-Owning a home seems totally out of reach, short of starting an OnlyFans or robbing a bank. There could always be a major recession, but whenever I think about that it occurs to me that there are probably millions of lost souls out there rotting away, waiting for the market to crash-- I'd rather not spend my life like that. It makes more sense to just rule home ownership out for the present, and assume prices will remain totally absurd and unaffordable for the near future.
-There is no sense in cooperating with a system that is actively working against you. We all know the economy is a scam and that the government does nothing to protect its citizens or provide stability for those who weren't born in time to get in on the fun. It's not something I'm going to rage and seethe and shake my fist about all day, but it's important to understand and internalize it-- and just move on with life, pursue other hobbies, invest in local connections, and so on, with that in mind.
The entire thing will collapse-- not into doom and gloom, but into absurdity.
-Now that everything is done with the short-term in mind, and nothing is built to last, the sad thing is there will be very few traces of our existence. Instagram pics and selfies and group-chats will vanish into digital oblivion, poorly-built made-to-break furniture and devices and books will crumble, and the legions of shoddy homes and apartments will be abandoned: historians in a thousand years may wonder if Americans and Westerners began to die off after the year 1980, since they will have almost no proof of their existence.
Our social relations and our lives have also been min-maxxed and efficiency-optimized for maximum convenience, so the same will be true there-- we will disappear quickly, without much connection to any particular place or person, and there will be little to remember us by.
-Pursuing the barbell strategy, as Nassim Taleb says: doing something very low risk and traditional, such as working as a plumber or carpenter or welder, and pursuing scholarly or artistic interests on the side. In other words, avoiding the fake 'stability' of the middle route (going to college).
Not only has a degree become a negative financial investment (especially in the long run as bloated governments and corporations alike collapse under their own weight) the universities themselves are largely anti-scholarly, pro-conformity, publish-or-die, rat races run by armies of ignorant HR blob 'people'. They have become bullshit-factories, and being a part of that means risking infection-- better to just stay away.
-Avoid corruption! The society revolves around lies and absurdities, and lies are damaging not just because they're false information--which most people see through quickly-- but because repeating lies gradually corrupts your soul. Fighting all of them is impossible (better to just let them die on their own), so the most important thing is to minimize the degree to which you degrade yourself by assenting to the whole thing.
Never lie to yourself either. If something is bad, abusive, wrong don't try and reframe the abuse as being akshually wonderful. Lying to yourself is where lying to others starts from, and if you're honest with yourself it's much easier to be honest with everyone else. It's less stressful in the long run, too.
-Anyone who explicitly tells you about their virtuous behavior-- instead of showing it, or you hearing about it from others-- is wicked. And anyone who starts off by telling about their victim status-- rather than you learning about their life from others-- will abuse you or other people in the future.
Contrary to the evolutionary science thing about language facilitating communication, it's mainly the opposite: people call themselves precisely what they're not, say things they won't do, and generally obfuscate and confuse things.
Our growing concern for abstract causes, and endless virtue-preening, is perfectly compatible with our increasingly sick, vicious, and wicked behavior towards one another.
-People whose flaws you don't know are usually infinitely worse than the ones whose flaws you're aware of.
-If something has to be called 'smart' or 'efficient', it never is. I've never seen a smart device do anything intelligent, and every single efficient choice has been 10x more costly than the old-fashioned option.
-Related to the above, there is nothing more wasteful than an 'environmental' product.
ReplyDelete-Planes fall out of the sky, bridges collapse, the streets are dirty and the buses are always late-- yet bureaucrats and journalists and experts claim we live in a super-advanced society.
-The modern economy is one group of morons adding more and more weight to a bridge, and another group of morons chipping away at its foundations.
To fix the society, we need liberals who are more conservative (or liberal-ish) and conservatives who are more liberal (or conservative-ish). The extreme freaks of today are either pathologically greedy and parasitic or too empathetic and virtuous.
-The definition of a weak man isn't one who loses fights, but one that only fights people that are weaker than him.
One of the reasons why so many healthy people who don't have any real mental problems are on hardcore meds / drugs / substances these days is because the way they approach life is psychotic. They try to turn normal / regular existence into some kind of war, for no reason.
ReplyDeleteWhat they do is treat every single interaction like a battle, where they're gonna WIN and you're gonna LOSE, no matter how irrelevant or pointless or even damaging this behavior is-- but they have an addiction to winning, their low / pathetic self-esteem needs a steady stream of Ws in order for them not to collapse, and so they just keep on going back to that over and over and over and doing it over things that are less and less relevant.
They wind up so tense, angry, and miserable due to closing themselves off to other people, that the only way they can relax, have fun, and feel normal is to turn to these bizarre / weird substances.
And as usual with people like that, the wins aren't honorable, impressive, or anything like that. They're not worthy victories against a superior enemy in the service of some higher cause. Nope-- 99% of the time, it's just cherry-picking, punching down, and being the most pathetic power-tripping faggot imaginable, starting fights with people who have less power and influence than you and over some random bullshit anyways that doesn't matter (and which they're usually wrong about).
Absolute loser behavior.
Another big thing is to avoid irony as much as possible.
ReplyDeleteThere's nobody dumber, more gullible, or easier to fool than smug, haughty, ironic people.
Now that everyone is so ironic and contemptuous, people autistically and smugly make fun of basic things, but wind up believing in concepts that are completely retarded.
As I said before, irony itself could be used simply and correctly as a tool-- to make fun of arrogant power-trippers and wannabe alphas / high IQ types, check people's egos, and mock delusional beliefs in general.
But as I've said, it just never gets used that way.
Instead it's been co-opted by the losers into a trophy-generating device, to feed their anti-social habits (in this case, the addiction to WINNING)-- by being so smug and 'so above it' and 'so much more smart / hip / aware than you normies' the weirdos can maximally and endlessly inflate their egos for every second of the day, and over the most minuscule things.