You are omitting the other option: satisfying work: small farming or craftsmanship. Work is stultifying if you are over supervised or if you are just a tiny link in a chain of production.
And service work takes a different quality if you are working in a true community. When I was growing up, the barber was also the mayor of the town. Men would hang out at the barber shop to play checkers or talk issues. The barber socialized while cutting hair. The same held for grocers, fishmongers, etc.
I do not consider 15 minute cities to be necessarily dystopian. Why not short commutes in a full size sedan? That's more eco friendly than long commutes in an econo-box. And you still have the trunk space for that vacation.
Yes, being a small business owner is qualitatively different than being a wagecuck for others, I agree with you. But most of the small business owners end up working even longer hours than the wagecuck; they have even less free time to themselves. Small farmers make destitute wages, for example...
The reality of how the deck is stacked against the self-employed (government regulatory and tax burdens, bankster financing, etc) means that it is next to impossible to raise a family while depending on self-employment, unless your business is already very well established before you get married and have kids (or you have your wife as the primary breadwinner while you plug your meager profits back into your business, in which case, good luck having kids). If we eliminated all the banksters and the ponzi scheme known as the dollar, that would free up tremendous wealth to be enjoyed by the *productive* economy. Add to that all the administrative costs for regulatory and tax compliance, and you have the reason why it's so hard to escape the rat race or find meaningful productive work that pays the bills.
Small farmers make destitute wages today. Things changed under Nixon.
Small farming is never going to pay well, however, since the job satisfaction is going be part of the compensation. Which is better: a fancy apartment with all the amenities in Manhattan, or a leaky tenant house with horsehair sticking out of the plaster, noticeably curved floors and ceilings, no air conditioning, but surrounded by a farm the size of Central Park?
It doesn't have to be *that* bad haha. You can maintain and improve your house yourself, you don't have to rely on the magic contractor fairies or deal with a crumbling ruin. I know most people don't learn the first thing about this in modern life experience, but if you're serious about running a small farm you'd better get used to picking up new skills.
Sure. So is most of everything else involved with running a successful farm though. There's not an app for that, and it's not something you can order from Amazon.
You are describing a reality from your childhood that no longer exists, and partially the point of the post. Small business owners have been crushed, taxes & regulations pre-covid - and loss of markets and capital combined with stifling inflation post-covid. Small business, in every form, is the heartbeat of strong nations, its been gutted - hollowed out, and the process that caused this loss and suffering continues.
I'm trying to bring back that reality. I'm working on making the Republican Party into the small business/small farm party instead of being the tax cuts for Wall St. players party.
> When I was growing up, the barber was also the mayor of the town. Men would hang out at the barber shop to play checkers or talk issues. The barber socialized while cutting hair. The same held for grocers, fishmongers, etc.
How old are you? Unless your at least an octogenarian, when you were growing up, the majority of the US economy was dominated by people working on assembly lines at massive paternalistic corporations.
But you still relied on equipment made by said corporations. Also tobacco is a cash crop, what do you suppose the people you were selling it to were doing?
Back in the day, Good Union Jobs paid a premium over more satisfying work. 40 hour workweeks with time and a half when running over, etc.
Some of those jobs still exist, but most have been sent abroad. Meanwhile, farming has been heavily consolidated, and franchises dominate even more of retail than when I was a child. (Though franchises were big even then.)
"Today, there is really only two ways to escape the rat race: either ascend it via passive income or drop out from it entirely. Because only from escaping the rat race can a person really be free; if you are not in charge of your time you are a slave."
The former relies upon the slavery of others to work. Not just slavery, but the stealing of the slave's wages. I would argue that even Aristotle, who was ok with slavery, would be offended by our slavery today. Because it was morally expected that you took care of your slaves - provided them with food, shelter, and all the necessities of life for them AND their families.
If you go the passive income route, you're saying that you're ok with slavery, and that you are ok with stealing that excess wealth from others that you kicked and clawed your way out of. You just don't want it done to you.
The rest of the world be damned.
And possibly your soul.
I'd argue there's a third way - that of the freeman. It involves pain and suffering, and a woman willing to shoulder the sacrifices as well. Basically, a return to traditional living. Get out of usury. Invest in things that cut your cost of living - used cars, tools to upkeep them, raise your own food. Start a business for tax write offs. Have children, lots of them. Live in a state with loose laws about labor and zoning, rent a place in the sticks till you can afford a house.
You can run a business and be technically below the poverty line, while making ends meet. Labor from the children is also your retirement after the social security blows up in 10 years. You have the business write offs to invest in things that you use for the business that can help. Anything you can do to get your monthly bills down helps - We're down to rent to own, electricity, and water. Minimal food bills. Occasional car parts I can fix in the shop. We went from a 400 sq/ft house when married, to 1200, to 2400 as income rose - each with more animals, expanding how little we paid other bills, how much tools we had, etc.
It can work. It just hurts. Pain tolerances must be high for everyone. Be ready to be poor in money, and high in wealth of owning things.
Yes, this is a good point Uncouth. Going the "passive income" route is essentially acceptance of our interest based usury system which sucks the soul out of humanity. I think interest based lending should be tightly regulated and close to banned, but as seen in even Islam which explicitly bans it, they use every loophole imaginable to get around it. Islamic banking is usury in all but name...it is a tricky thing.
The path you have chosen is a difficult one - a struggle for basic sustenance that will consume all your time - but perhaps the right path. I have a future post on the Amish which tracks to an extent your experience, although even the Amish are not fully self sufficient. Have you had a lot of country living growing up? Skilled with your hands? Familiar with agriculture? Have a community you rely on? How difficult do you see that lifestyle as being for those without that background/existing skillset?
My understanding of interest lending of the middle ages is a bit gabled. I've heard two things that are conflicting, either of which I'd be ok with.
1. You have to legally define your money as investment money, separate from savings, which can't go back and forth in a free flow manner. Being legally separated, it can be lent at interest only to productive investments of sound quality, but you may get none of it back. Think of the old Dickens novels where people and banks are constantly ruined and bankrupt.
2. You literally can't lend any money at interest, but can lend money more as a purchase of ownership in companies in which you are legally entitled to a % of all profits based on how much ownership you have and what you have haggled for.
Both lending options require you to know who you're lending to, and trust them. They require virtue and wisdom. More small bankruptcies, but less boom/bust on a nation wide scale.
As far as the path I chose - it does require community. I wouldn't do it unless you find a good, solid church that has the same values. I'm Catholic, and have a solid community we rely on. Car breaks down? I have several people we can call. Or babysitters. Book clubs. I recently was elected the board of a cemetery we're putting together for the community so we can handle end of life in house, and bury our own affordably. We have a neighbor that has a mill, others that weld, handymen, etc. I run a one man electric company till my eldest is old enough to work. I work on my own diesel truck, my wife's as much as I can.
But I started in the trades 10 years ago, and the same with the vehicles. Hadn't changed my oil before then and was working in theatre as a set designer and lighting designer. Some of it transferred over, but not all.
It's rough, but it's worth it. It can be had, and is worth moving across the country for if people can afford doing so. If not, you do what you can, where you can. As I've said on other people's blogs - we play with the hand we're dealt, and fight with the weapons on hand.
You're absolutely correct about everything here. I keyed into this pretty quickly after my own consignment to the wagecuck fate, and for years I've sounded like a raving lunatic to most people I know for saying exactly what you outlined here. Most everyday Americans are so steeped in this kind of lifestyle and culture that they can't even imagine what an alternative might be. Even now me and my coworker (half) joke about being treated worse than serfs because, during those days, a serf could expect to be fed by their employers.
My wife and I, at and almost at retirement age, have put away enough, at least on paper, to live out our existences at relative ease. But who can be at ease when your kids, your neighbors, your communities, your presumed destination vacations are basically in ruins compared to what situations and places once were. Fundamental changes at all levels of society need to be retuned, redone, recaptured from those that subverted them for their own gain whether for money, power, or both. Good enough is a deteriorating mindset that should make everyone uneasy not at ease. I love thought provoking articles and discussions---hopefully leading to life altering solutions. God Bless!!!
I have a dream... it is that a new party arises, a Freedom party. One in which in my opinion is the only solution to end slavery and that is to eliminate tax on personal property and income. Limit terms on elected officials and eliminate allowing corporations to donate to campaigns.
I know it will probably never happen but a man can dream can't he?
In other words, leave elected officials at an even bigger disadvantage when dealing with the managerial state.
> eliminate allowing corporations to donate to campaigns.
Bad idea. This basically amounts banning the ability of the little guys to pool their resources together to fight the big guys.
> I know it will probably never happen but a man can dream can't he?
I suppose I have an even more unrealistic dream. My dream is that the people who want to end this slavery become smart enough not to keep falling for every proposal that superficially sounds like it would help them but would merely further entrench elite power.
Ok, what counts as a "campaign contribution"? Any answer you come up with will be riddled with loopholes that those on the inside can take advantage off, to the exclusion of the less well-connected.
Those are slogans. And we got to this point because too many people were willing to support proposals attached to nice sounding slogans without thinking through what the actual implications of the proposals were.
Brilliant summary of the choices before most people. Additionally, one must also factor in the soul-sucking aspect of a rat-race job. While getting out is a calculated risk, it has tremendous upside and valuable life lessons to those who dare to live free.
Unless you have a fairy godmother …you need to (excuse the vulgarity)… work for a living . Our country affords that opportunity to all. Be grateful..we are very blessed.
The US total workforce participation rate is currently 62.5%. For males over twenty, the demographic with the highest participation rate, that rate is 70.2%. It turns out that for nearly half of the population and for a little over a fourth of the adult male population the government is their "fairy godmother". Frankly, at this point if you don't have any realistic prospect of a comfortable retirement and you aren't trying to raise a large family you are just being milked as tax cattle if you are working hard in this country.
I F.I.R.E'd at 43 years old with wife & 2 school aged kids in 2007. Served 6 years in Marine Corp after high school, then college for undergraduate & MBA. I started as peasant wage slave & graduated to executive serf, helping to build a $50 million business we sold to Cargill. I was raised in lower middle class family & learned the value of a dollar from Scottish spendthrift grandparents. When I was offered the "big money" and title of President, I walked. Corporate yes men are the bane of society. We traveled with the kids, then returned to start a cookie/sweet goods bakery we operated part time to pay bills & spend time with kids. We sold in June 2019 and found ourselves "stuck" in truck camper when the pandemic that wasn't a pandemic hit. We haven't stopped traveling, preferring to live overseas than subject ourselves to the insanity that is the U.S. these days, hard drugs & violent crime as just one example that dominates the west coast. I'm in concert with what you write and appreciate the ideas to reframe strategies based upon new, harsher realities. The old models are broken, and the choice is to lose yourself in the soul sucking systems of modernity, or find creative ways to live that raises your spirit.
Thanks for sharing your story, Sean, which is very interesting. It sounds like you're living your life with meaning and family connection. Yes, the great question today is how we can enrich our creativity and raise our spirits in such a spiritually poor age...
My previous job required me to travel within my home state. I found out that state law doesn't require your employer to pay you for travel time within the state -- if you have a company provided vehicle, which I had.
However there was one job where I had to travel one state away, it was a 3-hour drive, and I was paid an extra 6-hours any time that I had to go there. It made a significant difference in my income. Meanwhile, I could have traveled 6-hours within the state and not been paid at all.
The equation to remember is (Time = life). You can't get time back. You just lose more of your life. I'm not getting any younger.
I now work from home nearly 100%. And there's literally no comparison. I can get more work done, and not go anywhere.
* Lower stress
* No travel time
* Don't have to wake up super early
* Have more time with my wife
* Have more time with my kids
* Have more time in general
I would not consider going back to a job where I have to leave home, not unless there was no other option.
Say what you will about those stuck in the 9-5 loop, at least they’re getting up and facing the world (however depressing that world may be). I can’t imagine the shame and stagnation of the NEET lifestyle you described though.
It’s always frustrating when someone else writes what’s been on your mind for years but then again, I am very happy to find such pieces because it brings me such relief that I’m not the only one thinking it. Everyone is clamouring to escape the rat race. To escape becoming a slave. It feels like a storm is brewing but I wonder if most of us even have the thymos to fight it all anymore...or if most of us have already given up. After all, I believe one must become a slave psychologically first, before becoming one functionally.
The way I conceptualise this (and I'm more or less anarchocapitalist) is that Marx was broadly right - international capital will relentlessly optimise for starvation wages everywhere, maximum "exploitation" (in the capitalist sense if not in the more dubious Marxist sense), and so we are all of us (the 99%) proletarians even if we are making six or even seven figure salaries. And while I would like to *get to* an anarcho-capitalist utopia, the playing field is almost vertical at the moment, so I don't think it's going to ever get level without something akin to revolutionary expropriation. Maybe something along the lines of Julius Caesar's platform on debt and property. Maybe something more radical than that.
You know I think the worst part about this is that a solid slice of jobs and work time may in fact just be pointless busy work.
In the olden days for example famous scientists like Feynman only ever published a comparatively small amount of papers compared to researchers today.
Anecdotally having spoken to boomers I know about their jobs, my general impression is that for the past few decades the trend has been to increase the quantity of work an employee has to do, because at some point that was mistaken for an increase in quality.
Yes, the shift from an industrial society to a service based society has paradoxically increased the amount of work required of employees... If one is a salaried white collar employee one is expected to respond to emails, calls and texts at all hours of the day; there is no downtime.
I once ran a software engineering shop and it doesn’t take long to realize that every project amounted to the elimination of jobs. Internally, we came to believe that on the managerial plantation, all work is already automated. I’ve learned to be judicial about who I share that with bc it tends to draw unexpectedly violent rebuttals in the shape of ‘well speak for yourself, but I know my job’s real (harrumph)’. It seems like creative work and things that need an opposable thumb are still required. The rest amounts to keeping the serfs distracted and could be automated away rather trivially.
A lot of people don't believe the official stories on the construction of the great ancient structures or their real purpose. I'm a civil engineer and completely agree. The precision, symmetry, and machining of the hardest stones on earth with bronze tools, massive loads up to 1500 tons being quarried and moved 100s of miles over mountains, then hoisted hundreds of feet into the air. None of this can be accomplished by the suggested methods - it is literally physically impossible. People across the world were also using the same architectural styles and details ("Roman/Greek"), and much of the geometry suggests cathedrals and pyramids were used for energy harvesting and transmission. The step wells and temples of India, for example, are absolutely mind blowing in their scope and precision. If you're interested in looking into the subject, I recommend yt channels Global Vision, Jon Levi, Brien Foerester, and Robert Sepehr.
Checked him out. Good info but I don't agree with his take that the megaliths in Peru were built by Incas. Their own oral history says they found those structures when they got there, and you can see crude cobble work sitting on top of the ancient masterpieces. I think this is also true of Egyptians, Mayans, etc. and that there was an advanced global civilization that built these with very high tech that was later wiped out. Check out the Egyptian Sabu disc as one example of thousands of anomalies.
There were almost certainly advanced civilizations prior to the most recent ice age, which were naturally destroyed by said ice age. Man reverted to a pre-civilizational form, only to emerge again roughly 5000 years ago.
The only question is how many such cycles we have experienced as a species.
I agree. It's wild to think about and the fact it's all been completely hidden for so long is what's really a trip. I wonder how much the bastards that run this asylum really know? Some say the Library of Alexandria is stored in the Vatican, and other loot in the Smithsonian, including giant skeletons that were widely reported on in 19th C. newspapers. It wouldn't surprise me if they did or that they had texts and artifacts of the pre-freeze/flood/fire whatever civs.
I think that inflation was the biggest screw over. The fact that we are technically making more money hourly than people back then yet it doesn't matter because the price of everything just keeps going up is silly. Rigged system disguised by mismanagement if you ask me.
This is a great article, but I think most people are just spiritual peasants and always will be. If you gave them infinite free time they would just devote more time to gaming, entertainment media consumption, or clubbing, depending on their individual preferences. You may get a slight rise in genius innovators and a small subset of the population would become more actualized, but most would just fall even deeper into anomie.
You are omitting the other option: satisfying work: small farming or craftsmanship. Work is stultifying if you are over supervised or if you are just a tiny link in a chain of production.
And service work takes a different quality if you are working in a true community. When I was growing up, the barber was also the mayor of the town. Men would hang out at the barber shop to play checkers or talk issues. The barber socialized while cutting hair. The same held for grocers, fishmongers, etc.
I do not consider 15 minute cities to be necessarily dystopian. Why not short commutes in a full size sedan? That's more eco friendly than long commutes in an econo-box. And you still have the trunk space for that vacation.
Yes, being a small business owner is qualitatively different than being a wagecuck for others, I agree with you. But most of the small business owners end up working even longer hours than the wagecuck; they have even less free time to themselves. Small farmers make destitute wages, for example...
The reality of how the deck is stacked against the self-employed (government regulatory and tax burdens, bankster financing, etc) means that it is next to impossible to raise a family while depending on self-employment, unless your business is already very well established before you get married and have kids (or you have your wife as the primary breadwinner while you plug your meager profits back into your business, in which case, good luck having kids). If we eliminated all the banksters and the ponzi scheme known as the dollar, that would free up tremendous wealth to be enjoyed by the *productive* economy. Add to that all the administrative costs for regulatory and tax compliance, and you have the reason why it's so hard to escape the rat race or find meaningful productive work that pays the bills.
Small farmers make destitute wages today. Things changed under Nixon.
Small farming is never going to pay well, however, since the job satisfaction is going be part of the compensation. Which is better: a fancy apartment with all the amenities in Manhattan, or a leaky tenant house with horsehair sticking out of the plaster, noticeably curved floors and ceilings, no air conditioning, but surrounded by a farm the size of Central Park?
It doesn't have to be *that* bad haha. You can maintain and improve your house yourself, you don't have to rely on the magic contractor fairies or deal with a crumbling ruin. I know most people don't learn the first thing about this in modern life experience, but if you're serious about running a small farm you'd better get used to picking up new skills.
Covering bad plaster with paneling isn't hard. Raising a ceiling or taking the curvature out of a floor is rather more challenging.
Sure. So is most of everything else involved with running a successful farm though. There's not an app for that, and it's not something you can order from Amazon.
You are describing a reality from your childhood that no longer exists, and partially the point of the post. Small business owners have been crushed, taxes & regulations pre-covid - and loss of markets and capital combined with stifling inflation post-covid. Small business, in every form, is the heartbeat of strong nations, its been gutted - hollowed out, and the process that caused this loss and suffering continues.
I'm trying to bring back that reality. I'm working on making the Republican Party into the small business/small farm party instead of being the tax cuts for Wall St. players party.
I'm not alone.
> When I was growing up, the barber was also the mayor of the town. Men would hang out at the barber shop to play checkers or talk issues. The barber socialized while cutting hair. The same held for grocers, fishmongers, etc.
How old are you? Unless your at least an octogenarian, when you were growing up, the majority of the US economy was dominated by people working on assembly lines at massive paternalistic corporations.
I'm describing a small town in the south in the 1960s/early 70s. Fishing and tobacco farming were the main industries.
But you still relied on equipment made by said corporations. Also tobacco is a cash crop, what do you suppose the people you were selling it to were doing?
Back in the day, Good Union Jobs paid a premium over more satisfying work. 40 hour workweeks with time and a half when running over, etc.
Some of those jobs still exist, but most have been sent abroad. Meanwhile, farming has been heavily consolidated, and franchises dominate even more of retail than when I was a child. (Though franchises were big even then.)
Exactly! It's a reactionary concept.
For example, what killed walking to school? Answer: social engineers in robes who mandated forced busing.
I've mostly dropped out, but I don't have hobbies, I have learning, training and preparing.
"Today, there is really only two ways to escape the rat race: either ascend it via passive income or drop out from it entirely. Because only from escaping the rat race can a person really be free; if you are not in charge of your time you are a slave."
The former relies upon the slavery of others to work. Not just slavery, but the stealing of the slave's wages. I would argue that even Aristotle, who was ok with slavery, would be offended by our slavery today. Because it was morally expected that you took care of your slaves - provided them with food, shelter, and all the necessities of life for them AND their families.
If you go the passive income route, you're saying that you're ok with slavery, and that you are ok with stealing that excess wealth from others that you kicked and clawed your way out of. You just don't want it done to you.
The rest of the world be damned.
And possibly your soul.
I'd argue there's a third way - that of the freeman. It involves pain and suffering, and a woman willing to shoulder the sacrifices as well. Basically, a return to traditional living. Get out of usury. Invest in things that cut your cost of living - used cars, tools to upkeep them, raise your own food. Start a business for tax write offs. Have children, lots of them. Live in a state with loose laws about labor and zoning, rent a place in the sticks till you can afford a house.
You can run a business and be technically below the poverty line, while making ends meet. Labor from the children is also your retirement after the social security blows up in 10 years. You have the business write offs to invest in things that you use for the business that can help. Anything you can do to get your monthly bills down helps - We're down to rent to own, electricity, and water. Minimal food bills. Occasional car parts I can fix in the shop. We went from a 400 sq/ft house when married, to 1200, to 2400 as income rose - each with more animals, expanding how little we paid other bills, how much tools we had, etc.
It can work. It just hurts. Pain tolerances must be high for everyone. Be ready to be poor in money, and high in wealth of owning things.
Yes, this is a good point Uncouth. Going the "passive income" route is essentially acceptance of our interest based usury system which sucks the soul out of humanity. I think interest based lending should be tightly regulated and close to banned, but as seen in even Islam which explicitly bans it, they use every loophole imaginable to get around it. Islamic banking is usury in all but name...it is a tricky thing.
The path you have chosen is a difficult one - a struggle for basic sustenance that will consume all your time - but perhaps the right path. I have a future post on the Amish which tracks to an extent your experience, although even the Amish are not fully self sufficient. Have you had a lot of country living growing up? Skilled with your hands? Familiar with agriculture? Have a community you rely on? How difficult do you see that lifestyle as being for those without that background/existing skillset?
My understanding of interest lending of the middle ages is a bit gabled. I've heard two things that are conflicting, either of which I'd be ok with.
1. You have to legally define your money as investment money, separate from savings, which can't go back and forth in a free flow manner. Being legally separated, it can be lent at interest only to productive investments of sound quality, but you may get none of it back. Think of the old Dickens novels where people and banks are constantly ruined and bankrupt.
2. You literally can't lend any money at interest, but can lend money more as a purchase of ownership in companies in which you are legally entitled to a % of all profits based on how much ownership you have and what you have haggled for.
Both lending options require you to know who you're lending to, and trust them. They require virtue and wisdom. More small bankruptcies, but less boom/bust on a nation wide scale.
As far as the path I chose - it does require community. I wouldn't do it unless you find a good, solid church that has the same values. I'm Catholic, and have a solid community we rely on. Car breaks down? I have several people we can call. Or babysitters. Book clubs. I recently was elected the board of a cemetery we're putting together for the community so we can handle end of life in house, and bury our own affordably. We have a neighbor that has a mill, others that weld, handymen, etc. I run a one man electric company till my eldest is old enough to work. I work on my own diesel truck, my wife's as much as I can.
But I started in the trades 10 years ago, and the same with the vehicles. Hadn't changed my oil before then and was working in theatre as a set designer and lighting designer. Some of it transferred over, but not all.
It's rough, but it's worth it. It can be had, and is worth moving across the country for if people can afford doing so. If not, you do what you can, where you can. As I've said on other people's blogs - we play with the hand we're dealt, and fight with the weapons on hand.
You are extremely lucky to be able to find a partner who supports you in an endeavour like this.
You're absolutely correct about everything here. I keyed into this pretty quickly after my own consignment to the wagecuck fate, and for years I've sounded like a raving lunatic to most people I know for saying exactly what you outlined here. Most everyday Americans are so steeped in this kind of lifestyle and culture that they can't even imagine what an alternative might be. Even now me and my coworker (half) joke about being treated worse than serfs because, during those days, a serf could expect to be fed by their employers.
My wife and I, at and almost at retirement age, have put away enough, at least on paper, to live out our existences at relative ease. But who can be at ease when your kids, your neighbors, your communities, your presumed destination vacations are basically in ruins compared to what situations and places once were. Fundamental changes at all levels of society need to be retuned, redone, recaptured from those that subverted them for their own gain whether for money, power, or both. Good enough is a deteriorating mindset that should make everyone uneasy not at ease. I love thought provoking articles and discussions---hopefully leading to life altering solutions. God Bless!!!
I have a dream... it is that a new party arises, a Freedom party. One in which in my opinion is the only solution to end slavery and that is to eliminate tax on personal property and income. Limit terms on elected officials and eliminate allowing corporations to donate to campaigns.
I know it will probably never happen but a man can dream can't he?
The key thing is either eliminating the Federal Reserve or nationalizing it...
Agree
Dream- now that is a hobby
Alas, the Freedom Party domain name is owned by an Objectivist group.
> Limit terms on elected officials
In other words, leave elected officials at an even bigger disadvantage when dealing with the managerial state.
> eliminate allowing corporations to donate to campaigns.
Bad idea. This basically amounts banning the ability of the little guys to pool their resources together to fight the big guys.
> I know it will probably never happen but a man can dream can't he?
I suppose I have an even more unrealistic dream. My dream is that the people who want to end this slavery become smart enough not to keep falling for every proposal that superficially sounds like it would help them but would merely further entrench elite power.
We need term limits on civil servants as well.
Bring back the spoils system.
Corporations aren’t “little guys pooling their resources 🙄”
Depends on the corporation. That's what Citizens United was, for example.
Corporations aren’t people
Campaign contributions should absolutely be only made by real natural people, and capped in amount
Enough is enough
Ok, what counts as a "campaign contribution"? Any answer you come up with will be riddled with loopholes that those on the inside can take advantage off, to the exclusion of the less well-connected.
We want less of that shit. Saying that there will always be some isn’t a reason to never try.
Unfortunately we already have the system you describe in place and it hasn't worked out to great now has it?
So, let's make it worse.
How about we try something new? Taxes = slavery
Money + politicians = corruption
Those are slogans. And we got to this point because too many people were willing to support proposals attached to nice sounding slogans without thinking through what the actual implications of the proposals were.
Brilliant summary of the choices before most people. Additionally, one must also factor in the soul-sucking aspect of a rat-race job. While getting out is a calculated risk, it has tremendous upside and valuable life lessons to those who dare to live free.
Unless you have a fairy godmother …you need to (excuse the vulgarity)… work for a living . Our country affords that opportunity to all. Be grateful..we are very blessed.
The US total workforce participation rate is currently 62.5%. For males over twenty, the demographic with the highest participation rate, that rate is 70.2%. It turns out that for nearly half of the population and for a little over a fourth of the adult male population the government is their "fairy godmother". Frankly, at this point if you don't have any realistic prospect of a comfortable retirement and you aren't trying to raise a large family you are just being milked as tax cattle if you are working hard in this country.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm
I F.I.R.E'd at 43 years old with wife & 2 school aged kids in 2007. Served 6 years in Marine Corp after high school, then college for undergraduate & MBA. I started as peasant wage slave & graduated to executive serf, helping to build a $50 million business we sold to Cargill. I was raised in lower middle class family & learned the value of a dollar from Scottish spendthrift grandparents. When I was offered the "big money" and title of President, I walked. Corporate yes men are the bane of society. We traveled with the kids, then returned to start a cookie/sweet goods bakery we operated part time to pay bills & spend time with kids. We sold in June 2019 and found ourselves "stuck" in truck camper when the pandemic that wasn't a pandemic hit. We haven't stopped traveling, preferring to live overseas than subject ourselves to the insanity that is the U.S. these days, hard drugs & violent crime as just one example that dominates the west coast. I'm in concert with what you write and appreciate the ideas to reframe strategies based upon new, harsher realities. The old models are broken, and the choice is to lose yourself in the soul sucking systems of modernity, or find creative ways to live that raises your spirit.
Thanks for sharing your story, Sean, which is very interesting. It sounds like you're living your life with meaning and family connection. Yes, the great question today is how we can enrich our creativity and raise our spirits in such a spiritually poor age...
You are 100% right about this.
My previous job required me to travel within my home state. I found out that state law doesn't require your employer to pay you for travel time within the state -- if you have a company provided vehicle, which I had.
However there was one job where I had to travel one state away, it was a 3-hour drive, and I was paid an extra 6-hours any time that I had to go there. It made a significant difference in my income. Meanwhile, I could have traveled 6-hours within the state and not been paid at all.
The equation to remember is (Time = life). You can't get time back. You just lose more of your life. I'm not getting any younger.
I now work from home nearly 100%. And there's literally no comparison. I can get more work done, and not go anywhere.
* Lower stress
* No travel time
* Don't have to wake up super early
* Have more time with my wife
* Have more time with my kids
* Have more time in general
I would not consider going back to a job where I have to leave home, not unless there was no other option.
Say what you will about those stuck in the 9-5 loop, at least they’re getting up and facing the world (however depressing that world may be). I can’t imagine the shame and stagnation of the NEET lifestyle you described though.
It’s always frustrating when someone else writes what’s been on your mind for years but then again, I am very happy to find such pieces because it brings me such relief that I’m not the only one thinking it. Everyone is clamouring to escape the rat race. To escape becoming a slave. It feels like a storm is brewing but I wonder if most of us even have the thymos to fight it all anymore...or if most of us have already given up. After all, I believe one must become a slave psychologically first, before becoming one functionally.
The way I conceptualise this (and I'm more or less anarchocapitalist) is that Marx was broadly right - international capital will relentlessly optimise for starvation wages everywhere, maximum "exploitation" (in the capitalist sense if not in the more dubious Marxist sense), and so we are all of us (the 99%) proletarians even if we are making six or even seven figure salaries. And while I would like to *get to* an anarcho-capitalist utopia, the playing field is almost vertical at the moment, so I don't think it's going to ever get level without something akin to revolutionary expropriation. Maybe something along the lines of Julius Caesar's platform on debt and property. Maybe something more radical than that.
You know I think the worst part about this is that a solid slice of jobs and work time may in fact just be pointless busy work.
In the olden days for example famous scientists like Feynman only ever published a comparatively small amount of papers compared to researchers today.
Anecdotally having spoken to boomers I know about their jobs, my general impression is that for the past few decades the trend has been to increase the quantity of work an employee has to do, because at some point that was mistaken for an increase in quality.
Yes, the shift from an industrial society to a service based society has paradoxically increased the amount of work required of employees... If one is a salaried white collar employee one is expected to respond to emails, calls and texts at all hours of the day; there is no downtime.
Rene Guenon wrote a book called "The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times" about how the modern era favors quantity over quality which I will be reading soon: https://www.amazon.com/Reign-Quantity-Signs-Times-ebook/dp/B09PGVCH4Y/
I once ran a software engineering shop and it doesn’t take long to realize that every project amounted to the elimination of jobs. Internally, we came to believe that on the managerial plantation, all work is already automated. I’ve learned to be judicial about who I share that with bc it tends to draw unexpectedly violent rebuttals in the shape of ‘well speak for yourself, but I know my job’s real (harrumph)’. It seems like creative work and things that need an opposable thumb are still required. The rest amounts to keeping the serfs distracted and could be automated away rather trivially.
A lot of people don't believe the official stories on the construction of the great ancient structures or their real purpose. I'm a civil engineer and completely agree. The precision, symmetry, and machining of the hardest stones on earth with bronze tools, massive loads up to 1500 tons being quarried and moved 100s of miles over mountains, then hoisted hundreds of feet into the air. None of this can be accomplished by the suggested methods - it is literally physically impossible. People across the world were also using the same architectural styles and details ("Roman/Greek"), and much of the geometry suggests cathedrals and pyramids were used for energy harvesting and transmission. The step wells and temples of India, for example, are absolutely mind blowing in their scope and precision. If you're interested in looking into the subject, I recommend yt channels Global Vision, Jon Levi, Brien Foerester, and Robert Sepehr.
I recommend DeDunking.
Checked him out. Good info but I don't agree with his take that the megaliths in Peru were built by Incas. Their own oral history says they found those structures when they got there, and you can see crude cobble work sitting on top of the ancient masterpieces. I think this is also true of Egyptians, Mayans, etc. and that there was an advanced global civilization that built these with very high tech that was later wiped out. Check out the Egyptian Sabu disc as one example of thousands of anomalies.
There were almost certainly advanced civilizations prior to the most recent ice age, which were naturally destroyed by said ice age. Man reverted to a pre-civilizational form, only to emerge again roughly 5000 years ago.
The only question is how many such cycles we have experienced as a species.
I agree. It's wild to think about and the fact it's all been completely hidden for so long is what's really a trip. I wonder how much the bastards that run this asylum really know? Some say the Library of Alexandria is stored in the Vatican, and other loot in the Smithsonian, including giant skeletons that were widely reported on in 19th C. newspapers. It wouldn't surprise me if they did or that they had texts and artifacts of the pre-freeze/flood/fire whatever civs.
I think that inflation was the biggest screw over. The fact that we are technically making more money hourly than people back then yet it doesn't matter because the price of everything just keeps going up is silly. Rigged system disguised by mismanagement if you ask me.
This is a great article, but I think most people are just spiritual peasants and always will be. If you gave them infinite free time they would just devote more time to gaming, entertainment media consumption, or clubbing, depending on their individual preferences. You may get a slight rise in genius innovators and a small subset of the population would become more actualized, but most would just fall even deeper into anomie.
I agree with you, bread and circus and the masses are more or less satisfied. But those aren't the regular readers of this Substack, I think...