Is so freaking real. I notice it within myself sometimes and when it happens I do not like it one bit Sam I Am. Like when trying to do or create anything, if something doesn’t do exactly what I anticipate it to do, I will get so stressed about it so fast. I do worry this is not helped by the advent of modern technology where we have been conditioned to expect everything to just work. I don’t think that is an argument against technology but just an aspect of its existence that we need to stay aware and vigilant of especially in regards to ourselves. Ooh, I just experienced another example of my impatience when trying to type the word vigilant. I just couldn’t spell it right and I became convinced that my computer had conspired against me rather than it just being me that could not spell.
This is a very interesting aspect of being human that I have witnessed within myself on multiple occasions. When something doesn’t work, I will often feel it’s a conspiracy against me involving whatever it is that’s not working doing so out of spite. This leads me to beating my spacebar, for instance, when a program won’t let me enter a space into the name of a file when it had before, rather than acknowledging the infinitely more likely scenario that something in the code of the program has just became corrupt or maybe there was an update that I hadn’t noticed.
It can be so hard to be patient sometimes and it’s impossible not to notice the negative effects that has on my life. I think for me, my impatience mostly comes down to a need for control of my environment. I find I cannot tolerate anything behaving in a way that I don’t like and this is something I need to learn to deal with. I don’t know where this came from but psychology tells me it can come from growing up in an environment that always felt out of control. That may be the case and I probably need to go to a therapist to find out what things from my childhood I choose not to remember. Mental illness sucks, because it is a feedback loop. The very depression and anxiety that should be dealt with by a therapist also sucks the motivation and executive function out of you that would drive you to go to therapy. This is why there needs to be as few barriers as possible between people and help because the more barriers there are, the fewer people will go.
Recently I’ve felt like these posts were more rambling than putting together concise ideas into a blog form. This has been helpful for me and my ability to just vent and process emotions but I hope it has also remained somewhat readable. I almost forgot to make this week’s post so hurray to me for remembering. Anyways, I hope you enjoy reading my thoughts and will continue to do so and maybe invite some others to do so because I would love to have some real traffic on this site. Sending out my love to everyone and I’ll see you next week. ❤
I have had a very rocky relationship with my ability to stand up for what I believe in. I feel like in a very real way, for a lot of my life, I’ve allowed myself to be a pushover when it came to big problems but was often stubborn and probably insufferable when it came to small things. Maybe that was because where I felt powerless in big situations I made up by being a knob about small things. Last year I had a life changing moment however, where I made a decision that was borderline vindictive while at the same time a step in the direction of caring about myself. I won’t get into the details here but long story short I hurt someone who had proven time and time again that they were OK hurting me. I still don’t know if I stand by what I did really, but, I do believe it was a very big step for me in deciding that I matter as much as anyone else.
Since then I have been exploring this idea and what it means to me. I have been discovering a real ability within myself to stand by what I believe which is a very new feeling. Before, I had a really bad habit of always feeling like whatever someone else said, or whatever I said, that they were probably the one that was right. I hated this feeling and I am so glad I am learning how to let go of it. I feel more liberated to make decisions and not care so much about what other people say about them. I do still very much believe in listening to people and being able to learn from experiences that aren’t your own but I no longer default to assuming other people are right. I can weigh all of the evidence, other people’s and my own, when deciding what I think is right.
So now that I’ve learned to stand up for things, I’m now struggling to decide in what situations it is called for and in what situations it is more appropriate to find common ground or “keep the peace.” I won’t lie, a lot of me is inclined to believe that it is never appropriate to “keep the peace” when the topic is big, when it’s climate change, when it’s acknowledging the suffering of black communities, basically when it’s morality. A favorite quote of mine (that I do not mean to sound arrogant in saying because I know I am not always right) is something to the effect of “ignorance flourishes when those who are wise remain silent.” Maybe the only time that it is appropriate to keep the peace is when it’s stupid things like what car is the coolest or whether or not John Stamos is the hottest person to ever live (bad example, this is totally also a big moral issue that I WILL fight you over). Staying silent and listening when given the evidence of a situation you realize you may actually not know something is most definitely important too.
I suppose then that I do already know the answer to my conundrum, I just don’t like it because I’m not comfortable with all of the repercussions of it. Standing up for what you believe in means you absolutely will lose friends, it means you will not always be the most liked in a party, depending on the party. These are things very unfamiliar and uncomfortable to a people pleaser which I have been up until now. That all being said, the trade offs are invaluable. You will no longer feel worthless, you will no longer feel like your opinions don’t matter. If you have a good head on your shoulders, you will be able to be a voice of reason when reason is not in the room. Maybe not the most important to the world but most certainly invaluable to one’s self, standing up for yourself will mean that the people who are in your life, will be the one’s who should be there.
I really enjoy writing these, not only because I am glad I am learning to write but also it’s so helpful to me to be able to put my ideas down in a more concrete form. I am learning about myself as I type these posts. I hope whoever is reading my work enjoys them enough to want to read more of them. I really hope I can be a solid voice of positive change in this world. For now I am just going to keep trying my best and putting myself out there. Sending my love to anyone who needs it. I’ll see you next week. ❤
OMG… BUH BUY MICTH MCONNELL! With him not acting as Senate majority leader anymore there are so many policies and bills that can come through. Really hoping for that $2,000 stimulus check because as I understand it, the bill already passed in the house, but there are so so many more things to be hopeful for. I believe there was also a Marijuana legalization bill passed in the house and without Mitch in the way it may very well make it through too. Progressive policies may have a fighting chance under this administration and just… OMG… I forgot what hope felt like with that circus of an administration that preceded this one to come.
Just picture it, a U.S. with legal weed nationwide, just wow. They better clear every Marijuana charge ever, including dealing, because we know it’s not immoral, so we should stop punishing people for it. What’s more is we need to give those locked up for distributing it help setting up their own dispensaries if they so wish, as to not give all the financial gain to white people for doing something that blacks have been doing for decades. It’d be just like when Elvis rebranded Rhythm and Blues, a black dominated genre, as Rock and Roll, so that white people would listen to it. No more of this shit. Back to happy, OMG WEED!!!! No more stigma!!!!
Then there is climate policy, maybe we’ll have a fighting chance against climate change, I can only hope. I hope there will be few enough politicians owned by oil companies that we will get real legislation passed. Progressives are still going to have to pressure the fuck out of politicians because no matter how serious you think climate change is, it’s worse, but holy cow now that pressure may have a real substantial effect on policy makers. Maybe we’ll be able to have policies and politicians that see short term prices as irrelevant when an inability to tackle climate change is an existential threat to or species. Maybe we’ll have people making big decisions that can see further than three feet in front of them.
Then there’s Black Lives Matter. Please, please let’s enact some real change, please. Let’s stop blaming people for their actions when we can’t say we wouldn’t act the exact same way if put in the same situation. Poverty creates crime, we know this, our country created the poverty in black communities, we also know this, therefore… we know that the U.S. created all the problems we see in black communities including the black on black crime. You can say “but everyone is responsible for themselves” and while that is true, if that is the total sum of your understanding of human action then you do not have a full picture of what it is to be human. When a woman is pregnant and sometimes struggling to deal with all of the emotions pregnancy can bring, we give them understanding because the hormones associated with pregnancy are causing that difficulty right? When someone loses a loved one we give them room to be on edge because of that pain, yes? Well what happens when that pain isn’t the years it takes to recover from loss or the nine months of pregnancy but a lifetime of racism endured by black people and those they love? You either choose to understand pain and give people room or you don’t, there’s no room in this society for double standards, especially ones so cruel. Help black communities and make the real systemic changes that should have been made long ago. Pay retributions to all black people since most of them are the direct descendants of the slaves that built this country and those that aren’t are oppressed by the racist policies that still hold back the black community today. Create strict policy that does not allow us to discriminate even through implicit bias so that we are forced to look at our implicit biases and change them. Allow the U.S. to come to terms with its internalized racism so that we can actually fucking overcome it.
Hopefully what is happening in DC won’t turn into a problem but only time will tell. I have hope and I’m going to cling onto it for as long as I can while trying to remain vigilant. I hope anyone who is reading this is doing well and maybe can find their own hope because we all need it at this time. I believe we can get better, and I am going to try my best to help get us there. Much love to everyone, especially the black community right now, and I will see you next week.
And good riddance. I’m going to say something rather controversial here so I hope I don’t scare you off from reading the rest of this post. I really worry that it wasn’t the year that was bad, but that it’s us, and we’re on a path down a bad road if we don’t change our behavior. One could probably say that there was a bit of bad luck involved in this year because no one planned Covid19 BUT our inability to react to it properly was absolutely on us. I don’t believe that our society is currently set up to handle big systemic problems like this, especially here in the U.S., and I find it very likely that if we don’t learn how to think as a unit when it’s called for then it is only a matter of time before an even bigger systemic problem comes knocking at our door, and this time instead of that “measly 1% death rate”…. it’s going to be more like a very potential extinction event. Can someone say global warming?
Let’s not forget that Covid was just one of the problems with this year. We also had horrific displays of police brutality (not like we didn’t have that before), riots that ensued because of said brutality, and quite an economic crash caused by absolute garbage leadership. None of these things are tied to being the luck of the draw of what this year gave us, they are all simply manifestations of a bad system that we live in. We don’t live in a society built around helping people, therefore it couldn’t handle a pandemic well and just brought more wealth inequality. We don’t live in a society that is determined to undo the wrongs of our very racist history and therefore we got to see some of the worst implications of that. I really fear and honestly believe that we aren’t just going to be able to “ride this one out.” We have to actually try to fix the things causing these problems.
Ok, I will admit that while 2020’s problems are all tied our system’s faults, they did kind of all hit at the same time. I do hope we get a little room to breathe and thankfully with Biden as our president we won’t have to deal with that stupid cult of personality for at least four more years. I hate to admit this but I don’t think Biden will be anything more than a trip right back into the status quo, but that is at least marginally better than complete insanity. As for the concept of whether or not a new year can inherently bring any sort of change all on it’s own, I think it’s possible that they do but not through some grandiose cosmological force. The best case I can make for things changing on January 1st from December 31st is that if most people believe that things will change, the placebo effect will cause they themselves to act differently. When enough people do this, the world does in fact change.
WOOT Last post of 2020, couldn’t come soon enough. I’m hopeful for change because I think more and more people are being put in situations where they can no longer ignore the systemic problems that face us. I’m going to do my part and NEVER shut up about said problems because complacency kills just as fast as malice. I hope you can forgive me for this joke but I’ll talk to you next year. 😛 Love everybody. <3….. Except you Mitch Mccollnell, you suck.
Growing up I considered myself Christian and absolutely loved Christmas. I could swear the day literally felt like it was unlike all other days and we all transcended to a different plane of existence. I was lucky to have a family that was loving and created those moments that I was able to enjoy so much. I owe a lot of that thanks to my mom for always trying her best and making a priority out of creating those times. One Christmas I even got an Epiphone Les Paul (guitar) and I LOVED IT and still have it to this day. That was probably my favorite day of my entire life so far because I really didn’t think we could afford anything like that at the time but mom made it work with a little help of my dad who no longer lived with us. Christmas really was my favorite holiday but as I’ve grown older I’ve lost a lot of the romantic feelings I had about it and honestly have grown to actively dislike a lot of things about it.
Nothing changed per se about how my family does holidays, it’s more so that I recognized things that I didn’t recognize as a wee lad. One is that I realized I was an atheist who thinks all the supernatural bits are just simply untrue and just humans making up stories to try to have some sort of understanding of their world even if that story isn’t founded in reality. This has made Christmas just a little strange because it’s like, do I still celebrate it? Am I a hypocrite if I celebrate Christmas as an atheist? I am aware that many atheists do celebrate Christmas; I think since Christians celebrate the Pagan holiday of Halloween and have mutated most of their holidays with other Pagan holidays such as the Christmas tree being a Pagan tradition and all of the weirdness that is Easter traditions, if I am a hypocrite at least I’m not the only one. I don’t know how much I really cared for the religious aspect of Christmas as a kid anyway because I really wonder how much I believed it vs. how much I wanted to believe it.
As for the non-religious aspects of Christmas, even though I like them, I also very much don’t. I think there are some good intentions there but it has turned, in a very real way, to an unhealthy situation. People buy things for the sake of buying things. People end up stressed about what to get people and it becomes it’s own thing, and the worst part is that more often than we’d like to admit we get things we appreciate for a day or month max and never use again… AND FEEL GUILTY FOR NOT USING. Yes of course there are things like my Les Paul that are just absolutely special and cherished things but so much of it isn’t about that and it makes me sad. Ideally for me, I would like it if we spent more time only getting things that were mostly like that. If someone really wants a thing, get that, if they kinda don’t want anything because they have all the physical things they want, don’t get get them anything. This should be an accepted norm. Of course I can appreciate the concept that Christmas can serve as a reminder that giving to others is a virtue for sure, but not in the way we do it. Maybe if we’re going to stress about how to give, we should focus on one big special thing for someone who would sincerely benefit from it rather than “get ALL the things for ALL THE PEOPLE!!!!!! GONNA DIE stress.”
This one’s gonna be short because I am writing this at 8:30pm on Christmas Eve and also I think I said all I would like to say. 🙂 I hope whatever holidays you celebrate, if you celebrate any at all, that you enjoy them and make your happiness as much a priority as you make others. Much love to you all and I’ll see you next week to probably rant about the weirdness and more importantly the arbitrariness that is New Years. Happy whatever you are doing with your life right now. ❤
This year, because of Covid19, I filed for unemployment for the first time in my life and holy cow am I disheartened about this system that is supposed to help people. I am very lucky that I have family to rely on if and when I need help and the only reason I had filed for unemployment was because this was more than “needing help,” this was “a global pandemic took the job I had just landed and now I need to be able to pay my bills for the foreseeable future.” So I filed in mid March and proceeded to await payments while in the meantime having zero money to pay bills other than with credit cards and thankfully having a few extensions from bills for which some would still eventually come due. At the end of April I received a letter saying that I was disqualified from receiving any payments because I had voluntarily quit a job in 2019 (but I had worked jobs since then and according to the law I should have been requalified so I decided to file an appeal) and here is where literal hell begins.
First I would like to say to those who would argue “well you should have just gotten another job after Covid took yours”… do you understand the concept of shutting a society down to fight a pandemic or do I have to spell it out for you? This is completely counterproductive, we are literally trying to reduce unnecessary contact and if we’re just going to tell everyone who was sent home from their job to go and find another job then we are literally accomplishing nothing. It’s not even like there were enough essential jobs for every person who needed a job at that time to have had one so just… no. Anyway, so now here I am with no money, unnecessary credit card debt, trying to get ahold of the Employment Security Department(ESD) to check on my court date after filing for an appeal. Anyone who was trying to get ahold of ESD at that time will understand my pain. I literally called 120 times in an hour once without ever getting through because there was no putting it on hold, there was you either got through or you didn’t, it would say “sorry we’re busy” and literally hang up on you.
I waited and waited and waited to hear anything about my appeal and nothing. I finally found myself having to move in late May because the place where I was staying became a very toxic living environment. I was stressed out, had no money, and was about to drive across the country to live somewhere that was anything close to a healthy living situation. I changed my address with the post office before moving but didn’t think to change it with the ESD specifically because honestly at that point I was lucky that I could remember to brush my teeth. Well it turns out that in the two weeks between me moving and finally remembering to change my address with the (ESD) the letter about my appeal date was sent out to my old address, so guess what I never got and subsequently missed? What is even worse is that I didn’t know I had missed it because I couldn’t get ahold of the ESD to find out anything; the online portal did not tell me of said missed court date.
I didn’t find out till another month later what had happened because the last time I had gotten ahold of the ESD they told me it could take up to a month and a half to schedule a court date so I didn’t call again until that time had passed. They also told me that I didn’t have a court date set at that time even though my date had already passed. Honestly at this point I had lost track of time because as we all know 2020 has been GREAT for mental health and so when they told me of how long scheduling a date would take they also told me the date that I had filed my appeal (for which I based my waiting on) and I think that they had the date wrong and I didn’t think to double check them. So when I finally realized what had happened, I was shocked and immediately filled a petition to have another court date. Well now it’s December, I filed that freaking petition in July. I just had my court case on the 14th and you know what they decided, they decided that since I didn’t change my address with the ESD immediately, that they won’t even hear my appeal, so now I have none of the money that I needed to pay those bills and I am just… so… fucking… done.
Honestly looking back, maybe I could have tried harder, maybe I could have believed harder that something would eventually happen because at times I was sure I was forgotten about, but you know what, why the hell is this system set up like this? I am one of the more fortunate ones; compared to others’ situations my mental health probably wasn’t the worst and I did have people to fall back on if I needed it. I can’t believe that people in any kind of worse situation would have to go through the same soulless system to freaking survive. It simultaneously breaks my heart and makes me want to burn every government building to the ground. This government does not serve its people, I most certainly don’t feel served, I feel exhausted and like all the government could do was try to tell me the many reasons I did not deserve help in a time of a global goddamn pandemic. It shouldn’t have been at all about turning me down for the smallest of mistakes I made, it should have been about helping me and everyone… that’s it. We are so afraid of not helping people who “don’t deserve it” that we actually don’t help millions who REALLY NEED HELP. My heart goes out to all the people that our system has utterly let down and probably made to feel like absolute garbage. I am here to tell you that you are wonderful, and it is our system that is an absolute piece of not worth the words I am currently writing dinosaur shit.
Well I hope you enjoyed that fun tale as much as I enjoyed living it. As is obvious with the point of this post, I am broke as absolute yeet and have a donation option on my about page. I may start a go fund me to make up for what the government lacks in compassion. I am so tired of this system; if it was a person it would be a selfish POS that literally no one would like. I am ready for a change and hopefully I am on the right path to be a part of that change. In the meantime I love you all and will see you next week. ❤
Creating jobs is only a good thing and replacing jobs is only a bad thing because of the structure of our system. The fact that new technologies threaten jobs and therefore the livelihoods of people is a fault of capitalism and is one of the greatest threats to our species. There are so many things that we could create that would be infinitely beneficial to our species, but since they disrupt our system they fail to be created, or even worse, in the case of robots or automation, they get created and are seen as a threat (because they are a threat to people as long as the system remains the same) rather than being seen as keys to unlocking great potential for our species.
Technology is and has always been just a means for humans to free up time or resources to do more of what they want and less of what they have to to survive. There are a lot of things that fall into this category that most people don’t really think to call technology, such as running water. Like running water, automation has a huge potential to benefit all of mankind, but because of the structure of our system, it is failing to be fully invested in by companies and society, and in the cases where it is, it is creating larger wealth gaps and further disrupting the system rather than allowing all humans the freedom to do more of what they want and less of what they don’t, as is the purpose of any technology.
Could you imagine for a moment, living in a world where when a new technology is created, and instead of the workers being afraid of losing their job and therefore their means of living, they could instead rejoice in the fact that there was now one less job for them to have to do while retaining the same standard of living? This is the world for which I want to live in, but instead, currently, the time and resources freed up by most new technologies is mostly enjoyed by a select few at the top of corporations who created or implemented said technology. Now, you can say “well they made it, they don’t owe their profits to anyone,” and while you are right from a capitalist perspective, in that is how we have decided to define ownership, do you really think that way of thinking is was it is best for humanity? Better yet, could you sleep at night if you were the head of said corporation and you had the power to help liberate all of mankind from the crutches of endless work but just didn’t want to because it would eat into your profits? How could any moral person think this was ok? It is my fundamental belief that any technology that has the potential to better all of mankind should be the property of all mankind, not just the person who created it. We won’t survive any other way.
Our (American) society is so individualist ( which I think has its merits, such as the fact that people need a certain level of autonomy) but we have completely overlooked not only the benefit, but the absolute necessity, of the ability to work together as a community. Most advice we give each other and most ways of thinking we seem to be ok with are centered around taking care of ourselves and ignoring the implications that our actions have on the rest of society. This is especially true when it comes to business and it is beyond awful. Businesses will often destroy their own product to raise prices as was the case with Nike cutting holes in their own shoes to avoid market saturation. It’s all about what makes the business money, not what is good for all of humanity. We have to stop this, we have to learn to think together when the actions we are taking have such impactful systemic effects.
One last thing I just thought of after remembering Napster.com because of watching “The Social Network” about the founding of Facebook… In my opinion, sites like Napster, Bearshare, and LimeWire aren’t inherently immoral, they are only immoral because of the capitalist system. We are all better off the more each other gets to experience and learn in this world. Sites like these, and all other file sharing sites, acknowledge this, and I believe they keep popping up because of this fundamental truth. We need to stop creating for the sake of ourselves but rather for the betterment of all people. We need more people doing things like Jonas Salk did when he virtually gave away the polio vaccine so that people could have much easier access to it. I will concede that in order for a society to really work where most people do things for free we need a way to support them pro-bono. This is yet another reason why I fully support a Universal Basic Income, which I will write a blog on by itself in the future at some time or another.
…..Oh, oh one last-last thing I thought of. When people say “capitalism gave you all these things you enjoy you know?” While that may be true, it is not the only system that could have given me these things, it is just the one that did. A lot of gynecology (maybe all of it, I am not sure) was developed by very inhumane practices done to black women. Would you use the existence of gynecology to justify those means of discovery? I sure hope not.
Writing these is turning out to be really fun for me. It allows me to put a lot of structure to my thoughts and pinpoint the ways in which they may be fallacious and the ways in which they are true. I hope you are getting as much enjoyment from them as I am and continue to read and comment with thoughts you may have so that we can improve the conversation and our understandings even further. If you feel like supporting me (I would absolutely love to make a living at this so if you’re rich, Hi :)… ) I have a donation option on my about page. Much love and I’ll see you next week. ❤
The way I see it, we are just computers running algorithms and constantly adapting those algorithms to new environments. When we are first born we have a base hardware determined by genetics which has its own biases. Then as we experience life as a tiny human those biases become a very basic algorithm with very simple, but eventually very ingrained in/out functions. These functions carry into our adulthood and if they aren’t that great, the human will suffer because of it. At best it will take them years to rewrite said functions or create new functions on top of them that directly counteract the bad ones.
As we grow older we keep creating algorithms based on the environment we experience. Those algorithms become increasingly complex and nuanced and are all still predicated on the lower level algorithms we learned in childhood. The only way a person ever learns something or changes their behavior is by experiencing a new environment that satisfies an input of their internal algorithm which then has an output of change, and since the previous algorithms were all created by things outside of the person’s control, so it is true that the decision to change wasn’t really a decision at all but just a function of an algorithm written by a complex interplay of environment and OEM human brain architecture.
What I find important about all of this is that in my opinion, it renders the idea of “good” and “bad” guys as obsolete. As I write this I realize that I just made a post about this very concept last week so hopefully I don’t repeat myself much here. If we’re just a culmination of these algorithms created by the interplay of our genetics and environment, of which both in a very real way are not in our control, how can it be right to label people in such a way? Obviously people do things that we can call “bad” (or rather undesirable) but I think to label the person themselves bad misses this very important concept. If a person has codependency issues and therefore hurts people in relationships but has yet to be presented with the circumstances that would cause their change, how can we really assign fault to them because of this? And before you say, “Well they were presented with a situation that should have changed them but they still didn’t change,” obviously said situation couldn’t have changed them or else it would have; you just have miscalibrated in regards to what input creates what output for that individual person.
I really don’t know how I feel about fault because I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concept of fault given this understanding of reality. It would seem it completely absolves any one person of fault and I think that might actually be closer to the truth of reality compared to the current model of every person is the only one directly responsible for their own actions. Maybe fault in itself is a logical fallacy. Maybe we should look more at people in the same way we look at say… a ball not rolling down a path you wish it to. You don’t yell at the ball or put it in jail to punish it, you just move it to where you want it to go. Of course it’s a lot more complicated with peoples’ actions but one easy example is if our society created better living situations. If we just threw the money that we put into policing and military into standard of living guarantees, crime would absolutely decrease dramatically. As for how to think of oneself under this world model, I don’t really know, I’m still pondering it too. I really am struggling to decide if I believe anything close to a form of free will exists. Can we move our own ball? If so, through what mechanism are we doing so if the only two mechanisms at play are genetics and environment? Maybe the best we can do is experience the illusion of moving our own ball when in reality it was completely outside of our control.
As for what the absence of free will does to the experience of life? I think had we never believed in said concept, it’s absence wouldn’t even be an issue. Is a rollercoaster less fun because you can’t drive it? Sure it’s less scary maybe, but if you never thought you could steer it to begin with then not being able to wouldn’t even be a problem. If life truly is just predetermined by very concrete laws of physics, I think we can still very much thoroughly enjoy it, it’s just a different experience. On top of this, with an absence of freewill, we can drastically change how we address prison systems and each other’s shortcoming in general. Under this understanding, vengeance makes no sense. Just like with the ball earlier, just focus on moving the ball, not whether or not it deserves to suffer because of it’s actions.
Ok, that one seemed like a bit of a rollercoaster of a post for me, kinda like just tying to think on paper. Hopefully it was a fun read. I really wish I had more time to write and that I felt financially stable in doing so. I feel like I could spend a lot more time learning and therefore forming much more informed and nuanced understandings of the world if I were more financially stable doing only this. I think understanding ourselves and one another is as important as love when it comes to making the world a better place. If you agree and would like to help me add to that understanding, I have a donation option on my about page. Much love to you all and I’ll see you next week. ❤
They don’t exist. Everyone does bad and good things in different proportions. Sure, some do more good than bad and some do more bad than good, and maybe there’s a threshold where the amount of one that you have done cannot possibly outweigh the other but if that’s the case it is very much the exception. More importantly, we are all capable of good and bad, and that’s where I draw my conclusion. None of us can really know if we would do the same things someone else does unless we were put in their position, and I don’t mean just that one moment where they did something “bad”, no, I mean their entire life’s experience. Maybe one can know how they would act had they been put in a dangerous situation, but it is impossible to know how you would act had you lived all of a person’s life up unto that point and then put in that situation.
I really believe that the only thing that separates some people from being considered “good” or “bad” is luck. The luck of how you grew up and what things you had to go through. What challenges you had to face that maybe others haven’t, and more importantly, challenges that others wouldn’t have been any better at facing. I think there are many people walking around being seen as good people simply because they haven’t yet been put in the situation where they would prove they weren’t. I think that what determines if a person is kind or gentle isn’t necessarily how many people they’ve hurt but rather how many people they have the ability to hurt yet chose not to. Sometimes the only reason a person is gentle is that they lack the physical power to be cruel, not the will. Converse to this, I think sometimes the reason a person is seen as bad is because they were put in a situation where that was virtually their only option, not because it was their sole will to be bad. I find this so important because the way we think about other people and their actions as well as how we think about ourselves, directly affects how we decide to design our society and the morals therein.
The way I choose to see good and bad in this world is like this. Every person has their threshold of what they can tolerate from their environment and what circumstances they would have to endure to make them behave in ways others may not approve of. Some people have a very low threshold and will behave in a way that is less than likable given the slightest adversity, while others have such devotion to certain ways of being that virtually no circumstance could change their behavior. I believe those two groups of people are the extremes and nearly everyone else exists much more in the middle than we would like to admit. I believe most of us aren’t aware of how we would act given a certain set of circumstances but we think we do know and we are willing to judge others based on our assumptions of our own capacity to act certain ways given different circumstances. Case in point, how many people can honestly say they know they’d never steal food if they believed that was the only way they could have it. How many people can honestly say they know what it’s like to feel completely stuck on the societal ladder with absolutely no way to move up?
I believe at the core of my being that our current prison system and “justice system” is inherently corrupt because it is built around the principle that there are good and bad people rather than the more nuanced truth that good and bad are more actions than people and are more (if not nearly completely) determined by circumstance than will. I find our current prison system to be an inhumane and futile waste of our resources. It seeks to punish those we deem “bad” rather than understand them and perhaps create a society where their actions are less likely to occur. If you want less drug use in society (I don’t think use is inherently wrong, only abuse) then perhaps it would make more sense to create a society where being happy or even content on a daily basis wasn’t so damn hard. There is an experiment called rat park that clearly outlines this principle and demonstrates it’s truth that you can look at here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park P.S. Just because a system looks like happiness is attainable for everyone doesn’t mean it actually is, case in point, the U.S.
I think a much better way for our society to run, is to learn from psychology and let go of baseless belief systems, such as the one Ronald Regan so often posited that claimed actions only occur because of the individuals will for them to and therefore the individual is the only one responsible for their actions. If this were the case, then we wouldn’t see trends with environments compared to actions but we absolutely 100% do. People tend to be more abusive if they come from a family of abuse, people tend to be mentally ill if they had an abusive or neglectful childhood… Yes people overcome these things but that does not mean that these adversities in no way affect that person and it does not mean we shouldn’t offer great sympathy to people regardless of their actions when seen in the light of what circumstances led up to them. I don’t believe we should let people who wish to harm others just roam the streets, we do need a safe society to live in, but we shouldn’t think of them as “bad people” but rather people doing bad things that need to be quarantined until deemed safe for society again. For the very few who could never be safe, quarantine them indefinitely (and treat them like a person not a monster) or offer assisted suicide if that is their wish. I truly believe if we addressed the fundamental flaws within society however, that these people would be virtually non-existent.
In short my belief system is thus; don’t punish the person, figure out what circumstances led them to the place they are at and change those circumstances. Are those circumstances from their past and now you cannot change them? Do whatever you can to eliminate the possibility of future generations enduring those circumstances; for the person now, do your best to help them overcome those previous traumas and please, don’t demonize or dehumanize them. We are causing our own pain by seeing everyone as “good and bad” and not just as people. We can evolve past this, we will be better off once we do. I am not asking you to be a victim and allow bad actions to continue, only to never label people as good or bad because of their actions, because truthfully, you have no idea how bad you could be given different circumstances than the ones you currently experience.
Thank you for reading the slightly rambling thoughts that I have in my head. I think my official post day is going to be Thursdays and I plan on being as diligent as Stevenly possible to commit to that set day. You can donate on my about page to the cause of me writing words in exchange for existence but only if you are rich and want to maybe try out a one person experiment of UBI? If you’re actually rich then maybe pick up some more people wishing to enjoy what they do for money while you are at it. Love you all and I’ll see you next week. ❤
Ok, time to be a little off hinge. I have a serious beef with the concept, culture, and state of mind created by what we call work. I absolutely believe, or more accurately, understand the truth that if we want something to be done, someone or something must do it, this is very clear and evident to me. Without the many generations of people who have lived before me that put in their time and effort to accomplish things, the world would not be what it is today, but here is my question: should getting stuff done be the point, or the means to achieve a more desirable point? If your reason for doing things is to create a better future for your children, but you don’t really enjoy a whole lot of your own life, are you going to pass that mindset down to your children and expect them to be happy? At what point does a person get to actually enjoy that better future to it’s fullest extent?
I believe we’ve spent so much time tying to “get ahead” that we’ve completely lost sight of what we are trying to get ahead in. Me personally, I agree with John Lennon on this one, that the whole point should be to try to be as happy as possible. Therefore anything that is done in this pursuit but makes you less happy in the process is pointless. If you have a job to make money, and therefore be happy, but the happiness you lose in pursuit of that money is greater than the happiness the money could ever bring then having said job is not worth your time. If the only way we know how to create things as a society is by making most people less happy than the happiness those things bring, then we need to rethink how we are deciding to live.
I absolutely loathe to the core of my being what I see work culture doing to everyone that I love. I find it genuinely depressing that we all are ok with a life where we are always looking forward to the weekend and ok being genuinely unhappy for 40 hours a week. I feel like this is absolutely normalized abuse, no sane person would look at this model and think it was ok unless they had been conditioned to believe that it was. Now, listen, I do understand that some jobs just by their very nature can never be very enjoyable, but we shouldn’t use that fact to make every job a soul crushing experience. I believe most jobs, or things that need to be done for society to run, could be infinitely more fulfilling if we made human happiness the goal instead of it being production or profits. The happiness of all people should be the central and direct goal of all jobs. Happiness at a job is not something one should only have if they are “lucky”. Fuck man, life is short, this is just no way for humans to exist.
For me, I see the healthiest way we could manage the system is to not force people to work. If no one wants to work for the rest of eternity and we all die because of it, that is absolutely better than this garbage. I don’t know if you know this though, but people actually have a desire to contribute to society, people want to be valued, it is hard wired into our brains, just ask you friendly neighborhood Spiderman, I mean psychologist. The reason a lot of people in today’s time don’t contribute isn’t because they intrinsically don’t want to, it’s because they see no path for themselves to, or worse, they see no path to contribute while also being able to live with themselves. Like me, I’ve worked jobs, and I absolutely detest how they make me feel about myself and have decided I’d rather die than feel how most of them make me feel so right now I’m just trying to find a way to exist without hating what I have to do to sustain that existence. I love getting stuff done, I recently produced an album entirely on my own which was every form of the word exhausting so if you desire to tell me I’m just a lazy piece of shit you can kindly fuck right off. I want to do so many things with my life, I want to design homes maybe, I want to combat social injustice, I want to write and play music, I want to just live, but the worry of how to make money in a way I can just even tolerate has me paralyzed to even move.
On the topic of work itself and it’s place in society. I think most people are so intertwined with the system that the see work as the only way of existence but I’m telling you it is not. Up until this point I’d say it was but with the advent of technology it no longer has to be. We can use technology to do the things we don’t want to do in order to better enjoy our time. We already do this with all other technology: we save time walking to the river by having running water, we save time going to the library by having search engines, we save time planting our own food by practicing mass farming. Yes, one can benefit by doing any one of these things the old fashioned way but just like living in a tent outside, it is infinitely more enjoyable when you don’t have to do it. I believe to the very core of my being that we need to stop seeing jobs as things society needs to survive but rather the tool to get to a place where we no longer need them, then we should yeet them through a black hole into another universe far far away from here.
The issue now is finding a way to transition away from jobs while not having massive wealth disparities. We are currently seeing the benefits of technology by way of the free time and wealth it has created, but our current system hasn’t allowed most of humanity to share in those spoils but rather a very few extremely wealthy people while the rest of us mostly struggle. I wish I knew the best way to transition from a system that is based around jobs to a system that’s based around the enjoyment of life supported by the technology created by all generations before us but I can’t say that I do. I also don’t think we are quite at the place where all jobs can be automated but I do believe we are directly on that cusp of it and if we stick to our current system we will eventually see some of the worst wealth gaps we could ever imagine and therefore one of the most unstable societies. Studies have shown that wealth gaps are one of the strongest predictors of societal instability. I think it is possible to transition if we just have a few smart people making big decisions who realize it is in their own best interest to help make all of society happy and healthy. My favorite method of achieving this is through a Universal Basic Income but that should be a different post for a different day.
As always thank you for reading and I love you all. You can donate to the charity of Help Steven Do Things on my about page and help me live my life a little closer to what I want others to also live theirs. Truthfully, that is my goal here, of course I want to be content too but I cannot truly be content until everyone around me more or less is also content. I want to be lifted up only so that I may also lift others… and by lifted up I mean funded. Plz help, much love, see ya’ll next week.
Steven Wilhelm 