Moving Blogs

All future works will be posted at my new wordpress blog retributionisblind.wordpress.com

retributionisblind.wordpress.com

Challenge Yourself

Society has become twisted. A person values their success based on their income, or by the number of people who show interest in their life. You see this with people who are obsessed with having large number of friends particularly on social media. We have allowed a new generation of online celebrities gain unprecedented influence on the world. Not saying they are worse than the gatekeepers of before, but I doubt many understand that with that influence comes responsibilities. No one can doubt their hard word, and the fact their is a market for their talent. These are the artists of our time since, and for the first time ever people who have the ability can easily share their talent with everyone, but in this saturation we can sometimes feel overwhelmed. So like always we look for something or someone to filter through all the material. We take recommendations from friends, bloggers, or institutions we think are credible. I know anyone reading this can think of examples in their personal lives. Without even thinking about it we find ourselves in a repeated cycled checking the same sites, and viewing the same material in an endless loop. We become trapped in this artificial personal bubble.

Which is why when Stumbleupon first became an Internet sensation I thought the purpose was pretty novel. We should challenge ourselves little by little to find something new even if it doesn't fit our interests. All it takes 10-15 minutes every couple of days to have that resolve to pick up that random book or read that random online forum. Yes you may be challenged, or bored, but you may also find something beautiful and new. We often place too much importance on individuals who seem god like. Weather it be the athlete who can run a 4.2 second forty yard dash , the artist who can paint, or the writer who produces literature. We tend to often forget they are humans just like us who sleep, eat, pee, cry, and laugh. We become fixed on living our lives through others that we begin to lose sight of what is real and precious. Later this becomes a reality where the artificial no longer matches the reality. That fiction is preferred over the non-fiction. My lesson to you is to learn from your hero's but do not idolize them. We place too much focus on what something means, or what the proper interpretation of book, movie, television show should be and not enough time just "experiencing" and taking in your own opinion or inner thoughts. I say this as someone who has devoted most of their life with the fundamental belief that there is a way to break down everything in our world into basic facts or principles. That our world can be like a chemistry book, and what we do not understand is because we have yet to discover it. All I ask is how can we have people who watch Netflix all day, and such that it becomes a strong focal point of their existence. Eat, sleep, work, reproduce, and die.

 Do we solely exist so that the society can be productive? So that the desires of humanity can be focused into the capitalistic culture humanity has created? The message is clear we exist to consume, and keep the wheels of the money making machine turning. How long can this last? Where has the pride gone? The value of work? Of relationships? Of building something greater than yourself? Using creativity to share, and cherish. Contributing to society instead of merely consuming. Perhaps that society has never existed. For human existence has been always filled with inequality. Better minds than mine have attacked this problem, and the best answer I've seen is that some vague solution will appear, and people will realize it is time to “move on” to the best alternative for us all. What kind of answer is that? That's no answer at all. I am not asking for perfection, because I don't even know what that is. Frankly anyone who claims to have that answer do not know what they are talking about. I am just asking the questions we all have, but we hide from each other because we want to give the illusion we know what we are doing. People so easily forget that they are mortal , and potentially living a life without worth. Our dreams, and goals just like our genetics are inherited. In some form we are just mere copies of each other. We have basic needs, but we all address them differently. At one point the universe came from a singular point we are all interconnected, we feel alone, but we are not alone. Past, present, and future is all intertwined. I wish I had all the answers, but I don't. Surprisingly it doesn't scare me, but instead is the fuel that keeps me going. I promised myself I wouldn't regret any action I took in life, but when ever my life does end I feel I will have one dying regret: That I never found all the answers I was looking for.   

Money

         Money is whatever you want it to be. Facebook currency, the money in your bank, it can be anywhere and everywhere. Currency and modern capitalist economics is the current foundation of our structural political societies. Now in this piece I will not go in the aspects of money which other better economists and writers can delve in, nor the subjects I have touched upon in other writings. I want to write about a disturbing trend I have seen in the modern society and especially during this global recession. I feel as if the need for capital and the desire to "accumulate" wealth is an as high as it ever was. I see more and more people pursue jobs/careers for money. What is important is having objects, flashy cloths, and to be so called "alpha". It is important to understand that in an era where consumerism is highly praised and associate happiness with the symbol of wealth which is money. Yet if you study money itself you see that at any point in history it could be worthless and can change. So why do we place such value on something that easily be blow away like a piece of dust? Still our culture does this, it pushes this and it drives this to the ultimate extreme. I describe the modern economy as a matrix, we seem to want to believe we live in an alternate reality where when the dream bubble pops we will crash and burn like no other. If people can easily discard communism and many of its other forms as trash and state elitism or anarchy as a childhood idealist dream that is not truly possible. Yet humanity can openly accept the concept of the “growth economy” with limited resources, the financial "tools" which we invented, and other various risk factors which shape our world. People accept the crappy boom and bust model which is totally insane. How can it be that the society we strive for is a society with so much waste and excess. It is yet another theory which believes that we can forever expand and consume all in our path. Marx, Keyes, Hayek, and whoever helped developed our modern economic society did not consider the fact that our human population would grow in desire to such extremes. Those theories should be inspirations for future theory but not the bases of what we should be constructing now. In the present we need to look outside the box a little bit and envision a future and build one that will help to support our species both rich and poor as a whole. Yes this sounds a bit socialist but different in the sense that where socialism is about creating equal opportunity and taking wealth to create a more fair society. No the basis of this new society should be common survival of our entire species. Let's not kid ourselves the ideal world may not happen the future could be a place where the privileged live comfortably like they always have historically and the rest of us are left to scrap by and make due with the resources that are left to us. We should be careful not to make our nightmares our own realities.

A good book on the history of money I recommend: Ascent Of Money

If you don't like to read the documentary can be found here (could be broken by the time you read this).