I would love to know, oh wise one, which of your many assets is going to help you when you have no means of securing a roof over your head, no means of a meal every night, no means of healthcare, or safety.
I'm going to go ahead and agree with OP. Your ability to make money is your greatest asset, and one you should protect.
While I agree that a certain base level of income is necessary to have decent life, it becomes a lot less important after that's reached. And that level for me mostly includes enough money for food, accommodation (, and healthcare if you're in the US) and some extras like going out or traveling once in a while. In Europe this is pretty easy to achieve in a technical field. Beyond that, I feel like more money doesn't add much to my happiness. Saying that this is one's most important asset sounds like one should spend most of one's life on maximizing income, which I think is indeed a bit sad.
There are plenty of people who are managing that without making any money at all, despite all sorts of prolonged efforts to turn their way of living into hell.
Integrity, being surrounded by loving people, being in good health, having the freedom to be all that you are. Those are all more important from my perspective.
We've been carefully conditioned to believe that this game is the only alternative, it's not.
>Integrity, being surrounded by loving people, being in good health, having the freedom to be all that you are. Those are all more important from my perspective.
Sure, because you don't have to worry about where your next meal is coming from. As soon as the risk of death due to starvation or exposure to the elements is real, your priorities are going to change real quick.
More than anything, we have to survive. Money is how we do that today.
Worrying where it will come from is never going to be a good idea, worrying in general is the worst kind of visualization. Dying from starvation is not really realistic in any western country, many will even stop you from doing it by your own choice. Money is not how we survive, you can't eat money or build anything worth building using it. All it takes is a slight disruption and it's paper with funny faces on and digits in a computer that doesn't run anymore.
Take a look around you; I'm sure you can find plenty of people living if not outside, at least on the outer perimeter of society. They're still here, some of them in better overall health than more well adjusted citizens.
There are thousands and thousands of collectives, religious and otherwise; that live together in relative harmony and mostly grow their own food and keep the state at arms length. I've lived in two myself, one ashram and one oriented around permaculture gardening.
I would point you to the native tribes, but I can't think of any that we haven't brutally destroyed to remove all traces of their way of living.
Total dependence has always been the goal, and they've fought long and hard using every trick in the book and then some to get there. The fact that we're even having this kind of discussion is a testimony to the strength of the human spirit that just won't give up.
I don't believe it's the only game, rather, I believe it's the best. The alternatives are theoretically wonderful, but when you lose the security of regular meals, a roof over your head, a shower, etc... Suddenly I'm not convinced.
Judging from the fact that you too are posting from a computer, running on the internet, I can assume you haven't adopted the virtuous life of income free bliss that you speak of?
Oh, for heavens sake. That's as far as you can see? You can get that in prison. We were born and raised on a giant slave plantation. There are enough resources to take care of everyone, so much that some of it has to be kept off the market to keep up the illusion and prices.
I'm currently scraping by at a bare minimum, growing my own vegetables and foraging whatever I can find in the area. And I find it infinitely more satisfying than writing software for startups and helping them rape the world in the name of profit.
On a more constructive note:
Consider the effort put into, and importance of, visualization in sports and other areas. If you can't see it; it's just not going to happen, ever. Same goes collectively. What's worse, you tend to get more or less what you expect. Which is why the people running our plantation put so much effort into making us visualize exactly the kind of slave life they have planned for us.
What do you mean by 'visualization of sports and other areas'?
Are you talking about the projection of images for mass consumption which leads to emulation, or realisation of said images?
Interesting stuff. I know myself that my biggest limit is my ability to imagine my own future, and how that vision is constantly cropped by my peers, and culture.
What are you doing on hn may I ask? Sounds like an interesting life.
I mean that in certain areas we've recognized and pay tribute to the importance of visualization. But then we fail to make the connection and realize that the same mechanics apply to everything.
It's mainly the projection of fear, really. Fear of not fitting in, not having a roof over your head or food on the table, of war, disease, terrorists and so on.
It's tricky business to snap out of the collective psychosis, it took me 35 years and I still probably wouldn't have if life hadn't thrown me a banana peel in form of a serious accident.
Somewhere deep inside I'm sure almost everyone knows what they would really want to do. But it's too painful, the contrast hurts and it's emotionally tangled up with all the other things that we're not supposed to think about. So we "forget", to fit in.
Oh, mostly nostalgia at this point :) I was in the startup circle for a while, and I've been writing code for more than 32 years. But the only kind of coding that feels worthwhile to me these days is exploring better ways of writing code [0].
"I'm currently scraping by at a bare minimum, growing my own vegetables and foraging whatever I can find in the area. And I find it infinitely more satisfying than writing software for startups and helping them rape the world in the name of profit."
Oh really? You're "scraping" by? How then are you growing your own vegetables? Please tell me, on who's land do you sow thy seeds? Where is this magical place that you can setup a fort, free yourself from the machine, and live off the land, without having to spend a penny?
Hey now, none of this is my fault, most of us are in the same boat. As much as I would want to be completely independent, this society tries it best to make that really difficult. But I'm working on it, I don't consider myself a victim anymore.
You seem to have missed the memo on visualization, yours is pretty much a perfect example of how not to do it. You may safely trust me on this one, you'll never go anywhere if you start by enumerating all the reasons it could never work. First you commit, then all sorts of solutions appear seemingly out of nowhere. It always starts with a leap of faith to make sure you really want it.
Agreed. I actually spent the early part of my 20s thinking money wasn't so important, but I started to regret it when I realize I wanted to become independent, eventually start a family, and it all required money to achieve those means. I also used to despise the idea of having to get married, playing life by a to-do list of checkboxes (that society forces upon you in some sense), but I realize you can always have your cake and eat it too. Besides, higher levels of income usually require you to be reaching some level of competency and proficiency in a hierarchy of other people speaking the same language (productivity, logic, etc.) Also, it also serves as a very pragmatic and quantitative metric, something to continually strive towards. Sure, I can grow my own vegetables, read/write a bunch of books, go travel the world, and be a really interesting person, and that would be great, but where are you getting the roof over your head and the meal every night? Good news is, you can have your cake and eat it too.
In other popular threads on this site, people have long discussions about loneliness, depression and suicides. If works for some, it does not work for all in the long term.
I work with beaten husbands and most often, the beating starts because of their inability to produce income for the wife. Most divorces start after a layoff too.
If you believe you have value beyond your ability to produce, it’s nice, many people transform beliefs into truth by excluding all opposite evidence. Meanwhile, keeping the wife is way more correlated with produce than other factors like weight or unmeasurable things (aka: love and attention).
You... may want to reconsider that one.