Everything

“I have everything but I am still not happy.”

Well, that’s because you don’t have everything, you have just money (and things that you can buy with it)

You don’t have a job that satisfies you while letting you retain your piece of mind

You don’t have quality relationships with people who will be there for you, even if you are broke

You don’t have material objects that fulfil your needs without having maintenance costs that make you dependent on corporations that you don’t want to depend on.

Or maybe you understand that you need all these things, but you are thought that you need them in addition to being rich.

Or that you want to make money first and then concentrate on everything else.

Both of these are dead ends. Act now to attain what you want. Directly.

Why, cause “character is faith,” as Heraclitus says. The saying is more literal than it seems:

Pursuing your goals is not merely a prerequisite to getting the results you want. If you look at it from the grand scale, goals are themselves results - pursuing the goal to be good (“good” both as a person or good at some specific skill) is the same thing as being good.

By the same token, pursuing a goal as obtuse and meaningless as money makes you an obtuse and meaningless person.

e.g. a person who is sorry for whatever bad thing they have done and wants to be a good person already is a good person, better than a billionaire who donates 10% of this fortune to charity.

10-year-old-kid who has set their mind to become a great pianist is a great pianist, better than anyone who merely plays just for the money.

Art under capitalism

Under capitalism art is a commodity like everything else and so the most valuable pieces are most expensive, however, as value in art is relative, this principle works the other way around - the most expensive pieces are most valuable i.e. the rich determine the criteria for what’s beautiful and ugly.

This undermines art, reducing it to just another form of entertainment for the elite, and marginalizing all artists who want to be something different than that.

The best thing a creative person can hope for, is to be like Stephen King - be so famous that a capitalist would consider your opinion when making their (his) business strategy.

Capitalism and mentall illness

Actually, it is not so much that capitalism leads to an epidemic of mental illness, it is more that there are many conditions, many people that are so incompatible with capitalism that making them comply will cause the system to lose any human face. We are categorized as sick, because else the system would have to be categorized as such.

Work

People don’t hate work, they hate executing the commands of some idiot and being harassed.

What is capitalism about

And to think that people are fooled that capitalism is all about, hard work, entrepreneurship etc. Capitalism is about capital, folks - it’s there in the name.

Mental illness

It is not so much that capitalism leads to an epidemic of mental illness, it is more that there are many conditions, many people that are so incompatible with capitalism that making them comply will cause the system to lose any human face. We are categorized as sick, because else the system would have to be categorized as such.

Capitalism is dead

Capitalism is dead, the establishment are holding up the corpse and putting hat and sunglasses on it, in an effort to hide this fact (which is nevertheless quite obvious to anyone who is not living in a bubble)

Capitalism and innovation

Hard to defend the thesis that capitalism promotes innovation, when the main social discourse surrounding any innovation is how to deal with the people who would lose their jobs because of it.

Realize how ridiculous this looks in the grand schema of things: someone comes up with marvelous new technology that solves all your issues and your first reaction as a society is “but what would the people who used to work on that issue do for a living?”

Cars

It’s amazing how oblivious people are to how dangerous and harmful cars are to people - any life-threatening thing in the city, such as an hanging cable, open vent etc is big news. Cars - people get murdered every day and they don’t even report it.

That quote about the heart and the brain

People who use that quote that if you aren’t into communism as a youth you have no heart, but if you don’t later drop it when you get older you have no brain, seem like they are so desperate over the fact that they have lost their hearts that they made up the second part to soothe themselves.

Capitalism and christianity

Was thinking that Plato allegedly said that ignorance is the only sin and if it’s possible since the concept of a sin came later in history and I suddenly realized. That the concept of a sin is pure BS Like “There is this thing that you would really like to do but you should not do it because it is wrong (and God will punish you), so you should never ever do it and you should beat yourself (literary) when you go as far as to think about it.”

That’s like saying “you’re guilty until proven innocent, and you will never be innocent. All you can do is pray to us to relieve your pain.”

The doctrine of the world’s major religion is just totalitarian propaganda, thinly disguised as advice/prophecy.

Like, if you take the fable about Adam and Eve and the apple. What does the apple represent? Sex? Knowledge? Or most probably just opposition to authority. Not clear what was God’s purpose with putting the tree there. All we understand is that if we do wrong we will be punished and we already did wrong…

Middle-class

In society under capitalism nowadays, there is a third class between workers and the masters which is instrumental to keeping the regime working. It is the financially prospering, but emotionally and ideologically bankrupt middle class - people who have “succeeded” - managed to educate themselves and get a well-paid job - but have completely stripped themselves of their identity in order to do so, and are trapped by their fear to be thrown downwards and their inability to move upwards.

Middle-class folks cannot have solidarity for their masters, because they know even more than everyone what the masters are.

And they cannot have solidarity with the workers, out of vanity and out of fear that they will be punished for their opinions and thrown in the working class.

They even cannot have solidarity between themselves, as they realize their role as maintainers of the process that is keeping them in this crooked position.

Some brainwash themselves into thinking that they are actually part of the working class - you know, people who stay at the office all their life and glorify what they do. At the same time they are somehow always broke, although they make more than enough to subsist.

Or some brainwash themselves to think that they are the masters, or they will become masters any minute now. These are the people who glorify how good the system is, and how everyone can succeed (Elon Musk fanboys)

And some realize the pointlessness of their position and they just spend their life getting high, and trying to “cheat the system” to get more for less.

What unites all three groups is that they are morally broke and just frantically seeking for a way to justify what they do and what they are.

Social scientists say that a healthy society should have a “strong middle class”. But how can the middle class be strong? It cannot be strong financially because their earnings would always reach a glass ceiling and huge earnings drive you out of the middle class. It cannot be strong politically, because they have a lot to lose - a political stance would make you lose your spot in the middle class in the worse way). They can be numerous, but not strong.

Zuck’s metaverse

What does the “metaverse” mean?

Save your time - it doesn’t mean shit.

Huge corporations use demagogy to lure customers to use their products and fool them into thinking that these products are worth more than they actually are.

They do that because their products usually have no real value whatsoever, as is the case with #facebook.

Nazis do the same thing. What is constitutes “National Socialism” as an ideology? What’s the meaning of the swastika in the context of the Third Reich? And of all other symbols that the neo-nazis use?

There is no meaning, just a bunch of people are trying to fool the public (and possibly themselves) that they are special and they have something valuable to offer, when they just do not.

Luxury goods

You buy a car from the store - the price is 30 000 EUR.

You want to sell it immediately afterwards - the price is 25 000 EUR.

A new facelift hits the market (so the same car but with a different headlight design) - the price is 20 000.

Where did that 10 000 go?

My response - almost all goods that exist today are some version of luxury goods - ones which you buy just for the experience of buying something expensive - non-luxury goods don’t lose their value after they are sold e.g. Ikea furniture is the same price second hand, a piece of expensive hand-made furniture also. But almost all other furniture is at the luxury class. There are even classes of goods, such as cars, for which all models are luxury.

The fairy tale

The fairy tale: #capitalism works because motivated by money and by money only and capitalism provides them with opportunities to make more of it.

The truth: #capitalism “works” by enabling people in power to exploit the rest of them, but this is justified because they generate massive amounts of wealth, which is all that matters if you believe the fairy tale.

To break free from #capitalism, you have to break free from the fairy tale. Is money really so important? Would you spend your days in toxic environment for money? Would you ignore your friends and family for money? Would you sacrifice your health for money? Or the health of the planet?

The fact is that many people do these things and this fact has been used as proof that money is indeed the most important thing for most people.

But that’s nonsense. People don’t do bad things for money because they are evil, or extremely materialistic by nature, they do them because they are hostages to the system, because the belief in the fairy tale made a society where money is equal to life itself.

Those are both poor and rich people that I am talking about. Both people who have no other options and people who do have them but don’t realize it. But they all have something in common - if they stop believing the fairy tale, they would be outcasts, they would have a hard time adapting to society, they (we) will not be sure what to do with their lives.

“So what do you want us to do start a #revolution?”

Firstly it’s not about wanting to start a revolution, it’s about needing it - nobody would risk their life just out of wanting (in the same way that noone would risk his life for money)

And secondly, you don’t have to be active politically to change the status quo - I am starting a revolution for myself by just refusing to fall asleep to the fairy tale and by speaking my mind here. If everyone did that, this would be enough for this to work.

Money as a motivator

Money does not work as a motivator, no matter the quantity. Money may be enough to motivate you to do something, but it would never motivate you enough to get inspired when doing it. And an inspired person would always be better than an uninspired one.

Sounds trivial, but I often see people who go into #programming just because it pays well, become mediocre programmers and then get mad at the world and to their more capable colleagues.

Then they become managers (because capable programmers rarely apply for management positions) and promote their shallow understanding of what programming should be to the world.

The lifecycle of a #software company under #capitalism

• 3 people start a new company, write some awesome code and create a product that is better than the billion-dollar competition.
• They are so successful that they become a billion-dollar company themselves.
• They hire mediocre managers who apply their wrong conception of what software is and how it should be built and function in order to fuck up the process and the product itself.
• 3 people start a new company…

Statistics

Statistics that indicate the well-being of people in a nation:

• Life expectancy
• Access to health care
• Literacy
• Percentage of people that own their own homes

Statistics that are most often displayed in the media:

• GDP
• GDP per capita
• Economic growth

The fairy tale says that boosting the ones from below would inevitably result in boosting the ones from above. But is this really the case?

Jeff Bezos

I don’t have any problem with Jeff Bezos going in space, the only thing I dislike is that he came back.

Lazy Marx

I assume that people who say that Karl Marx didn’t have a job are all writing monumental 1000-page studies as a hobby.

Productivity

Seems that all this obsession with productivity that we have is due to the fact that we don’t believe in the things we do and so we want to at least do more of them.

Questions I ask myself before buying something

What’s the purpose of this item?

Do I really need for an item which serves that purpose? How would it benefit me?

Do I already own something that can be repurposed/fixed/made to serve the same purpose?

Can I borrow such thing from a friend who does not need it?

Who is selling this item and do I want to endorse them by buying it from them?

In what ways does the item make me dependent in therms of fixes, supplies, energy consumed etc. On whom?

Do I really need that item right now, or can I can buy it later so I have more time to consider the above?

More stuff

Buying more stuff will not bring you closer to happiness, just like living longer years will not bring you closer to immortality.

Countries and corporations

Most people agree that countries are ruled in a democratic fashion with the right to vote etc. but at the same time they think that corporations are better off as dictatorships where most people are depraved of any rights.