Tag Archives: society

Thoughts

On gardening and civilized society

Ever since we’ve begun the restoration work on the historical monuments in the Transylvanian countryside (see Asociatia P.A.T.R.U. for the details), I’ve had to tend to the landscaping, among other things. And if there’s one thing you learn when you garden, is that you have to prune the weeds constantly. Some weeds you simply cannot just pull out and throw in a compost pile, they’re so invasive that you must burn them in order to stop them from spreading.

Yet in our modern, civilized society, we are led to believe that we must tolerate the weeds, including the really nasty ones. That somehow, we are to be as tolerant as possible, that there is a place for everyone in our all-inclusive civilization. It’s as if everyone’s a precious flower that we must tend to and nourish. Inasmuch as I want that to be the case, and lots of other idealistic people want that to be the case, a lot of people are weeds. Nasty weeds that we shouldn’t tolerate, that do not deserve our respect, attention, or our help. These are people that constantly shit the bed of civilization, so to speak. They take every chance, every opportunity given to them by society, by well-meaning people, and they abuse it. They turn it into something to be regretted. Like weeds, if they’re not pruned, they spread everywhere, and then there’s no garden anymore. They must be thrown out of society. For some, a little time in the compost pile might be enough. For others, there is no coming back. It’s like trying to stick a square peg in a round hole. They’re anachronisms, throwbacks to more barbaric times. Unfortunately, unlike anachronisms, they’re not self-eliminating, they’re self-perpetuating. And so more drastic action must be taken.

This isn’t something that’s done once. It requires regularity. Punishing regularity. Real effort, real sweat. A constant battle against the weeds. Just like gardening.

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Thoughts

Work

The single highest purpose in life.

The more one lives, the more they ask themselves about the meaning of life. What’s the point of it all? Why are we here? Who made us? We get into all these complicated discussions about origins and God and the afterlife, discussions that amount to just about zero. All the while life goes on, with or without our answers.

The point is, we are here. And if our lives are to have any meaning, if we are to get any enjoyment from them, we need to contribute. We need to do something. We need to work. It’s not an external mandate but an internal one. We ourselves get to find out that our lives have less and less meaning once we stop working. Even if it’s work we don’t like, it still gives some meaning to our lives. And when we do like it, oh boy, then our lives become wonderful!

Some of you will say, “Surely love is the single highest purpose in life. You’ve got your priorities wrong.” Nope. Love without work is dead. That’s a paraphrase, and I bet it sounds familiar to some of you. The actual quote is “Faith without works is dead.” A wise man wrote it. What is love but a kind of faith? The two imply each other. Faith cannot exist without love and love without faith just isn’t love. Furthermore, what would your love be worth to your partner without works? If you profess your love for them, but your deeds (your works) say otherwise or say nothing at all, then that love is dead. I’m not talking about esoteric things here, I’m talking about human love, the kind I hope you’re experiencing in your lives.

If all this talk about work is ringing false for you, then I am sure you don’t like your work. You see, for most of our written history, a lot of people have been engaged in doing unpleasant work. That’s still going around these days. Instead of each of us thoughtfully considering what work we should do, because we can do that nowadays, we jump at jobs for the wrong reasons, only to find out we hate them, and therefore we wrongly assume we hate work.

Even if we can’t pick our jobs, we can actively choose to do the jobs we have better. It’s a choice we can make every day, to do good work and let that be what makes us happy in our jobs. When we do that, the wonderful thing that will happen over time, is that our jobs will get better. We’ll find ways to make them better and new opportunities may open for us, perhaps advancement, perhaps other jobs that we’ll love. But we have to do good work first. We have to make that choice and we have to follow it through.

Rest assured when I tell you that work is the highest purpose in life, and that we can only find meaning in life by doing good work.

In recent years, research has been done on productivity that has shown that people who take proper vacations (where they break off from work completely) are more productive in their jobs. It’s easy to misinterpret those results and say that we need more vacations as rewards for substandard work, but I’d like to point out with quite a bit of personal certainty that vacations only make people who love their jobs more productive. In case you hate your job, you’ll simply dread going back to work and once you’re back, you’ll do the same crappy work you’ve done in the past. When someone loves their job, the contrast of being away from it is what charges them up. It’s the lack of work that winds them up like a spring-driven toy, and once they’re back, they unleash their newly gained energy on the work they love. That’s why we see increased productivity.

Instead of asking ourselves charged, difficult questions about the meaning of life and our origins, we should be asking questions like these, questions that will help us see right away that our lives have purpose and are worth living:

  • Am I working?
  • Am I doing good work? (Here I’m referring to the quality of our work.)
  • Is my work contributing to the greater good?
  • Do I like my work?

If the answers to those four questions are yes, then I’m fairly sure your life is good and you’re also feeling good. You wake up each day with a sense of purpose and at the end of the day, though you’re tired, you go to bed content because you’ve done good work. If not, then find out how you can turn that no into a yes. You know exactly what to tackle in order to get your life in… order.

These questions are also good criteria to be used when evaluating those in our societies who prefer to shirk work, the goldbricks, the ones who seek to be on social aid perpetually, the ones who complain about not having enough and about being downtrodden while they sit at home wasting their days glued to their TVs, making children so they get more aid from the government. Sadly, there are plenty of those human bed bugs around. What’s even more sad is that governments are willing to tolerate them and use them for cheap votes instead of requiring work from them. Those are exactly the kinds of people who deserve to do unpleasant jobs, because they’ve been living off the blood and sweat of honest folk and they haven’t contributed anything to the greater good. They need to go through plenty of tough work so they can compensate society for their squalid, useless lives where they’ve only consumed resources and generated trash and bodily waste.

Okay, back to pleasant things…

Let me entreat you to find work that’s meaningful to you. See if you can do work that contributes to society somehow, work that adds to our civilization, that builds upon that of others in order to yield even better results.

If you’re retired, see if you can do some consulting or mentoring work for 3-4 hours each day. Not only will you supplement your fixed income, but you’ll wake up each day with a renewed sense of purpose and you’ll contribute your lifetime of experience to those who need it, even if they’ll take a while to realize it.

Here’s to good work from all of us! 🤲

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Thoughts

The answer to a great many questions of today

    This post will seem to fall right out of nowhere for you, mainly because you haven’t been privy to my thoughts in recent years — how could you be, after all? It may also strike you as highly inconsiderate and you may even become angry with me. Let it be so. You will inevitably calm down and you may also agree with me in a few months or years. 

    The pompous title may lead you to think I’m going to philosophize. Nope, it’s just a little bait meant to entice you to read on. I’m going to speak plainly, because this must be said plainly and repeated loudly, for all to hear and understand: the answer to a great many questions of today is “too many people”. 

    Go ahead, ask a question about the state of the world or the state of the planet. Any question at all. The answer, if you dig right down to the core, is inevitably overpopulation. 

    Shall we have a go right now? Here are a few examples; keep in mind you already know the answer: 

    • Scarcity of clean drinking water?
    • Disappearing forests?
    • Disappearing fish? 
    • Disappearing animals?
    • Garbage piling up everywhere?
    • Pollution?
    • Overconsumption?
    • Poor quality of manufactured goods?
    • Poor quality of foods? 
    • Traffic jams?
    • Growing numbers of lonely and depressed people in large cities? 
    • Filled up cemeteries that are now contaminating water tables and surrounding land?
    • Crowded schools?
    • Crowded hospitals?
    • Crowded nursing homes?
    • Crowded mass transport? 
    • Crowded buildings/smaller apartments/taller buildings/feeling like a sardine in a tin can?
    • Natural beauty ruined by poorly planned and poorly made modern development?

    I could go on and on, I suppose, but I would also get sadder and sadder as this list grew bigger. It’s daunting to face up to the problems we’ve created for ourselves, simply because we collectively thought there should be more of us. “Sure,” we thought, “let’s go on f*****g, it feels good and we’re making babies. The world needs babies…” 

    It turns out, the world doesn’t need that many babies. Babies of all species are absolutely adorable and they melt your heart with their cuteness, but the overpopulation of any species is a real threat to the species itself and to the planet as a whole. 

    In the past, people thought the answer to many questions were more people. How do you solve a labor shortage? How do you fund social security? How do you gather enough revenues as a government in order to build and maintain a modern infrastructure and have enough employees to take care of it all? How do you grow the economy? We thought “more people” was the answer. Well, it turned out not to be so. 

    Paradoxically, at over 7.2 billion people, we still have massive labor shortages, social security and other social safety nets are in the dumps, it turns out that governments can never have enough revenues, and most puzzling of all, that economies and companies do and must stop growing. As a matter of fact, the very economic model that drives every economy in the world is based on constant growth. We can talk about “boom/bust cycles” and “contagion” and “recovery” all we want, but in the end, it’s about growth. And you can’t have growth forever. At some point it stops. It has to stop. You either run out of people or you run out of resources. To pick an example out of recent memory, there are only so many smartphones that people will buy. Given the limited resources available on Earth, there are only so many TVs/cars/houses/pieces of furniture you can make before you turn the whole Earth into a dug-up wasteland. 

    This is a huge topic: an immense “minefield” that we’ve built and that we’ve got to wade through and “disarm” if we want to have a sustainable future. It’s filled with “hot potatoes” that no one wants to touch or step on, because there’s a real price to pay in the real world if you are a person of any clout and you dare talk about these things publicly. But these things must be said and someone must make the hard decisions, or else… 

    Shall I tell you what you’re thinking? If you’re a parent, the basic question swirling through your mind right now is: “How dare YOU tell ME whether or not I should have MY children?” How dare I even bring up the question of procreation, which most people, at some level or another, conscious or subconscious, believe is their God-given right and even more so, God-given blessing? 

    I wonder though, should God ever truly speak to us — if He or She or It would even deign to speak to an arrogant, dirty, criminal and avaricious species like ours — would would be said? We don’t know. God isn’t speaking to us, in spite of what some deranged “religious leaders” seem to think on the topic. We are left to figure this out on our own. 

    I think it boils down to egotism. We are all so caught up in ourselves, most of us much more so than we realize, that we believe the world would be deprived of something if we didn’t have children, as if our exact chromosomes will combine to create a super-child that will solve the problems of the world. Let me assure you, right here and now, that collectively, the world won’t miss a beat if any one of us stops having children. It might even breathe a sigh of relief, as in “Thank God, I’ve been spared another mouth to feed!” And no, your “super-child” won’t solve the problems of the world. YOU need to work on solving them RIGHT NOW, so STOP procrastinating and passing the buck to future generations! 

    What about the other egotistical question, “But who will take care of me when I’m old?” Does it always have to be about you? Must you be a burden to your children in old age? How about you figure out some other way, such as taking care of yourself and your money, so that you reach old age in relatively good shape? That way you can be independent and function well, living from your own resources. Why, you might even be able to give back to society, through volunteering and donations, instead of being a feeble shell of your old self, depending on social security and being carted around by a nurse. 

    Is it any wonder that the rate of birth among well-read, well-educated folks all around the world is declining rapidly? As people better themselves and start to think beyond their bellies and their willies, they begin to see that all is not well with the world, and they choose to have less or no children. 

    When I think of the people who are having more children, it is unfortunately those who shouldn’t be having them. Let me make it CLEAR here that I am NOT talking about RACE. What I am talking about is: livelihood, education, household resources, strength of the couple’s relationship, geographical location, available opportunities and so on. Let me make it plainer: a child born to a couple who abuse each other physically and verbally, living on government aid or in poverty, or in a country roiling in upheaval and conflict, will have limited or no opportunities and will have a poor quality of life. That child will likely be abused by its parents, perhaps even sexually — certainly and at the very least emotionally — and will grow up just like them, stunted, tortured, a stump of a human being that will likely continue to hurt others, just as it was hurt, knowing no better way in life, unable to do better in life even when shown and helped. That mother and father should give serious thought as to whether they should be having children at all, because they cannot provide for them, but unfortunately they give no thought to this at all and typically have them in droves. Is that the right thing to do? 

    The solution is simple in theory but near-impossible to implement: we must each of us choose to have but one child or no child. It must not be forced upon us, or else it’ll feel horrible. We must make that choice. If all the families in the world would choose to make this decision, for the sake of our world as a whole, the world population would enter a steady and unforced decline, a very welcome decline that would allow us to slowly plan and become accustomed to an ever-decreasing population and re-work our economic and government models in order to account for it. 

    I cannot state how dire the situation truly is. In developed countries, it’s easy to get lost in the abundance of it all, even if you’re poor. You can still dream about “having it all” and you think it’s going to be like this all the time. But we are on the precipice. We have been for some time, our end postponed for a little longer and a little longer. Mind you, I’m not talking about Biblical stuff here. I’m talking about the planet shaking and scratching us off like a bad case of fleas, but it’ll certainly feel Biblical to us. I’m talking about us doing it to ourselves, because as a species, we are all of the stuff I said we are in the paragraphs above. And it’s so easy to solve this peacefully, slowly, without the use of force and fear and horror, if we act now and we act collectively. 

    I am sorry to dump this on you so near to Christmas. I’ve been mulling over this stuff for years and I’ve alluded to it here and there, but I haven’t come out and said it outright so far. Since most of us will have some downtime and our bellies full this year-end, it might be a very good time to think on these things. 

    I remain hopeful. Who knows, in the near future, instead of bugging newlyweds for grandchildren, parents might ask them instead, “Have you thought about not having kids?” or “Isn’t one child enough, honey?” Wishful thinking, I know… 

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    Thoughts

    Social media and time spent on websites that produce original content

    Here’s something I’ve observed in my own use of social media websites: most of the time they’re so sticky that when I click on an interesting article to read it, I tend to skim through it in order to get back to the social media site where it was posted. Why? My rationale to myself is that I want to see what other articles I might discover. But in truth, I think I’ve gotten so used to skimming the news feed for interesting stuff, that I’m more concerned with that instead of actually taking the proper time to read through the interesting stuff. And that’s not right. And I don’t think I’m the only one doing it.

    It could be that we’ve gotten to the point where, without realizing it, we’ve become superficial skimmers, and I blame social media. The very websites whose mission it was (in the beginning) to present us with articles and photos and videos because they allowed users to post links to them, have now reshaped our attention span in such a way that we value browsing the news feed stupidly more than we value reading the actual content for which we browse the news feed in the first place.

    What I’ve also seen, because I myself am guilty of it at times, is a tendency to form an opinion about an article from the blurb that I can read on social media, before I can read it in full, or to determine whether it’s worth reading from the title alone. And — and this is shameful but worth talking about — I’ve also caught myself giving an article or a link a like/plus/heart based solely on its title, blurb and accompanying thumbnail, without reading it. Again, I rationalized it to myself by wanting to go back to the news feed, because “I had a limited amount of time” to spend on social media and wanted to catch up on the things that were posted. What a crappy rationalization, right? And yet I don’t think I’m alone; I’m fairly sure others are doing this.

    I’m curious to find out if anyone out there is doing or has done research on this and can confirm it.

    What I’ve also seen from our own site stats is a drop in our visitors’ attention span. In a word, they’ve become more superficial than before. They don’t spend the proper amount of time to read through something; when I post photo galleries, they don’t look at even half the photos; when I post videos, they don’t even look at a quarter of the video. It’s gotten to the point where we’ll post an article and people will start to ask questions related to it on social media (and this happens to my wife all the time) that are so blatantly ignorant of the very article we’ve posted that it’s crystal clear to us that these people haven’t read the article. They haven’t even clicked through to skim the first paragraph, which would have answered their question.

    Some will say that’s fine, we can now post our content directly on social media, in full length, along with the accompanying photos and videos. Perhaps, but that doesn’t work either. I’ve seen the same dropoff in attention spans there. I can attest to this. If a post isn’t short enough to fit within 1-2 sentences, or you post more than 2-3 photos, or you post a video that’s longer than 15-30 seconds, most people will simply not see all of it. They’ll click away. And that defeats the purpose of posting anywhere and also defeats the point of creating content. Not to mention that if you choose to post all your original content on social media, you are no longer in control of it, because it’s not on your website and you don’t get to decide if it stays up or not (down the road). You also destroy a viable business model, which is to post on your own site, make it a treasure trove of valuable information and then monetize it in various ways or use it as a stepping stone to various other projects.

    I’m not sure how far this trend will go. Will we have to create shorter articles and write them in the simplest language possible? How much can we communicate doing that? To whom will we be communicating? If audiences can’t handle a page-long article and need us to speak to them in first grade or second grade language, what kind of people are we reaching? What kinds of intellects are we nurturing? Is social media contributing to a “dumbing down” of its users?

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    Enough with the content algorithms!

    I’m writing this because I’ve had enough of the mindf***ing algorithms that every single social media service employs these days, in varying flavors. What do I mean?

    Well, have you indicated your preference for something on Facebook? Are you surprised by the fact that the posts you see are always geared toward those preferences? Are you surprised when the ads you see are also about the stuff you might be using or want to buy? Are you surprised that you see virtually nothing from stuff you didn’t indicate that you like or are interested in? Are your surprised when you see an ad along the very same lines laid out above, interspersed between every 3-4 posts, and it’s a video ad that repeats, over and over and over, until you have to hide it and also tell Facebook to hide all ads from that brand, but then a different ad for that same product pops up again from another account, and you have to hide that and hide all from that brand, only to go through the same s**t, day in and day out?

    Have you viewed a few videos on YouTube on a particular topic, say the latest digital cameras, and now your YouTube homepage is filled with videos on that topic? How about the recommended videos in the sidebar? Did you get enough of that topic the first time around and already made your decision, but now you can’t seem to be rid of videos about digital cameras that make you doubt your decision, with reviews where “experts” are yelling at you that this other model is better, so much better than the other model you want to buy, and by the way, they have an affiliate link in the description that you should click on when you buy it? Do you struggle to find other content now, because all that YouTube recommends to you are more videos on digital cameras with more “experts” voicing their “opinion”? Are you afraid to search for some other stuff on YouTube because you know that for the next few weeks, you’ll be inundated with more videos on those very same keywords, even though you’ve already seen all you ever wanted to see?

    Have you posted photos of a watch or a pen on Instagram, only to see tons of ads for watches and pens, and get recommendations to like more accounts on watches and pens? Do you find it hard to see anything else on Instagram, because that’s pretty much all they’ll shove down your throat, putting ads for watches and pens between every 2-3 actual posts (for watches and pens)?

    Isn’t AI fun? Isn’t social media fun? Don’t you love how it’s catered to your very needs, even though you don’t know they’re your needs and you don’t want them to be your needs, but they’ll be your needs goddamit because that’s what the social media algorithms are force-feeding you?

    Well, f**k all this s**t. I’ve had enough. Facebook, Google, you guys need to adjust your algorithms. This is absolutely ridiculous. The world is a varied place. Humans are varied, diverse individuals. Just because one day we want to see a video about [insert topic here], it doesn’t mean we want to see more videos on that same topic later in that same day, or the next day, or every damned day for the next few weeks, until your algorithms figure we’ve had enough. And we definitely don’t want to see ads for that s**t haunting us whenever we use your services and your websites and wherever else we might go (yes Adwords and Facebook Pixel, I’m talking about your omnipresent ads for whatever product we might have once seen somewhere). We want variety. We need variety. We need to see and experience opposing viewpoints on a topic. Sameness, day in, day out, is a real mindf**k. It’s not the real world, but since we tend to experience the world through social media, the responsibility falls on you to represent the real world in a real manner.

    This has got to stop. These algorithms have got to be changed. They need to become more human. Do you realize you can drive someone mad with your code, haunting them with more and more and more on something they only wanted to see once, something they can’t be rid of now? Do you realize you should be held responsible for the mental health of the people who use your services? It’s high time that fact dawned on you. Change your practices! Do it now.

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