Lamentations: Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless. There is nothing new under the Sun.
You make some interesting points that I will be grappling with for a while, but my main remaining question is this: how does cashing in on the failing system (making money) help us in the future? What does money get us that doesn’t put us back into the same weighted wheel of fortune where the 5 people don’t take it away from us again? It feels as if, as you say, money will become useless, then it doesn’t feel like the best way to spend our time.
Paint a picture of how we can use money to create something instead of nothing. You’re right, we need ideals to believe, people and goals we can aspire to.
"The tiny handful of people left with—literally—all the money in “the economy” emerge as its new kings and emperors and dukes. That is why they are trying so desperately to pile up as much of it as they can now, and soon enough, they will try to turn it into hard assets, land, minerals, slaves, and so on."
Make your money asap and invest like the billionaires - hard assets, land, minerals, slaves, and so on. I wouldn't recommend slaves though... sooner or later there will be a revolution where heads will roll. Carefully building strong communities would be a better way to go.
My wife and I started a garden in our community 15 years ago. Many people have come to garden. Some for a short time, some for years now. We found growing healthy soil is the way forward. The soil is so fertile now, everything grows.
We purchased a few houses in our neighborhood 15 years ago after the last downturn. We put our efforts and money in making them homes. We charge a fair rental price, lower than the new urban apartments springing up. People seem to like living in them, some for a year or two, some for a long time.
Our neighborhood had our annual plant sale this week, twenty years now. We work together donating plants we grow and buying plants from local growers. We set up at the local church hall. Lots of people come, some are new, some have been coming for years. It's good to see and be with our neighbors. We make a bit of money and use it to help our community.
It is good being in the neighborhood. It doesn't feel like a TikTok community and I don't understand why they misspell tick and tock.
You see things very clearly and I agree with many of your diagnoses.
But politically and economically, I hold out some hope. Societies have collapsed in the past and others have risen like a phoenix. Not everyone in this period has consented to nothingness.
I’m not being a Pollyanna. I am saying that these things that are true overall are not true everywhere. As long as people exist, there will be many who care about literacy, culture, and posterity. There have been reasons to despair more than this in the past. The Black Death. WWII. The Gilded Age. The Congo and Sudan in the past decades. South Africa.
Anything that has to do with polities and people, we can change if the will is great enough. Things look permanent until they are suddenly not. For that, I would hold out a thread of hope. Burning down the library of Alexandria was a deep and permanent loss that can never be undone. But there have been meaning and literature and discovery and art since then.
Global warming, on the other hand, is baked in now. We can slowly stop it getting worse if we want to, but we are already in for a world of pain. Twenty years ago I chose not to have children, as a vote of no confidence in our society and in global warming. I will not condemn children to the future I see coming.
But people can be smart and wise as well as foolish and destructive. For that, I maintain a thread of hope.
Lamentations: Meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless. There is nothing new under the Sun.
You make some interesting points that I will be grappling with for a while, but my main remaining question is this: how does cashing in on the failing system (making money) help us in the future? What does money get us that doesn’t put us back into the same weighted wheel of fortune where the 5 people don’t take it away from us again? It feels as if, as you say, money will become useless, then it doesn’t feel like the best way to spend our time.
Paint a picture of how we can use money to create something instead of nothing. You’re right, we need ideals to believe, people and goals we can aspire to.
"The tiny handful of people left with—literally—all the money in “the economy” emerge as its new kings and emperors and dukes. That is why they are trying so desperately to pile up as much of it as they can now, and soon enough, they will try to turn it into hard assets, land, minerals, slaves, and so on."
Make your money asap and invest like the billionaires - hard assets, land, minerals, slaves, and so on. I wouldn't recommend slaves though... sooner or later there will be a revolution where heads will roll. Carefully building strong communities would be a better way to go.
My wife and I started a garden in our community 15 years ago. Many people have come to garden. Some for a short time, some for years now. We found growing healthy soil is the way forward. The soil is so fertile now, everything grows.
We purchased a few houses in our neighborhood 15 years ago after the last downturn. We put our efforts and money in making them homes. We charge a fair rental price, lower than the new urban apartments springing up. People seem to like living in them, some for a year or two, some for a long time.
Our neighborhood had our annual plant sale this week, twenty years now. We work together donating plants we grow and buying plants from local growers. We set up at the local church hall. Lots of people come, some are new, some have been coming for years. It's good to see and be with our neighbors. We make a bit of money and use it to help our community.
It is good being in the neighborhood. It doesn't feel like a TikTok community and I don't understand why they misspell tick and tock.
Living is not reasonable. It never is.
You see things very clearly and I agree with many of your diagnoses.
But politically and economically, I hold out some hope. Societies have collapsed in the past and others have risen like a phoenix. Not everyone in this period has consented to nothingness.
I’m not being a Pollyanna. I am saying that these things that are true overall are not true everywhere. As long as people exist, there will be many who care about literacy, culture, and posterity. There have been reasons to despair more than this in the past. The Black Death. WWII. The Gilded Age. The Congo and Sudan in the past decades. South Africa.
Anything that has to do with polities and people, we can change if the will is great enough. Things look permanent until they are suddenly not. For that, I would hold out a thread of hope. Burning down the library of Alexandria was a deep and permanent loss that can never be undone. But there have been meaning and literature and discovery and art since then.
Global warming, on the other hand, is baked in now. We can slowly stop it getting worse if we want to, but we are already in for a world of pain. Twenty years ago I chose not to have children, as a vote of no confidence in our society and in global warming. I will not condemn children to the future I see coming.
But people can be smart and wise as well as foolish and destructive. For that, I maintain a thread of hope.
The growing sense of nothingness is fueling the growing sense of numbness. It’s all about the current architecture.