[Previous entry: "It lives!!!"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Investment bankers and lawyers"]

10/15/2005: "Can't sleep, clown'll eat me"

It was raining hard tonight around 2-3am. Kept me up.

I've got the YABA treasure hunt w/Maggie, Dennis and Jeff in the morning and I'm still recovering from what some people have jokingly called "Asian Bird Flu." *Hack* Hope SF isn't too wet & that I won't have to push too hard :D

My mind is wandering.

Every so-often when I'm awake in the mornings like this, I wonder if I should toss out my rulebook and just do "bad things." For instance, why not drop everything and run away from things, set up shop somewhere remote, tropical, beautiful? Why not live without the half million condo, the fancy cars, the "nice things" and instead just live simply, slowly, peacefully?

The only reason I can come up with is progeny. Living your retirement before earning it would doom your progeny to an idyllic, spartan lifestyle which may not be of their choosing. How would you afford to pay for their non-basic needs, their education, their entitlement to mass-marketed junk?

Aside from this, I can't really come up with anything other than a faulty definition of success and its relationship with the ego of an individual who has been inbred with that definition.

Societal success in the current millenium has been tightly associated with posessions and monopoly money, with bling. It's showcased on quite nearly every voyeuristic in-your-face i've-got-more-money-than-you/you'll-be-a-millionare TV reality series and quite nearly every i'm-a-straight-and-chic/gay-and-happy (lawyer, banker, doctor) TV show out there.

Maybe we, the people, were the ones that really lost when the end of the Cold War proved community assets executed by politicians couldn't work. Now that it's over, the still-working, non-trustfund-babies like myself have become entangled in the dogma of the evil capitalist system. We are conned into believing that success is spending most of our waking hours working in fairly unnatural ways to buy mostly useless junk. Junk which the evil capitalist system has marketed as absolute necessities to uphold the status quo.

So, maybe what I'm trying to say is that "bad things" aren't so bad after all.

Bah! Maybe I need to sleep. More gibberish at 6am won't help at all with the Treasure Hunt tomorrow.

Replies: 1 Comment

Thanks for coming out to treasure hunt - while we didn't win, it was still a valiant effort.

As for the rest of this post, sounds lik ethis article:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/10/16/MNG7EF96GR1.DTL&hw=middle+class&sn=001&sc=1000

Dennis said @ 10/16/2005 11:53 PM PST