Archive for February, 2024

50% Under 30 Living at Home in #America

Posted: February 17, 2024 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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Is there a difference between societal norms and cultural norms?

Have either of those changed in the past generation (20 years)?

How about the past half century?

Living at home with one’s parents into adulthood used to be akin to the scarlet letter. At least for men. A forehead tattoo with a capital L for the child, and there parents.

Go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, retire, die…

Millennials and Gen Z went to school, more than any other generation in history. Millennials and Gen Z got jobs. Yet more of us are living at home with our parents than ever before.

Nearly half of adults under 30? That’s a lot of lazy freeloaders. Or is it something else?

Are the most educated generations of men and women in history failing the system or is the system failing them? Are they failing society or is society failing them? Are they failing culture or is culture failing them?

Wages hadn’t kept up with productivity for half a century before the pandemic and the historic aftershocks of inflation. How many mind fucks can developing brains take before they’re permanently fried?

Both my parents are dead, so I’m happy to hear so many people 18-29 have living parents that they can live with. But I have a feeling they would rather leave the nest if they didn’t have to choose between rent and eating.

An upside to living at home is that it gives more time for organizing.

The empirical data on this issue seems to keep moving in one direction. Capitalist bootlickers will gaslight and deny saying that unemployment and the stock market are doing better than ever. As if either of those things has anything to do with suffering and quality of life for actual human beings.

Every year, every election cycle, every generation the rank and file seem to be asked to take less, do more, have less, save more, enjoy less, suffer more, think less, feel less, be less so that those with the most can have that much more.

Is this sustainable? Is this ethical? Is this tolerable? Is this how it’s always been? Is this how it will always be?

Perceived Momentum Solidifies #Habits

Posted: February 13, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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I’ve been a premium subscriber to Lumosity (brain games app) on and off for a decade now. I find it helpful. The older I get the more I realize my brain can use all the help it can get. Real, imagined, or placebo I don’t care. Don’t tell me about the labor pains just show me the baby.

I would use it reasonably consistently here and there then drop off. I would subscribe to the premium version when there was a sale on Cyber Monday or on New Year’s Day something like that. I’d start and stop and start and stop. I’d unsubscribe and resubscribe. Does this cycle sound familiar or relatable?

I never confused it as a magic pill for a bulletproof brain. I just knew myself enough to know that I’ve done enough detrimental work on my brain that a brain training app could at least serve as a beneficial use of time.

It has helped me at least a little. But what made it finally stick, just in the last year, was when I dropped the expectation of it helping my brain and doubled down on it helping me structure my time/daily schedule.

I realized that the value of just going through the motions, even half heartedly, provided as much value to me as putting full effort into using the app. How? Consistency.

I found that for me, the consistency of using the app everyday, without exception, even if I picked the quickest, easiest games, without enthusiasm or even a quarter of my concentration, did more for me that applying myself fully to the game once or twice a week and then forgetting about it for stretches of time.

As I did that more and more, and built up more and more streaks, a funny thing happened…my scores in all the games went up. I set my personal best records in all the games I played consistently. How? Consistency. I didn’t half ass it every time I opened the app.

But I did some of the times. When I was busy, feeling burned out, hungover, melancholy, distracted, multitasking, etc I still would take the time each day to open the app, and play the five games required to warrant completion and a little graphic at the end showing how many days I had completed my brain training consecutively.

There were however plenty of times where I was motivated, concentrated, caffeinated, enthusiastic and excited to play the games and try to beat my previous best score, to make up for a poor performance from yesterday and/or because I felt training extra memory or attention games would help me at an upcoming event.

This isn’t a paid ad for Lumosity (I wish) because it’s not about the particulate it’s about the general. It’s about doing the thing consistently. It’s about doing it every day, even half assed. Because if we do something everyday, half heartedness is inevitable but so is doing our best and so is doing better than we perceive we are capable of.

How?

Consistency.

Wealth #Inequality Means #Democracy is a Farce

Posted: February 13, 2024 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
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A government of the people, by the people, for the people in a world where cash rules everything around me.

We’re getting closer to the traditional national gaslighting of people to vote for the lesser of two evils. Gaslighting and voter shaming being the only options left of a corporate captured media and government.

Keep the facade going, there’s motions to go through. There’s time slots to fill, content to create, and appearances to make.

If people can barely survive after a decade which saw both political parties have control of government at one point or another, what is the point of voting? Unless voting third party. That’s where the gaslighting and voter shaming come into play. I wonder what Jill Stein will be blamed for this election season.

What a better life? GET A JOB! So then what do I need to participate in the farce of the decaying corpse of democracy for? Don’t super delegates pick who runs in the general election anyway? Doesn’t the electoral college mean that only a few swing states decide the presidential election anyway?

If voting was so important why isn’t it a national holiday? Like it is in other countries…

Vote local? Well that’s where I can see one vote having some value. Probably why we never hear about local elections. Hard to make us hate our neighbors over referendums and country treasurer battles.

If the masses are doing worse than they were before, habitually, for generations…what good is government? What is the point of elections?

Political theater, divide and conquer, evoke emotions, distract, tribalism…

How else can the 1% get the 99% to hate each other?

Red hates Blue

Blue hates Red

Elephant hates Donkey

Donkey hates Elephant

Blue Collar hates White Collar

White Collar hates Blue Collar

North hates South

South hates North

Half the country hates the other half

What a shame, what a waste, what a farce…

In America, we don’t have a democracy, we have economic totalitarianism.

One must pay attention, and do just a baseline level of research to find this truth although it becomes more obvious every year. The economic elites find less and less need to hide it. It’s becoming more common to say the quiet part out loud, in the open, on live mics on livestreams.

Keep the masses running the rate race fueled by promises and propaganda. Coerce them to work for a living until they’re burned out, bankrupt, or dead.

Just go along to get along. Gotta make rent, gotta put the groceries on credit. Can’t attend the protest cause I’m out of PTO, can’t take my PTO cause my copay went up again, can’t afford my copay cause groceries got more expensive for the forth year in a row.

What a shame, what a waste, what a farce…

#Rumination or Rut for Short

Posted: February 11, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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I came across the word rumination randomly and it immediately stood out and stayed in the forefront of my mind. I knew the word, I felt it strike a chord, but I didn’t immediately know the definition off the top of my head. So I looked up the definition online.

Rumination – a deep or considered thought about something. The action or process of thinking deeply about something.

Sounded right, looked right, made sense, then I saw a tab below with the definition from the American Psychiatric Association.

Rumination – a cycle of negative thinking. Rumination involves repetitive thinking or dwelling on negative feelings and distress and their causes and consequences.

Ouch, that one struck a chord and cut deep. It’s human nature to want to deny that we can be categorized as a type. If I was at a different stage in my personal journey, I would deny, gaslight, change the subject, and refuse to acknowledge.

But I am who I am, and I am where I am. Rumination has been a norm, a standard for me. As a creative/artistic type, it comes with the territory. Artists are sensitive. Overly sensitive compared to the average Joe/Jane. We are more sensitive to both the highs and the lows, the positives and the negatives in life at both the micro and macro levels.

You can’t spell rut without rumination.

Ruts are built on a foundation of rumination. Ruts are funded by rumination. Ruts are mentored by rumination. Rumination holds fundraisers and provides endowments for ruts. You show me a human being in a rut and I’ll show you a human being dealing with rumination.

Repetitive thoughts? Is there another kind?

Dwelling is as natural for humans as blinking. From the boomer who still talks about their glory days playing sports in school to the teenager still heartbroken a year after getting dumped. The self fulfilling prophecies of rumination are the dark side examples of the law of attraction.

I feel like rumination should be used as regularly as the words stress, fear, anxiety, and depression in regards to mental/emotional health concerns.

When we can label something, our awareness of it immediately grows exponentially. What we can’t describe due to our naiveté makes us feel more alone and detrimentally unique. Like we’re the first to experience what we’re going through.

Meditation followed by affirmation practice(s) can help first break the cycle of counter productive thinking with present moment awareness, then replace them with beneficial thoughts and visualizations. Philosophy study can teach us that people have been experiencing the same mental/emotional issues that we’re dealing with for thousands of years and provide wisdom based guidance.

I also think it is not just important, but imperative, to pair these sedentary practices with physical exercise. I was doing physical exercise regularly for years before my meditation and philosophy practices. Weight training, yoga, machine based cardio, and nature trail walks/hikes (when the weather allows it) make up my regiment that I whole heartedly endorse for all humans.

But regardless of order and regardless of which one someone is already doing, it is equally important to train the body, the mind, and the spirit. All are connected. Healthier body, healthier mind, healthier spirit. Stronger body, stronger mind, stronger spirit.

Holistic approach is the best approach always.

Letting Go of Wanting Control

Posted: February 8, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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Control. It’s human nature to want to control things. It makes us feel safe. It makes us feel powerful. It makes us feel better. Certainly better than feeling in danger, weak, or confused.

We seem to want more and more control as time goes on. Our institutions want more control over its citizenry. Every year there seems to be more and more attempts at censorship on social media. Always for the greater good right?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

We have so little control over what happens to us and around us, to really think about it is scary. That’s why it’s so much easier for the masses to not think about it. Not only do we not think about it, we deny it. We deny it and try to force control on the external world and ourselves. Always for the greater good right?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Trying to turn the world into an ever expanding safe space is as misguided as it is wasteful.

It is hard, if not impossible to accept how little of our lives we actually control without some kind of philosophy or spirituality practice, or in my case, both. Stoic philosophy and the spiritual teachings of Alan Watts have been tremendously helpful for me in letting go.

Focusing on what I can control, letting go of what I can’t.

Easier said than done of course, just like everything else in life.

My mind seems to drift into mental movies about possible future events and possible future outcomes that stir up my emotions with the velocity of a jet engine. I was never taught to think like that, or feel like that. Not directly, I suppose. So where does that way of thinking and feeling come from?

I’ve lived enough life, met enough people, to know that not only am I not alone in that way of thinking and feeling but that way of thinking and feeling is the norm.

I’ve also lived long enough to know that what is considered normal is insane.

Insanity wrapped in social acceptability.

Studying stoic philosophy, listening to Alan Watt’s speeches (preferably with some video playing to compliment his words) helps calm my mind with perspective, and ease my emotions with wisdom. Breaking vicious circles inherited through nature and nurture, and in a way, restoring child like ease and wonder towards life and the world…until the next challenge presents itself. And those don’t take too long to show up. If we’re alive, we’re facing challenges.

Anxiety comes about because we want to control the uncontrollable. We would prefer to not have challenges but that is not how life operates so we get anxious about it. And why wouldn’t we? Did we ask to be born? Did we ask for a series of never ending challenges sporadically spaced out from the time we are born until the time we die? Absolutely not. Who would?

At least we are fortunate enough to be alive at a time when the knowledge and wisdom of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world is so accessible with such little effort. So we have to tools to better address our so called problems.

It is natural to forget. It is natural to be anxious. Philosophy and spirituality practices help us to remember.

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