Dogma questions
11.17.21 #blog #article #KFO #thisisthenew.me #writing
Note: I’m trying to service the early seed of routine.
Recently…
I’m trying to think outside of how I feel about the ongoing professional challenges. I think enough has happened in my life to make me question my dogma.
dog·ma | ˈdôɡmə |
noun
a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true: the rejection of political dogma | the Christian dogma of the Trinity.
Yes… I question my dogma.
My thing was I always figured it made sense to imagine a world where I dance on the graves of fools who didn’t see very far.
I’m just saying.
I do not know how I’ll die. I know I want whatever those last days to be comfortable. I know I’m comfortable now. I know I want to be able to set aside enough of now, to use later. I know my end days are more likely to drag out, then be sudden. If I drop dead of a heart attack, so be it. I might be a little disappointed about how the last few weeks of my life went. I admittedly live a comfortable boring life. Maybe that means I’ll be content. I think I vacillate cause I want my life to always be like this, but I don’t want to work the rest of my life.
My Dogma…
I still believe in America?
I still believe in America…
I believe if we work hard and save for the future we can have a good life in those times when we no longer want to work, maybe even before we get our social security check, or whatever we managed to save over the years.
I admit I wasn’t thinking big. I have not imagined world domination or wanting to be corrupted by money. Am I obsessed about money? Yes, probably... I am not dominated or corrupted by money though, maybe I’m at worse unerring in my hopes of at least taking some of my great wealth and setting it aside versus greedily sucking at it like a hummingbird. Flittering hear and there, paying for micro pleasures and convenience.
2. “I’ve had the feels lately”
A lot has happened in the last few years. My dogma seems dogmatic, surely that isn’t the needle scratched on the magnetic. I don’t know where north is anymore. At least I see the clouds again.
Caught in the grind
Journal bits
I’m trying to work through the disconnect I have with writing. A disconnect i’ve had since struggling to leave my fat self.
In this space (today 11.17.21), my thoughts are intermingled between what i’ve come to understand to be my present voice (something which is tight and tweetish), versus my old writing voice. I admit that having a voice in writing is tricky. It is like a muscle you build. The stronger the voice, the more you build a box around how you express those thoughts.
The other thing that is in my mind is my inability to find a way to think, muse on paper, convert said thoughts to the digital realm, then check in, revise and ultimately publish.
“How many garbage words do you spew out before you find your rhythm again?
How long can you have a writers drought”
When I write on the computer my voice and sensibility call back to the old days. My fingers and eyes know what they want to see. This is like being an over the hill rocker, sitting with a over the hill producer, and trying to brainstorm a hit that has the charm of past glory. I spent so many years writing at KungFu, writing a certain way. Any writing other than just a initial thought is very much overcast with this filter, this style that panders to an audience that isn’t there anymore. An audience that isn’t there, of which I am one of those people not there.
When I write by hand it is usually small notes, left behind, to caution me.
Recently I went through the dashboard of my car and found a note to myself “I’m caught up in the grid”. Jesus… Thanks, Paul. It is true though, I’m in the grind. I’m always in the grind, so much so that I don’t even notice it. When I do finally catch wind of my toil, my surroundings seem foreign, look different. I no longer feel like I’m in control, I’m in the captains chair, but the computer is flying.
Old me
You can’t be the old you. And if you spend time thinking about it you might as well accept that you’re in a alternate universe. It should be liberating to not have to be your old self. If you had glory years, if the best is behind you, it gets a little harder though. How do we move forward without repeating ourselves, without competing against our formerness, which has no bearing on the world the older us is navigating. I’m so much better than who I was, but I miss who I was, there was a lot of freedom in that earlier version of me.
As a futurist I’ve spent many of my waking hours trying to peer into the future, so that I could chart a path that it made sense to travel down. I remember when I was young my ideas were always a little too big. Things would start with a simple enough idea, but the scope always grew in my head. Eventually I would have to split the idea into parts, everything was a trilogy. Most of the time the humble idea no longer lived up to the opus that started to build in my mind and I’d abandon it. That isn’t how most people get into thinking about the future.
I did eventually get better at coming up with an idea and working on it in manageable chunks. I did start to believe the big fiction ideas were just that, immense daydreams that my mind made to pass the day, this was grounding, but poetry and think pieces were real, world building was less of a thing I could build to.
As I got older I found myself anxious with my routine. I began to worry that my successful creative hobby, and my good working career were me. They were. We are what we do. I was a succesful IT professional and an early Internet blogger with some following. Life was good. I was growing uncomfortable though. On close appraisal, the more certain and firm things felt, the more they seemed insubstantial. I was starting to see the first hints of the world past adulthood, the early uncertainty of middle age.
The nineties recession had left everything dingy and decaying, except for the growing presence of the internet. In the real world White flight was continuing its migratory pattern to newer suburbs. White families were fearful of non whites moving in and lowering property values, so they moved their kids to new poorly built suburbs. A world of new schools, longer commutes, no apartments, few black and Latino faces.
So it is again curious to think that years later I would find myself riding pretty high and uneasy. As the two thousands picked up so did the housing market. All over the world people were taking dated and neglected homes and remodeling them. There was an opportunity to make money and the home was important again. Home ownership became a rally cry. Most middle class and wealthy people will own a home in their lifetime, multiple homes, for the poor it is another matter. During the 2000’s though everyone was owning a home, or multiples homes!
Home ownership was changing, consumerism was also changing. Everybody was upgrading their homes. The natural pattern of buying a “first home” and then getting the larger home cause your family was growing, and you wanted to move to where the “good” schools were, and then maybe downgrading to a smaller home when you got older was changing. People were trading in homes like they were cars or shoes. Flipping became a term. The cost of houses was rising at an alarming rate, like Dutch tulips.
The thing about trends and events that everyone is drawn into, especially when money is a componet is that everyone is suddenly a fucking expert. Everyone is trying to figure out how they can get in on the action. And everyone is sure the party will never stop.
I liked the Internet, but I was growing slowly concerned about the house game. The thing about lows and highs is that they always average out. Naturally you don’t want to buy at the top of a market that is going to topple. Really you always want to buy the ugliest house for the least money, but that discussion is for another time.
The Internet was filling with promise. My livelihood was based on the internet. Computers had gone from being these devices which were capable of doing great feats, they were slowly becoming the looking glass to the information highway. Housing on the other hand was turning into a party where someone had spiked the punch.
In the perfect scam the mark becomes convinced that they want to be in on the action. You’re not hard selling them. Usually you just have to drive a nice car, wear nice clothes, and have things they want. This is how you rope them in.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the newest and best version of me was going to toss on a sandwich board and wail on and on about the sky falling. I was looking into the future and everything was fucked. The thing is that people who are on the opposite side of delusion are decried. No one wants to hear what you’re saying, they don’t thank you later.
I didn’t short the market. I don’t do the stock game, that isn’t in my wheel house. I did eschew debt though. I did fight off the advances of buying an additional house, that my ex wanted to do at the time. I wish i could say that meant everything went well and we won, but you lose sometimes, even when you’re on the winning side.
Looking back, I was continuing to lead a life that didn’t have a lot in common with the people around me. This is lonely. Most of us find a tribe of like minded people. Most of us do not want our conceptions challenged. We are comforted by the same. When you’d stop dreaming about stories to pass the time and you realize your job and your outlook on life are going to dramaticlaly change, the uncertainty is crippling.
And that is where I found myself. I was losing weight, paying off debt, more than skeptical about the hysteria people were going through and I was afraid.
Fear is a motivator. My growing anxiety and fear that everything was about to come unhinged is what saved me. Old me wouldn’t have seen that. Old me was oblivious.
End part 1.
The Fix
I think we’re all in a pot of water. I don’t think anyone expected to be here, with a crazy president, a pandemic, protests, a collapsing economy and 3 hobbit movies that were all so bad.
I think a lot of personal recessions are going to happen. The have not will suffer more, but not in any shocking way, just more. The middle class will carry on, but continue to resent what feels like a life less than what they imagined. I guess this is especially true for many white Americans who were really clearly at the top of the food chain. The thing about being on top is usually you’re standing on the backs of others. This isn’t a condemnation of white people, lord knows they’re getting a lot heaped on them these days.
Our values have been replaced with the value we place on the things around us. If you’re poor you’re likely to stay poor, this is cause you can’t usually afford to not be poor. If you’re middle class you have a good chance of staying middle class, but you’re likely to be your own worst enemy, if you’re wealthy, you’re likely to stay wealthy. This is the class system, it doesn’t look the same as how the British had to deal with it, which was transparent, still a barrier though. The Indian people are even more nuanced about it with their caste system. In America we’ve always been this land of opportunity. We were always a racist land, we always also believed in class, but if you found some way to make money we weren’t mad at you.
The thing with values though is that we all want. We all want it to be better. Even when we minimize, we want a better minimum. The reason why giving up things is considered enlightenment and hard to achieve is because we have things. And all things are not the same, there is version after version of everything and they’re either cheaper or more expensive. Our values have been rewired to focus on our wants. There is so much fuckery going on here in the US that no one wants to hear the “You can do it” speech. No one wants me going on a tear about the poor and how they could if they just… I know better, it is a more complicated, at the very least a more nuance discussion.
I’m gonna really muddy the water and say that we are held back by our lack of imagination, there really is this truth we lack an understanding of.
Growing up upper lower class it was made plain that if I was clean, carried myself in a respectable way, and worked hard, I could succeed. They weren’t wrong. No one told me race wasn’t going to be an issue, everyone made plain it was a huge issue, i just had to live with it.
Growing up poor also taught me to think the good life is luxurious. Just to be clear, the good life is luxurious, it just doesn’t feel like that, once you get used to it. Once you get into the good life you’re always tempted with nicer versions of everything. You don’t take things for granted when you’re poor. Sometimes the fridge is empty when you’re poor. Clothes are finite, you have one “good outfit” and shoes. I looked ok for school and each year I had a clean outfit that wasn’t threadbare, that was for going to special places, to see family and such. Growing up poor taught me not to take anything for granted. I grew up rich in dignity, that was pretty surprising since a teenager raised me and I usually saw my dad a few times a year.
People are ill prepared with leaving their comfort zone. I moved away from what I knew and was transplanted to the south. When I came here in eighties the whites around me were in some form of middle class living and the blacks were just trying not to draw attention to themselves, they seemed in a place and worn down. The integrated form of southern racism was far worse than the segregated racism of the midwest that I came from.
The fix is done in broad daylight and all we have to do is oppose it, we’ve not been good at that lately. They keep taking cause we let them. I think everyone should protest, but I also think everyone should vote, I think before we burn everything down, we should just change it with participation, there are more of us than them, we’re just not putting the right effort into it.
We're not the same and I don't relate
July 2nd 2020
A recent study has come out explaining that money can buy you happiness. The approximate number is an income of 70k, you can make more, but there isn’t a much greater level of happiness, they say. The things around you just get nicer, in theory.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/how-much-money-you-need-to-be-happy-according-to-wealth-experts.html
They’re not wrong.
The thing is that people will tell you that money creates its own problems. I’d say how we spend money is the problem source. In my late teens and early twenties I went from job to job. In each instance I made more money and I ended up spending more money. It was only during a period of a couple of years that I contracted that I had good savings habits.
The difference between a salary job (false sense of security), and contract work (you really won’t have this job long), was that the money from contracting was and still can be a wild ride. On one job, for a few months I’d be scraping the barrel and making $700 every two weeks. I’d then go six months making $3000 a month. It was a wild ride. In addition to not knowing what I might be making in the following months, I also had to deal with being unemployed for weeks or months at a time.
You always had the choice to hold out till you hit your number. A lot of people did that. They’d retire in increments. In this instance you’d declare to yourself (and anyone around you that), there was no way you were going to accept anything less than 80k a year. At that point it was just up to you to make do till those big ticket offers came in.
I saved a lot of money during those contracting years. It was the only time in my twenties when I had really great financial habits. I eventually left contracting, it was too unstable for me. The financial uncertainty felt agonizing, though I never really struggled with managing my money, outside of anxiety. In addition to that, as a contractor you feel like a second class citizen, put that on top of being a minority and it really was a bummer socially.
The way to tame money is to not spend it.
The thing with not spending money is that our entire society is built on consumption. If you can afford it, why aren’t you doing it? Why aren’t you drycleaning your clothes? Why would you clean your house? Why are you driving an old car, that is ugly, sometimes needs repairs and is paid off? Why indeed?
We are seduced by the now, with little heed of the fact that we’re all time travelers with capsules likely to land us into barren futures.
Taking a small portion of your income and saving that for retirement and making it rain with everything else you earn is normal.
When I got to my thirties I was really overcome with anxiety about finances. I had a salaried job, the economy was a rollercoaster. I had to change my life. I started with paying off debt, it took years of conditioning and change to get there. I truly did not suffer while doing it.
Once I got to my later thirties I realized that my identity was tied into my profession and ability to make money. That made me aghast. So I doubled down. The debt was gone, but I wasn’t saving in any significant way. So I had to push harder to be better at that. And I did, I started to save, but you first have to bring down your entire cost of living if you want to really save. And I did. Then I took all of my savings and started to invest. Investing is saving, but you do take your liquidity and turn it into an object, whether it is stock, or a rental house. I again had no money, but now I was able to live on an income of 22k a year. This was far less than the nearly 100k I was making before.
I didn’t have any money though. My cost of living was greatly reduced. My money had a long term mission that was serving me, but there was really just some emergency money around. Again, no one was starving. I still had family vacations. We still went out to dinner.
End part 1.
The sky fell during an earthquake
This piece was started on July 1st 2020.
I started today at 5am. The summer has been fairly mild and I’ve been biking on the Dahon Mariner. I’ve recently begun selling off all of my bikes and somehow this bike has become my favorite people powered bike.
The weather was maybe in the sixties, very comfortable out, unexpected for July in Georgia. I rode eight miles with the sun slowly above. Down close to my wheels I watched as worms raced slowly across warming concrete, desperate to reach the envied comfort of grass, they had little hope of success.
It is easy to either feel comforted or filled with despair when you do the same thing every day. Riding back I saw wild flowers raising their head to meet the sun, and pigeons as graceful as doves wooed me with the motion of their wings.
My mind of late has dwelled on the brightness of the future I've laid out in for myself. This is in contrast to the unknown end that I know I have no control over and also ponder alot.
I’m still haunted though. I feel I should be doing better. In a recent conversation with a friend, they did the back of the napkin on my state of affairs.
“Aren’t you X? That means you’re fine, you should have no worries anymore, why be so serious, life will pass you by.”
I didn’t disagree with the assessment, though I made plain that I do not feel i’ve gotten to the place where I can truly stop. It isn’t enough to be in the place where I don’t have to worry. Where I am, all will be good, but I could find myself not comforted with my routine. I could still be burdened with some chicken shit routine, so I can “make do”. There is a new level of uncertainty that says to me “Push on, shit is unpredictable.”
What happens to your psyche If you’ve always assumed the sky was going to fall and instead the earth beneath you opened up? Do you get eaten up cause you didn’t see the earthquake, or are you just glad you’re prepared and you realize you just knew some disaster was going to strike.
I have overcome this financial hurdle. I don’t feel like I’ve lost everything to do it. I was never comfortable with working for the right now and just hoping future me will be ok. I was never comfortable with the fact that the people around me, family, friends, peers, take no heed of their circumstances and act powerless.
I grew up and watched people who were not “have” and “Have not”. I grew up and saw people who worked incredibly hard, had families, went to barbeques, enjoyed life and they retired. They weren’t miserable. I grew up and watched people who most certainly wanted every moment to be of their choosing and those people did not age out well. Half those people did not have to worry about retirement cause they killed themselves, in uninteresting ways I might add. The other half just went into their sunset years with nothing, certainly not their carefree youth.
I need to make one more push.