Power and luck
Always wondering what the future will become, letting my darkest fears lead as much as not.
Life is curious, since momentary comfort seems to out weigh fears, at least perhaps for generally healthy minds.
I mean sure fear makes me think to take more cautious decisions, and not too much sell my future choices by debt or deprivation. My conservation is mostly limited to not spending money.
This weekend my most recent financial siren call is a "Heart Monitor watch" for running to better track my heart rate while running. 100% a game (a TOY) , no practical value at all, except perhaps improving my race times by a few percent. The costs were from $50 to as high as $500, even including GPS tracking, and fancy downloads to a computer. Fun fun fun, but again not very important. So I let go my little dream once again. Maybe if I got a chance to borrow someone's watch and see how fun it would be I'd change my mind.
I admit my decisions are reasoned more on laziness than optimizing wealth. Like for instance, living alone in a 3 bedroom house. I've nothing against roommates, and could use a little expense sharing to reduce my expenses and allow me to pay down my mortgage sooner, but my initiative is limited to causually mentioning to anyone interested, if they know anyone who needs a nice play to stay.
Anyway, thinking about the bigger picture, it seems clear sooner or later, harder times will come, times of plagues, drought, fire, floods, famine, pestulence, poverty, and whatever nasty thing you can think of. We've done well in spreading out out dependency, as well as expanding our expoitations of natural wealth, but whether disasters come by accident or by our poor planning (unsustainable consumption), harder times will come.
I think of medical research that found women's brains were more resilient to recovery from injury than men, apparently more redundancy. Also apparently it explains statistically why there's more male idiots and geniuses, less redundancy, more fragility to injury or failed development.
I imagine modern culture follows the male perspective of maximizing power and influence by taking increased risks, and finding on average more gains than losses.
More conservative souls will sit back and shake their heads, and perhaps take advantage of the risk-takers, moderating the gains, and always holding back enough that things will be okay if they don't work out. Well most simply, spending CASH rather than CREDIT is clear example of a cautious soul's work.
Cautious folks (like me) want security in the future. WE don't want to make our future dependent upon undependable future success. Real conservatives (compared to my little reserve) are those like the Amish, who look with skepticism at all modern devices, questioning if they're better off or not taking on a dependency they can't produce themselves.
Anyway, it's hard for a person like me to want to live my little safe life and know my future is dependent upon greedy bastards continuing to raise pyramids of consumption that I know can not last.
So how to respond? I follow the Amish way somewhat, choosing the bicycle over the car, partly for cost, partly pride, but overall security, knowing even if my life is smaller, I'm closer to the sources that sustain mean. Even if I can't build my own bike from scratch, I know a bike's just a tad more efficient than my own two feet.
Beyond simple fear for my own future, or those who take more risks than me (without proper evaluation of their risks or gains), I do lament the risks in losing much of the gained knowledge in our speedy age. Who can catalog our collective wealth of knowledge and who will protect it - if the digital bits become at risk.
A glorious time as live in, and I think we really can live with much less if we had to, I fear the uncertainty of this transition. I wish we had more redundancy. I suppose the multiplicity of humanity (6.5 billion) is a sort of redundancy. We can afford to lose a lot more than we would admit or want to think about. I don't like looking down as far as we could fall....
Life is curious, since momentary comfort seems to out weigh fears, at least perhaps for generally healthy minds.
I mean sure fear makes me think to take more cautious decisions, and not too much sell my future choices by debt or deprivation. My conservation is mostly limited to not spending money.
This weekend my most recent financial siren call is a "Heart Monitor watch" for running to better track my heart rate while running. 100% a game (a TOY) , no practical value at all, except perhaps improving my race times by a few percent. The costs were from $50 to as high as $500, even including GPS tracking, and fancy downloads to a computer. Fun fun fun, but again not very important. So I let go my little dream once again. Maybe if I got a chance to borrow someone's watch and see how fun it would be I'd change my mind.
I admit my decisions are reasoned more on laziness than optimizing wealth. Like for instance, living alone in a 3 bedroom house. I've nothing against roommates, and could use a little expense sharing to reduce my expenses and allow me to pay down my mortgage sooner, but my initiative is limited to causually mentioning to anyone interested, if they know anyone who needs a nice play to stay.
Anyway, thinking about the bigger picture, it seems clear sooner or later, harder times will come, times of plagues, drought, fire, floods, famine, pestulence, poverty, and whatever nasty thing you can think of. We've done well in spreading out out dependency, as well as expanding our expoitations of natural wealth, but whether disasters come by accident or by our poor planning (unsustainable consumption), harder times will come.
I think of medical research that found women's brains were more resilient to recovery from injury than men, apparently more redundancy. Also apparently it explains statistically why there's more male idiots and geniuses, less redundancy, more fragility to injury or failed development.
I imagine modern culture follows the male perspective of maximizing power and influence by taking increased risks, and finding on average more gains than losses.
More conservative souls will sit back and shake their heads, and perhaps take advantage of the risk-takers, moderating the gains, and always holding back enough that things will be okay if they don't work out. Well most simply, spending CASH rather than CREDIT is clear example of a cautious soul's work.
Cautious folks (like me) want security in the future. WE don't want to make our future dependent upon undependable future success. Real conservatives (compared to my little reserve) are those like the Amish, who look with skepticism at all modern devices, questioning if they're better off or not taking on a dependency they can't produce themselves.
Anyway, it's hard for a person like me to want to live my little safe life and know my future is dependent upon greedy bastards continuing to raise pyramids of consumption that I know can not last.
So how to respond? I follow the Amish way somewhat, choosing the bicycle over the car, partly for cost, partly pride, but overall security, knowing even if my life is smaller, I'm closer to the sources that sustain mean. Even if I can't build my own bike from scratch, I know a bike's just a tad more efficient than my own two feet.
Beyond simple fear for my own future, or those who take more risks than me (without proper evaluation of their risks or gains), I do lament the risks in losing much of the gained knowledge in our speedy age. Who can catalog our collective wealth of knowledge and who will protect it - if the digital bits become at risk.
A glorious time as live in, and I think we really can live with much less if we had to, I fear the uncertainty of this transition. I wish we had more redundancy. I suppose the multiplicity of humanity (6.5 billion) is a sort of redundancy. We can afford to lose a lot more than we would admit or want to think about. I don't like looking down as far as we could fall....
posted by Ares Olympus at 11:12 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home