As I mentioned a little over a month ago, the competition over which theme would get the fifth Wednesday post in December was almost unparalleled in the enthusiasm it generated and the number of votes the top three themes generated. All three of the themes are worth a post, and I decided well before cognitive collapse got the top spot that all three of them would get a post; if the complexities of a quick relocation to Silver Spring, MD hadn’t gotten in the way, we’d have covered all of them by the time January was out. Still, here we are, and it’s time to discuss the theme that nearly won in December: why downward mobility is one of the few ways to achieve certain kinds of relative freedom in today’s decaying industrial nations.
Yes, I know that this sounds like the ravings of a lunatic. There are reasons for that reaction. We’ve all been taught since about thirty seconds after we finished being born that the rich have more freedom than the rest of us. This is true, as it happens, but most people go on from there to convince themselves that the only way to achieve the freedom they want is to claw their way up the social ladder to the rarefied classes that the rich inhabit. That’s where they run off the rails, partly because the life of the would-be social climber involves less actual access to freedom than most forms of outright chattel slavery, and partly because modern industrial societies have a couple of centuries of practice at harnessing and redirecting the energies of would-be social climbers so that additional freedom is the least likely outcome of their efforts.
To make sense of this, it’s crucial to recognize that there’s a vast difference between money and social class. It’s quite possible to have a net worth in the godzillions and still be excluded from the uppermost class, just as it’s possible to have a net worth that puts you somewhere in the upper middle classes at best and still be a member of the ruling elite. Money is straightforward: it’s a system of arbitrary tokens that modern societies use to regulate access to goods and services, and either you have it or you don’t.
Class, by contrast, is anything but straightforward. Human beings have the same instincts of herd behavior as all other social vertebrates, and those have unimaginably deep roots; while behavior doesn’t leave fossils behind for paleontologists to observe, the patterns we’re discussing are so broadly distributed among vertebrates that it’s probably safe to assume that they evolved back in the Devonian period, when primitive fish first started swimming in schools for mutual defense. Despite our pretensions, human mentality consists of a fragile and imperfect veneer of conscious thought over the top of a standard-issue primate nervous system, and when it comes to a conflict between conscious thought and the rest of our minds, conscious thought rarely wins. This is true in many contexts, but it is especially true when the social instincts come into play.
Social climbers almost inevitably fall victim to the consequences. Aspire to a class above your own and two things follow as the night the day. The first is that members of the class you’re trying to enter raise barriers against you, since you don’t make the right social signals that tell other people you belong to that class. The second, if you succeed in learning how to make those signals, is that once you’re let inside, you will be influenced by the other members of the class you are joining: your opinions, ideas, and values will shift, gradually or not so gradually, to conform to those of the other members of that particular herd.
This is why all the talk about “changing the system from within” you heard as the Sixties wound down was never going to be anything but empty air. As former hippies shaved, put on “square” clothing, and applied for corporate jobs, they promptly absorbed the values of the people and institutions they once despised, and voted for Ronald Reagan in droves in 1980 and 1984. That wasn’t just hypocrisy, or the vagaries of bored children who got tired of one game and decided to play another, though both these factors arguably played a role. The herd instincts we share with guppies and gazelles swung into play, drawing them willy-nilly into conformity with their new herd.
The unconscious gravitation exerted by collective thinking on the social climber has two results that are lethal to any hope of freedom. The first is that even if the climber clings to the idea of becoming more free, any freedom he wins will be exercised in conformity with the collective convictions of his new class. (“Look, I want to be more obedient and conformist, okay? It’s my free choice.”) The second and more deadly of the two is that the habits of every class in modern society involve spending more money than people of that class generally make. That means either pining after things you want and can’t quite afford, or going into debt to buy them anyway, and both these choices are mental manacles far more unyielding than any shackles made of iron.
The most important forces holding people in bondage in modern industrial societies, in fact, are the paired factors of desire and fear deployed by the consumer economy: desire for the goods and services you don’t have and fear that you’ll lose the ones you do have. For most people these days, desire is the more important of the two. You don’t have to terrorize people into obedience if you can convince them that obedience will get them the things they want, and if you manipulate them so that you decide in advance what they’re going to want, your power is complete.
The roles of desire in maintaining the current system is anything but accidental. In his important book Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, as discussed in a post late last year, historian of religions Ioan Couliano dug deep into an important current of Renaissance occultism and showed how certain mages of that era explored the ways that people can be controlled and manipulated through desire. He also suggested that the reason most modern industrial societies don’t use police state tactics very often is that they are “magician states” that dominate their populations through the manipulation of desire, rather than through the more brutal and clumsy methods used by dictatorships.
A more recent scholar, Mauricio Loza, built on this insight in his 2000 book The Hounds of Actaeon: The Magical Origins of Public Relations and Modern Media. He makes a very strong case that magic—actual magic, the art and science of causing change in consciousness in accordance with will, rather than fake magic of the Harry Potter variety—is central to the political economy of modern industrial nations. Both writers, as I’ve noted in the past, make the mistake of thinking that the kind of magic they discuss is the only kind there is, but within their limits they provide a very useful tool for understanding life in today’s world.
The mistake just noted is all the more ironic in that it was challenged millennia in advance by the most influential intellectual figure in the history of the Western world. That would be Plato, the extraordinary Greek thinker who set Western philosophy on its feet once and for all, and traced out the possibilities of the discipline so cogently that 2300 years later our intellectuals are still following in his footsteps. (Alfred North Whitehead, another extraordinary thinker, wasn’t wrong when he characterized all subsequent Western philosophy as “footnotes to Plato.”)
Plato’s main writings were dialogues in which different characters proposed competing answers to an assortment of profound questions. In the best of his works, there’s never an obvious winner or loser in the resulting debates, because his goal was to get people thinking, not to force-feed them dogmas. Even so, there are times when it’s not hard to figure out what Plato himself is thinking, and the dialogue we’re about to review is one of these examples.
It’s called The Symposium, and it’s the reason why meetings where scholars discuss things are still called “symposiums.” (Plato was the source of a remarkable number of terms like that. He used to teach in the precincts of a temple dedicated to a minor figure named Academus; that’s the reason the words “academy” and “academic” got into our language.) The original meaning of the Greek word symposion is “drinking party,” and that’s the setting of the dialogue: a drinking party that includes most of the great intellectuals of Athens during the latter part of its golden age. Because they’re ancient Greek intellectuals and philosophy as we know it is being invented around them, their drinking games are a little more erudite than most: to be precise, each of them is supposed to give a little talk about erotic desire as the others tip back their glasses.
There are some pretty lively talks, but the one that matters comes from Plato’s teacher Socrates, who is the central figure in most of Plato’s dialogues. Socrates wants to pass on the teachings he received from a wise woman, Diotima of Mantinea, on that very subject. What Diotima had to say, to summarize Plato’s precise and elegant prose too briefly, is that desire isn’t an immovable presence in our lives. It’s profoundly shaped by our expectations, our beliefs, and our understandings. This means that it’s possible to educate desire, to redirect it from self-defeating and self-destructive targets to other goals that enhance and affirm our lives.
This isn’t done by white-knuckling it, or using brute force of will. It’s done by a gentle, step-by-step expansion of consciousness. Suppressing or renouncing desire, from this way of thinking, is self-defeating; if it succeeds, which it almost never does, the result is a kind of spiritual castration, while if it fails in the usual way, you’re right back where you started. Instead, just as a budding musician is guided a little at a time to become more sensitive to the subtle nuances of tone and phrasing, the student of Diotima’s way learns to become more sensitive to what he actually desires, and sheds mistaken ideas of the desirable for a clearer sense, rooted in personal experience, of what happiness and fulfillment actually are.
The tradition that developed out of The Symposium became one of the core elements of Western esoteric spirituality. The concept of the education of desire also found its way tolerably often into the religious mainstream, though there it too often got shoved aside by more puritanical attitudes that treat desire as an evil weed that, at least in theory, has to be ripped out by the roots. All in all, it’s hard to learn anything about occultism without seeing the footprints of this among many other contributions of Plato all across the landscape. This makes it all the stranger that Couliano and Loza, both of them very well educated and alert to subtleties, nonetheless completely missed the idea that desire can be educated, refined, and put to work in the cause of liberty rather than remaining a source of vulnerability to coercion and manipulation.
If desire is the instrument by which the current order of society remains itself, though—and Couliano and Loza make a strong case that this is true—then learning to redirect desire, and to brush aside attempts to manipulate it in the service of social control, are both essential skills. It’s because your ordinary social climber doesn’t realize this that he so reliably fails to achieve the freedom he seeks by clambering up the social ladder. His desire for freedom becomes a lever by which he is drawn into conformity with the class to which he aspires to rise, and thus becomes more constrained and obedient to the system, not less.
The blind spot that makes the social climber vulnerable to this fate is quite simple: he assumes that increased freedom is a privilege of higher social status, pure and simple. This is far too simplistic an analysis. There are some modes of freedom that come with class standing–for example, the US and most industrial nations have a two-tier justice system in which the rich and famous can get away with nearly anything so long as they don’t irritate their rivals too greatly, while most of us don’t have that option–but most of the freedom that the wealthy classes possess has, strictly speaking, nothing to do with their social class at all. It is instead a function of money, and of a very simple equation involving money at that. They need less money than they have, and so they cannot be constrained by the paired forces of debt and greedy longing that close like jaws on most people in our society.
This equation works even at very modest levels of income. You can be very poor and quite free, so long as what little money you have is more than you need. That was Diogenes’ way. He was a contemporary of Plato, who took the quest for personal autonomy a good deal further than most. He had little and needed less. When Alexander the Great came to Athens, he sought out Diogenes and talked to him, and at the end of their conversation asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” The only thing Diogenes asked for was for the conqueror to stand to one side, because it was a cold day and Alexander’s shadow was keeping the sunlight from warming him. Awed, Alexander went away saying, “If I weren’t Alexander, I would be Diogenes.”
It’s not necessary to live in an upturned tub, as Diogenes did, to make use of the same lesson. All that’s required is that you embrace a level of expenditure, and accept a social status, lower than the one that your income would otherwise provide you. That’s downward mobility. Whatever your income level is, figure out how you would live if you were a little poorer and a little lower class than you are, and then live that way. Accept a lower status and standard of living in order to embrace a heightened degree of freedom: it really is as simple as that.
Simple, though, is not the same thing as easy. Peer pressure is only one of the challenges you’ll face. Depending on your social status, you may have to contend with systematic measures on the part of your employer meant to force you to remain in mental chains. All those absurd sumptuary rules about what office workers are supposed to wear to work have a very simple purpose: they are meant to help keep corporate employees so deeply mired in debt that they don’t dare risk doing anything that might threaten their incomes, and so remain high-paid serfs of their corporate masters. Downward mobility is easier with some jobs than with others, and in some cases a change of employer—or even of profession—might be necessary if you want to put downward mobility to work for you.
You will also have to contend with entire industries that are out to make you think you need things you don’t actually need, or want things you don’t actually want. Here, though, we’re in territory already explored at length in the discussion of Situationism that occupied nearly all of last autumn. Most of the more intrusive ways that the sorcerers of the corporate-bureaucratic system lure you with fake desires are at least partly voluntary; as I’ve mentioned tolerably often over the years, throwing away your television and getting a good ad blocker on your computer are good basic counterspells, and finding other content from outside the current media hive mind to keep your mind fed is another.
Here again, you don’t have to live under a tub to make this work. A quiet, relatively cheap apartment in an unfashionable neighborhood, a few bookcases, and an old stereo do the job tolerably well for me. Your choices may well differ—in fact, they’ll almost certainly differ, because we are talking about freedom, after all.
We are also talking, please note, about a certain degree of relative freedom. One of the things that makes so many discussions these days run off the rails is that so many people insist on thinking in absolutes. The debates concerning free will and determinism are great examples: nearly all the arguments used by both sides presuppose that if it’s not all the way in one direction it must be all the way in the other. That real life exists in the forgotten middle spaces, where some of our choices are mostly determined and others are subject to varying degrees of wiggle room, is unmentionable in these screaming matches.
In exactly the same way, nobody is ever completely free, and nobody is ever completely unfree. Eugene Genovese’s classic study Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made is a fine study of the ways that people found ways to grasp certain freedoms even in the context of outright chattel slavery. Equally, no matter how free you think you are, certain constraints limit your freedom. Nor is any one maneuver going to give you all the freedom you want. Downward mobility as a practical expression of educated desire can free you from certain of the “mind-forg’d manacles” Blake wrote about, and give you much more wiggle room and many more chances to make your own choices than most people have. That’s what it can do; that’s all it can do; but if you like to make your own choices, it helps a great deal.
It has another feature which bids fair to become even more important as our civilization keeps slipping down the arc of its decline. The slow (or not so slow) disintegration of our built infrastructure, the erosion of standards, the constant drift toward the shoddy and flimsy, and the rest of it: these are symptoms of accelerating decay that the angry posturing on both sides of today’s political conflicts does nothing to stop. The less dependent you are on the tawdry output of a society in decline, the more easily you can navigate the downslope and the better your chances of getting yourself and the people you care about through the crisis periods of that process—and that, too, is a form of freedom worth pursuing.
Brilliant. I’ve been thinking about the modern sorcerers in politics and advertising, and the unholy alliance between them and “industry” a lot, lately, now that I am on the outside of society, i.e. retired. I have considered bathtub living, but I have too many records and books. Life is full of challenges, right?
Sounds of a raving lunatic? Count me in!
Timely, thank you.
I just got “restructured” out of what Graeber would have called a BS job, but one could flip a coin most days between that and humiliation ritual.
I will be taking this post to heart; I doubt I will be the only one.
@JMG,
“You don’t have to terrorize people into obedience if you can convince them that obedience will get them the things they want, and if you manipulate them so that you decide in advance what they’re going to want, your power is complete.”
That’s it in a nutshell, isn’t it. I think I first started to understand this many decades ago when I first read Thoreau. But what a beautifully concise formulation!
BTW, good luck with your new situation, and I hope you settle into Silver Spring smoothly and find all the right people and places! I’ve never been there myself, but it sounds nice.
JMG, thank you for this very helpful lens through which to face the coming decline.
I want to share one thing I learned years ago: money is nothing but a claim on the labour of someone else. Accumulate it and it’s useless. It’s only when exchanged for goods and services that it has actual value. Nothing that the earth provides can be exchanged for money without someone doing work, even if it is just the paperwork that will give you ownership of a patch of land.
The more skills you have and the more provisions you supply for yourself by your own labour, the less money you need, however the less time you have for non-essentials. The wiggle room you wrote about is found right there: What needs can I meet and what needs do I want to meet by my own labour, and what needs can only be met by buying the labour of another?
Very good and helpful, thank you.
The old genetic instincts to climb up in status, and to indulge do scream sometimes
JMG,
I think a call for freedom in common parlance is really a stand in for “I want to be free of the debts I have” and “I don’t want to be time poor, having no hours to myself.”
That last one though, “time poor” is something nearly every rich person I know suffers. They have no steady leisure (the ones I know work 10-12 hour days), they just have extravagant 3 day trips the rest of us can’t afford.
All of this has much to teach me, and relates in certain ways to things I mentioned in the last comment I put through on the previous post yesterday.
The words from a ritual come to mind: “…help me attain appropriate desires…”
Willing the wrong things will not be as helpful as willing “appropriate desires.” Great wording because that will, will vary from person to person.
I am reminded again in this essay also of The Razors Edge by Maugham, where Larry the loafer seems to have the most freedom, praise Bob!
The library has been a good job for me in that regard… I’ve increased my wage over time, but we still live below our means and remain in the class we started in really. There isn’t a ton of social pressure in my work. With the other mostly introverts here, I can also be a little eccentric, and its appreciated rather than cajoled. However, when I was first coming up, I often didn’t make the right signals when going for promotions, so got stuck in the entry level positions for quite awhile. Still, being stubborn can pay off in certain situations, knock on wood.
In my last comment yesterday, I was talking about a ternary thinking in regards to folk art, commercial art, and the avantgarde. Anyone who is interested can read it here:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/folk-art-commercial-art-and-the-avantgarde-an-artistic-ternary
I have to modify my desires for total experimentation to make some headway in commercial writing. Total commercialism however loses some of the imagination that comes from experimenting… this is the first result of this thought experiment.
When I am in a lower class, there is a feeling of more self-hate, and of being less worthy. Those are painful. Any thought on that?
Suppressing or renouncing desire, from this way of thinking, is self-defeating; if it succeeds, which it almost never does, the result is a kind of spiritual castration, while if it fails in the usual way, you’re right back where you started.
Just as Jesus’s admonition that “money is the root of all evil” should be amended to “the love of money is the root of all evil”, Gautama Buddha’s admonition that “desire is the source of all suffering” should be amended to “being ruled by desire is the source of all suffering”, especially when the desires are petty desires, and especially when what those desires are have been inculcated into your mind by those who would control your attitudes and behaviors. I know this from my own experience. Back when I was a sad young fool, I let myself become a slave of fear and desire, and indeed made such a fool of myself that I ended up not having any friends anymore. Far better it is to be the master of what desires you have, and to be able to recognize that more often than not, there will be things that are more important than your personal desires, petty or otherwise.
An excellent post that explains why the old saying “Money is a good servant but a bad master” is true.
The post also reminds me of the discussion of Eliphas Levi’s The Doctrine of Ritual Magic, and his idea of channeling the astral light through will. Advertising and other desire-making travels through the astral light, below consciousness.
My only large expense has been the ridiculous amount of money I spent for my kids’ education. Being the good kids they are, they used it to get freedom rather than riches.
Yes. Socrates himself lived very simply – he would have made an excellent Stoic. And there’s this quote, I have forgotten the source: “You know, if you sucked up to the emperor, you wouldn’t have to settle for lentil soup.” “If you could learn to like lentil soup, you wouldn’t have to suck up to the emperor.”
Nice essay – lots to think on.
Funnily enough I recently saw reference to Aspasia of Miletus – “The young Socrates frequently sought conversation with her and calls her, in the dialogue Menexenos, his teacher of rhetoric’. How many more women like her and Diotima of Mantinea were there!?
Having made efforts to reduce constraints of society via downward mobility, one of the main problems me and bacon have, is that houses / property have been turned into an asset class. Inflation in housing costs is a bugger when you have to rent and don’t earn much. Finding somewhere cheap to live is no good if the area is generally poor and cannot support self employment.
For example, in one area we lived, we knew of a retired bank manager who used to get beer money by doing gardening jobs – he charged much less than any local gardener because it was pin money to him – he had a house and pension and felt no problem about undercutting other gardeners who actually needed to work for a living. So it goes.
That coupled with energy prices of the last few years means we are dab hands at dressing in layers but the deterioration in society makes downward mobility more tricky. I recently saw a report on poverty in the UK from the Joseph Roundtree Foundation; one thing they mentioned particularly caught my eye – the estimate that, IIRC, 20% of adults in the UK don’t have any resources for emergencies or £100 in savings – very much paycheck to paycheck.
Which of course means they are easier to control in terms of desires and fears, especially if they depend on government largess. Add children to the mix and there is yet another lever.
We still use nokia 1800 dumb phones and will do so until they turn it off around 2030 – our annual phone cost is about £25 each – we look on internet connected phones as having a personal agent of one’s own mental destruction sitting in a pocket. Luddites.
Educating of desire seems foundational in inner work, although if current patterns and trends continue, a whole load of people are about to discover an education in desires and fears that they were not expecting.
Navigating downward mobility (collapse now and beat the rush) at this stage of things takes persistence and resilience, Unless one has resources, the cost of living and general fragility would be a big obstacle for many people.
Mainstream society in the UK is currently like a bloated dead badger on the kerbside in summertime – it’s going to stink when it blows.
Logical – flawlessly logical!
This sounds like the advice of the FIRE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) community: stay out of debt, spend less than you earn, invest the difference. (The idea is that eventually you can live off the investment returns.) You don’t mention what to do with the left-over income; I suspect this is because 1) it’s not your focus here and 2) you expect all investments to lose money in a shrinking economy. It would be interesting, though, to know what provisions you’ve made for loss of your investment and royalty income!
The question of class inevitably brings up one’s upbringing. In retrospect, I quite admire my mother, who aspired to be of the class that my father quite effortlessly belonged to. She schooled or budgeted her efforts with great precision. Indeed, she was actually quite good with money (to my personal detriment for much of my life as what was mine was in some sense hers). By the end of her life, she was admired by outsiders as a great lady; the epitome of classiness. To her family, often, she was just that impossible woman. To me, she was someone who tried to convince me of a great many things that just weren’t so, which took me decades to understand. Among them, deceiving me about my own actual desires and wishes. Not so different, if looked at clearly, from the situation in many families. If it weren’t for gaslighting, there’d often be no light at all!
Since I had the opposite of any intention to fit in with the classes she variously belonged to and wished her children to participate in, and was (as I was to discover in my ’60’s, Aspbergian), I’ve been almost cheerfully downwardly mobile up until I was able to retire: debt free, but with very little money. Enough, I’m happy to say. So far.
The only longer term relationship I had was, to my occasional horror, was with a woman who wanted to tap into the streams of virtual money flowing (to her eyes) around us all, more or less by hook or crook. She picked a very unsuitable partner for that enterprise, I’m sorry to say. On the other hand, we had a great many similarities. Which may be why Vedic astrology pairs people with catastrophic relationship indicators together. It worked out, after a fashion, I often think of her now that she’s passed, and dream of similarly awkward situations to the ones she put me through in life. She was a New York egalitarian, aside from her desire for more money than we had, and never understand the nuances of class that were as obvious to me as the nose on your face to me, a Southerner who grew up among often quite non-wealthy Southern aristocrats.
Sorry. Class. Money. Various kinds of upward (and downward mobility). All of these sparked my meditation on these things. I hope my thoughts weren’t too tedious or irrelevant. The story of my life was written in this little essay of yours, somehow. Thanks for the spark!
JMG, you write: “Suppressing or renouncing desire, from this way of thinking, is self-defeating; if it succeeds, which it almost never does, the result is a kind of spiritual castration, while if it fails in the usual way, you’re right back where you started.”
What do you see as the relationship between this suppression or renunciation of desire and the various ascetic practices that are practiced as means of spiritual development in some traditional religions?
A warm welcome back, JMG!
Terrific essay – thank you.
A few thoughts:
Tantra is not my yogic field of expertise, but the tale of Socrates’ “wise-woman” reminded me of other tales of old where the female tantrikas were the initiators of spiritual development for the men.
I’ve also come to think of kundalini as “desire” hormones transmuted into psycho-spiritual wisdom.
In the non-tantra yogic traditions, yes: what is prescribed is a type of renunciation – Sanskrit “vairagya”- more accurately translated as “without interest”. It conveys an attitude of cultivated detachment or letting go of desires, I guess, in other words, a strengthening of will-power and discerning awareness.
Vairagya too does not mean stuffing down or puritanical suppression of all desires, but instead it is a practical and successful approach to maneuvering between worldly living and spiritual development. (Unless, of course you have decided to go to a forest and become a true renunciate or to become a mendicant!)
When you mentioned “spiritual castration” that results from suppression and extreme renunciation of worldly desire, I thought of the term “spiritual bypass” used to describe same. And just the other day, someone on a podcast referred to same concept as “premature immaculation”, LOL!
Not having had children myself, still I might speculate on how much more challenging these practicalities of “downward mobility” would be with children and their “peer pressures”. Personally, I still remember the sting of not having the fancy Bass Wegun designer loafers some of my classmates wore as I had to settle for the Sear’s brand knock-off.
My parents, children themselves of the depression, were MASTERS at practical and sensible living, raising five kids on one blue-collar salary. (They eventually became rather wealthy from good investments.) But of course, times were different back then.
Though I went through a period of (wasting my money on) buying “designer” shoes and handbags to make up for my “lack” in childhood, LOL, the lessons learned from my beautiful, wise parents served me well. I was able to move to Manhattan where I had a cheap little apartment in a (then) unfashionable neighborhood, with second-hand books and my old stereo, surviving on a retail workers salary. (Yes, back in the 70’s that could be done!)
Anyway, I guess the greatest lesson from your amazing essay is that what really counts is the sense of INNER-FREEDOM that practical living and spiritual questing bring.
Thank you again my friend!
Jill C – Yoga and the Tarot
Thanks for another great essay. I agree with you for the most part, although I feel this strategy would only be truly successful in a stable, non-inflationary monetary environment, which is the opposite of what we’re seeing right now at the end stage of the US Dollar’s currency cycle. Without ensuring that you have some way to increase your income every year, simply spending less than you earn each year will likely result in a slow decline in your living standards. If you have a reserve of savings, maybe you can manage it, but if not, it could be downright dangerous for someone living close to the poverty line already. You didn’t touch on this subject in your essay, and I recall you saying that your income has been increasing over the years simply because you have been continuing to write and sell more books every year, so would it be fair to include this as a part of your overall strategy for maintaining a degree of freedom?
In an inflationary environment, apart from defensively living below your means, I think one also must make effort to gain a certain degree of ownership over productive assets like food-producing land, energy generation, tools, and marketable skills, to avoid having purchasing power and thus a degree of freedom gradually eroded over time. After all, you can reduce your desires and resist the pressure of other people telling you what you ‘need’, but you still need to eat and have someplace to live.
This reminds me of a conversation I had while working as a dishwasher in college. I was talking to one of my friends there about my bike and about biking to work each day. I explained that I viewed biking as killing two birds with one stone. It helps keep me healthy and helps me save money on gas. Plus, the bike doesn’t require insurance or a license or a parking spot. People think of the car as the symbol of freedom, but the bike is the actual symbol of freedom.
One of the other dishwashers laughed at me. She said “Symbol of freedom? Maybe for a 12-year old child!”
In the context of this post, her remark is part of the mechanism of social control that keeps people in debt. People buy into powerful emotional imagery about products they don’t need. In America the automobile is loaded with a bunch of magical imagery about freedom and the open frontier.
Great essay.
I feel like this is one of those lessons most of the few people who will ever learn it have to learn the hard way, by beating our heads against the wall chasing the myth of “more” until we finally are forced to admit to ourselves that we can never truly have it, and to have enough — a much better feeling — requires discipline.
One thing I’ve struggled with is the binary of “my desires are mysterious forces beyond my control” vs. “my desires are completely arbitrary and meaningless, and I might as well not have them.” Unfortunately the third option — some desires are artificial, some are natural, some are good, some are bad — doesn’t lend itself to easy answers, especially without a living tradition to impart its wisdom to those struggling with it. And most such traditions have been in severe modes of failure in the West over the past half-century or more.
Having never lived a so-called “upwardly mobile life”, by conscious choice (very pointedly rejecting that path in my very early 20s), I have long noted the discomfort that some of my lifelong relatives or (former) friends have implicitly expressed at my non-conventional lifestyle. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is simply an expression of a deep-seated insecurity or dissatisfaction with their own quite obviously upwardly-mobile and materialistically-oriented lives.
Apologies for failing to close the bold tag after the word “such” in Comment #10. I proofread and really thought I did! Well, I guess that closing portion of the comment is the part most worth reflecting upon. 😉
Fascinating essay on the theme of simply living within your means
Thanks JMG
Tony A (post #6) wrote:
“The old genetic instincts to climb up in status, and to indulge do scream sometimes.”
Perhaps I am an extreme social outlier or a complete freak in this regard, but the very concept of “status” is so bizarre and alien to me that I still, after 60-some years, struggle to understand it.
I don’t think that anything I have EVER done, or sought to do, in my life, has involved in any way the struggle to achieve some illusory form or level of status. What is status, anyway, but the opinions of those whom you neither know nor value? Why should any person give the most minuscule damn about what others think about them and their life choices? I don’t think I have ever had any such thought or feeling.
Of all the ways in which one could waste one’s time, or life, the seeking of status would have to be near, or at, the top of the list for me. But again, I am not sure that I really even grasp the concept in the first place.
I’ve been working on developing a lower standard of living for a little while, and have had some success to that end (I’ve gotten rid of a lot of junk, buy very little now, etc.). Ads have become a source of comical amusement, and easy to dissect to find whatever primate emotions the company is trying to manipulate. Spending less than I bring in has been easy enough. But my best friend recently expressed concern about my Spartan lifestyle as well as my dismissal of his ideas about investing to increase one’s net worth. He just couldn’t understand the motivation and seems concerned that I’ll be eating cat food in my retirement. I found it a little amusing, and promised him I’d buy a few stocks in cat food companies.
In my situation, I’ve found that focusing on spiritual goals has been an effective way to redirect desire to ends that, well, don’t cost a penny. Just time and effort. The rewards are far more fulfilling.
Gluttony, Lust, Greed, Envy and Pride. Desire is heavily stacked in the vices.
But would you it is also an important ingredient in the Will?
Hey JMG,
> Socrates wants to pass on the teachings she received from a wise woman, Diotima of Mantinea, on that very subject.
While it wouldn’t surprise me greatly to find someone claiming Socrates or some other famous philosopher was really a woman, I assume you meant to say “pass on the teachings he received”.
—David P.
John, life does indeed have its challenges. Living in an upturned tub is one option, of course, but there are less drastic steps in the same direction that can also pay off well.
Justin, I think you’re already well on your way. 😉
Dugan, the humiliation rituals are another side of the story, one I didn’t have space to include, but they’re cut from the same cloth as the absurd sumptuary rules I mentioned in the post. As a salaried employee of a big organization, corporate or government, you were a well-paid serf, and serfs always have to grovel before their masters. Now you have the opportunity to be free of that, too. Enjoy it!
Sgage, Thoreau got it. A couple of millennia before his time, so did the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tsu, whose writings first got me thinking along these terms. Thanks for the good wishes!
Myriam, excellent! Yes, exactly — ordinary human labor is the simple, gritty reality that lies behind all the intricacies of the money economy, and you can do an end run around all of those intricacies by doing things for yourself, as well as by not buying things you don’t actually want or need. There are other advantages, too — I have my first batch of homemade kimchi in this new apartment in process right now, because I’ve never found any commercial kimchi I like as well as my own!
Tony, but they’re not strictly genetic. That’s the secret. They have connections to old genetic drives, but they’re powerfully shaped by cultural and psychological factors. What if you could satisfy the drive for higher status by rising to more exalted psychospiritual staes, and satisfy the drive for indulgence by figuring out the difference between what actually makes you happy and what advertisers are spending billions every year trying to trick you into buying instead? You can do these things, you know, and the results are much more satisfying.
GlassHammer, granted. What that shows you is that a genuine desire — the longing for free time — is going unsatisfied by the consumer economy, while fake not-really-equivalents are being sold to people instead. Those three day trips are exhausting and expensive! Being able to take a whole day off and just nap, lounge around, play old albums, and read books I enjoy, as I did on Sunday, is much more pleasant and restful, and it’s within the reach of anyone who can redefine their relationship to their desires.
Justin, yes indeed. Reading The Razor’s Edge was another defining experience for me along these lines, as Larry really is the bodhisattva of downward mobility, the one person in the high society depicted in that novel who broke out of the traps of craving and desire to become a genuine individual.
Tony, thank you for bringing this up. Grab a beer and have a seat on the sofa, because we need to have a little talk. Those feelings of self-hate and unworthiness are not natural and normal. They’re the results of an evil spell — and yes, I mean this quite literally. Like most people in today’s industrial nations, you’ve been put under an evil enchantment — again, I mean this quite literally — that’s intended to make you hate and despise yourself if you don’t obey the commands of your masters. Breaking that spell is essential if you are to have any freedom at all, and the first step in breaking it is recognizing that it’s there, and that it’s not your feeling. The next time you get that reaction, notice it, make it conscious, and think to yourself, “that’s just the spell talking.” Then go on to other things. With practice, you’ll find that it loses its grip on you, and then you can do what you want.
Mister N, yes, exactly — thank you for this. I also had some experiences along these lines back when I was young and clueless.
Tom, you raised your kids right, then. Delighted to hear it.
Patricia M, that was our good friend Diogenes again! He was a true master of the one-liner, among his other gifts. My reaction when I first read that story was, “But lentil soup is really good!” That’s still my reaction — in fact, I may just make a big pot of it later today.
Earthworm, I know it can be difficult, and the artificially inflated price of housing is one of the major difficulties right now in the industrial world. My approach has been to live in a much smaller and less fancy place than I can afford — my new apartment is about 500 square feet, which in US terms is tiny — but I have some flexibility due to my income, which other people don’t. Eventually, as the countryside empties out (a normal event once depopulation really sets in), illegal homesteading in isolated areas will become standard, and that’s one of the ways you get from a dying urban society to a rural-village society with empty urban ruins, another normal transition. We’re not quite there yet, though. Thank you, btw, for the dead badger metaphor — spot on, and, er, colorful. 😉
Old Steve, thank you. I’ve tested it repeatedly in my own life, and it seems to work.
So – a coherent meme campaign like Amelia has the function of educating desire for a very specific purpose? Then… that campaign should work far better than ordinary advertising of the aren’t-you-hungry kind due to its appeal to social needs via cultural and linguistic land-lines… right? Which means Amelia is winning with sources of power far deeper than the advantage gained by following the rule that satire works when it punches up from lower class to higher…
And (maybe off topic): The idea of the old gods awakening in relation to Amelia came up on Magic Monday, so it may be worth noting that she is seen cleaning graffiti from Stonehenge in, “Amelia ‘Our Pathways’ FINAL MIX Full Lyric Music Video,” on YouTube.
Well, I am fascinated by the phrase “education of desire…”
It so happens that a wise archdruid, several times bishop, not a million miles from here wrote the following***, in relation to the question of “right or wrong motives” and how they relate to the “education of desire” in taking up certain western esoteric practices:
QUOTE
Every desire, according to Plato’s teaching, no matter how confused or destructive, is ultimately a desire for the Divine, hidden under one or more of its veils. Some of those veils can be very thick! Nonetheless, even mixed and murky motives can lead in the right direction, so long as they inspire the discipline and steady effort required to follow the course of instruction given in the pages that follow. This is as much as to say that every road, however rough and winding, eventually leads home.
END QUOTE
This quote was very enlightening. Thank you. Apart from anything else, the concept that where we are headed is “home” is helpful… because people’s homes are not all the same. A useful corrective to the idea that we are all climbing the same mountain… 🙂
I like the idea of gradually pruning and training desire. Is there a similar idea in relation to fear?
*** quote is from Revisioning the Tree of Life, John Michael Greer, Aeon Books, c 2025, p 107.
Oh JMG, this came at the right time for me. I’ve lived by this wisdom all through my twenties and halfway into my thirties, and I’ve rarely worried about money. I’ve actually really enjoyed living the frugal lifestyle, and have learned a lot of practical skills and life wisdom from working low-wage jobs that gave me the freedom I wanted (both mental and temporal) to pursue other projects as well as to rub elbows with people below the class I was born into.
Last week though, I had a talk with my Boomer father in which I sought his advice about my next career move. I was deeply discouraged by his insistence that I’ve made a series of poor decisions by not seeking further degrees above my BA, and that as a result of this and of all my hopping around I’m not qualified for any kind of ‘sophisticated’ job. (His word). Alas, although it was unspoken I know he was also referencing my decision to not get jabbed, a very sore point between us.
There’s a lot my father doesn’t understand, but his remarks still stung. It is at least partly true that feeling rejected by my PMC family over the years for my Ecosophian-tinged ideas and beliefs has turned my avoidance of money into an aversion to money, and that may well be subconsciously holding me back from attaining a more secure level of income. I know I’m a capable person who could be earning more and contributing more to the world through my work, I just haven’t found that pathway yet.
Many cities these days are passing laws against living in upturned tubs. Too many people who can’t afford housing are trying to do it. I know you’ve been reading Proust; there is no lack of social climbers in Marcel’s world, and some of them succeed as the novels unfold. A while ago there was some minor discussion of Knut Hamsun. Many of his novels are about rootless tramping about, Norwegian style, doing odd jobs. His most famous, and the one that won him the big prize, was “Growth of the Soil.” It involves a fellow who, owning little or nothing, tramps up to the northern wilderness and establishes a solitary farm there. A woman shows up, her appearance marred by a hare-lip. He takes her as his wife. The farm eventually thrives. She gets her hare-lip repaired. Big literary prize for the author. It’s a sort of upward mobility. And, of course, it’s fiction — and it has been 50 years since I read it, so my memory of it is blurred. Having had the experiences of reading Hamsun and Proust has never advanced my upward mobility, limited or non-existent as it has been. It would have been quite rare to meet anyone else at “the phone company” who would have read these authors. Same with Couliano and Loza (not to mention Bernays). You just find time for them as best you can.
Thanks, John… I’d rather be hanging out with my peeps on the funny farm than going to posh parties.
–
Here is a blast from the 90’s zine past I was reminded of by this essay: Dishwasher Pete… having a trust fund isn’t the only way to travel and see the states!
“It used to be easier to ‘drop out.’ These days, there’s an entire economy built around the notion of staying in touch with everyone all the time, with documenting your every move online every minute.
But in the 1980s and 1990s, you could travel the country as a roaming dishwasher, publish an erratic zine about your lifestyle, and become a super-obscure cult hero to an audience of a few thousand who’d check in on you once or twice a year.
Amiably drifting Pete Jordan decided to work as a dishwasher in all 50 states, embracing the ‘slacker’ lifestyle and the zen of the moment, and shared his stories of the ‘dish dog’ way in what turned out to be a surprisingly successful zine. Long after his dish days ended, Jordan wrote the candid, witty memoir “Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest To Wash Dishes In All 50 States,” one of my favourite books about the ‘90s. ”
https://nikdirga.com/2019/01/25/thats-so-90s-week-ode-to-dishwasher-pete/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_Pete
@Tony and JMG,
I have a lot of those feelings too, connected to being on a disability pension due to multiple physical and mental health issues but looking healthy. I cannot be what people think I ought to be on first meeting me, and its hard not to put those expectations on myself even though I know exactly why I don’t have a job, and just how hard I tried to work and or create my own microbusiness, and just how often things have blown up in my face or slipped through my fingers.
Part of my problem is that I’m scared that people will use their first impressions of me to think that people on disability are faking. I’m not, but some people are very ready to believe other people are cheating the system and will find ways to see evidence of it everywhere so they can justify making it harder to get disability or get by on the very low disability income because they resent paying taxes for it.
So feelings of guilt are a huge part of it, and they aren’t rational.
It’s an interesting one, as downward mobility is easier in some places than others. One of the few features about the US that appeals to me is jingle mail, the ability to walk away from a mortgage. Most other countries don’t have it, and when rent and the stress of a predatory landlord is higher than a mortgage, this puts a hard floor for most on downward mobility. Also too the lack of decent rental accommodation in many places. You can always downscale however, cash up a home and buy something smaller and cheaper, but it’s getting harder. A large country like the US again has advantages.
This post is close to home as I’ve recently had to quit a salary job due to corporate disorganisation and trade on my own account. Fortunately for me business is booming, but I can see how the salary mirage traps people and, yes, over time, dulls the mind and your skillset. For me I’d rather serve customers.
When Bill and I got married in 1993, I discovered Amy Dacyczyn, first via her newsletter (I still have all of mine) and then she published almost (but not all!) of her newsletter in her tome, “The Complete Tightwad Gazette.”
It was from Amy that I really came to understand the concept of “say no to the things you don’t want so you can say yes to the things you do want.”
Knowing what you want, what you really want, helps clarify so many decisions. If you want to get closer to financial independence, why are you dropping hundreds of dollars a week on DoorDash as a recent NYT story detailed? And then wailing about your poor choices?
Amy Dacyczyn wrote a great deal about the philosophy behind your thrift and frugal choices. The idea wasn’t to become a miser sitting on a pile of gold. It was to get closer to the future you want. The future YOU want, that you gave serious thought to.
Thrift — because you expend life energy to earn money which you then spend for the things you want — gives you control.
Interestingly, she interviewed Professor David M. Tucker about his book “The Decline of Thrift in America” (1991) and later, a Simplicity writer who’s name I can’t remember. Tucker went into detail about how thrift used to be taught and upheld as a social virtue. The Simple Living lady said that “simplicity as an ideal” got co-opted to sell you stuff.
If you can find a copy of “The Decline of Thrift,” read it! It’s fascinating how our culture changed.
Regarding advertisements as an evil spell, ever since I first encountered that framing, I’ve had a two-step reaction to most adverts. First, I recognise them an attempts at manipulation. Then, it occurs to me that they’re laughably bad ones because what they depict seems rather unappealing. Admittedly, this might be because my general outlook is rather unfashionable where I live; perhaps, to pick a recent example, the average young German adult in a big city really does get a kick out of seeing a man throw a toddler-ish temper tantrum at being served vegan “meat”, only to discover that it’s (supposedly) quite tasty.
(For those who can stand video, it’s probably worse than you imagined it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eHs8B-SQYU)
This might classify as a success but, unfortunately, my natural reaction in such a situation is anger. Anger at them for trying to manipulate me, more anger at them for thinking that this garbage (to pick a druid-approved word) would appeal to me.
This displeases me greatly because I am still being manipulated, even if it’s backfiring. The screens at my train station are big, obnoxious, and exactly where one naturally looks if one isn’t reading (difficult because there are very few seats) or staring at one’s phone (undesirable for obvious reasons). It’s a subway, so the only nature to observe is the occasional rat, lost pigeon, or homeless guy relieving himself. The train comes every 20 minutes, so if I’m unlucky I’ll spend 20 minutes (or more, thanks to the state of public transport) occasionally glancing at the screens. This has me fairly reliably in a foul mood on the drive home.
Do you have any advice?
—David P.
I love how virtually everyone has the same reaction to Diogenes: that guy was amazing, and I could never be like him. Of course Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium, who was a student of Diagenes’s student Crates, who had exactly that reaction and so founded a gentler path. I think it’s fair to say there’s something genuinely heroic/saintly about Diogenes.
Another fascinating figure to me is the distant intellectual ancestor of Epicurus, Aristippus the Cyrenaic, who infamously declared pleasure the highest good and sought to live a life of fame and fortune. But he seems to have held his hedonism lightly and made the best of every situation, making him a kind of Dionysian counterpart to the Apollonian mood of Cynicism and Stoicism. A high-risk, high-reward strategy, to be sure, and definitely not for everyone.
Oh, and I just realized that Aristippus was the one who had the exchange with Diogenes that Patricia Mathews paraphrased above. The yang to Diogenes’ yin, to be sure.
Hello again, JMG and commentariat.
You’ve written about a lot of topics worth to be commented, John, in addition to the downward mobility main topic, so I don’t know where to start commenting them.
Well, I’m going to point first that the “magician states” idea is quite reasonable to explain how modern industrial Megamachines work, which aren’t blunt totalitarian dictatorships. Between the stick and the carrot, one party systems usually choose the stick, but “democracies” choose always the carrot (desire) instead the stick, unless the carrot doesn’t work (which in normal “peace” times is very rare).
So, the idea of desire slow “domestication” by Plato and occultists seems reasonable, me think, to free yourself from the “magician states” dual manipulation (propaganda/advertisements); expanding your own consciousness and educating yourself seems a slow process which would need a lot pf patience, but I think it’s worth to be tried.
Another idea you’ve pointed is that downward mobility can help to free people from their own social class (according their money richness), because they won’t be compelled by their former social group anymore. I think it’s a reasonable idea, though hard to do in real world. Envy of the same economic incomes people, or even worse, of upper social classes is a heavy influence within a heck of people. For example, I’ve been watching how the real middle class is being declining in my country more or less since 2008 economical crisis. However, I also see the most part of people who has fallen from middle class status since some years ago, go on pretending they keep being middle class (at least middle-low class); so they pretend a lifestyle which they can’t live forever. For example, expensive bars and cafeterias are full every weekend of people, but I bet during the work week a lot of those apparent middle class pretenders go to the supermarket watching carefully which food is labelled as “special offers”, and sold cheaper…In addition to this, I’ve seen, from a few years ago until today, more and more outlets shops have opened in my town to make business with a bigger and poorer working class people (and former middle class).
Roldy, I’m tempted to quote Sherlock Holmes: “You know my methods, Watson. Apply them.” The provision I’ve made for the loss of my royalty income — I have very little in the way of investments, because the economy is already contracting and I expect the real value of all investments to decline — is, of course, making sure I’m well supplied with practical skills that can keep me fed and housed in hard times. Why do you think I’ve put fifteen years of hard work into learning astrology? Plenty of occultists supported themselves during the Great Depression by casting horoscopes for pay, since divination of all kinds is always in demand when times are hard.
Clarke, thank you for this. I had the great good fortune to meet and marry a woman who grew up dirt poor and had a fiercely independent attitude that rejected the thought that she should conform to anyone’s class standards. That made it easy for us to navigate the poverty of the first part of my writing career, and to deal with the increasing affluence of the second half without getting stupid or wasteful about it. I know that not everyone’s so fortunate!
Roy, I think that those traditions are mistaken, of course. Pleasure-hating asceticism is a common habit of some faiths, but it seems unhealthy and unproductive to me.
Jill, vairagya, if I recall correctly, is the exact equivalent of the Stoic virtue of equanimity, literally “having a balanced soul.” It’s something you can practice with perfect grace in ordinary life — experiencing pleasures and pains without being knocked off your balance by craving the former and fearing the latter. You’re right that trying to live up to a state of purity that’s not yet natural to you is a really bad idea; as Manly P. Hall wrote, “To attempt to live beyond what we know is dangerous. Not to live up to what we know is equally perilous.” He’d have laughed good and hard at “premature immaculation,” btw — as did I!
Stefania, au contraire, this strategy becomes even more essential in an inflationary environment. Inflation means that the tokens we call money are losing their value because they are being produced at a rate exceeding the rate of production of real goods and services. That inevitably happens as civilizations decline, and it means that living below your current means is essential — it also means that no “store of value” will retain its value, and that productive assets will lose any value they have other than their immediate usefulness to you. It also means that the legal forms that give you ownership of those assets will become increasingly fragile, btw! As depopulation sets in, access to land and housing will become easier, though we’re not quite there yet; more broadly, though, the only assets that will count as the decline continues are the things you can do for yourself and the things you can do in exchange for the direct products of other people’s labor. That will involve a really drastic decline in standards of living for most people, so it’s good to get ready for it by living cheaply and simply now.
Nephite, excellent. Yes, exactly; the automobile may have been turned into a symbol of freedom by clever marketing, but it’s actually an instrument of servitude, since a car does you no good at all without highways built and maintained by the government, petroleum extracted and refined by huge corporations, and much more of the same kind.
Slithy, I know. That’s why I’ve been working for my entire adult life on getting some new life into one such tradition, which isn’t suffering from failure so much as sheer neglect.
Alan, I know the feeling! I’m sure there’s some dissatisfaction involved, but there are also herd effects involved — social pressure against nonconformists is part of the standard herd instinct.
Mister N, duly fixed.
Raymond, you’re most welcome.
Brenainn, well, that was Diotima’s suggestion, and it does seem to work!
Rashakor, misplaced desire is the essential nature of every one of the vices. Desire moving in harmony with an enlightened will is the essential nature of every one of the virtues.
David, ah, typos. 😉 Duly fixed.
Rhydlyd, okay, there’s definitely Somebody flowing into the form of Amelia. Scrubbing graffiti off Stonehenge? Oh my.
Scotlyn, why, yes, I’ve written rather a lot about this from time to time. As for fear, of course. Fear isn’t wrong or bad, though it can be misdirected and misplaced.
Dylan, that’s a real issue. It took me quite a while to get past my gut-level aversion to the suburban lifestyle I grew up with, and let myself earn a comfortable income. For what it’s worth, meditation helped.
Phutatorius, of course. Now that the system is threatened, pressures to conform to the behaviors that support it (at our expense) will be cranked up hard, especially in those areas that are most vulnerable to snowballing economic implosion. I’ll be discussing that in a later post.
Justin, thanks for this! A fine example.
Pygmycory, thanks for this. Yeah, that’s a real issue, and it doesn’t help that there are in fact people who are exploiting the system and could work if they wanted to — people like you, who genuinely need the help, are inevitably at risk of being lumped together with them. That being the case, living below your means is even more crucial, and in fact a visible display of poverty (even looking a good deal poorer than you are) may be useful, as people will tend to take that as evidence that you, at least, aren’t living well at the expense of others.
Peter, the US does indeed have advantages! I’m glad to hear you’ve landed on your feet and are providing other people with services they want and need. That will stand you in very good stead as things continue.
Teresa, thanks for this! I took inspiration from an earlier generation of tightwads, but it’s good to know that it’s still out there. I’ll see if I can scare up a copy of The Decline of Thrift.
David, the only thing I know that helps is treating the screens as an opportunity for will training. Do not look at them. No matter what, do not look at them. Keep track of the number of times you glance at them, and whittle that number down. It can become quite a passionate little game.
Slithy, granted! I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable living in an upturned tub, but a less intense version of the same principle works for me. As for Aristippus, he was at least perfectly honest about his choices, and I have to admire that.
Chuaquin, trying to maintain the lifestyle of a class you can’t afford is lethal. “Fake it until you make it” is usually bad advice anyway, and “Fake it while pretending you can still make it” is worse.
Ahh.
Thank you. Superb whack-em-in-the-head essay. The ideas were in the ether, and you plucked them out and made them tangible. Man, talk about original thought.
{ I noticed you called Socrates a “she.” Soc-rat-tees. Interesting. Was it you who mentioned that Socrates could have been a woman? And therefore a WISE-woman. Gandalfa-rat-tees. }
This essay reminds me of kings. Kings are kings for a reason. I informally study the Brutish Royil family of Great Brutain, much to my husband “Jethro’s” chagrin. King Churles III is on top because of his brutal ancestors. Push-comes-to-shove, Churles will morph into Willem the Konkerer.
Churles’ ancestors killed and maimed anyone who stood in the way in their quest for power. It wasn’t only him — it was the entire current aristocracy. Power = high-status, is it not?
Churles has publicly had a Mr-Nice-Guy attitude all his life. So did his mudder Quin Libibeth II. They both acted all innocent throughput their lifetimes. Except Churles treated †Saint Diana abominably, and weaseled out of it. His ancestors were tyrants; he was a tyrant to †Saint Diana but most of the time, he has the air of a weasel. Tyrants-to-weasels. Churles has no morals; he only puts on fake morals when it is convenient to himself. He wanted Cockamilla, so that’s what he got.
I hear Churles’ and Cockamilla’s marriage has been none too happy, not as extreme as, but similar to, the marriage of the banished Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, and his wife Wallis Simpson.
Anyway, back to top-status. Top-status means ruthlessness and evility. People clawing their way to high-status, doing unutterable things, happens to be the reason why I believe humans are doomed. Humans have not demonstrated that they have the internal wherewithal to NOT go extinct. It is humans, and none else, that will have caused their own extinction.
To wildlife’s advantage. Humans will only stop their insane behaviors when they no longer have the ways and means to ruin themselves and all that are in their spheres of influence.
💨🪓💪🏼Northwind Grandma💨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
“In the best of Plato’s works, there’s never an obvious winner or loser in the resulting debates, because his goal was to get people thinking, not to force-feed them dogmas.”
You know, this is one of the great strengths of Plato’s work, that was somehow totally lost along the road to the Neoplatonic synthesis. The other is his sense of humor– it’s still present in Apuleius’s time, but it’s hard to imagine Plotinus even cracking a smile without fretting that it will tie him too closely to the life of the body.
JMG,
I fully concur, from experience that more freedom comes from having more money than you need. I’ve always lived that way, but did also make a large “downward” social step 12 years ago with the result being even more freedom.
Regarding:
“throwing away your television and getting a good ad blocker on your computer are good basic counterspells”
A good start, but not enough. All proprietary software is an injustice because it is a VERY powerful way to cast spells on people. If you can see and know mostly everything about someone then you have vast power of influence and control. When I say proprietary software I mean Microslop, Go-ogle, the rotten apple, and pretty much everything on the en****ternet. An ad-blocker does not do much when your operating system can “see” everything you see on your computer – and connect the dots and make loads of inferences. Your bank accounts, emails, files, browsing history – everything. You cannot hide from the operating system – teleprompters on steroids.
40 years ago Richard Stallman and the FSF identified the only possible way to have just computing is for it to be free open source software (FOSS). They were right then and if we had all listened there would be far less tyrany in the world today.
Cheers
>You will also have to contend with entire industries that are out to make you think you need things you don’t actually need, or want things you don’t actually want.
Keep in mind someone has to hold the debt. Aggregate debt is always growing and it can’t be paid off. It can be written off or inflated away during times of great stress but those times are engineered to be far and few between.
Anyway, if people didn’t want things they had to borrow money for, who would hold the debt? Someone has to hold it, baked into the rules of the game. There are no wrong or right answers to this question, although that statement alone will send some people screeching at me.
>I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable living in an upturned tub
Cynically speaking, Greece has a nice mild Mediterranean climate, where doing this is relatively easy. Much more challenging to do the same thing in oh, say, MN. -28C challenging. 3′ of snow challenging.
Hi JMG – excellent post. And timely. I find my lack of knowledge around occultism and philosophy hinders my understanding of the topic, but I catch your drift. I frame the ideas you’ve written about more in terms of time management, propaganda, advanced psychological techniques and values – but there are many nuances in all this that make a big difference.
In the last dozen years I’ve moved eight times, migrating from a 2400 square foot three bedroom home (with full basement, about 3800 square fit finished off) to a one bedroom apartment of 700 square feet or so. I thought it would be easy, and the logistics around letting go of material possessions is easy – but there is some mental anguish and soul searching around the rearranging the ingrained value system and desires laid down by others. Still a WIP, but this post has numerous little nuggets to explore and continue with that journey.
@#7 GlassHammer – the “extravagant trips” you mention is one thing I’m still jealous of – I love traveling, but without the budget now it’s easier to avoid….:-)
@#22 Alan – I’ve noticed a certain amount from others of what appears to be jealousy when I’ve explained some of my lifestyle choices over the years – simplicity and happiness are worthy goals. Many are “trapped” in lives with problems and commitments, and as the Eagles music would say, “don’t realize they have the keys” to release themselves from the chains.
>the constant drift toward the shoddy and flimsy
I like to visit in-n-out every few years. I keep the cup and receipt as a souvenir and bring it back home. It’s a challenge getting in-n-out (or at least it used to be, now that they’re fleeing CA like every other productive entity). Anyways, I’ve got one cup from 2021 and another from 2026. *They’ve subtly shrunk the size of the cup*, it’s not enough to notice until you put them side by side but you can tell they shrunk it. And the receipts, all the prices are higher.
It’s like that with everything but I wonder how much smaller the next in-n-out cup is going to be? Every time I look at those two cups, I think “This, is collapse”.
Myriam # 5:
I share your view of money as correlative of real work, and your idea that money’s useless unless you change it for real things. However, I’d like to add to your opinion that I think (when I watch human History), money was born as a symbol of real goods, traded in first organized markets, whose symbolic power was supported by the new born states. During a lot of centuries were based in more or less scarce metals (coins); then it appeared money made of paper; finally not very much time ago, near all money flows have become electronic symbols in screens. So I think money has become a more and more abstract symbol, with less and less contact with reality. A progress or a degradation?
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Tony C.# 9:
If you’re able to think for yourself and make something useful or/and beautiful with your own hands, I bet your feelings will be better about yourself soon, and they’ll be far more nearer to real world, me think. We can’t do more good things than we think, beyond the status stereotypes we’ve been accepting by others during our past.
I haven’t watched TV in decades, but my son and I have tuned into the NFL games this season so he can teach me about the sport (I’m humoring him). My sulfurous commentary on the inanity of every commercial during every game rattled the beloved offspring sufficiently that he finally devised a plan: He mutes the sound and hands me a blackout sleep mask to wear until the game resumes. No manipulation from ads, no spitting outrage from me. Sunday’s big game will be the final frontier of resistance, whew.
I also want to share with another commenter my reverence for Amy Dacyczyn, the Frugal Zealot, whose Tightwad Gazette volumes informed the core methodology of my formative adult life. She continues to light the way, cheaply. I baked two loaves of bread this morning for mere pennies, and I still think of her when I make a frittata out of fridge scraps. Downwardly mobile, richly inspired. Cheers!
Lovely. This post brings to mind the quote by Rumi; “Last night my master taught me the lesson of poverty: Having nothing and wanting nothing.” Which had nothing to do with outer values but rather an inner state.
surely a hat tip (at least) is owed to siddhartha don’t you think?
“Craving and desire are the cause of all unhappiness”.
JMG # 41:
Of course, I agree. When people pretend to live in an upper social class they don’t really belong to it, they’re playing with fire. For example, mortgage debts and consumer loans temptation can be a fast way to the economical disaster if/when they mix with an inflationary context, an unexpected economic problem or a decline in families incomes (evidently, s**t happens, so the loss of job can happen too). Or even worse, if/when every situations I’ve pointed before mix in a perfect storm, those people crazy life goes directly to hell…
In the old spanish novel “El lazarillo de Tormes” its main character meets an arrogant knight who pretends be rich like his status deserved in the streets, but indeed he’s poor so he’s near to starve at home. I think pretending to have a fake upper status isn’t new. A dangerous game in every time.
By the way, according some statistics data, average cars age in my country has been going up during last years. So you can do the math and guess, more and more cars are getting older because less new cars are sold by car industries to replace the old ones. So it seems more and more people can’t allow themselves to buy a new car. Another sign of times for a middle class status here!
My counter spell is, “Time is the most expensive luxury.” When I live simply, I feel superior to people who spend much more than me by reminding myself how much more time I have than them.
Epictetus had it down pat: train your desire to only apply to the things that you control, and remember that the only things you control are your own thoughts.
A while back the wife and I joined the Dave Ramsey cult. Just your run of the mill keep track of your money, spend less and invest. Paying off your house gives you an indescribable feeling of freedom. The same way that a full solar eclipse is impossible do describe, getting out of debt, and the mental health that comes with it, is amazing.
On the topic of NOT freedom, Michael Hudson points out that in the ancient near east, long, long before the Bible’s jubilee year, about a year after a ruler died, all private debts were canceled. This went on until the Romans came in. The Romans asked why the Egyptians did it and the Egyptians explained that if too many people were it servitude, it made it very difficult to raise an army.
Justin Patrick Moore #8
> to make some headway in commercial writing
What kind of commercial writing, may I ask? “Copy”writing for upcoming home-based woodworking micro-business constructing solid-wood furniture in own workshop (beginning with smallish pieces like dining chair, nightstand, plant stand, lazy susan, over time branching out into (visioning here) bigger pieces: wall-shelf, bedstead, dining table, dresser, sideboard, large table; website; paper collateral, at least? Goal: promoting such a business.
(I am speaking for myself.)
💨🪑🛏️🪵Northwind Grandma💨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi John Michael,
Man, I read your essay and can’t believe that you’ve just splashed secrets writ large in concise clear language. What the heck? 🙂 Well done you…
Always had something of a soft spot for the great Diogenes, and the story you recounted was a goodie.
Will, is a matter which has long been of interest, and like you suggested, correctly I believe, we get a modicum of that power to use as we see fit. And isn’t that where things get interesting?
Dunno, but I’ve long wondered if the magician state collapses at the point where the spells no longer deliver very much stuff at all? Hardly a revolutionary moment, but more of a sad walking away episode – possibly to better adapted spells. Did you know that the average mortgage in this country is now around $694,000? Like, how does that story make any sense? But clearly, their magic is still strong.
Cheers
Chris
Yes!! A student once asked what western philosophy is closest to Patanjali’s classical Yoga Philosophy, and not having any education really in that area, I researched and concluded that Yoga Philosophy was very much like a combination of Stoicism and Phenomenology, so thank you for that JMG!
Great to have our brilliant commentariat back in action riffing on ideas – so refreshing!
Yoga and the Tarot
> David, the only thing I know that helps is treating the screens as an opportunity for will training.
Well, would you look at that. Just yesterday, I realised my need for precisely such exercises, and now you’ve shown me one. Thank you.
I find this very interesting because this week has been marked by many such synchronicities. Well, many by the standards of synchronicities, at least. As I don’t think they’re my doing, I’d like to propose a rather strange (to my mind, at least) connection between this week’s Magic Monday and today’s post.
The Old Gods are “returning” as industrial society collapses. While I don’t want to speculate on the direction of causation, it seems quite unlikely that those two events would occur at the same time if they are independent of another. While I have no experience with other pantheons, opting for downward mobility sounds like a solution that would delight the Germanic Gods: “You’re concerned that the lifestyle you’re accustomed to will become ever more expensive while the system requires you buy into ever more insane ideas to keep your income level? Sounds like you know what to do, then, doesn’t it?”
—David P.
John,
In my studies on the United State’s history of urban geography it is very obvious that the car-dependent culture we suffer wasn’t inevitable but was a massive planned project meant to enrich the elite and control the masses. So of course, I agree with you.
Also John, if you ever decide to write a Lenocracy Survival Guide for how to live below your means and avoid parasitism I would be the first buyer. But until then, do you have any book recommendations related to that topic? (Suggestions from the commentariat appreciated as well)
An excellent, thought provoking essay, as always. Despite the delays, it was well worth the wait. I voted for this topic twice I believe (or perhaps I just wanted to see it win twice? I can’t quite remember, haha) not only because I was fairly sure you would approach this idea from a fresh perspective (and didn’t disappoint on that front), but also because I really wanted to see the reactions and conversations that develop in the comments around this topic as well. I don’t know how much I will participate myself, but I will be enthusiastically perusing the responses this week, for wisdom, experiences, thoughts, and insights 🙂
I find myself coming at this article from the other direction of most of the people you are writing for. Watching both of my parents fall into the misery of the debt trap from a young age, I was determined never to make the same mistake, and as such have always spent well below my means ever since entering adulthood. I’m fortunate to never have struggled financially as a result, at least so far, even when I was working minimum wage as a restaurant greeter about ten years ago.
However, on the other hand, the image of the humble monk who lives modestly has had its own influence on me, and recently I’ve realized that influence hasn’t been entirely positive. As you put it, “Suppressing or renouncing desire, from this way of thinking, is self-defeating; if it succeeds, which it almost never does, the result is a kind of spiritual castration”. Many times in my 20s I have denied myself even simple things, convincing myself that my own desires were a waste of both time and money. I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that this constitutes its own form of self-destruction, and it’s part of what had kept me feeling so stuck for so long during that period of my life. Instead of being controlled by consumerist desires, I am instead controlled by my own guilt, restricting myself to no one’s real benefit.
As an example, just last month I was guilting myself for considering buying a couple of extra bookshelves, talking myself into believing that well, I don’t really need books that much, I should just try to donate the few books I have, and so on ad nauseam. It’s not that I couldn’t afford new bookshelves, I absolutely can, I just wouldn’t let myself indulge the desire, despite it making quite a lot of sense for my preferred lifestyle and habits.
Recognizing that this behavior is counter-productive and ultimately self-defeating is something I believe I’m still in the process of fully internalizing, but I know it will be necessary. For the past year I have been taking concrete steps to stop living the “virtuous” (that is: barren) life I have told myself I should want and instead pursue the life I actually want. I’m quite certain that getting past this set of hangups will be essential for completing that process.
This essay has helped me along in that realization, and I will do my best moving forward to embrace a philosophy of appropriate desire rather than the elimination of desires. Wish me luck!
Re: sumptuary requirements
If you are a man, there is a way to keep these under control.
I am a pensioner now, but back when I was working, I stuck, quite rigidly, to classical styles of clothing that never go out of fashion.
For example, white or light blue Oxford cloth shirts always work for everyday office wear. If you want to add pinstriped shirts for variety, all well and good.
My suits and trousers were always charcoal gray, navy blue or lighter shades thereof, and I stuck with classical styles.
With this, you can mix and match to your heart’s content and never make a mistake.
More generally, if you are careful in your choices, you can always look dignified, even on a modest budget.
Thank you, JMG, for the great essay, and belated congratulations on your move. May you find what you are looking for!
If anyone is interested in the how-to aspects of the topic, I would like to recommend a couple of books. One of them is Living Poor With Style by Ernest Callenbach, and another one is How To Survive Without A Salary by Charles Long. Great practical books!
@Stefania #19:
Sorry to barge in, but I can’t help myself 😉
“In an inflationary environment, apart from defensively living below your means, I think one also must make effort to gain a certain degree of ownership over productive assets like food-producing land, energy generation, tools”
Oh dear… Have you ever heard of the Russian Revolution? They came. They shoot you. They took your stuff. Easy-peasy! Another interesting period in Russian history was the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 90s. As the crisis developed and people moved en masse, those were the exact assets that were severely affected by inflation. The things that were valued were the ones that could be easily exchanged – alcohol, cigarettes, even sugar. Also, anything that you could use to bribe yourself out of a pickle – a stash of cash or a golden ring to slip on someone’s finger.
I truly hope that we won’t get to it in the US, but who knows…
JMG,
One of the ways you can see the social class vs money structure playing out is within an Ivy League University. At the university both I and my present wife went to,the social gate keeping was done by the greek system. It was very large and involved most of the students on campus. There were fraternities and sororities that were known as the home or gateway to the elite class. You could not gain a bid from these houses by having wealth. You could only join because you were already a part of that group or a very few via athletic prowess, charm and good looks. There were other fraternities and sororities that collected members of new or dirty money, such as dictators kids who could not get in to the elite class houses no matter how rich they were.
I was somewhat oblivious to all this and ended up in a house full of other middle class kids, most of which had joined ROTC as a way to pay for college.
My future wife on the other hand was recruited and offered a bid to join the most exclusive sorority on campus even though she was the child of Hawaiian sugar cane workers. I can only assume it was the same combination of exotic good looks, charm and social grace ,that attracted me to her, that was what got her this window in to the elite class. She turned them down and joined a house of “nice” middle glass girls. She was wise enough to sense that while this sorority might have been a direct road to the highest classes of society, she would have had to make compromises for the worse.. Lucky for me, as it is almost certain that the first of those compromises would have been pressure not to associate with boys outside of the top fraternities, which would have cut me out.
@JMG, interesting point and a good one. I’m actually doing that, though a large part of it is because my landlady is awesome and in exchange for occasionally helping with her daughter I get really low rent. I’ve offered her more, repeatedly. She keeps saying no. I also grow some of my own food, do a lot of scratch cooking using cheap or homegrown/wildcrafted ingredients (I’m working on improving my skills on that one this year, because just because I cook a lot doesn’t mean I’m very good), don’t own a car, ignore fashion look for sales and mend clothing until it dies, and am generally frugal. The odd result is that I have no debt and significant savings. Not enough to buy a home or anything, but enough that a) unexpected expenses are manageable even if still I hate them, and b) When I lose my longstanding excellent housing situation or something else major goes completely pearshaped I have substantial manouvering room . I also have used bits to help other people.
My reaction to having my health crack up on me just in time for the great recession and living on extreme low incomes and flat-out fumes and help from family for several years is to have sticky fingers for money to the point that I have difficulty persuading myself to spend it even when its a really good idea and I can easily afford it. I think its the same way that a lot of people who lived through the great depression reacted, and for similar reasons.
derek #44:
While I am sympathetic to the general idea and use Linux myself, I think “[Stallman was] right then and if we had all listened there would be far less tyranny in the world today” is a little too one-sided. Stallman is a communist and can thus handwave all economic issues away by claiming that communism solves them. The matter of fact is that a company with full-time developers, Q&A, and customer support can create software that serves their customers better than developers who have to do all of these roles in their spare time.
Nowadays, companies seem more interested in milking their customers, which is why nearly all software is getting worse, so FOSS is becoming competitive, but this appears to be a fairly recent development. Mind, FOSS is not just becoming competetive because it’s gotten so much better but also because quality standards are sinking across the board and so its issues become less of a deal-breaker.
—David P.
Watching a step parent go bankrupt, a parent have a narrow brush with same after an injury, and another step parent be really noticeably good with money on a modest income then get a substantial inheritance has also been a big influence on my desire to be frugal. I don’t get along with the parent who’s the best at money management, and they’re way more status desiring than I am, but I did learn a lot about what to do from watching them. Though a lot of what we actually do is different, because our options are very different, and I am not trying to maintain the appearance of middle-class while saving money.
I also learned a lot about what NOT to do by watching a couple of the others.
This post is tremendously helpful. I’m currently emerging from a cocoon of suffering that gave me plenty of time to reflect on things, and what I discovered is that it’s impossible to reject the system without replacing that desire for achievement with something else. What Plato’s wise friend said is true. The call of the wild must be answered, and if I don’t have a specific set of goals that I came up with on my own it results in getting dragged back into the collective where my efforts to please people (who aren’t worth it) consistently end in disaster.
JMG, great essay. I particularly liked: “It’s because your ordinary social climber doesn’t realize this that he so reliably fails to achieve the freedom he seeks by clambering up the social ladder. His desire for freedom becomes a lever by which he is drawn into conformity with the class to which he aspires to rise, and thus becomes more constrained and obedient to the system, not less.”
I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a woman from a wealthy family, in which I suggested that two incomes aren’t always truly necessary, financially – some people could manage on one income if they learned to live more frugally. Her response was “But then people ask you ‘Why don’t you have a new car this year?'” I thought, but didn’t say, “I wouldn’t want to be around anybody who would even think of asking that.”
Perfect illustration of how acquiring more money can result in less freedom, not more.
Northwind, no, that was a typo. As for Charles, nah, you’ve forgotten that the basic rhythm of every civilization is set by the tramp of mailed boots going up a set of stairs, followed by the whisper of silk slippers coming back down. The Windsors are your usual set of etiolated, inbred aristocratic types whose distant ancestors could handle genuinely rough times. Finally, of course humanity will go extinct sooner or later; every species does. Equally, you will die, and so will I, and so will everyone else. Does that make our lives worthless in your eyes?
Steve, that’s one of the things that has me less interested in the Neoplatonists. Middle Platonism, which was the tradition in which Apuleius wrote, still had a sense of humor, and it seems to have been directly ancestral to most of Western magic.
Derek, as I said, they’re basic counterspells, and they do quite a bit of good all by themselves. Of course you can go much further. I have; I write my books on free open source software, and am reading your comments right now on a freeware browser…
Other Owen, yes, and that’s one of the reasons civilizations fall. All that debt is borrowed against the impending reality of catabolic contraction.
Drhooves, I know! Downsizing from a 1100 square foot two bedroom apartment to a 500 square foot one bedroom apartment has been quite an exercise in reassessing my priorities, and I still have some boxes of stuff stacked awkwardly in closets which will probably have to go. It’s not half bad as a training exercise, though it can be wrenching.
Other Owen, collapse? No, let me whisper the unspeakable word: “decline.” Say it aloud, and feel the very timbers of society shudder. 😉
DD, I admire your willingness to humor your son. I would have had to say, “Sorry, can’t do it.”
Llewna, thanks for this!
Moishe, if I’d tipped my hat to everybody who had that insight, I wouldn’t have had room for anything else in the post.
Chuaquin, that statistic about cars is worth watching. I wonder whether there’s a way to track it in other countries.
Kfish, a fine counterspell — thank you for this.
Bradley, and now you know part of why ancient Egyptian civilization thrived for something like five thousand years, while Rome burnt out in less than a millennium…
Chris, yeah, once the goodies stop arriving, the whole thing comes clattering down. I suspect one of the reasons that some industrial nations have veered back toward more brutal and clumsy methods is that the goodies are starting to get harder to provide…
Jill, it’s a valid comparison. I’ve recently been reading Thomas McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought, which makes a very strong case for the thesis that Greek philosophy wasn’t the isolated phenomenon too many Western writers like to make it — instead, it was simply one branch of a broader cultural florescence that extended from India to Italy, and common themes, ideas, and principles spread all through that region. From that perspective Epictetus and Patanjali were talking the same philosophical language because they were exploring different modes of the same grand intellectual-spiritual adventure.
David, the synchronicities are getting fast and thick these days! Yeah, the old gods generally seem to have that kind of attitude.
Nephite, hmm. I mostly got inspiration back in the day from hippie classics such as Dolly Freed’s Possum Living and Alicia Bay Laurel’s Living on the Earth, combined with assorted bits of Taoism and Zen. I don’t know whether any of that would be useful to you. As for a book, hmm again. I’ll consider it.
Untitled-1, luck to you! Yeah, the opposite of one bad idea really is another bad idea, isn’t it? Bookshelves have their place; I donated a bunch to a friend who can use them, but I still have five of them, most of them quite large.
Michael, there are contexts where that works and contexts where it doesn’t. A good argument, granted, to seek out the ones where it works…
Inna, thank you for both these recommendations.
Clay, a very good point — and your wife was already a very smart woman at that age, which is of course rare.
Pygmycory, excellent. I thought I remembered that you were already well ahead of the game. I knew quite a few people who experienced the Great Depression, btw, including my paternal grandparents, and you’re spot on target. My grandfather turned a very modest income as a firefighter, and then a pulp mill foreman, into considerable affluence by the simple expedient of spending very, very little.
KVD, exactly. If you don’t set your own goals, someone else will do it for you; if you don’t exercise your own will, other wills will dominate yours.
Yavanna, and also a good example of the terror of peer pressure that makes the lives of so many rich people simply another form of serfdom.
One big thing I find helpful in finding meaning and self-respect in my situation is my faith. God knows my actual situation and everything I’m doing and why. And He judges on a very different set of criteria. I feel like pleasing God is a lot more attainable than pleasing society, at least for me. And more worthwhile in the long run.
John – Every time my wife and I applied for a home loan, we were told “You can afford a lot more house than that!” Bankers never understood our amused disinterest in borrowing way more than we wanted, to buy a type of house we didn’t want to live in. Our current home is 100 years old in a quiet, comfortable, downscale neighborhood that suits us very nicely. Family members and friends only stop jeering at our disdain for high end luxury living that we could “easily afford” when we remind them that we are paying literally 1/10 of what they are for their mortgages. When they remind us that “Yes, well, you get what you pay for!”, we can only laughingly agree.
Interesting post. I generally dismiss most talk of “freedom.” Maybe it’s because I’ve lived most of my life in Japan, where they aren’t obsessed with the concept. It always seems like a vacuous, half-baked notion: freedom from what? To do what? Untethered from these concrete concerns, it functions more as a thought-stopper than anything else. It often also represents modern western penchants for self-centered shallow autonomy at the expense of anything deeper.
But this post posits a good answer to at least some of these questions. Thanks.
John,
Those sound like great books to read. Thanks. Adding them to the list. I also got inspired by your Green Wizardry book among others, almost all of your books touch upon frugal living to some degree. It would just be nice to have a definitive guide.
Thanks for considering the idea.
Um… why the oh-my at the Stonehenge cleanup? This struck me as very good news. Maybe my staves might have some insight on who is backing British populism… or – would it be impolite to ask?
And thank you for the insight into social needs. I hadn’t thought of them in the broader context – mostly because my own Myers-Briggs type doesn’t have many or much of those it does.
When I read the Symposion, I only got the literal meaning of Diotima’s teachings about Eros: to love a beautiful person, then to love beauty itself, then to love goodness itself… You have broadened the implications of her teachings: to love music, to love quietness, to love books etc. are also aspects of Eros. I find that both brilliant and very useful.
I do agree with Stefania that the current environment is so difficult to navigate that one probably needs to both improve one’s marketable skills (or assets) and to reduce spending just to get by.
It occurs to me that there are multiple elites: Hollywood producers, Wall Street investment bankers, DC politicos, top-tier influencers like Logan Paul and Mr. Beast.. Religions have their elites too–ambitious priests may dream of becoming bishops and cardinals–or alternatively, saints!–while fundamentalists may aspire to head megachurches or TV crusades. So, who belongs to the upper classes of occultism? Successful book authors? Some mysterious people I’ve never heard of? (Maybe there are multiple hierarchies, as with Christianity.) And…is it desirable to belong to this elite?
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Scotlyn (no.. 31), I dunno, I desire ice cream. Plato would probably say that it’s not really the ice cream I want, but “the Beautiful” (the Tasty?) or some such. Sensual pleasures are supposed to be poor relations of higher pleasures,. If you say my tastes need educating, I won’t argue, although if *Plato* said this too me, I’d gently ask him about the wine and pederasty.
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Jill C. (no. 57) “A student once asked what western philosophy is closest to Patanjali’s classical Yoga Philosophy…”
Oh, that’s a conundrum! The big issue is that Yoga tends to be paired with Sankhya, which features a very elaborate model of consciousness / the universe. Maybe the tradition of monologistic prayer from Eastern Orthodoxy?
re: car haters
Some of us don’t like living cheek-to-jowl stuffed into european-style cities and apartments. Or memorizing train tables. Or waiting at the bus stop. Or having to shop at the market every other day because one bag is all you can carry on the tram. And then there’s the really ugly issue of race and security and public transit in this godforsaken country. Also see: Iryna Zarutska. That’s the pink elephant nobody and I mean nobody wants to talk about. But you had better be aware of that pink elephant if you want to live.
And some of us just like cars as a technology. They’re interesting. All you can do with a train is watch it. Nobody lets you take a train apart.
Bikes are OK when the weather is good. But when it gets cold your nose snots up and when it rains, nothing stays dry. Cynically, you only find people riding bikes where the ground is flat, if there are any hills the number of people willing to ride goes way down. And I’ll leave this story here – https://www.dailynews.com/2014/08/27/no-charges-for-lasd-deputy-who-fatally-struck-cyclist-while-typing-on-computer/
I’m like trying out a different “alter ego” than my usual one, just for this post. The inspiration for this was that I went to the dentist today, and the hygienist who cleaned my teeth is an immigrant from Ukraine — she’s picked up the bad American habit of saying, “I’m like….” She told me that in Ukraine she was a dentist, but when she came here she accepted the downgrade to hygienist because getting licensed as a dentist here would’ve meant a couple of years of schooling to get a new license: the cost wouldn’t have been worth it. But she says “I’m like” just like a native speaker. I told her that a few years ago I’d had a yoga teacher, “O,” (who also advertised herself as a counselor for people in “kundalini crisis.”) Now “O” was an immigrant from Russia, where she’d been a physician. Again, the cost of getting licensed in the US wasn’t worth the trouble so she accepted the professional downgrade. Now I’ll preach a little bit: immigrants who accept lower status to come to the US are a far cry from immigrants who come here to take advantage of generous gov’t handouts. I don’t see many people making this important distinction.
“The Decline of Thrift in America” is a remarkable book.
Professor David Tucker really dug down. Sadly, he published it through Praeger, and there was one small edition. You’ll need to get it via the interlibrary loan. A used copy runs $65 and up.
Wait till you read the section about a forgotten genre of novels from the 19th century: how young brides rescued their new families from penury via thrift!
Or how, up until the Eisenhower administration, thrift was so valued it was taught in the public schools.
It’s eye-opening in many ways.
Three points come to mind, viz., that Epictetus and Seneca both wrote extensively on the slavery of desire for material goods, of the phrase (I can’t remember who) ‘income one shilling, expenses one shilling and sixpence, result: misery. Income one Shilling and sixpence, expenses one shilling, result: happiness, and the warm fuzzy memory of the day I paid off my mortgage and have never felt so free, because suddenly, any anxiety I had, explicit or implicit, about not having a place to live if I lost my job evaporated, along with any fear I bore, explicit or implicit, about the ‘authority’ of those above me in the hierarchy. Epictetus and Seneca, following Plato, were right, as long as you have enough, and a good sense of what constitutes ‘enough’ you will be freer that one who was crying because he was down to his last million Sesterces.
Bruce
Hi JMG,
Thank you for this post – lots of food for thought, certainly!
I’ve observed something similar to what you’ve described as pressure to conform to class behaviour patterns only on much smaller level of increment in the upward mobility. I work in a medium size corporation and, even though I’ve seen it so many times already, it’s startling to witness how people change their behaviour every time they get promoted one level up, particularly if it is a promotion that involves managing more people than before. There was a guy here – a really nice and friendly person who was easy to engage and chat with. After a couple of promotions it became unbearable being around him for all he could produce in an informal conversation with his corporate “inferiors” was unsolicited life advise and mentorship or long lectures on how to be a good leader.
I also had a few years long stint as a low level manager and at that time I was already familiar with the idea of egregores and I could feel the energy level pressure on me to fit a certain mould and not just from my peers and “superiors” but from the people I managed too. For example, some of them, being clearly smarter than me in what they do, quite unconsciously, started attributing some of their achievements to me and it was hard, and often thankless, work to give their authority back to them. What I could tolerate even less is how my peers and “superiors” behaved as if they are a different cast – having separate lunches from the “peasants” and talking of people they managed as if they were stupid little kids that needed to be parented.
By that time I already spent more than a decade walking my spiritual path and I could palpably feel the pressure to compromise my integrity. I know of people who are strong enough to keep theirs while holding these or higher level positions but I’m not entirely sure they’d be able to still be themselves if they had a chance to reach C-level titles. For myself, I ended up deciding not to wrestle with it and asked for a voluntary demotion and, later, switched to working part time. It seriously felt like dropping a mountain off my shoulders and, yeah, it certainly added a level of freedom to my life that I didn’t know I didn’t have before that.
Once again, thank you for this post. I’ll go think about all of it some more.
Good to see you back in the swing of things!
Education of desire … I can say something about that.
Back in 1992, I quit my job as a research chemist, after 8 years in corporate life. I’d chosen to work in a corporation because, after 5 years of grad school, I knew I did not have the needed intellectual capacity or desire to do university-level chemical research. I had thought that after a few years in a corporate environment I might search for a job teaching chemistry in a four year private college like the one I got my BS in chemistry from. By the time I quit, though, I knew that I couldn’t continue in the corporate world, nor did I have enough interest in teaching chemistry to try for the college teaching job. The only thing to do was leave and see if I could figure out something else to do.
My husband is a working-class man. He had a decent job in a light bulb making factory, but I earned more money. When I quit, our income dropped by 60%.
I already had some experience with re-educating desire, since when we married, we chose to live in his two bedroom house with a lower mortgage in a low income neighborhood instead of my two bedroom condo with a higher mortgage in a better neighborhood. The house was on a small lot, only 1/8 acre, but it was enough to give me a start on gardening. I was willing to leave the prettier condo with no garden for a cheap house needing work in a low income neighborhood that had land for me to garden. Desire #1, for a little land, satisfied in return through learning by doing how to live in a low income neighborhood.
Since I didn’t have my identity tied up in my job title, it wasn’t hard to give up the job on that account. But I did feel guilty about giving up the income, for putting the onus of paid employment entirely on my husband, and because I felt as if I was letting the efforts of feminists down. When I got my PhD in 1984, the percentage of women earning PhDs in science was much lower than it is now. Until around 1966 or so, employers could legally discriminate against hiring women. Newspaper employment ads were headlined “Help wanted – male” and “Help wanted – female”. I was a precocious and omnivorous reader, so I read these ads and noticed that the jobs for men seemed a lot more interesting than the jobs for women. Feminists got that discrimination made illegal; part of me felt that I betrayed that effort by quitting. I’d also heard a lot about what could happen to married women who didn’t work and got caught in bad marital situations. Before I could quit, I had to deal with the guilt and fear that I felt around these issues.
After I dealt with the guilt and fear and quit, I felt great relief. My husband and I divided up the house and yard work in a way that worked for both of us. But after about a year we realized we were spending more than he earned. That’s when the big re-education of desires began.
This was around the time when the original edition of Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin was published. I read about it and got a copy. It taught us how to re-educate our desires in an ingenious way: by making us aware of how much time everything we bought cost.
There are three steps to the process. The first is writing down every penny that comes into or goes out of your life, categorizing the income and outgo, and summing up each category after the end of a month. The second is determining what it calls your real hourly wage. This is an adjusted hourly income, in which you subtract out all the money you have to spend to keep the job (commuting, meetings outside work, the alcohol or drugs you use to take the edge off the stress, clothing, etc) and add in all the extra hours it takes beyond the job to keep the job (commuting, meetings, shopping for clothes, etc). Divide the reduced income by the increased hours to get the real hourly wage. The third is using the real hourly wage to convert all the money spent in each category into the number of hours it took the job holder to earn the items in that category. Knowing that you cannot get back the hours you spend working, you ask yourself, was it worth it to spend that many hours of your life on a particular category?
When my husband and I did the process, it became very clear what we were spending his working time on that wasn’t of value to us and what was of value to us. For instance, we spent too much of his working time on eating out, so we cut it way down without feeling deprived. This was the re-education of desire for us. We didn’t feel guilty about eating out; we didn’t stop eating out altogether; we did drop it down to the point where we both felt it was worth the amount of time he spent working to earn it.
Within a few months after beginning the process in mid 1993 we consistently spent less than we earned. It’s been that way most of the time ever since, with changes and adjustments to those changes along the way.
“All those absurd sumptuary rules about what office workers are supposed to wear to work have a very simple purpose: they are meant to help keep corporate employees so deeply mired in debt that they don’t dare risk doing anything that might threaten their incomes, and so remain high-paid serfs of their corporate masters.”
Well… here, in SillyCon Valley, it’s not about what you wear anymore. You are allowed to demonstrate your free spirit by coming to work in sweatpants. It’s not even about your car anymore. Car-free is all the rage. It’s about your vacation now. You are supposed to travel to faraway places and have experiences that broaden your mind, enlighten your soul, and induce deeply spiritual experiences (and lighten your pocket, of course, but don’t you dare to mention that). You are supposed to be specific nowadays. Only losers go to Italy. Enlightened people go to the Amalfi Coast. 🤣 It’s crude to go to Japan. The truly sophisticated tour Shinto shrines with a private guide. 😆 And on and on, endlessly. You can part with a huge amount of money this way while looking deeply spiritual and unconcerned with money. And then back on the corporate farm… 😂
Hey JMG
On the subject of saving money and frugality, I’m reminded of a famous book of financial advice that I finally read last year, called “The richest man in Babylon” by George S. Clason.
According to him, the key to growing wealth is to always save 10% of your income at the minimum, then invest your savings. While investing may not work indefinitely through the long descent, the 10% rule seems to be a good target or minimum level for people who want to practice saving money after a long life of habitual spending. I crunched the numbers, and I discovered that, assuming that you are paid fortnightly/bi-weekly, the practice of saving 10% of your income ensures that each year you reserve an amount of money equal to what you earn in 2 1/2 fortnights.
Also, completely unrelated, I published my latest Substack essay a month or so ago but never got around to sharing it here. It is about some philosophical impressions I had from contemplating the sea during a cruise my family had in December.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/the-foreboding-and-monotonous-sea
Byung-Chul Han that said people are building their own prison cells all in the name of productivity and “Yes you can!”. On writing that phase it makes so much sense why a subset of people turned against Obama-era politics with phases like “Yes we can.”. Eventually some people, not all, get sick of being sold a false bill of goods. In pushing shallow self positivity, one can forever move the goal post and never achieve the proposed dream. Without the relief of any sense of completion or a sense of ‘good enough’, they will forever being building new prisons for themselves. The perfect slave. That some folks hit the gym and no matter how much they exercise, they can always optimising just one little bit more, forever out of reach.
It is not to say that you cannot improve yourself, it is that it is a reasonable means that has been hijacked. Han’s response was that folks can live the contemplative life.
As for Freedom via money. The whole idea of Alpha wolves was based on one study of wolves packs. It turns out this behaviour was only seen in captivity, later studies showed that when they are in the wild that specific structure disappears. Yes, there is still a pack hierarchy but it is much more leveled out and co-operative to some degree. Singular strong near abusive individuals only really come about when they are stressed from captivity.
So I see people in higher classes all trying to desperately trying to get to the top of the money/social pyramid so that they can be ‘The Alpha’, all I am seeing is people that are stressed because they are trapped in the system they are a function of. Yes, the millionaires and billionaires strangely have less freedom than we think but they cannot let others know so they project ‘freedom’. I also think this is why we see folks like Elon Musk who seems genuinely trying to do anything to break out of that structure while also attempting to hold onto power. For many in that class it might end up self destructive in the long run.
Generally, the more people have the means of making large sums of money, the weaker their overall constitution is. I really really REALLY hope that I do not become rich. I do everything in my power to stop that from happening as it would be a horrible way to live.
“If you wish to make someone happy, do not give them what they want but take away from their desires.” – Epicurious
And another I have posted here before.
Diagnose is eating lentils with bread, a meager meal even in his time. A friend comes up to him as asks “Diogenes, why do you eat this? If you served the king then you could eat much better.” Diogenes merely responded “I eat lentils and bread so that I do not have to serve the king.”
> The slow (or not so slow) disintegration of our built infrastructure
Last week someone summarised collapse so simply it was funny. ‘One day a bridge falls down. Nobody comes to fix it.’
“All those absurd sumptuary rules about what office workers are supposed to wear to work have a very simple purpose: they are meant to help keep corporate employees so deeply mired in debt that they don’t dare risk doing anything that might threaten their incomes, and so remain high-paid serfs of their corporate masters.”
I missed that trap, OSHA set my workplace dress code. Even for the women office workers who were not expected to run out into the plant at random times OSHA said No to strappy high-heeled sandals.
“Another fascinating figure to me is the distant intellectual ancestor of Epicurus, Aristippus the Cyrenaic, who infamously declared pleasure the highest good and sought to live a life of fame and fortune. But he seems to have held his hedonism lightly and made the best of every situation, ”
There is no reason to wallow in misery just so you can more deeply enjoy heaven if you get there. You should make the best of the situation. That’s like the stone soup (or nail soup) story. Toss the leftovers in the pot and see what you can make. The last stew I made had half-off beef (it was about to ( ‘expire’) old potatoes, barley and lentils (always cheap) and a couple elderly cans of vegetables from the pantry.
That biblical commandment about not coveting the neighbor’s stuff is appropriate too. My version is Thou shalt not spend yourself into bankruptcy just to keep up with the Jones. I do need a more poetic way of saying it.
The value of limitations being anathema to the Faustian psuedomorphosis we labor under will doubtless make this an unwelcome message to many – even those conservatives who claim to value freedom and hard work. A number of folks on social media have amassed followings by extolling the virtues of living simply, and they are often most bitterly attacked by “conservative” folks who accuse them of demoralizing folks and propagandizing them into accepting lower standards of living to advance the WEF type agenda of living in the pod, eating the bugs, having less and being happy with it etc.
For me, the value of limits was something I first experienced in the creative realm. “creativity depends on limitation” is an aphorism which some have trouble understanding at first. But it’s foundational. I never finished more songs than when I was working with my old four track cassette recorder. Four tracks… and then you’re done! Meanwhile the infinite things you can record, edit, tweak and sample on modern digital audio programs make finishing things almost impossible for me… it takes a lot of will power to say this is DONE definitively.
As someone who goes to a lot of estate sales, it never ceases to amaze me the amount of items that were purchased and never even opened/unboxed. Granted, there is selection bias at work, as hoarder types are more likely to have estates that necessitate their next of kin hiring companies to sell their stuff off, but I think if we knew how much merchandise went directly from production to landfill we’d be shocked. I see this most often in the mcmansion type homes of the nouveau riche. The type of houses that have cavernous libraries, filled with beautiful vintage hardcover books that on inspection are actually just hollow cardboard shells inscribed with labels like “HAMLET” or “ROBINSON CRUSOE”. If people don’t believe me, look up “decorative books”. It’s a bafflingly common purchase for social climbers.
Anyway, thanks for another thought provoking essay, JMG. As a downwardly mobile individual myself these are welcome words of encouragement that I might be on the right track!
Tyrell
“and if you manipulate them so that you decide in advance what they’re going to want, your power is complete.”….
“the reason most modern industrial societies don’t use police state tactics very often is that they are “magician states” that dominate their populations through the manipulation of desire, rather than through the more brutal and clumsy methods used by dictatorships.”
But at some bottom there will always need to be some police state, and the most base level of desire manipulation which is the gov-sponsored drug trade and then the police-managed dealing networks, informant networks, jail and court systems. And our civilization is getting more bottom heavy on the dope and police state end of things as the spell is breaking at the same time people wake up to ‘the end of progress’ and related news
Thanks for the post. I have a weird relationship with privilege/status. I grew up relatively privileged and have a well-paying, privileged, job now. But growing up, and now, I never fit in with the privileged. There’s some kind of weird, unspoken, debased, unnamed ideal of that class (for both genders) that I could never fit in with. Nowadays, I get by compartmentalizing my personality based on who I’m with and it is a pretty successful strategy. For example, I can’t say anything conservative at work (I do real work from home, not just sit around, so mostly no big deal), and can only talk about spirituality with a few carefully vetted people. When I talk to my Catholic Priest friend (rarely), everything’s on limits besides the occult, but spirituality/philosophy is fair game within those parameters. I have a network of many semi-friendships with lower class people at the places I frequent and I like being around the bluecollar plumbers/hvac technicians/handyman when they work on my house. I’ve never got the impression they find me annoying when I’m talking to them while they work. Mostly I hang around my family of which my immediate is privileged and some of the extended family is bluecollar. I don’t get into fancy fashions/hobbies/travel. An old friend told me he thought I was poor when he first met me. A waiter told me I was a good ole boy once which made me smile because it would feel fake if I adopted that identity. I haven’t been wise with 100% of my financial decisions but think I’m in good shape, for the most part, within the parameters of the post. I do have a beer and nicotine desire that needs reeducating I’m not exactly sure what to do with this whole paradox, but there it is. To be silent. Sorry, a bit of stream of consciousness.
“Eventually, as the countryside empties out (a normal event once depopulation really sets in), illegal homesteading in isolated areas will become standard, and that’s one of the ways you get from a dying urban society to a rural-village society with empty urban ruins, another normal transition.”
A friend of mine who lives in a remote region of California tells me that this is already happening, in a small way. He has observed here and there small enclaves of modest, discreet extralegal communities and habitations. I would consider doing this myself, but I think we’re not yet far enough down the curve for me to feel secure living this way. The authorities can still easily move in and shut you down.
Forgot to add, any chance you are willing to share your kimchi recipe? I’ve been meaning to start making my own for some time now.
Thanks!
The only real value I see in things is the enjoyment they provide while you have them. So, for me, the question is what do I need to be happy. I used to watch my 55 inch flat screen with stand, sound bar, and Blu-ray every day. Now I only turn it on if there is a ballgame. Today I understand what Cypher meant back in 1999 when he said “put me back in the Matrix, I don’t care if it isn’t real, I won’t know the difference. The flaw in that plan is that you can’t unknow what you know. Once I realize that endless distraction is not an ultimate good, that it is simply an uneducated desire, I am left with some work to do. Educated Desire, now if only that came with a remote control my life would be perfect.
Pygmycory, it’s an old and very honorable way to sidestep peer pressure.
Jeff, I bet. When you pursue what you desire, instead of what a corrupt system wants to lure you into desiring, that’s the kind of pushback you get!
Zachary, you’re welcome.
Nephite, I’m by no means sure I could write a definitive guide — all I’d have to go on is my own idiosyncratic experiences.
Rhydlyd, oh, it’s very good news indeed. But the fact that Amelia’s out there cleansing Britain’s most famous pagan holy place is, ahem, striking.
Aldarion, I had the help of a couple of millennia of intelligent discussion of Diotima’s ideas. Glad it made sense.
Ambrose, of course there are. The elite classes (plural) aren’t monolithic; they consist of an assortment of power centers of various sizes and levels of influence, all constantly contending against one another for bigger slices of the pies of wealth, power, and privilege. As for the upper reaches of the occult scene, those consist almost entirely of successful authors and teachers. No, it’s not especially helpful to belong to that group, but sometimes it’s hard to avoid.
Other Owen, in that case, don’t you dare complain about paying the taxes that support the highway system, the global network of military bases that keep the oil flowing, etc., etc…
I’m like, er, perhaps you can explain to me what this has to do with the theme of the current post.
Teresa, and they’ll be sitting on the reprint rights in the usual big-publisher way. That’s very unfortunate.
Renaissance, that was none other than Wilkins Micawber, the character in Dickens’ David Copperfield, played by W.C. Fields in his one serious screen performance. Many years ago I wrote a blog post about that very saying.
Ganesh, many thanks for this. I’ve tended to avoid such contexts reflexively, so your data points are interesting to hear.
SLClaire, and thanks for this, likewise.
Inna, oh, it’s always something, isn’t it? As long as it keeps the serfs in their place!
J.L.Mc12, thanks for both of these.
Michael, you really ought to turn off your spell checker. Seeing “Diogenes” turned into “Diagnose” was admittedly funny, but still! The definition of collapse you gave is very nearly perfect, however.
Siliconguy, poetic or not, it’s true. I bet that stew was tasty.
Tyrell, it would be nice if conservatives remembered someday how to conserve. As for estate sales, oh dear gods, yes. The stuff I get at thrift stores, unopened and unused, for 10% of its notional value is remarkable, too.
AliceEm, yes, I know that, which is why I specifically said “don’t use police state tactics very often” (emphasis added).
Luke, I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t have more work to do. It sounds as though you’re moving ahead, though.
Kevin, no surprises there. I’d expect it to happen first in the states that are in most headlong decline, and California’s way up on that list.
Tyrell, sure. You can find it here:
https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/254241.html?thread=44729377#cmt44729377
It’s really easy to make, and keeps literally for months.
Point, I think half the reason so many people are so frantic and crazy these days is that they’re trying to unknow what they know, and failing.
That makes sense re. the Middle Platonists. I read through John Dillon’s book on them years ago and was struck by just how much more interesting their various cosmologies were than a lot of what came after. I also notice that the same can be said of the Christianities in the same time period. A lot of my own thinking was shaped by Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblichus and Porphyry, but there is certainly something much more sterile about them than their predecessors– and, again, I notice that the same thing is true in Christianity, and at least partially coincides with the transmission of Plotinus by Augustine and Proclus by Dionysius.
The slow (or not so slow) disintegration of our built infrastructure, the erosion of standards, the constant drift toward the shoddy and flimsy, and the rest of it: these are symptoms of accelerating decay that the political posturing on both sides of today’s political conflicts does nothing to stop.
We have a brand new tape machine at work. We are keeping the old one as a back up for when it breaks down. I can not make phone calls on my cell phone, but I am still getting text messages from politicians asking for campaign donations.
In the last few years, since the C-v-d panics of 2020, I’ve slowly been introducing my wife to the idea that our institutions are failing and “nothing works anymore”.
We’ve had a personal issue in our lives the last few years that should have been resolved by multiple interested parties (I’m being vague on purpose due to involving both criminal and civil legal matters). Every one of these responsible parties, to the letter, responded with “not our job”, even when the law and their own rules set out that it is, in fact, their job.
This slowly helped me to convince her that our institutions are basically broken. We don’t live in the US, but we’re experiencing the same pattern of symptoms and defects.
As far as this concerns freedom, it’s helped us to realize a few things. One of the most important is that provided you don’t 1) kill or seriously injure another person or 2) get in the way of the tax man’s takings, you can do pretty much whatever you like. You’ll get sternly worded letters, naturally, but enforcement is non-existent due to lack of will, bureaucratic bottom-covering, or nested thickets of rules so dense it’s impossible to comply with all of them.
One other thing, since Plato plays such a key part here:
Iris Murdoch’s long essay “The Fire and the Sun” one of her main questions is why Plato, who is notorious for his mistrust of poets and artists, not only wrote in the form of dialogues but proved quite skilled at it.
She gives an entertaining interpretation of Republic’s Allegory of the Cave, whereby the Fire represents the greedy and deceptive ego casting shadows on the cave wall. Plato’s mistrust of poets is due to their skill in manipulating the Fire to cast images dazzle and delight, while having no real idea of the power they wield or its place in the larger picture. The Sun which lies beyond the cave and illuminates the greater fields of being is no part of the poet’s art; the poet plays with a power he doesn’t understand and for selfish or destructive purposes.
I couldn’t help but think of her reading as you described the workings of modern magicians playing their own games with desire.
Thanks for this education on Plato! I have been hip deep in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance and between it and the rise of Amelia, it has me thinking of It Girls and how they have been used over the decades to push both products and agendas. I have written a series on It Girls over at my Substack, but since they are behind the paywall (I got pretty spicy, and I usually hide that behind the paywall for my own comfort) I will synopsize the articles instead of linking. From what little I understand, I believe that long ago, Renaissance mages figured out that if they focused their will upon the creation of an idealized, fantasy woman love interest, it generated a great deal of magical power. The mage could use that power to become a better artist, thinker, or warrior and/or to influence other people. In our era, the fantasy woman has been mainly used for the mages behind her to influence other people; hence the It Girl. She is a kind of tulpa created to capture magical force from the general public. Evelyn Nesbit, Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Angelina Jolie, and Kendall Jenner are all It Girls. Amelia was an accident that got out of hand — she is an It Girl that cannot be controlled because she is not real. I have a hypothesis that she created herself. Normal It Girls, however, go into It Girl-dom thinking they can call the shots. They end up being wholly owned by their Svengali masters, and the Svengalis want to sell something that has little to nothing to do with their It Girl puppets or the interests of those It Girls. Also, they are worked until they literally die because their contracts are forever. Expect Taylor Swift to be gracing us with her musical efforts well into her 90s if she makes it that far. I used the example of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman in my third It Girl essay, whose face and body was used to sell luxury brands on the surface. The real thing being sold, however, was the normalization prostitution/human trafficking, as the film Pretty Woman is the story of a happy hooker who gets picked up by a super-rich private equity bro and turned into a real life princess who lives happily ever after. Svengalis often want to normalize a taboo so the taboo energy can be milked for profit and energy on its way down. Pretty Woman was actually a Disney film. The other main thing being sold besides designer dresses was dieting and anorexia. Roberts has always had a supermodel-thin build. The side quests that the selling of uber-thin images achieves are the normalization of Big Pharma drugs (to stay thin, of course) and surgery, such as the ghastly stomach-reduction procedures undergone by Sharon Osbourne and her daughter Kelly. Both are now gaunt and skeletal from gastric bypass combined with alleged GLP-1 drug abuse. Much of living well and spending less these days is seeing what is truly being sold by the Svengali team behind the It Girl or It Boy, realizing it is sinister, and ignoring it as much as possible. Aspiring to be an It Girl or aspiring to catch one’s own It Girl to mate with are extremely expensive undertakings. On a very different topic, do you use any kind of special equipment for fermenting kimchi?
@David P RE : Richard Stallman. “Stallman is a communist and can thus handwave all economic issues away by claiming that communism solves them. ”
I can say from personal experience having worked with Stallman on and off for a decade that he is not a communist. And trust me, he would let you know if he was! Don’t get a single word wrong or you will spend a LONG time having to correct yourself… exhaustingly so…
His ideals are a mix of multiple different ideas. It is communistic in an ideal sense that it relies on the dynamic of a community in that the entire process is open to all to see. It is free market in that ideas are allowed to flourish or fail based on utility, it is capitalist in that you are free to sell this software and make money supporting said software, this is how he made a living for the first 15 years of the Free Software movement. But he is also in favor of a kind of Bernie sanders level socialism in government that provides basic services for people as he has said “Not just because I have a pro-state gland”. 😉 There is no one box that he or the movement fall into which has lead to it having multiple points of criticism while also having said criticism miss the mark.
That said, my criticism of FLOSS is that it is based on the assumption that computing technology has to operate at the scale it is today. I have argued that Perma-computing is the missing piece. FLOSS software pushing up modern computing hardware is just the lesser of two evils, it still requires the large scale internet and billions of pieces of hardware produced every year. Intel, AMD and Nvidia do not care what software you are running so long as you buy more of their stuff.
But if computers can be made more locally, communicate by lower tech means (Local radio/HAM radio) and be made to last decades with user buildable parts, then there is a viable future for computing I can get behind. It will not survive the long decent in a large scale but it will decline a bit more gracefully.
“Mind, FOSS is not just becoming competetive because it’s gotten so much better but also because quality standards are sinking across the board and so its issues become less of a deal-breaker.”
Yes and no. Yes, proprietary stuff is sinking fast, but at least for the last decade or so there has been a big push for Libre software to go for quality. Many realised that it wasn’t enough to just be free, it had to be good. So it is two things moving in opposite directions.
@ Mister Nobody # 10. “Just as Jesus’s admonition that “money is the root of all evil” should be amended to “the love of money is the root of all evil””
That is already in the Bible and the full text is actually very fitting for this topic. Timothy 6:10 “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
@ Tony and JMG “Like most people in today’s industrial nations, you’ve been put under an evil enchantment” – “that’s intended to make you hate and despise yourself if you don’t obey the commands of your masters” ”
Another way this comes out is when those same people try to shun and humiliate others that do not fall into line. For all of the faults of the hippies, at least they could push those buttons, it was probably the only lasting legacy they had. Nowadays just saying “I don’t have a car” is more than enough to generate outrage.
@ Patricia M. Oops I didn’t see that you have already summited the Diogenes lentil story and I had put my one in. That said I do love seeing all the variations on that story.
@ Dylan #32 ” I was deeply discouraged by his insistence that I’ve made a series of poor decisions by not seeking further degrees above my BA, and that as a result of this and of all my hopping around I’m not qualified for any kind of ‘sophisticated’ job. (His word)”
I have generally found that the smarter people are, not just book/degree smart, the more they tend to shun the trappings of wealth. For instance in a fun flip on this, there are now an estimated 600 Buddhist and Taoist hermits that live in the Zhongnan mountains in China. The amazing thing is how many of them have come from getting university degrees, they saw what it was all about from inside to see it was a trap not liberation. That seems to be a good use of a degree, to see how entrapping they can be.
The way through isn’t clear to others but it may show itself to you.
I thought downward mobility was the current topic. I presented two examples. Nothing more.
Well, thank you for that, since I never read David Copperfield, but it sums up the concept to which I have always ascribed, never increasing my lifestyle, despite increases in pay. Hence my slight mis-remembering of the phrase, but it stuck so hard in my mind.
I always thought that Seneca’s habit of going into abject poverty for a few days every few weeks, just to remind himself that it shouldn’t be that scary was a good idea, too. It’s do-able, if not entirely pleasant, and somewhat stressful. But do-able. Not something to be reduced to quivering jelly about. Spend a week living on ‘poverty’ income, or better yet, never rise too far above that in the first place. Now that inflation has ravaged so many budgets and caused so many to squawk like chickens, I fully appreciate the value in the discipline.
However, I do note that despite this wisdom being freely available for centuries by what we regard as the best minds in history, depressingly few people ever take up the challenge.
Bruce
Steve, Dillon’s book was my intro to the middle Platonists also, and I found it enormously helpful in making sense of my own views.
Moonwolf8, I keep several old laptops running Windows 7 handy. When my more recent used laptops give me trouble, those always fill the gap. At this point, retro is less of a style choice than a practical necessity.
Matt, that’s a common experience these days, as I’m sure you know; if it’s helping your wife grasp the hard realities of our situation, then it’s doing something useful. I’ll have to check out Murdoch’s essay one of these days.
Kimberly, thanks for this. “It Girl” isn’t a phrase I’ve heard in many years, but you’re right that it’s a very revealing phenomenon. As for kimchi — how’s that for a change of subject sudden enough to generate whiplash! — no, just an ordinary big mixing bowl and some ordinary half gallon canning jars. (I usually make around a gallon at a time.)
Michael, I find “I don’t have a tv” is even more effective at getting foam-flecked outrage. It’s quite entertaining to watch.
I’m Like, and used them to make a highly political point irrelevant to the theme. It’s a point with which I agree, btw, but it’s still not relevant to this post.
Renaissance, I now consider the first decade or so of my writing career, when I was very poor, to be one of the more useful experiences of this life. I find that I can cut my expenditures very far, very fast without much trauma, just by tapping into those years of experience.
JMG,
In his own way, Other Owen is making a relevant point in relation to todays post. He seems to be pushing back against the idea that a common tactic used to economize one’s household budget is to give up automobile ownership. He is treating the concept of a car free life as a miserly edict pushed on the unwilling by some kind of powerful scrooge czar.
But this is the opposite of what I think the point of your article is. That point is that voluntary downward mobility is only possible if you know longer desire the things that a higher material standard of living provides. This requires adopting other goals and motivations not associated with materialism.
The goal is not to force you to give up the car you love because it is the noble way. The goal is to gain a new set of desires and perspectives that allow you to minimize the cost of living so you can obtain more freedom and resilience against ongoing collapse.
If owning a car is high on your list of personal satisfaction then pursue other measures of economy. Perhaps a permanent dwelling has no utility for you and van life is for you. A lifestyle where you gain all the benefits and freedom of living in you mobility device.
Or perhaps you like cars so much that you start an auto repair business and live in the back room to save money.
There are many paths for many people, and grumping about a common path does not nullify the need for the journey.
Hello JMG! First time commenting on your blog although I have been steadily reading along which has been a godsend. What compelled me to comment was an interesting effect I had while reading this post – noticing all my oppositions to and long buried beliefs about money, class, and self worth that this was dredging up. Your replies to Tony show that freedom from those spells can be had. I think that is partially why I chose the occultist’s path; to ultimately be free from the conditioning. It gives me hope.
#41 comment to Roldy- my latest mix of interests is using my improving art skills to do all the 78 cards of Philip Carr-Gomm’s Druid Tarot deck in a dedicated journal along with keywords/wee stories that help me memorize the character and meaning of each card. So I’ve been putting hard effort into learning mainly from Benebel Wen’s Holistic Tarot. Never thought about reading cards to provide a bit of income. But today was the 3rd time in recent weeks I’ve had folk seeing me quietly working in my corner of my coffee shop and coming up very curious as to what I’m drawing/writing ( writing in cursive is now noticed as somehow retro). So when they realize it’s about Tarot and Wen’s book is loaded with post it’s and highlighter on the table they are quite keen on having a reading. I politely decline as I’m not at that level yet. All were PMC/gov’t well to do here. Bonus is cash only no paper trail.
Just realized you’re in a patch of high income high stress types who would appreciate some intelligent insight and be willing to pay handsomely for it. Cause human nature (and that class thing) wouldn’t value your insights for a half tuppence.
JMG wrote (post #41) in response to Stefania:
” Inflation means that the tokens we call money are losing their value because they are being produced at a rate exceeding the rate of production of real goods and services. That inevitably happens as civilizations decline, and it means that living below your current means is essential — it also means that no “store of value” will retain its value, and that productive assets will lose any value they have other than their immediate usefulness to you.”
I have to challenge the last two claims that you make here, John Michael, which you have repeatedly made in other posts going back at least 10 years (as long as I’ve been reading your blogs). I believe that you are in serious error here.
There is no historical, nor would I say logical, reason to suppose that at least some traditional, or non-traditional for that matter, stores of value will not retain value as civilization declines. Indeed, I can imagine any number of things, such as precious metals (gold and silver), and also non-replaceable tools and simple machines that are not and cannot be made any longer, becoming MORE valuable as civilization declines and regresses.
In particular, I wonder if you do not have a blind spot for the proven value of gold and silver as practical, and stateless, money. There is no historical precedent for gold and silver becoming worthless (outside of some very temporary and emergency ‘lifeboat’ situation), and as our current bloated and predatory financial superstructure collapses, I can see the precious metals regaining their rightful monetary roles. Indeed, I cannot envision a near or medium-term scenario in which that does NOT happen.
Yes, in the LONG term, as population declines, I can imagine scenarios in which those metals might decline in value, as the per-capita total aboveground (refined) quantities of them increase, but that is a matter that would most likely play out over centuries, not a few years, and almost certainly not within the lifetime of anyone alive today.
Even in a declining civilization, trade will still be desired, and necessary, and still taking place, and money will be necessary to facilitate that trade. This was true even during the Bronze Age. Short of an all-out nuclear war, or some similar massive worldwide cataclysm, I absolutely cannot envision a world any time soon in which ALL trade has ceased to function, and in which gold and silver are, as Lenin claimed, “only good for lining the urinals of public toilets”.
To Clay Dennis (#102),
You, as well as Other Owen (post #77) make some very valid and positive points about vehicle ownership.
Like Other Owen, I literally cannot imagine living without my own vehicle. While obviously there are significant costs to owning a vehicle, in my case, and I am sure in many others, those costs are FAR outweighed by the freedom that vehicle ownership can (not necessarily DOES) provide.
If I did not own a vehicle, I literally could not live anywhere in my entire state (Alaska) without living such a severely restricted and penurious life that it would be virtually indestinguishable from homelessness. Without my own vehicle, I could never be self-employed as I have been for over 20 years in the niche business that I am in, and to NOT be a wage-slave in a tedious hamster wheel of a corporate job is a freedom that I value more than almost any other.
And also like Other Owen, I despise, DESPISE living in urban areas. I grew up and lived my first almost three decades in a large city, and could not wait to escape from that environment as soon as I reasonably could. I have at times found cities interesting places to visit, but soon enough the stress starts to build, and I would truly rather die than to have to live indefinitely in a crowded antheap of humanity, particularly nowadays, with the invariably hyper-statist and soul-crushing politics that prevail in cities today. No offense to our host! But I could never live as you do. Nor, probably, could you, or would you want to, live as I do. Vive la difference!
But in some significant other ways, notably in my complete lack of carrying or owning a cell phone of any sort, or a television, and in my eschewing of eating away from home, I am far removed from most other Americans. But I’ve been marching to the beat of a different drummer my entire life, since my earliest memories, and this causes me no stress or grief whatsoever. Indeed, I find it strange that it should cause those things in others.
Hi everyone,
My wife and I have the plan of cashing in on the ridiculous increase in house prices over the past 5 years to sell up and take 2-3 gap years, where we can travel, study, and spend time with family. And then just work out what comes next after that 🙂 (Of course, if the whole real estate market here in Australia tanks, we may have to reconsider, but you know, them’s the breaks!)
Inna # 62:
Thank you for your books recommendation, I take note of them.
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JMG # 69:
Indeed, car industry here often complains bitterly periodically about how old are getting the average cars which run in our roads and streets, for evident motives (to sell more new cars). By the way, a Lebanese origin guy told me a time ago, in his country (at least until it became eventually a full failed state), there was an active importation second hand cars business. The most traded were old European
Mercedes. Why? That kind of cars were a status icon between the middle class Lebanese, to pretend they were richer than they really were!
John, I’d like to link you hard data by online Spanish MSM about how old are getting the average cars here, but unfortunately my crappy (abd old) smartphone doesn’t allow it to me. I’m sorry for my technological hard limits; although if you write in Google or another search engine “parque automovil España viejo”, these magic words will give you the data (if you understand some Spanish). Data say my country has the oldest cars in the EU, even nearing African levels (according “El Confidencial” said recently last year). Bad times for a status symbol me think.
Your penetrating and helpful remarks about social climbing and its drawbacks remind me of two works I have recently read. I am enjoying Moliere’s 1670 play “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme”, which presents as pure farce the spectacle of a wealthy bourgeois trying to spend his way into the ranks of the nobility. The audience is encouraged to laugh at the huge contrast between the false values that M. Jourdain pursues and the reality of his situation.
The other book deals with the USA as of the 1980s. It is Paul Fussell’s “Class”, which sets out to refute the belief that the USA has no class system. Fussell points out that even the pretence that no class divisions exist serves to reinforce those divisions. His book is rife with concrete examples of the pervasive pressure to “rise” in society, and how it normally backfires. Near the end, he postulates an apparently happier group of people who opt out of class and live for themselves and their true desires. Whether such a group really exists – and he clearly sees himself as a member of it – is questionable.
Zachary # 72:
I agree. Often the speeches around “freedom” are indeed empty babbling, especially when they come from politicians (of the neoliberal Conservative tendence or woke leftists, it doesn’t mind me think) They sound fake…when you check their freedom concept is often to limit others real liberty in the name of their ideology: “libertycides”.
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The Other Owen # 77:
I understand your view to some extent, but though you like cars, you can be able to see their kitsch side too (in Kundera words, the denial of their s**t). Car culture has helped to destroy modern sociability for example (individual isolation and status competition).
Bikes have their bad side too, but as a biker myself, I think their advantages are over their problems. Average storage room rent is lower than a car garage rent here, for example. I live in a medium size European town, which is near flat, and our climate is usually dry. I’m quite confortable now with usual dry cold winter days here. So no problem to use my bike near everyday…There are some bike lanes too, and car drivers here usually respect bikes. If you respect traffic laws, cars usually will respect you too. So what’s the problem here? I’m a happy biker, and I’ll be it until I get too old for it (I hope not before 20-30 years in future!).
A time ago I met a French cycloturist who told me he was from Northern France, where it rains a lot. He said he used his bike in rainy days too, because when you train your will with patience it isn’t a real problem (maybe a Stoic attitude).
#65 David P,
You might be missing the point about FOSS, it is about freedom from surveillance, influence and “being milked” rather than some notion of quality. Also it is subjective, not matter of fact whether or not the quality of big tech is better – from extensive experience I think it is glitchy, annoying, controlling, contrived rubbish and has been for decades. But, of course people also love it, or are stuck with it, or perhaps just don’t know any better.
Now we have AI, which is just more powerful proprietary software (not intelligent), also glitchy, annoying, controlling, contrived rubbish, with the best use case being even more powerful “milking” of people in every way imaginable. Thankfully it is quite fragile and we’re on the downhill run now, so shan’t last long.
JMG – I’m pleased to know that.
>Every time my wife and I applied for a home loan, we were told “You can afford a lot more house than that!” Bankers never understood our amused disinterest
Someone has to hold the debt. If you’re willing to hold debt, why aren’t you willing to hold the maximum? I guess in a system that has exponential growth, there’s no such thing as “enough” to those who have aligned fully with that system.
The Ancien Regime collapsed when interest became 50% of the budget. We’re not there yet but due to the magic of exponential growth – we soon will be.
>But if computers can be made more locally
Last I checked, the state of the art in backyard chip fab is the early 1970s and I was amazed at all the hoops he had to jump through to get something out that worked. With a little more effort, you *might* be able to fab a 6502 or a Z80 in your garage.
@ Other Owen #45
“Someone has to hold it, baked into the rules of the game.” Yes, this is what money, at least in our times, IS.
It is debt for some (ie debtor-signed promissory notes against their own future performance of work and/or their own future surrender of property), and on the reverse side, credit for others. Those who are net creditors in this money system hold as “assets” some given share of *other people’s future work* and/or *other people’s surrendered property.
Given that these are the rules of the game, and that holding ANY money at all is to hold some given share of what belongs to other people, I myself have endeavoured in latter years not only to NEED less, but also to EARN less. I decided to try to hold as little as possible of tokens entitling me (because founded upon debt) to share in what inherently belongs to others (their time and their possessions), because holding it (in my humble opinion) is to be responsible for it – ie for them.
Two thoughts come to mind:
1st, in vino veritas
2nd, WalMart patriarch Sam Walton held onto & used a 1979 Ford F-150 (bought new) as his daily driver until he died.
Some very valid observations.
Michael Gray #98:
Interesting, thank you. I was genuinely under the impression that RMS had once described himself as a communist but perhaps that was just M$ propaganda. Nonetheless, I think that my argument still stands and actually relates to your permacomputing point: if you want software to be produced at its current quantity and you want it all to be FOSS (as opposed to just having weekend projects become load-bearing), you need a lot of economic hand-waving to pretend that it can work. If you’re willing to accept a “downgrade” in computing, that vision might actually become feasible.
Regarding user-buildable parts, there’s this fella fabricating ICs in his garage: https://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/.
I’ve also noticed the increase in FOSS software quality, which I tried to include with the “just” in that sentence.
—David P.
@alan #25
I think it is interesting to fully embody what you wrote for a while. And then see what happens after that? Is there more to it ?
“The reason most modern industrial societies don’t use police state tactics very often is that they are “magician states” that dominate their populations through the manipulation of desire, rather than through the more brutal and clumsy methods used by dictatorships.”
It seems to me that as there are less and less desirable goodies on offer in declining societies that more brutal methods are going to be the way forward for governments. In the UK there are arrests for social media posts and in the US, ICE is shooting peaceful protesters in the face. Are we at the end of ‘magician states’?
At this page is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 2/5). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany, who is experiencing complications in her pregnancy due to an influenza infection, recover and have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Marko have the strength to seize the opportunities.
May Luke Z and his house, whose furnace has problems that can’t be fixed until after the current severe weather ends, be blessed and kept safe until the cold subside.
May Pierre’s young daughter, Athena, be healed from her fatigue and its root causes in ways that are easy, natural, and as holistic as possible.
May Bob Ralston (aka Rasty Bob), who is in hospice care in Buckeye AZ, and who just lost his wife Leslie Fish, be blessed and find relief from his pain and discomfort; may Bob’s heart remain strong.
May Leslie Fish, wife of Bob Ralston, who passed away in early December, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to her next existence.
May Corey Benton, who passed away on 12/10, be blessed and make a peaceful transition to his next destination.
May Satoko L in Kyoto, who is recovering at home after weeks of hospitalization for Acute Hepatitis while in a state of immunodeficiency, continue to heal quickly and safely, and return to full vitality.
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May the abcess in JRuss’s left armpit heal quickly.
May Brother Kornhoer’s son Travis’s left ureter be restored to full function, may his body have the strength to fight off infections, may his kidneys strengthen, and may his empty nose syndrome abate, so that he may have a full and healthy life ahead of him.
May HippieVikings’s baby HV, who was born safely but has had some breathing concerns, be filled with good health and strength.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Hi JMG, I’m going to post here as “Ecoprayer” from now on, as it sometimes gets difficult to find instances where people use my name when writing to me with prayer requests after Chuaquin leaves many comments (which I certainly am happy if they continue to do so). I’ll appreciate it if when you to acknowledge receipt as you always have, you do so from now on to “Ecoprayer” instead of to Quin. (I’ll still post as “Quin A” at times that I might have any comment separate from the subject of the Prayer List.)
Many thanks as always for creating this community!
Best,
Quin
Wow, excellent. Thanks. This post has really spoken to me. I’m a 60 year guy educated to degree level, avid reader, meditator and musician. My job is…cleaner. Street cleaner. I push a barrow in the street on Sundays and clean car parks the rest of my week. Out of my (relative) free will. I live in a single room, quite happily, save about a third of my monthly income. This is the freest I’ve ever felt.
I stopped pursuing a career in music because I realised the unstable income put a constraint on my peace of mind. And yet, I’m constantly evolving creatively. I still engage with the local scene. I’m developing a bit of a wise old mentor reputation around here, which is something that tickles me greatly.
One thing this Epstein files malarkey is uncovering for me is what kind of grim lives those people live, they have relations among themselves that no self respecting person would tolerate, certainly not me. I ceased envying them a couple of decades ago but it’s still educating, seeing these emails they send each other, etc. It actually has touched my compassionate nerve, despite the crimes they commit on a daily basis, I just can’t imagine being in their shoes. And Caribbean islands and all, the backgrounds they’re photographed in show a surprising degree of ugliness. All of it is a huge grim lie. May they achieve self realisation.
I’m like # 78:
Indeed, I’ve also seen quite migrants who come here have universitarian studies from their countries…which they are difficult to be accepted by Spanish educative laws. The painful word for these non-EU migrants is “convalidación”, sometimes a bureaucratical nightmare. For example, some South American migrants have been in their countries doctors or teachers, but often our government doesn’t find equivalence with our education system, so…it rejects their titles; so these migrants have to downgrade their real jobs, even doing not qualified works. It’s a pity.
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Michael G.# 85:
Byung Chul-Han is a smart observer of nowadays human miseries in globalized societies, though I think he doesn’t say anything really new in his philosophy…but I recognize his brave attitude when I compare him
with another today thinkers (I won’t give you names, ahem). He’s worth to be read.
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Alice # 88:
Police is the stick and propaganda/advertisement (aka Spectacle) is the carrot. Stick is only used in “democracies” if/when the carrot fails. However, I tend to think the stick is a necessary evil. In addition to prosecute political dissenting in hard times (cough), police is necessary to control common crime (organized or not) against decent citizens. Even the most utopian thinkers (for example Marx and his supporters) who praise the “end of History” by a future state abolition, in their less hystrionic mood recognize (with reluctancy) in a organized ideal society there would be “smaller” problems which naïve Communism wouldn’t solve by itself. So a little bureaucracy and police would be needed (cough), though equality would make lower the crime rates; unless we think in a return to hunters-gatherers life, a minimally organized society needs some “lesser evils”. In the real world, Commies when they reached the power in some countries, always implemented a strongly militarized and police state, oops! I can easily imagine a country without a permanent army (indeed it really exist today: Costa Rica, me think), but not a country without police beyond Rousseaunian dreams: human nature always will lead a few people to harm the other…for example children abusers and another non-economically motived crimes.
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Michael G #98:
Well, I don’t know enough of Mr. Stallman ideas to label him as a Commie or not (if you said he isn’t really, I tend to believe you: by your depiction of him I’d label him as an European style Socialdemocrat, me think); but I can also point the thoughtstopper word “Communist” is widely used within right wing guys to blame easily other people without a reasoned criticism…simetrically as the thoughstopper “Fascist” in the left against their correlative black beast. So I can recommend from my personal view a cautious use of those labels…Thank you fir your opinion.
JMG, Inna:
Thanks for your replies. As I mentioned, living below your current means works nicely in an environment where either the cost of living is staying roughly the same year after year, or one’s income happens to be rising faster than the rate of inflation, (as it sounds like it has been for you, JMG). But imagine you were working for an hourly wage that was not rising with inflation, or you were on a fixed pension. In those scenarios, the old rules of saving and living below your means become only one part of the overall strategy needed just to get by.
Imagine this: one year you are living in a one-bedroom apartment in a nice part of town, eating steak for dinner. A few years down the road when your rent and grocery bill increase, you move to a bachelor apartment in a slightly dodgier part of town and have hamburger for dinner. Next rent increase, you invite a friend to move in with you to split the rent and have canned beans for dinner. I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. Is it going to get to the point where you are literally living in a flipped over storage container on the side of the road somewhere, and using your hands to drink rainwater out of a puddle? That strategy may have worked in ancient Greece, but it would be an extremely rough go in the winter here in Canada and most other northern locations. In my town people who have already cut every possible discretionary item from their budgets are resorting to working multiple jobs, eating one less meal every day, visiting the food bank, and having to decide between eating and paying the heating bill. There are groups dressing up like Santa’s elves and Robin Hood going around stealing food from grocery stores and redistributing it to the poor.
It is the Red Queen race: inflation is causing us to run faster and faster, just to stay in the same place.
Living below your means is one part of the strategy and one that I fully employ! But there’s another side which complements that strategy and is perhaps more offensive in nature: improving your skills so you can earn more for your time, figuring out how to sell a product that rises in cost with inflation, doing things for yourself to avoid having to spend money, and yes, owning assets that rise in cost with inflation – maybe even just the place you live so you at least don’t have to pay rent month after month. You’ll notice, though, that I did not mention wanting to have a ‘store of value’ in terms of financial assets to attempt to preserve wealth. Instead, my husband and I have been working on gaining skills and tools to be able to do exactly what you describe – produce more of the things our family needs directly: things like growing fruits and vegetables in low-tech and low-input ways, keeping animals for food and fertilizer, gathering and growing herbs for medicine, cutting firewood for heat, repairing small engines and appliances, learning advanced first aid etc. Some upcoming projects are to install a metal roof to be able to collect and store rainwater, getting a dairy cow which will convert solar energy in the form of grass into food for humans, and planting more medicinal and edible perennials. We have been expanding our community connections to be able to barter directly for things we need, which has taken all sorts of forms over the years. We sell some of the food that we produce and have been able to gradually increase the costs over time as the quality (and expenses) have increased. I left my previous job years ago to be able to redirect my time towards these types of projects and downsized my lifestyle and desires correspondingly.
The eventual likelihood of outright regime collapse risk is, for the time being at least, a different scenario. Is it possible that one day roving warbands or revolutionaries will show up at the door, shoot us and take our stuff? Of course. However, I don’t believe that will happen overnight, and I am fully prepared to flee without a second thought if that becomes necessary. My strategy for that scenario has been to try to become a person that is worth more alive than dead! JMG mentioned previously that if Atilla the Hun were to show up at the door, he would treat you much more favorably if you were able to hand him a cold beer that you had produced from your own labor and skills.
In the meantime, there are other ways of stealing which don’t require the firing of a single shot. Inflation, or the gradual increase in the money supply and the resulting dilution of purchasing power, gradually steals from everyone as the cost of living rises, with the poor and middle class impacted the most. Tariffs impact small and medium sized businesses the most as they are forced to eat the costs of more expensive imports. Is it possible that in a crisis, the government will resort to financial repression/capital controls? Also likely, although my thinking is that they would resort to a wealth tax, like what is currently being proposed/modified in the Netherlands, before the outright seizure of farmland that is actively producing food for the local population.
In the face of the decay of industrialization and the end of globalization, I think we are going to need all the strategies just to get by and retain a degree of freedom.
Clay, that’s a valid point.
Jane, very glad to hear that this is helpful to you! We all have those spells stuck in our minds, and becoming aware of them is the first step toward banishing them.
Alan, there are two factors that you’re missing and a historical datum you apparently don’t know. The first is that any form of token of exchange — very much including gold and silver — has value only if there are goods and services you can buy with them, and only if people are willing to part with them in exchange for lumps of otherwise useless metal. Neither of these can be guaranteed in any society in decline. Second, as long as enough people think the way you do, once the rule of law breaks down — as it always does in an age of decline — gold and silver attract lethal violence the way a dead rat draws flies. I talked about that here among other places:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-nibelungs-ring-the-legends/
But it’s a commonplace of dark age history. You might look into the archeology of treasure in Britain, especially from the late Roman and post-Roman periods; hoards of gold and silver are quite often found close to the ruins of a Roman villa, which was sacked and looted by barbarian raiders. They didn’t get the buried gold, but that doesn’t mean that the owner got any benefit from it! Seriously, are you willing to take the risk that somebody will figure out you have precious metals and shoot you dead for them, or take you and your family captive and start torturing, beginning with the children, until somebody breaks and tells them where your stash is? That’s the kind of thing that happens all the time in dark age conditions.
Finally, the historical datum you’re missing is that during the last dark age in the West, and in every other dark age in a society that previously had money, money and precious metals both dropped out of use completely. Most inhabitants of early medieval Britain, for example, went their entire lives without seeing so much as one silver penny. Economies in dark age conditions reset to systems based on labor and customary exchange, cutting market interactions out completely; those don’t get going again until cities start to be rebuilt a couple of centuries after the nadir has passed. During the interval, gold and silver have value only as decor.
But I’ve said this many times before and it never makes a dent in the obsessive fixation on precious metals. By all means follow your own counsel — but don’t expect me to agree with you.
Russell, I hope it works for you.
Tom, I read Fussell’s book, which has a lot of good points. His “X class,” though, which allegedly opts out of the class system, is nothing of the kind; it’s simply the current American version of the middle class intelligentsia, which quite reliably tries to ignore or efface its own place in the class system.
RCW. Walton had a clue. I’m not sure his heirs still do.
Pholiate, thank you.
Bridge, yes, and in fact I discussed that in passing in last year’s comments on Situationism. As the social consensus that makes a “magician state” function cracks, yes, older and cruder methods of social control come into play.
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
CC, delighted to hear this! Thank you for the reminder that there really is another way.
Stefania, as I noted in the post, living below your means is only one of several strategies. Please do note, though, that I’ve lived through a lot of inflation in my time — I well remember the 20%+ inflation of the late 1970s! — and have also been very poor. There are times when increasing your earning potential is an option; there are also situations like the one I’ve found myself in where income increases for wild-card reasons. Downward mobility, however, isn’t a one-and-done thing. We are all going to be much, much poorer as the decline continues, and so each step of downward mobility should be seen as preparation for the next.
Without going into detail but speaking from experience working for one such person, I can confirm that “pining after things you want and can’t quite afford, or going into debt to buy them anyway” even applies to billionaires.
Was that true of other historical periods as well?
For those of you who haven’t seen it, and are interested in photography and journalism, I recommend again Chris Arnade’s book “Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America”
His distinction between front row and back row is useful and poignant.
“After abandoning his Wall Street career, Chris Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and becoming close friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonald’s. Then he started driving across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of stories everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography.
The people he got to know, from Alabama and California to Maine and Nevada, gave Arnade a new respect for the dignity and resilience of what he calls America’s Back Row–those who lack the credentials and advantages of the so-called meritocratic upper class. The strivers in the Front Row, with their advanced degrees and upward mobility, see the Back Row’s values as worthless. They scorn anyone who stays in a dying town or city as foolish, and mock anyone who clings to religion or tradition as naïve.
As Takeesha, a woman in the Bronx, told Arnade, she wants to be seen she sees herself: “a prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God.” This book is his attempt to help the rest of us truly see, hear, and respect millions of people who’ve been left behind.”
He has a pretty neat substack too, he’s been walking all over the world.
—
Downward mobility might mean getting a fry and coffee from mickey ds instead of the nice coffee shop and upscale burger joint.
In relation to Zachary’s comment, I do wonder sometimes: Why is it we Westerners care so much about freedom?
Part of it, surely, is we have a long history of having an abusive relationship with authority: our authorities and ruling classes always seem to expect obedience but feel no loyalty to us in return. Instead they cover up each others’ crimes and conspire against the “rabble,” until finally there is a crisis. So there has developed a latent distrust of anyone who claims the right to tell us what to do.
But also freedom as a spiritual ideal has been a part of Western culture since at least the Cynics, who intentionally flaunted the norms and ideals of their society. Most other cultures don’t seem to share this ideal, preferring more communal and traditional ideals. So where did the ideal of freedom come from and why does it appeal so deeply to us?
Many thanks for this clarification of the freedom inherent in being downwardly mobile. I’ve always felt this instinctively, but I appreciate you laying this out more clearly for me to understand.
Best wishes as you settle into your new life in Silver Spring! I’ve heard that Takoma Park has a lovely Farmer’s Market. Friends and neighbors (George’s Mill Farms) sell their delicious goat cheese at the market and the beyond organic veggies from Potomac Vegetable Farms are quite good (a 50-year-old family farm started by an Asian-American woman). Purple Mountain Grown also vends there and they are doing some exciting experimenting growing rice and all sorts of beans in Southern Maryland. Enjoy exploring the area!
Wow, awesome post…gonna have to re-read this a few times to absorb as much as possible.
Have been acutely sensitive to different forms of coercion (political-social-economic whatever) since our 5th grade teacher read “A Wrinkle In Time” by Madeleine L’Engle to us out loud.
The slavery of desire is powerful and more insidious than about anything. I think the proper response isn’t to desire nothing, as Eastern mystics might teach, but to be in control of one’s desires and not allow others to dictate them.
JMG,
One of the ways you can enter the elite class without a high income or net worth is to be a prominent journalist at one of the big three newspapers ( Wapo, NYT, LA times). Though to be fair you can only usually gain these positions if you are already a member of the elite class. My son pointed this out to me a few years ago when he was working in television news in NYC and gained the acquaintance of various NYT writers. He said, ” They are pretending to have a job, everyone I have met from the times was already rich.”
So when this week Jeff Bezos sent a third of the staff at the Washington Post on a downwardly mobile career path it created tantrums from one end of the elite class to another. No one in DC cries a tear when steel workers are laid off, but just a few members of the ” Liberal Press” hitting the unemployment lines creates tantrums. This is not about their sacred news, but more about shakeups in the members of the highest social class.
@Dennis Michael Sawyers
“Was that true of other historical periods as well?”
I would certainly think so. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.” If you were the richest man on Earth in 2000 AD you could always spend your money on another big project with a big plaque singing your praises to show off to the other rich people.
Dear JMG, in response to your post #126:
Actually, I am fully aware of all those points that you raise in regards to precious metals. But I have to ask you to consider the possibility that you may be, if only at least somewhat, falling into the same sort of false dichotomous thinking here regarding precious metals as stores of value that you have rightfully highlighted many times elsewhere, for example in those who can only see business-as-usual, or total and instant collapse, as the only two possible outcomes for civilization going forward.
Yes, it is very true that in most of medieval Europe, gold and silver coinage, and a market economy, had largely if not completely ceased for hundreds of years. But the fact that gold and silver did not circulate as everyday money does NOT mean that they had ceased to be stores of value! That is an entirely false conclusion, and simply not true. All the long-distance trade that still was carried on, even in the darkest parts of the Dark Ages, was not facilitated by fiat currency, you know. Even if much if it was barter-based, gold and silver still did play roles in trade, even if it did not in everyday life. Is rhodium today, for example (currently at over $10,000 per ounce), not valuable merely because the vast majority of people do not own or ever see it?
Now, the matter of security, and holding onto one’s precious metals (or any other valuables) in times of chaos and upheaval, yes, that is quite another thing, and potentially a very serious issue. But even then, for every horde of unrecovered gold and silver coins that has been found by archeologists and others over the centuries, and that STILL continues to be uncovered today, how many more WERE recovered, and used, by their owners? Archeology can only showcase the former, not the latter, so it is an inherently biased and one-side indicator in this particular regard.
I would argue that the fact that wholesale chaos and brigandage CAN occur, or even WILL occur at some indefinite future date, is no reason to just throw one’s hands in the air and completely give up on trying to save some sort of store of value, if one has the means and desire to do so. It may be a century yet, or two or three, before the Goths and Vandals are knocking at the door.
Ugh, just realized I have a typo in my last comment, to Dennis Michael Sawyers
I mean to say “If you were the richest man on Earth in 1000 AD…” not 2000
“But also freedom as a spiritual ideal has been a part of Western culture since at least the Cynics, who intentionally flaunted the norms and ideals of their society. Most other cultures don’t seem to share this ideal, preferring more communal and traditional ideals. So where did the ideal of freedom come from and why does it appeal so deeply to us?” — Slithy Toves
I think this also has to do with our swarm learning to become “Lords of Freedom”
Also, I think in our time and onwards we will see a cintinued polarity tug being exerted between Neptunian iconoclasm and Uranian collectivism ( think I got those right – but might be backwards).
@Siliconguy
“Thou shalt not spend yourself into bankruptcy just to keep up with the Jones.”
I love this coinage. It’s quite poetic enough already, and both pointed and funny.
Gold does have rather limited industrial uses and those don’t take much. Thin layers on electrical contacts and even thinner layers as infrared radiation blockers come to mind. Silver is more useful overall even though the film market is pretty much gone, though in a collapse that might come back. Currently solar panels are sucking up a lot of it although how much longer that will be case is an open question.
The real value will be in the always useful copper as well as alloys of plumbum, stibnum, and stannum. For stannum in particular the good cassiterite ores are pretty much gone. That also applies to zinc. As long as the supply of aluminum beer cans lasts aluminum bronze is possible, but aluminum in bulk requires a huge infrastructure.
And now Norway is having Epstein problems. “The relationship of Mette-Marit, Crown Princess of Norway with the late American convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has become a major scandal with significant ramifications for the Norwegian royal family.”
Apparently her son is as honorable as Hunter Biden. “My class will protect me.” At some point that stops working.
JMG,
Thanks for your reply. I’ll look forward to hearing your views in a hopeful future post on some of the other strategies that remain dimly possible for mitigating the decay of industrial civilization.
Alan,
I hope you don’t mind me contributing my two…gold coins? in response to your comment above (#105).
The way I see it, and at risk of the overgeneralization and oversimplification that is partly unavoidable in a short reply, as you pointed out there are two scenarios/timeframes playing out here with respect to the possible future role of gold and silver.
In the first scenario, the eventual civilization-ending, return-to-dark ages cataclysm wherein the rule of law breaks down after many years of decline, I absolutely agree with JMG’s reply to you in that precious metals at worst put a massive target on your back, and at best come off as patronizing to the point of being insulting. I’m trying to imagine a point in the future where someone rolled up to my farm and tried to trade useless pieces of gold for food: the result of my hard physical labor, that I was literally using to feed my family. Silver, maybe, but only if I was an electrical engineer and was trying to rig up or retrofit some bit of electrical equipment or something. I would be much more inclined to hand them a hoe or a pitchfork and ask them to lend a hand in exchange for the food. In that scenario, if you had precious metals, it would be arrogant and/or dangerous to try to use them as money.
But there’s another scenario playing out right now, that may or may not be related to the overarching decline of industrial civilization, depending on your point of view. You have likely noticed that central banks and retail investors largely outside of North America around the world have been quietly buying up tonnes of gold. I believe gold recently surpassed US Treasuries as the world reserve asset in terms of value. De-dollarization has been picking up momentum. Thanks to the US’s weaponizing of the dollar as we saw most recently in the freezing of $300 billion of US dollar-denominated Russian assets following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many countries have quietly started diversifying outside of US treasuries in case their country was next. It looks like gold is being viewed as a neutral settlement asset for payments not denominated in US Dollars.
At the same time, the US as an empire is in the natural end-stages of its ability to project power and remain dominant. The US Dollar seems to be at the end of its currency cycle – I’m sure you have noticed the extremely high levels of government debt now – the result of years of overspending on military and domestic commitments – and in the growing absence of foreign buyers, the US is resorting to printing and buying its own currency to fund spending commitments, as almost all governments choose to do at this stage in the cycle. At this point in the past, at least in the past 500 years or so in the west, there has always been a new empire waiting in the wings with the capacity to gradually take over from the old empire. This coincides with the old empire’s currency being gradually dumped as it inflates due to overspending/overextension and the new currency taking over (America taking over from the British, who took over from the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese). This is overtly being referred to as the ‘debasement trade’ now. But what’s different about right now is that there is no other single power able to take over for the US, and the world seems to be flailing around a bit in the attempt to figure out what happens next. The BRICS nations are certainly starting to strategically align but agreeing on which if any of those countries’ currencies should be the next reserve currency is politically challenging for various reasons. Instead, they have floated the idea of a tokenized neutral currency which would be at least partially gold-backed and used to settle trade between BRICS nations. In this scenario, gold seems poised to play a significant role and may actually be worth holding on the individual level, especially in light of the ongoing debasement/devaluation of the US Dollar.
The question that seems to want asking here is, why is there no new power right now with the capacity to take over from the US? I believe it is because we and our monetary systems have run up against the resource limitations of the actual physical world, and there is no area where further growth is possible, in a way that would have allowed a competing power to accumulate resources and rise to dominance the way that past empires have done. So, if this is in fact the reason, we may be closer to the first scenario – the overarching decline of industrial civilization due to resource constraints – than anyone would like to accept.
To me this means gold may be worth some consideration in case the short-term second scenario sticks around for a while longer than expected, but once we get further into the longer-term decline scenario, gold ceases to be a safe or useful tool for trade.
Since peer pressure has been a huge part of the discussion, I want to throw my two cents in about something I find fascinating: it seems surprisingly rare for people to be willing to consider that given we are susceptible to peer pressure, then maybe we should try to harness it. I’ll even provide an example: when I decided I wanted to get back into shape, I joined a running club. I didn’t join for a sense of community, or because I liked running, but because I knew that by surrounding myself with runners once a week, I would able to use their peer pressure to push me in the direction I wanted to go.
I see a lot of people talk about avoiding bad crowds, or about seeking people to emulate, but it seems surprising to me that so few people are ever willing to talk about intentionally joining a group that has and as a group values traits you want to have, so that you can harness their peer pressure.
Synchronicity : today I watched a speech you gave at Masonicon 2019 (on Masonry and the Secret Societies). Within it you also bring up the quote about “footnotes to Plato”, though you attribute it to Bertrand Russell.
Other than that, it’s a great talk, highly informative and you manage to make it funny all the way through. Man, can you speak fast!
Tom W. # 110:
Ah, Molière…he was a great critic against his time vices and hypocrital attitudes (which indeed I think are the same in every times). Rich people trying to “buy” nobility titles or playing a fake aristocratic pose are good example of social climbing attempts in that time. I’ve read somewhere this French writer had some problems with its time censorship…During Modern Age wealthy men with aristocratic desires reality lived with gentlemen whose nobility level hided they were poorer than their titles seemed to say about them.
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Ecoprayer # 122:
I respect and understand your name change, well, it’s true I’m very active in JMG blog…No argument here.
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Alan (?) and JMG # 126:
According my “dilettante” knowledge of History, gold and silver have been the wealth basis for money because of their scarcity. They’re also under the “peak everything” in the future, like another metals. However, I must share John view. Gold is worth to be “collected” only when there’s a real market and strong state in a civilization, like ours or during Ancient Age, as a token for trading things and paying taxes. However, when markets and states become weak, gold isn’t useful anymore unless as a treasure (and it’s a risk to save a treasure in hard times). Middle Age economy was based mainly in feudal debts (in grains and work for example), and self-production. Market was weak until last Middle Age centuries, and it was often a barter business, with a scarce money use. Metal coins were made sometimes by kings with gold and silver, (at least here), but I think more for their propaganda than for using them massively: “Hey, I’m the ruler here!”So, I tend to think gold and silver are near useless in “dark times”, too.
JMG,
Thank you for this post. And right now I wish I had more time for Plato and middle platonists. But this strikes me as a fruitful course for some meditations. I do notice that I am getting, well not wiser, but maybe at least more experienced with age. Still it irks, that other people still keep chasing the old desires and one cannot dissuade them.
Do you have any advice how one can navigate social environments full of heedless people pulling in all the wrong directions?
Also regarding your comment to Alan investing in gold. I have contemplated your counsel and have decided to stick to my instinct. I am scheduled to attend a beer brewing course later this month and will be staunchly opposed to brewing any kind of gold brew. Instead my authoritative voice, since I will be the oldest man attending, shall counsel investing in a brew of oily blackness.
I wonder if I should put on my old man hat and stand there shouting: “Make it as black as my soul!”?
Best regards,
V
@JMG “you really ought to turn off your spell checker. Seeing “Diogenes” turned into “Diagnose” was admittedly funny”
Oh dear lord, this is what happens when I use ummm… Employee provided assets. However, Diogenes did diagnose the situation well.
@David “if you want software to be produced at its current quantity and you want it all to be FOSS (as opposed to just having weekend projects become load-bearing), you need a lot of economic hand-waving to pretend that it can work. If you’re willing to accept a “downgrade” in computing, that vision might actually become feasible.”
That is a fair take, I called it ‘Keeping up with the giants’. In letting the trillion dollar companies define taste in software, the little players could never keep up. It is by design. They make moving targets, especially in internet facing stuff to ensure that smaller competition are always chasing.
I proposed, just do your own thing and do it well. unfortunatly even in the majority of the Linux space they are still chasing rather than just doing their own thing. As for the down grade in computing I will just say the Epicurus line again. “To make some happy do not give them what they want, but take away from there desires.”
“but I can also point the thoughtstopper word “Communist” is widely used within right wing guys to blame easily other people without a reasoned criticism…simetrically as the thoughstopper “Fascist” in the left against their correlative black beast.”
Ah brilliant! A perfect pair those two are. Now if we can have Fascist communists then the horse shoe theory of politics can come into play.
As an aside, with out naming them, I have been to the home of the head of a large “Communist” group a few times over the years. I say it in quotations as I have never have I such rampant consumerism in a single individual outside of celebrities. There is nothing communist about their actions in any way, I suspect they just like feeling different.
Downward and upward mobility between different social classes has made me think eventually in “The Great Gatsby”, an excellent novel written by Scott Fitzgerald a century ago (warning: possible spoiler). It’s IMHO a fiction maybe well based in real cases of “new rich” men who tried to adapt themselves to high class “old money” people behavior, then and in every times of History.
Gatsby has a true motive for his huge and histrionic parties (to attract a rich woman to them); but I also think he doesn’t act only for love: he also wants to be accepted by high class, who suspects he hasn’t got a clean past to justify his fast social climbing. If you haven’t read yet this novel, I recommend you to read it. Movies are good too, but books are usually better than movies, me think.
———————-
A flash from my past: I remember spending my teen vacations during late ‘80s and first ‘90s in a small town. It was a happy time for me, but I didn’t like the status exhibition which some rich boys (and their middle class imitators by envy) did in the streets, running with their noisy new motorbikes those summer evenings. An evident economical power (true or fake) show. Well, there were old good times when everybody here were middle class or pretended being it (ahem).
derek #112:
With respect, I don’t think that I’m missing the point of FOSS just because I think that software can have more virtues than the ones you name. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that they’re quite important! But consider the following situation:
I installed Linux on my mother’s PC, so she wouldn’t have to switch to Windows 10. She mainly used it to rip and burn music CDs and to browse social media sites. The latter required patent-encumbered media codecs, which I installed for her. For whatever reason, they uninstalled themselves several times. This is a quality issue, one so severe that she couldn’t keep using Linux. Instead, she now uses proprietary Android devices (a tablet and a smartphone), both of which are as shoddy as modern big tech software usually is, but have not, as far as I can tell, randomly uninstalled any codec so far.
Would you honestly argue that she should just get over her subjective notion of quality and accept that every now and then, she simply can’t use her devices until I reinstall those codecs? That she she doesn’t know better for preferring a working but proprietary tablet to a non-working but free PC?
The Other Owen #114:
Sure, but as the decline continues, more and more modern hardware will break to the point of being unrepairable. At that point, a 70s-style chip that can still be produced might be better than nothing.
Chuaquin 124:
As I was the one who brought up the communist label, let me assure you that it was not intended as a thoughtstopper. I sincerely believed that he had called himself a communist.
—David P.
I notice a lot of the old will training manuals pair desire and will, which desire directing it. For this reason, will training exercises are usually things you have no desire to do, which have an outcome that brings no gain or loss to your life. In performing the task, you begin to notice your actual will as opposed to the frayed strands of will chasing after (or away from) your desires.
This raises interesting questions for me that I’m not even sure how to frame. If will is best noticed and trained in the absence of desire, is there a counterpart in which one trains desire without involving will? There is always will involved in the Schopenhauerian sense, but I mean in a way that limits its involvement so the focus is on desire alone? Just as there are simple will training exercises, do you know of any basic desire training exercises?
I also note that while will training amounts to taking frayed and tangled strands of will and spinning them back into the main strand that comes from your divine source, desire also exists in frayed form and unified. Each of those self-defeating desires seems to come from a tangled main desire which exists on a higher order of magnitude. There is desire to purchase a shirt, and desire to unify and direct desire (Bateson would call it Desire 2, no doubt). The difference is desiring particulars, and desiring a context in which smaller desires serve the whole system.
Most of the desires you mentioned regarding status seem to reward the physical/etheric plane with goods, sex, changes to the physical world. But there are also desires that reward the upper astral or mental body, creating that higher context which may forego some of the physical rewards but aid the soul in the long run (Desire 3).
Might it be useful to make an honest list of desires, then go through each and decide what larger context/desires they stem from, and whether they pull you down to the material or up to the higher planes?
I’m all over the place here, meaning this was a great thought-provoker, but freedom stands out to me as an interesting thing to desire, as it is essentially options. Once an option is chosen, you are committed and no longer have as much freedom with regard to that thing, but each decision creates a new context and a new life, and desire for freedom would mean constantly reassessing your life to see which parts are yet undetermined and cultivating multiple options for the next round of choices. So freedom and structure alternate in a kind of dance. Desiring specific things is desiring a structure (physical/etheric), while desiring freedom is upstream in that it hasn’t manifested yet (possibilities in the astral/mental). We do have to choose particulars constantly, but the mage would orient to maximizing choice and choosing wisely, which is to say the mage both brings things down into manifestation and also sublimates things to higher planes for the next round of possibilities.
I hope any of that made sense.
Other Owen
“Some of us don’t like living cheek-to-jowl stuffed into european-style cities and apartments. Or memorizing train tables. Or waiting at the bus stop.”
Eueopean-style cities aren’t bad at all. Surely they’re better than the desolate parking lot hellscape that the american city has become. And I would argue waiting in traffic is just as bad as the horror of having to wait for a train or bus.
“Or having to shop at the market every other day because one bag is all you can carry on the tram.”
I would rather be able to walk to the grocery store each day to get fresh food than have to drive a my car to a big box store, load up with stale groceries that will go bad in my fridge before I get a chance to eat them.
“And then there’s the really ugly issue of race and security and public transit in this godforsaken country. Also see: Iryna Zarutska. That’s the pink elephant nobody and I mean nobody wants to talk about. But you had better be aware of that pink elephant if you want to live.”
Oh no! *shudders* brown people take public transportation! But seriously, I’m willing to bet that in the USA, more people die in car accidents each year than die from being murdered on public transport.
“And some of us just like cars as a technology. They’re interesting. All you can do with a train is watch it. Nobody lets you take a train apart.”
This seems like a really weird and stupid reason to build a car-centric culture. People still own and repair cars in Europe. The nice thing is that non-car-centric cultures give you actual options of how to get around instead of the car monoculture.
“Bikes are OK when the weather is good. But when it gets cold your nose snots up and when it rains, nothing stays dry.”
Oh no, a snotty nose! My nose is snotty when I get to work. Nothing a tissue can’t fix. The Germans have a saying “You aren’t sugar, you don’t melt in the rain. Its really not as hard as it sounds to bike in inclement weather. You just bundle up. I live in Utah which is very mountainous, hilly, and cold and I’m able to get everywhere I need to.
A meme on “changing system from the inside”
(I’ll attempt to insert an image, let’s see if it works)
@Stefania #125,
Your practical preparations look very sensible to me 😁
@Alan #105,
” I absolutely cannot envision a world any time soon in which ALL trade has ceased to function, and in which gold and silver are, as Lenin claimed, “only good for lining the urinals of public toilets”.”
Lenin actually never said that. What he said was, “When we win on a global scale, we, I think, will make public toilets out of gold in a few biggest cities in the world… In the meantime, it is necessary to preserve the gold of the Russian Federation, sell it for as much money as we can, and buy goods as cheaply as we can.” (It’s amazing what childhood memories preserve. We did study this drivel at school, but I double-checked the quote now😂 ). Note the future tense. In reality, he confiscated gold and outlawed its ownership (as in “Own gold – go to prison”).
Tsarist gold coins were hidden and useless for decades. They resurfaced during the 90s when people sold them for very modest sums of money and bought necessities to survive.
@NephiteNeophyte #59
Start with Amy Dacyczyn and “The Complete Tightwad Gazette.”
There are NUMEROUS other thrift writers and I’ve read many of them.
Thrift writing goes in and out of fashion, depending on the economy. Thus, libraries will have a section devoted to thrift writing. Look up thrift, second-hand, frugality, penny-pinching, and so forth in your library’s search function (however they do it). Take a look at those books. They are free.
Because thrift writing goes in and out of fashion, depending on the economy, the books also reflect their times. For example, those written before the late 80s all have sections devoted to how to maintain a home bar!
It’s worth reading the older ones because they assume you’re serious about cutting back to bare bones, similar to old cookbooks assume you know how to cook and old sewing books assume you can thread a needle. The more modern ones have a tendency to start with “decide if you need all those automatic payment subscriptions.” Which is an excellent start but what do you do next? The old books have suggestions.
Dennis, that’s certainly my understanding. I recall a study from a few years back that showed that most people, no matter how much or how little they have, are convinced that if they only had twice as much they’d be happy.
Slithy, that’s a fascinating question to which I don’t have the answer. Might be worth some research.
Catoctin, thanks for this! I haven’t ventured over to Takoma Park yet but I know it’s close by, and easily accessible by bus.
Davie, it was my 6th grade teacher who read that aloud — a fine book, and a good place to start such reflections.
Clay, an excellent point — and yes, I was listening to the caterwauls. It’s a fine display of the immense sense of entitlement that underlies upper middle class privilege these days.
Alan, it doesn’t take a complete collapse of society to put a target on the back of people who are known to have stashes of precious metal. Anyone who recalls the events of 1933 will also know that governments can take your gold from you at the stroke of a pen. More generally, it intrigues me that so many gold bugs don’t seem to be able to tolerate the thought that other people disagree with them. I’d prefer not to think that it’s just a desire to drive up the price of gold by getting more people to buy it — but that raises the question: why can’t you just accept the fact that not everyone agrees with your claims?
William, that’s an excellent point. I don’t tend to think of that, since — being autistic — peer pressure doesn’t work on me, but for those it does affect, your strategy sounds potentially useful.
Thibault, I gave that talk on almost no notice as a favor to friends, so I’m not surprised that it came out garbled. Yes, I talk too fast. 😉
Vitranc, the old man hat sounds like a good idea, and yellow beer is horrible. As for navigating social environments, well, as an autistic person I’m probably not the one to ask…
Chuaquin, The Great Gatsby is a favorite of mine! Glad to see it referenced.
Kyle, that’s a fascinating question. I haven’t seen desire training exercises in occult literature, but any book or course that teaches appreciation of any of the arts, for example, could be put to use along those lines. Your idea of listing desires and trying to correlate them also seems very sensible indeed. Hmm…
Ganesh, nope. I’m the only one who can post graphics here — it keeps spammers and pornographers at bay. Post a link and I can post the image.
#96 the other side of this, is sometimes a bureaucracy will go for the low hanging fruit, such that it would rather go after an individual for a minor breach of planning regulations, whereas corporate property developers have their ways to play the system, and similarly coming down like a ton of bricks on a generally law-abiding person who makes a mistake on their tax return, rather than go after the big tax evaders.
@Alan
Before the twentieth century, gold was very difficult to counterfeit or even significantly adulterate without changing its character in ways that ordinary well-informed people could detect within seconds. Either its appearance would give it away, or its weight, or its maleability. Ever watch a historical drama in which a character being paid in gold immediately picks up a coin and bites it? Gold is pretty soft as metals go, soft enough that healthy human jaws and teeth can make a noticeable dent in it, which is not true of other yellow metals that can be polished to a shine such as brass. This is one of the things that made gold useful as a medium of exchange.
These days, businesses that buy gold have to keep what amounts to a tiny chemistry set behind the counter to test the content of the metal offered for sale, because of the fakery that modern metallurgical technology has made possible.
I’m not so well informed about silver, but something similar has happened with diamonds and other precious stones. The fakes are just too good. Some of them, such as rubies and sapphires, can be manufactured now.
I was just rereading George Orwell’s memoir _Down and Out in Paris and London_. When I got to the third chapter, where he loses most of his money in a burglary and has to survive the rest of the month on, literally, the change in his pockets, it was maddening to me how much he wasted trying to keep up appearances. I kept thinking that if only he’d been able to transcend his upbringing enough to be honest with people, the power of networking might have brought him paying work a lot sooner.
Ah, makes sense. Here’s the link: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/67/81/31/6781310289f6e577b76cb1e44022a486.jpg
I just realized that the phrase “upwardly mobile” is itself a magic trick; it focuses on the “upward” part instead of the “mobile”. We’re led to think that the opposite of upward mobility is downward mobility, when the real consequential opposite is being constrained (in either direction).
I grew up in a third-world working-class adjacent context, became actually upwardly mobile and married into a higher social class (fortunately, to a lovely lady who didn’t mind who actually wanted to get away from her milieu a bit). It’s very interesting to see upper-class people who are “upwardly constrained” as well as my own peers who happen to be “strivers” making themselves upwardly constrained too. I’ve also seen a few who quit the rat race and have become actually downwardly mobile; truth be told, a lot of the upper-class folks envy them but are too afraid of taking the steps themselves to be downwardly mobile lest they lose certain (perceived or real) privileges of the status quo.
JMG,
My mind has been set to wondering a bit after your response to Alan above about the holding of precious metals. Luckily as a downwardly mobile former member of the middle class I don’t need to worry about hoarding bags of gold coins! What I have been pondering is more the realities of hitting the point at which the warbands are actually raping and pillaging. Now, in our own coming dark age it won’t be the Huns or the Vikings, it will be our own flavor of warbands, perhaps the descendants of drug gangs or street gangs or military units, whatever. It still seems to me that we are quite a ways off from warbands actively looting and pillaging though but you’re reply seems like maybe you actually are seeing more of a potential for that in the near term future? Would you say that the stage of wandering warbands is in the potential of the next few decades?
HV
Michael Hudson’s book mentioned by Bradley #54 is “And Forgive Them Their Debts.” It’s very interesting reading if anyone is interested. Hudson treats the Bible as an economic textbook.
The Old Gods are coming back? Good. I want to be a Valkyrie in my next life (cue Wagner).
Reading this post makes me happy that my parents went through the Great Depression. The main things I learned from them growing up was to do as much for myself as I could and not be foolish with money. What saddens me is that I am nearing the end of my life and likely won’t see the worst part of the decline and everything I have learned will probably die with me before anyone is willing to listen to me.
> Without going into detail but speaking from experience working for one such person, I can confirm that “pining after things you want and can’t quite afford, or going into debt to buy them anyway” even applies to billionaires.
> Dennis, that’s certainly my understanding. I recall a study from a few years back that showed that most people, no matter how much or how little they have, are convinced that if they only had twice as much they’d be happy.
@Dennis #127 and @JMG #152:
I’ve heard Dave Ramsey say that he has a billionaire friend, who told him something like “You know what’s funny about buying your own jet? You come to the airfield and other people have bigger jets than yours!”
I’d be interested to look at the study that shows people think they’d be happy if they had twice as much as they did now. Not that I’d have to see it to confirm, I see it all the time. I just need to go on one of these personal finance subreddits and find posts to the effect of “I’m living with my partner for several years now, I make $X and she also makes about the same and together we have a net worth of $Y. I’d like to double those before we think about marrying and starting a family”. Meanwhile, here I am, having half the income and a fifth of the net worth, AND three small kids, getting by just fine and actually feeling quite financially comfortable. Of course, everyone on the internet is 6’5″, can bench press 300 lbs., 10/10 looks, and packing in their pants a huge…, er, wallet, but I see that in meatspace as well, and I just scratch my head.
Joan, that’s a great example. Letting go of appearances, though, is a huge challenge for many people — and, er, especially for the English. Not sure why that is, but there it is.
Ganesh, got it. Funny.
Carlos, that’s an excellent point.
HippieViking, warbands are not the only people who can hold your children for ransom, you know. Nor was it warbands that I was talking about! Ordinary criminals, of which we have no shortage these days, are quite willing to do things along the lines I’ve sketched out. As the economy becomes more strained and class animosities become more intense, I expect the apparently wealthy to be targeted more and more often.
Annette, I know the feeling. Perhaps you can write down some of the tips you’d like to pass on to others, and get them into some kind of durable form, such as a pamphlet — there are already people interested in frugal living who might be interested in that.
Carlos, I wish I still had a link to that study!
@JMG
I saw a post on Tumblr advising people who “fell into certain parts of the pro-Palestine movement that were particularly anti-Israel, and [are] trying to get out.” It started with “Right now, you probably feel extremely uncomfortable when you see the words ‘Jew’, ‘Zionism’, ‘Israel’, and ‘antisemitism’. You may feel very strong negative emotions. You may even be triggered into heightened emotions you feel you can’t control. Anger, disgust, fear. You feel it in your gut. Those words probably didn’t cause fear and disgust two and a half years ago. You can unlearn that.”
It sounded like the intended audience could do with some of the same advice you gave Tony C, so I copied and pasted about the last half of the paragraph. The result was posted to joanspoliticalposts dot tumblr dot com about an hour ago. I will edit it to credit you if you want.
JMG,
That clarifies it. As for ordinary criminals, I think we are there now. The start of activities like you mention is something I’m already seeing pop up not so infrequently.
When it comes to ordinary criminals, Ganesh may well be on to something. Not all protected classes are protected by the government. Not by organized crime for that matter. I think a great many people across a great many cultures would say being a part of the right clan or tribe can provide quite a measure of protection!
HV
If I may add my two denarii to the discussion on precious metals in dark ages: it seems to me that you couldn’t simply have anything precious – you needed some number of armed men to defend it, and that meant (in those ages) that you had to be able and willing to defend yourself with arms, too. Merchants traveled in large armed convoys, and they lived in defensible houses (I saw some in Regensburg and in Florence) within very well defended walled towns. Even the wealthier and more highly respected farmers, those whose wife or daughter might use a golden necklace, could call on a considerable number of men on their homestead or in the neighbourhood to defend them. I am thinking of men like Lavrans from Kristin Lavransdottir in 14th century Norway, or of the descendants of Gallo-Roman senators in the 5th and 6th centuries AD. If you desired gold, you had to arrange your life around these necessities!
to Justin Patrick Moore @128 and @136:
Did you see my query at #55?
Warm wishes,
💨✍️⌨️Northwind Grandma💨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
David P #165
I suggested three options: 1 – love it 2 – stuck with it 3 – doesn’t know any better.
If your mother wants to be on social media then perhaps #2, she is stuck with the proprietary system even if she does not love it and does know better.
This post also reminds me of a (very old) joke by the Iranian-British comedian Omid Djalili. It goes something like, there’s an American, British, and Iranian at some high level meeting. The American goes, “My son has a MBA from Harvard”. The British person says in reply, “My son has a PhD from Oxford”. The Iranian goes, “ah, that’s nothing, my son has a BMW from Germany”.
The obvious implication being, the Iranian might have the money, but not the class. At least that’s what it meant to me some 20 years ago when I first saw it (on a Top Gear episode). For me it has another meaning now, which is the joke’s actually on the American and the Brit: their kids’ MBAs and MAs tend to serve little more than just class markers like the Iranian’s kid’s BMW.
Over here in Asia, showing off your fancy car, new iPhone, designer clothes, etc., is common but can be considered rather gauche. However, the one thing that’s almost universally acceptable to obnoxiously brag about is your kids’ “education” – meaning, that they are attending at, or have some fancy degree from a prestigious institution. Thus, parents would bend over backwards to compete for limited slots in private schools, sign up for all sorts of arcane extracurriculars, and so on, y’know, the stereotypical “tiger mom” stuff. I’ve even heard someone at the National University of Singapore (NUS) brag how their institution is at par or even exceeded Harvard. I mean, no doubt NUS is as good if not in some ways better than Harvard, but I know where all the tiger mom types would enroll their striver kids, if given the chance!
Us, we ended up homeschooling. Which has gotten us weird looks, and the inevitable “but what about the socialization?!” questions. Hey, you do you, but on most days we’re mostly done with school by 10 AM and – so far- tended to finish the entire school year weeks in advance of schedule, and *I personally can observe* that the kids can read and know their times tables and so on without having to check their report card.
Oh Ganesh, I almost fell out of my chair with that one!
Alan # 134:
Well, barter and feudal economics “ate” near all the market during most medieval times, but I can also see some gold and other metal coins were made by kings, but more as a prestige and power show (“look my face”) than as effective money. It’s interesting to say that, when Goths entered in Spain during our early Middle Ages, and ruled their new kingdom, they were Romanized and Christianized (though not Catholics yet). They respected the towns structures from Roman origin, and their kings made their own money. Some centuries later, sometimes the Christian kingdoms payed taxes to the Muslim rulers (South of mountains), sometimes when the Muslim kings were weaker, the Moors payed them to Christian kings. This taxes for not being attacked were often payed in gold, “raw” or in coins. But they were special “businesses”, not the average people economics. Pay attention to this data, please.
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M. Gray # 144:
Fascist Communists: Indeed there was in early NSDAP party a Nazi-Bolshevik tendence, until they were purged by Hitler soon. They were anticapitalists and antisemite alike (ahem), so when German corporations started to flood with money the party, they were an uncomfortable tendence.
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David P. # 146:
OK, if someone self labels him as a Communist, he/she could be labelled as a Commie (if he/she behaves sincerely). So I understand you didn’t want to throw the word as a thoughtstopper However, that ideology accurate definition isn’t always easy, and I repeat it’s often used to avoid think seriously about it.
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JMG # 152:
No argument here. I’m glad you like “The Great Gatsby” too.
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Finally, someone has written some comments ago, why the western civilization (as a difference with another cultures), is so centered in freedom. In the short form, I think it’s related with the Faustian belief in Progress. Of course, last centuries in Europe and its diaspora, the modern identity within the parlament capitalist democracies has been based mainly in rejecting bluntly our medieval past. Like Brazilians like to say in a difficult expression to translate it: “Falar merda”(ahem). It’s been a commonplace from Petrarca times until now to point the Middle Age was dark and ugly: feudalism (serfdom), ignorance and so on. In contrast, modern times show the complete individual freedom. I think this narrative has a true part of real
History in it, but in the other hand has another part of propaganda, to justify a not perfect present. Indeed, today situations of near serfdom within corporations and bureaucracies (like EU) can be excused if we compare it with the old bad times of feudalism…Ironically, sometimes European modern nationalism is based in Middle Age kingdoms, which is a Romantic idea me thinks. And Romantics had quite fondness of individual freedom (a clear contradiction me think).
Very good! What worries me much more about the decline of industrial civilization than poverty is the political and social violence that is coming our way. You can get used to poverty, as long as it doesn’t exceed a certain level (I don’t want to romanticize poverty too much). But you won’t get used to being the target of a raging mob or a violent government. Do you have any tips other than staying out of the public eye?
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
The difference between money and class has been evident to me my entire adult life. I was raised in a working class neighborhood but eventually made my way through law school. I married the immigrants daughter, from that same working class neighborhood, and she became a doctor. The behaviors and desires learned in my youth are often at odds with the upper middle class social circles I sometimes inhabit. I too, have changed, and am not entirely comfortable amongst either the working class or the upper middle class.
Some quick and superficial examples: Blue Collar guys show acceptance or affection by merciless “ball busting”. This is not done by the Professional class, who are more genteel. Mercedes and Teslas arouse no lust in me, but a well maintained pick up from the 1980s catches my eye. I whole heartedly support gun ownership, which is unpopular with higher classes. I still have vestigial shame about hiring in any sort of help (cleaners, lawn care, etc.).
I already live below my means, and can recommend it without regard to collapse as the more stress free option. But it will not be without its pitfalls. I am 45 years old. My recollection of the working class of my youth is of one less dysfunctional than today. My wwii era grandparents were unsophisticated, but well behaved folks. Married. Church going. No profanity or addictions. When I return to the old neighborhood, the current working class seems to have a significant rise in social problems. I would have more difficulty living amongst people with those issues than the material deprivation of a poorer lifestyle.
Joan, fascinating. Deprogramming services for the woke cult? It makes sense. If you’d like to credit me, please do.
Hippieviking, that’s also an important point — and knowing how to brew good beer, or provide some other widely desired skill, is one way to make other people interested in keeping you alive and happy. Just saying…
Aldarion, exactly. It’s worth reading chronicles from the Dark Ages to get a sense of just how bloodsoaked things got in those days once gold entered the picture. For that matter, when I was a student of taijiquan some years back, I knew old men who had been trained by teachers from pre-revolutionary China, when martial artists could make a living as guards for merchant convoys. They had some gruesome stories to tell.
Carlos, at this point a degree from Harvard is worth much less than a BMW, which can at least take you someplace…
Chuaquin, it remains true — and can be shown quite easily — that the average medieval peasant worked fewer hours, got more days off, and kept a larger share of the results of his labor than your average modern corporate serf. There is indeed a reason why so much effort goes into making the Middle Ages look worse than they were! As for “falar merda,” iirc, “talking trash” is a reasonably polite and fairly accurate English translation; the impolite version is easy enough to get to from there. 😉
Executed, there are various kinds of evasive maneuvers, ranging from camouflage to leaving suddenly for another country, but the most useful approach is the one that Chuang Tsu wrote about 2300 years ago: make yourself look like a harmless crank amd very few people will bother you at all.
Karl, granted. The decline of a civilization is never easy to live through, and every choice can involve disadvantages.
>Sure, but as the decline continues, more and more modern hardware will break to the point of being unrepairable. At that point, a 70s-style chip that can still be produced might be better than nothing.
Digital stuff works until it doesn’t and then you either replace it or do without. In theory you can scrape off the resin and with the right tools, you can mess with the silicon, seems like Schlumberger made some machine that could do that IIRC. But that’s out of reach of most people both in money and IQ.
I suspect more people will get better at reflowing cracked solder joints to bring back perfectly good chips that just have bad solder connections. Toaster ovens – what can they not do?
Looking at the state of the art of backyard digital electronics, it looks like the 6502 will be some sort of TTL breadboard, and not a fabbed chip. There’s quite a number of people who have demonstrated a TTL version of the 6502 already. In 2070, it could be the local village nerd is making Commodore 64s that look like a washing machine out of TTL discrete components.
Hey JMG,
Would you be able to do a post about what it’s like to live in the US on non-employer suppled medical benefits? For a lot of us, I think that’s the real limiting factor when it comes to embracing downward class mobility. I can keep myself entertained and marginally employed just about anywhere. I, like many of your readers, am not too concerned about making money, keeping myself fed, or maintaining a roof over my head. We are all a pretty skilled bunch with many talents in many industries. But that nagging idea of losing everything to…. Well, I got bit by a ground hog in my garden a few years back and was administered rabies shots. Without medical insurance, that would have cost me almost $25,000. If I lived hand to mouth, with that kind of debt, suddenly the gap between the two of those would become a lot larger.
Thanks!
>Most inhabitants of early medieval Britain, for example, went their entire lives without seeing so much as one silver penny
From about 600 to about 1800 (yes, that late in time) the Brits used tally sticks for money. That’s where the phrases “tallywhacker”, “paid full whack” come from. I think in some rural areas in Europe, tally sticks kept getting used into the 20th, although the authorities were keen to stop their use.
Aldarion # 164:
Of course, to own and save a gold treasure in those times, wealthy people needed a private army to repel neighbours tempted by envy and violent marauders. Even in legends, treasures were protected by a dragon, for example.
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In my final comment (# 169 end), I’ve remembered Petrarca as early critic of Middle Age “darkness” (pre-Renaissance man), but I’ve forgotten to say he didn’t believe strictly in a Progress toward an utopian future (like more recent authors have been thinking until today), but in the old good times of Classical Romans. Which in a very very wide sense could count as a progress, when it’s compared with medieval cherry picked worst horrors; but strictly, he wanted a return of Roman brightness, like their ideological heirs from full Renaissance to Enlightenment times thought, too. However, it’s also true the myths and half-truths about the “Dark Times” have been running within our Faustian progress believers until now.
I also think the obsession with individual freedom has a good side (fighting against oppresive social groups in the past), but a dirty and ugly side too: people without a willing social identity become “atomized” individuals, more fit to be modelled by advertisement/propaganda and mechanized work by modern Megamachines (corporations and states alike). Serfdom in name of freedom.
JMG # 172:
I agree. Medieval peasants had a lot of days off because of this or that Christian Saint celebrations, for example. Like I’ve written in my last comment, cherry picking the ugliest facts from Middle Ages and directly shamelessly lying have been a common place within European elites during the last 5 centuries (or some more, if we count Petrarca as a pre-Renaissance author), to justify the awful effects of XIXth Century, the Taylorist/Fordian times, and so on until present day.
JMG: “it was my 6th grade teacher who read that aloud”
Oh funny, we’re about the same age, I asked Chat-GPT if that was a thing during that time frame. Here’s what it said:
“Yes, reading “A Wrinkle in Time” aloud in grade schools was quite popular around 1970 and 1971. The novel, written by Madeleine L’Engle, was first published in 1962 and gained significant traction in schools during the late 1960s and early 1970s.”
Long term changes you all write about here – I teach Environmental Science and Earth Science to 14 and 15 year olds. At their age some of them will make it to or even past 2100! During the course of the year I assign homework due in 30-70 years. Things like seeing the Gulf Stream fail, successful or failed application of fusion power, establishment of a renewable energy based society, whether the Amazon rain forest transitions to savanna, a big geothermal energy breakthrough based on a new drilling technology (the Quaise Energy company), space colonization, the Cascadia fault off Oregon coast blows, a repeat of the gigantic 1862 California flood, whether thorium/uranium nuclear energy finally comes to the rescue, the arrival of undeniable fossil fuel shortage. I will be likely gone when most of the items come to pass so I tell them to write the results down on a paper, burn it and cast the ashes into the Pacific Ocean my ashes will be. At the end of the school year I give them the complete list to keep with them.
@Joan #162
“”You can unlearn that” and learn what we want you to believe instead” though they didn’t post the last bit. There really is a battle going on for people’s beliefs and some people *cough Zionists, Big Pharma etc* have deep pockets with which to influence influencers and try to change the public narrative. It’s just another trap to fall into. The middle ground is thinking for yourself and being evidence based and historically knowledgeable as much as you can.
I follow both ‘right wing’ or ‘far right’ (if you’re a lefty lol) accounts but I also follow some lefty PMCs so I know their mindset too. The lefties are too threatened to follow anyone on the Right generally speaking. People tend to be very tribal and partisan. For example http://www.instagram.com/what.the.fekete/ is good on Erika Kirk and Trump but will never say a bad word about her favourites, the Democrats. It’s possible they are paying her or her partisan views are just deeply ingrained. Asking ‘Cui bono?’ is very important.
JMG, Back in the 70’s 80’s and 90’s, before the higher education industrial complex had driven themselves in to a ditch, there was a fairly common automobile signifier of class in the NE United States.
The wealthy but lower class family would have a big and expensive luxury car. While the old money upper class family would have a middle aged Volvo ( or similar) station wagon with two carefully arranged vertical rows of stickers on the rear window. On the right side would be fancy prep school emblem stickers, on the left prestigious universities or colleges.
This provided instant status recognition to the valet at the country club or yacht harbor.
Andover, and Princeton would trump Horace Mann and Brown. The number in each row signified how many children you had because unlike fancy handbags you could only go to one of each.
If you only had the left hand stickers it meant you were someone who’s kids had gone to a public school so you were just a social climber, part way up the ladder.
This only worked before the internet ,when you could only get these stickers by going to the campus bookstore.
L’Engle was an interesting person and writer. I’d been doing a bit of the Christian psychedelic folk group The Trees Community, and it led to their connection with L’Engle, and her spiritual mentor Edward Nason West at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. West, along with James Parks Morton, were their spiritual mentor when they became a formal religious community and not just a bunch of hippies playing harps and sitars. There versions of some of the psalms are things I come back to every so often… I need to tease out the rest of their intercnnected story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR0vMY_ibls&list=RDVR0vMY_ibls&start_radio=1
Being read aloud to is great… some of us are auditory learners… and listening to stories is such a natural way to take them inside of us.
Monasticism is another way of being downwardly mobile. That artists might make their own “rule” leads to what I’ve been thinking about as a “bohemian monasticism” –the members of The Trees Community certainly lived that way.
Great interview with them at Psychedelic Baby Magazine:
https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2020/09/the-trees-community-interview.html
@ Carlos M #157
“I just realized that the phrase “upwardly mobile” is itself a magic trick; it focuses on the “upward” part instead of the “mobile”. We’re led to think that the opposite of upward mobility is downward mobility, when the real consequential opposite is being constrained (in either direction).”
That is a fantastic observation, which bears much thinking about! Thank you! 🙂
@ Joan #162
I must say that the Tumblr comment you cite strikes me as rather bizarre, since it suggests that being Jewish or Israeli is “emotionally” incompatible with pro-Palestinian sentiments. Somehow no one appears to have gotten around to mentioning this strange incompatibility to the not insignificant number of Jewish and Israeli people who actively participate in and contribute to these movements.
In regards to cars and car enabled lifestyles, I think it behooves us who currently need them to think about how people lived in our areas pre-automobile. Because these problems were previously solved, for a certain value of solved, which includes different ways of earning one’s daily meals, etc.
In my area it was horse or oxen, and maybe going to town once every month or two, not working in town daily. Making most everything at home from what the homestead could produce.
In yours it may’ve been feet and llamas or dogs or . . .
If we want to stay in our beloved places, we should be thinking ahead by thinking historically.
Now, most businesses here don’t currently have a place to tie a team up, but I also don’t have the skills to handle a team, but I know someone who does, so I have a place to start learning, and I have ample time now to learn before the step-down of lack of fuel happens, you know? Or decide that isn’t for me and go elsewhere.
“Looking at the state of the art of backyard digital electronics, it looks like the 6502 will be some sort of TTL breadboard, and not a fabbed chip. ”
https://monster6502.com/
A few years ago I read that some hobbyist had built a photoresist system and had duplicated a 6502 that ran at half the usual speed.
I also found this while looking.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178789
The original Apple II was entirely TTL logic except for the CPU and the memory. Those very basic LS series chips can be duplicated in a small scale photolithography setup.
By the way Apple’s 50th anniversary is this April.
Apple 1 to MacBook Pro M5 has been quite the show.
Kyle #147
Do you have some titles to the old will training Manuels and tips where to find them? I would like to look some of them over.
Thanks
Great post, as always, and I thought I might share a couple of thoughts on downward mobility:
1) For anyone struggling to embrace the idea “whole hog,” Seneca shared a way to at least get some of the psychological/spiritual benefits of downward mobility, even if you don’t fully commit to it (as he didn’t), and it strikes me that it would be a good stepping stone. He set aside a few days once a month or so and lived as if he were poor – plain bread and water, simple clothes, an uncomfortable bed, that kind of thing. While doing this, he would ask himself “is this what I so feared?” And the answer would be “if so, it’s not actually that bad, so I shouldn’t get so worked up about it.” So, for anyone not quite willing to cut out luxuries you enjoy completely, consider taking “fasts” from them and see how attached you still feel to them after a few months.
2) A term that is usually discussed in the context of upward mobility is “the hedonic treadmill.” The idea is that as you get more money, it’s normal (especially in our consumer culture) to start getting nicer versions of the stuff you used to get when you had less. Wine is a classic example. While you’re a poor student, you drink box wine. Then you get a job and start buying cheap, generic wine in a bottle. Then you get a promotion and start buying fancy vintages. If you get rich, you start buying wine that costs more than you used to pay in rent.
The underlying dynamic is that we acclimate to pleasurable things rather quickly. The wine that used to noticeably better, and so a special treat, becomes the new standard for acceptable. Fancy meals out become what you expect, and plain, home-cooked food becomes unappealing. It’s called a treadmill because you keep changing things, but stay in the same place in terms of actual enjoyment.
I bring it up both because it helps explain why being downwardly mobile can be beneficial (you don’t turn up, or even turn down, the speed on the treadmill) and because it offers some encouragement for going in the opposite direction. Sure, moving into a smaller space might feel constrictive at first, but in those first early days of adjusting, we can remind ourselves that we’ll get used to it and it will be fine.
Anyhow, hope one or both of these are helpful.
Cheers,
Jeff
About the car-enabled lifestyle:
Some of this came about with the rise of suburban developments outside of cities, and much of it was driven by wide-spread, more strict zoning rules that prohibited permanent living quarters within commercial zones. At one point my paternal grandparents ran a small auction business specializing in intestate estate sales. Its auction rooms occupied the first floor of (and the double garage) of what had once been a two-decker apartment house on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, CA; their living quarters were the upstairs apartment on the second floor. Similarly, the parents of a somewhat older friend (IIRC) ran a small pharmacy on the first floor of a three-decker in Los Angeles, lived in the second-floor apartment, and rented out the third-floor apartment. My grandparents did not own a car then, and I think the same was true of our friend’s parents. So far as I know, neither arrangement would be legal in either city today.
I think, initially, I expected this post to be about finance. And in part, it is, when discussing whether the answer to the simple equation M-D (Means minus Desire) is positive or negative.
But you introduced the question of class, which introduces a whole nuther bunch of reflection. 🙂
Growing up in a two-class household, regularly playing and interacting with schoolmates of a class higher than me, and with neighbourhood mates of a class lower than me, left me feeling a perennial outsider who could get relatively comfy in most circumstances, but never quite “fit”. So, actually, class status has not been my temptation, for the most part.
What has been my own trial and temptation is the tribalism you mention. The first real “tribe” I fell out of was the born-again, evangelical Christian church I fell out of in my late teens, although from there I fell IN to various other mostly “activist” tribes, often on ideological bases, while I worked stuff out for myself. Eventually, having worked stuff out, I’d find myself falling out yet again from my newest tribe – feminism, world hunger-ism, pro-indigenous rights-ism, environmentalism, and so on and so on… I will say that each of these tribes has left its mark on me, and while I have eventually had to “fall out” once again, I can safely say I have learned something positive from each.
In my thirties, though, I left all of this “tribing” activism behind, in order to dedicate myself to raising a family, and once the kids were grown, and I “looked up” again, I found some activism going on that suited my general pro-choice outlook, and got involved. And then Covid happened and I found that my “pro-choice” tribe did not seem to appreciate the anti-choice aspects of vaccine mandates, and once again I “fell out’ of a tribe.
So, yes, being a part of a tribe, and the ways in which it influences you… until it doesn’t, is a very deep part of my own personal history. And recently, given some of my active participation in the medical freedom style of activism, I’ve realised the extent to which my very first tribe is the one which has left the grooves in me that run deepest. Having generations of ancestors willing to face torture and loss in order to defend their right to read their OWN bibles, without expert intermediation, thank you very much! well, here I am, defending my right to read my OWN scientific research, without expert intermediation, thank you very much! and also, please note, this highly Protestant readiness I apparently have, to keep splitting from this or that tribe on the basis of a fine point of ideological difference. (For which many apologies to anyone who has felt the sting of this readiness from me… I’m still learning)… 🙂
I think it is time that I took my own advice, and started making ALL my own friends for myself, up close, and in person, and not because any “tribe” has offered them to me. (And in fact, there has almost always been one person from every “tribe” I fell out of, who has remained a true friend – the kind you don’t have to be “tribal” with, while dozens of other acquaintances painlessly fell away).
Scotlyn @ 185: I think the convenient and dismissive phrase for that is “self-hating Jews.”
Hey JMG
On the subject of precious metals, apart from the danger of trying to store the classic gold and silver, do you suppose that the same dangers could apply to the more novel precious metals such as Platinum, or metals that aren’t “precious” but still valuable such as Tungsten?
I think that the same danger would still exist for Platinum, since it is fairly well known that it is precious. But even if you were ignorant of what it is, it looks very much like Silver. But the other metals are a bit more ambiguous. Would bandits want to rob you of your tungsten ingots?
Will O.,
Re: request for titles of old will-training manuals. Sadly, I have since moved computers and don’t recall the titles, but I think I got all of them based on suggestions from JMG and Robert Mathiessen. Maybe they could give some recommendations.
I note that there isn’t much interest in training the will among modern authors. My movement coach actually recently gave his students some interesting will training exercises via a private lecture, though I don’t think I am allowed to share private material. That said, if JMG or someone else wrote a modern update to will training (and desire training!) I would be all over it. Maybe I’ll rework the stuff my coach shared so that it doesn’t copy his material. One of the interesting things about his approach is he gave exercises for the physical body, for the emotions, and for the intellect to train will at all three levels, without explicitly calling them earth/water/air. I found it a clever twist.
The targeting of shiny object holders is happening already.
The home of Sam Altman’s ex boyfriend was targeted last November. The victim was the owners current partner who was tied up and tortured to force disclosure of the passwords to his crypto cold storage. The thief and accomplices stole $11 million.
More here https://www.cryptopolitan.com/how-sam-altmans-ex-lost-11-million-in-crypto/
Will O.,
I managed to find a series of posts on Dreamwidth. Peruse these and the comments and there will probably be a number of goos suggestions. https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/will
Feudal Middle Age society was more stratified than Industrial Age society, whose social classes can be challenged in some cases by upward/downward mobility (in theory) beyond where you were born. In medieval Europe, under the aristocracy (with its inner hierarchy roughly classified in the short form as high and low nobility), people main difference was between the free people (under the kings direct authority) and serfs, who had many legal situations under the different kinds of feudal serfdom; but I think their common short depiction is they had limited rights and some duties under their feudal relation with this or that aristocrat. It’s interesting to point their status was under free people (who had every legal rights a non-aristocrat could have), but at least they were considered as people. Which was a better situation than true slaves. By the way, another interesting hard data about Middle Age is the decline of slaves trade in Europe (as soon as Western Roman Empire collapsed finally), which contrasts with the thriving slave trading within Islamic culture during the same times. A fact that unending modern biased criticism against medieval times doesn’t like to remember…
However, serfdom situation worsened and hardened during the last centuries of Middle Age. Maybe the rediscovering of Ancient Roman Laws in first European Universities was good to another things, but maybe not for serfs. Indeed, Latin word “servus” original meaning was slave (legally, another thing to sell and buy), not a person with limited rights. It’s also sadly interesting that when Modern Age started, first colonial Europe adventures and beautiful and humanistic Renaissance happened at the same time as the start of European slaves trade from Africa to America. But that’s another story.
Lots of opportunity for meditation from this post JMG, thank you, as always.
I came across something I wanted to share, namely because it connects topics from the broader theme of this collection of your essays, those of the Second Religiosity and the Lakeland Area, while also connecting education and class. The subject? A Catholic College opened in Steubenville, Ohio, which is right on the banks of the Ohio River in 2024 specifically to help teach students the trades, while also glorifying their faith.
It’s the College of St. Joseph the Worker.
It’s fascinating to see the Trades continue to get more attention and encouragement. It will be interesting to see if this sort of education helps encourage these ideas and knowledge to continue doing our decline, and if it helps contribute both spiritually and economically to the development of the Lakeland Area. Hopefully one in which the working class, and through them their skills and knowledge, is again viewed with more appreciation.
Annette2,
there are already people who are listening and putting frugality into practice. After one of my parents had a major income loss and related debt problem, they developed a sudden enthusiasm for frugality and proceeded to turn their financial situation around entirely.
There’s also quite a few frugality focused youtube channels, some of which are getting lots of views. If the economic situation worsens much more, I think we’re going to see frugality become very in indeed.
I’ve also gotten plenty of mileage out of frugality, as have other people in this commentariat. I can’t remember – are you one of the people contributing to frugal first fridays over on dreamwidth? If not, hope to see you there.
@siliconguy
On that site – “It’s a four layer circuit board, 12 × 15 inches, 0.1 inches thick, with surface mount components on both sides.” Lol. Not at the 4 layer, but at the surface mount. If you’re going to go old school, you need to go thru hole 😛
>The original Apple II was entirely TTL logic except for the CPU and the memory. Those very basic LS series chips can be duplicated in a small scale photolithography setup.
But what if you had to make the RAM out of TTL components? That’s what would baloon the size up to a washing machine.
Hi John Michael,
It’s funny you mention that, but I’ve been hearing of strange stories of language, bad, don’t do that, or else, coming from the island of our former English overlords. Seems all a bit weird, and you have much greater freedoms in your country in relation to that matter. We’re somewhere between those two points, and that probably is because the voting system down here punishes incompetency. There is no freedom of speech in this country, and never was – the country began life as a penal colony… 🙂
Oh my! Hey, the gold bugs are out in force. You told them that their future strategy for hedging their bets, could fall in value to zero. The way I see the matter, the word ‘decline’ can be perceived as one of the nastiest words in the English language. By the way, I agree with your analysis of the potential risks. History provides solid examples.
Years ago a friend got really upset with me, when I pointed out that a generally accepted risk with managed funds (although he insisted on calling them something else, but same, same) was that the unit holder doesn’t own the underlying assets – units are a bit of paper (or other digital record) which suggests that there is a claim on the value of the funds underlying assets. This is not the same thing at all, and oh my Gawds, I regretted mentioning that I sure can tell you. Incidentally, just to make sure of the strength of the belief system in those things, I tried the dispel on another person who was super excited about the things and made the mistake of talking about them to me over-long, and got the exact same reaction.
You’re pushing on the same hot button with the gold bugs. Always worth mentioning that stuff though. Finding buried Roman coin cache’s is a thing on the island of our former overlords.
Cheers
Chris
Great post JMG. Lots of wisdom. My main question is the relationship between health and income. The evidence is clear, there’s much less physical/mental disease and much more lifespan (10-15yrs) the higher income an individual has. (Partly due to better access to modern medicine, partly due to other factors.) What’s your advice for individuals who accept a lower standard of living but who still want to live as long and healthy as possible?
Carlos M. (no, 167) “Over here in Asia, showing off your fancy car, new iPhone, designer clothes, etc., is common but can be considered rather gauche.”
This sort of thing was the proximate cause of the recent political upheaval in Nepal. The government turned off the internet to keep the youths from sharing outrage-bait photos of local rich people’s kids and their luxury purchases Since a good chunk of those youths depended on the internet for their living, riots ensued. I hear the same sort of thing (outrage over the luxuries of the rich and well-connected) has been happening in Iran..
Carlos M. (no. 160) “I’d be interested to look at the study that shows people think they’d be happy if they had twice as much as they did now.”
Sakyamuni Buddha, call your office!
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Joan (no. 154) “I’m not so well informed about silver, but something similar has happened with diamonds and other precious stones. The fakes are just too good. Some of them, such as rubies and sapphires, can be manufactured now.”
Gold and silver are commodities–standardized products that anyone can buy or sell. Diamonds are not like that–they’re very individual, and flaws are not always easy to detect. The industry is dominated by one big company, and traders are predominantly Orthodox Jews (or in India, Jains) who trust one another implicitly, since a whiff of dishonestly would get one shunned. (Hard bargaining, however, is the norm.) This means you can buy a diamond easily enough, but good luck selling it at anything like what you bought it for, and no sensible person would “invest” in diamonds. The rise of “artificial diamonds” is more than an issue of fakery; it raises fundamental questions about what a diamond *is*. Again, the market is dominated by one company with a vested interest in such things. (See also: “blood diamonds” or “conflict diamonds.”)
Geshe Michael Roach–this is a white guy from New York who became a Tibetan Buddhist monk; “Geshe” denotes a kind of Gelugpa Ph.D., although his may be honorary–wrote a book called “The Diamond Cutter” which is partly a chronicle of his own experience in the industry. He’s not Jewish; it seems that he had a dream about diamonds (interpreted as a Buddhist symbol), which inspired him to work in the industry. At first no one would hire him (see above), but he met some Jews from these families while taking a college course in diamond cutting, and got his break. Roach has since turned out to be more than a little crazy (google him if you want the whole, sordid story), but I found his story insightful. I can’t speak to the quality of his translation of the Diamond Sutra, though (the other part of the book).
😊 Thanks Kyle
Just a tangent on the subject of precious metals. Some years ago, I read a summary of how life had been in Argentina during a particularly difficult economic period. The usage of precious metals in such a circumstance was in the form of using gold jewellery for currency. There was the condition that everyone treated such jewellery as 9 carat regardless of what it might actually be. Anyway, I thought it might be a useful thought for those that propose to keep some form precious metal for future purpose.
Mark, I have never — as in not once in my adult life — had medical insurance. I couldn’t afford it even before Obamacare sent the premiums into orbit, and since then the cost of health insurance has risen faster than my income. When I get Medicare two years from now, I’m going to have to get used to the unfamiliar experience of being insured. One thing I’d mention, though, is that those wildly inflated costs for things like rabies shots are purely for insured patients. If you pay cash, the cost usually drops to a tiny fraction of the notional cost.
Other Owen, yep — and during the first half of that period, those tallies only accounted for a modest share of “income.” Most exchanges were outside the market, by way of customary exchanges (the rent on your average peasant holding, for example, was two weeks of labor each year, during the off season) and the like.
Chuaquin, exactly. Take the rent I just outlined for Other Owen. What if you could pay rent on a house by putting in 12 days of free labor a year repairing the local roads and bridges, and the town mayor had to give you and the other guys a good lunch on each of those days? Most people these days would leap at the chance to have a deal that good — and that was standard during the Middle Ages.
Davie, it was 1972 when Mr. Picou, my sixth grade teacher, read that to us. It was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise miserable year.
BeardTree, excellent! Get ’em thinking in the longer term — it may just help.
Clay, that’s the kind of conspicuous display of status I’ve always found vomitous.
Justin, we’re approaching the point at which monasticism will start appealing to young talented people. When that becomes a trend, watch out below — it usually happens right around the time the downward slope gets very steep.
BoysMom, an excellent point. This is another reason I like living in highly walkable towns with local rail transport, a nice 18th century technology…
Jeff, thanks for both of these. Interesting that they’re both variations on the same theme.
Scotlyn, thanks for this. The old tribal affiliations sometimes run very deep; I wasn’t raised Scots Calvinist, but my paternal family came straight out of that tradition, and I can still see important traces of it in my own thinking!
J.L.Mc12, good question. I think odd metals might slip past if most people aren’t aware of their value. Any really concentrated store of notional value, however, will attract the attention of the violent.
Darren, ouch. Yeah, welcome to the slippery slope that ends in the Dark Ages.
Prizm, huzzah! I’m delighted to hear of this.
Chris, oh, I know. I wasted quite a few hours of my life in the runup to the internet stock crash of 1999-2000 trying to warn friends that they were buying into an absolutely classic market bubble. All I succeeded in doing was terminating several friendships; once I turned out to be right, they never spoke to me again. I think I may make a personal rule that anyone who comes barging onto this site pushing the precious-metals delusion will get instantly banned, as they’re not here to discuss the matter — they’re here to convince people to plunge into the same bubble they’re in.
Kev, you have to take charge of your own health. That means diet, exercise, trained relaxation, alternative health modalities, the lot. There are no guarantees — as I know from bitter personal experience! — but you can avoid most of the usual causes of ill health that afflict the poor if you do those things.
I went without medical insurance for 21 years of my adult life after having had it before then, and my husband went without it for 17 years, until each of us aged into Medicare. We had substantial savings from a combination of luck and frugality when he quit his job in 2001, so we considered ourselves to be self-insured. What we had in savings wouldn’t have been enough in the case of serious injury or a long term debilitating illness, but it was more than sufficient for the example given of a rabies shot.
My husband and I knew we were taking a risk and we fully accepted the potential consequences, including the possibility of death at a younger age than otherwise. We took very good care of ourselves and I learned enough about herbs and cell salts to handle small stuff. We visit dentists and optometrists when necessary, not on their schedule. My husband went to an urgent care facility once, after slipping on ice and hurting his shoulder, which was before Medicare. I never needed urgent care until after I was on Medicare, and so far only once for a short term issue. Even though I’ve been on Medicare for 4 years I still am not a patient of an MD; it’s getting hard to find one who is accepting new patients. My husband does have an MD he sees, but only because he had cataract surgery a couple of years ago and couldn’t get the surgery without an MD’s OK. He gets the free yearly wellness exam and nothing else.
I consider what I learned from not having medical insurance for so long as being one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned. But I don’t devalue medical insurance either. Some people need it. There are things MDs can do that I cannot; if I need one of those things, I’ll be grateful that I have insurance. But Medicare is in danger of becoming too expensive for us as time goes on, so we may wind up self-insuring partially or fully again someday.
@Kyle #196 Thank you for the Dreamwidth link on training the will, eminently doable, started today with the program.
Hey JMG,
As a fellow student of the late, great Mr. Picou, of Marvista Elementary in Normandy Park, greetings! I was about three years ahead of you. Of all of my grade school teachers, he was my favorite.
Did you know he also moonlighted at the movie theater at Southcenter Mall? I remember him telling our class that the French king gave his family land in Louisiana, which turned out to be nothing but an enormous swamp, thus they were quite poor. He was living proof that bad luck need not be permanent. Blessings on him.
OtterGirl
Ah the old gold bug! Once you’re bitten, you’re smitten. Do the math on dollar decline. In 1992 for 400 bucks buy an ounce. Sell it now for 4500. You made 4100!!! Ah…except your money is worth at least half as less to spend. In some cases, all the way down to ten percent. And…the IRS wants your capital gain tax, which will be what? Most of your profit. So you’re out all the time you spent buying it, hoarding it, selling it, and reporting it, plus inflation plus taxes. You’re not making much. Arguably should have just sold it and bought friends in heaven w it, or given it to charity, or bought a bunch of solid tools. And…don’t forget the risk of confiscation, theft and torture. Real wealth is not gold and silver that’s as derivative as anything else, in a prime sense, from actual wealth. If someone gives you gold, maybe it’s pure profit. If you steal it or kill for it, yup, mostly profit. Otherwise problematic. Moths and thieves and rust principle catches gold and silver too. Money especially today in any form has strings attached and gold is no exception.
I just finished Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. A world without a chance of “upward mobility” would deprive us of almost all the soap opera and fairy tale storylines, and that would make the world a bit dull. Desire, romance and ambition add spice to life and it gives us something to strive for and it fits human nature. There is never any real freedom because we are beholden to eating, drinking , breathing, sleeping and maintaining body temperature with clothes and shelter. That’s why almost every single human being (and animal or plant) in the entire course of history has had to engage in some kind of labor. So why not have the best comfort you can afford? You only live once and we’re not taking anything with us when our time is up. Freedom to me is to live in an off grid cozy cabin in the woods after my kid get launched into life
JMG # 207:
Customary exchanges like you’ve written about then, were normal in feudal economics. But I’d add to your view the usual management of common lands by the peasants within a same town or village during Middle Age; some of those commons have survived the Capitalism hunger until today in some European countries…So they’ve shown they’ve worked during some centuries.
******
There are metals which aren’t “noble” like gold, but they’re indeed under the “peak everything” in near future. For example: copper. Today it’s often stolen from railways facilities by Eastern Europe gangs here, so in a future of scarcity you can do the math.
———————————-
It’s interesting to point our Capitalist and Industrial Megamachines claim they’re proud heirs of Ancient Rome and Greece. Even today democracies were partially based in a idealized version of the Athens and Rome politics, I’m thinking in the term “citizen”.
This fondness to the Greco-Roman idealized civilization is correlative to the hatred against Middle Age European times; though for example, first real Parlaments indeed were medieval. Our Classical world lovers usually idealize Ancient Age times. However, they opportunely forget that Imperial Rome was a noisy and dirty city (according some Roman writings), its crime rate was always high, and of course it had an active slave trading thanks, between another causes, to the wars.
Modern term “citizen” was born during the American and French Revolutions in the early Industrial Age. It’s based in an idealization of Roman citizenship and Athens democracy. However, Republican Rome wasn’t a real democracy (then, the Empire was even less democratic). Ancient Athens democracy didn’t include women nor slaves.
Modern citizenship is a nice term: everybody’s equal in front of Law; one man, one vote, and so on. However, there’s a “little” problem called social classes. Which creates a big historical tension between theorical equality and real status differences within Industrial Age societies.
@ Phutatorius #192
“convenient” and “dismissive” indeed, but also, plainly absurd. 😉
But, further to my comment above, re my adventures in falling in and out of “tribes” have shown me the degree to which it is a feature of tribes (all of them) to police their members against non-conformity with the tribal story, whatever that happens to be.
It may be that those most avid to prevent our free thinking and free action are inevitably going to be those of the tribe to which we feel a most close belonging, but whose central story we fail to feel, to see, or to act upon sufficiently ardently.
Hi John Michael,
Your house, your rules is fine by me. Sometimes it’s equally as effective though, to nod sagely, politely disagree, and get on with your life.
Dude, as far as I can ascertain, people who get into that zone, are not receptive. There is a lot of weirdness in that space, and say, another strange example is suggesting that, bonds are considered cash, but are only liquid, if you can find someone to swap ownership of them, for cash. 🙂 You’d think it’d be obvious, but apparently not. We collectively organise society on the basis that commercial interactions are done and priced using cash, all the other representations of financial wealth, are only useful down at the local supermarket, if they are cash.
This is not a difficult concept to understand, but bear in mind someone on the interweb once totally blew my mind when they were confronted with the news that a really cloudy winter produced only 15 minutes of generating sunshine for photovoltaic panels for the entire day. I’d thought that it was an innocuous observation of reality. Apparently the system here was at fault because the person had this model which said it should have been two hours for the day. Who knew that lived experience was so meaningless when compared to an abstraction? Not I! That Giambattista Vico bloke seemed rather clever, he’d have some thoughts on the matter.
Might finally get some rain tomorrow. Yay! How’s the weather in DC going?
Cheers
Chris
OtterGirl, good heavens. Talk about a small world! Yes, that’s the guy — one of my favorite teachers, too. I spent four years at Nautilus Elementary in Federal Way, an open concept experimental school where nobody taught or learned anything, and then partway through sixth grade my mother moved us to a townhouse on the edge of Normandy Park and I landed in Mr. Picou’s class. He’s the teacher who explained to me why grammar matters. I didn’t know about his side gig at the Southcenter theater, though.
Celadon, nicely summarized. My advice remains what it always has been: don’t try to store value, learn marketable skills instead.
Candace, ah, but there are many different modes of upward mobility, and some of those fairy tales turn out to have interesting downsides. I forget the title now, but my late wife was fond of a modern sequel to Pride and Prejudice in which the strains on Elizabeth and Darcy’s marriage due to their very different class backgrounds were an important plot element. She also appreciated the merry mockery P.G. Wodehouse made of more recent upward-mobility-through-marriage romance novels — cheap paperbacks titled Only a Factory Girl come to mind.
Chris, oh, I know. As a practitioner of magic, it astounds me to watch magical thinking taken to such extremes: “I have this asset that’s notionally worth a godzillion dollars — what do you mean I can’t access any of that wealth?” As for weather, it’s as cold as a brass brassiere, and much less decorative. We had a little snow last night, but now it’s 18°F, and the pale weak sun is letting a little light trickle through scattered clouds. Brrr!
“I think I may make a personal rule that anyone who comes barging onto this site pushing the precious-metals delusion will get instantly banned…”
We’ve never had enough money to need to think about it much other than ‘observers’, but from the little I’ve read, precious metals, stock market, special savings accounts with limited access, cash under the mattress and all those financial ‘things’ are so much gobbeldygook – it’s all notional and dependent on the thieves in action and general state of things. Professional financial thieves, professional burglars or chancers who will mess you up for a bit of cash or whatever.
Bacon was in the room when my stepfather received a call from his financial manager of 30+yrs – they had invested his money until there was nothing left (apparently) and he subsequently went bankrupt; but they had managed to take their fees for all those years, so not a total loss.
If your cash doesn’t go Wiemar, your jewellery doesn’t get stolen, you or your loved ones don’t lose some fingers and toes for your passwords etc etc everything is a gamble, but the integrity of the financial wizards is always a calming influence.
While systems run at a certain level they might be good ideas but what goes up can always go way back down and ts far as the banking system goes, I may be mistaken but once one puts it in the bank it is no longer yours and one is a creditor of the bank at the end of a long line of ‘more important creditors’ – Essentially, when ones bank funds are ‘bailed in’, things are pretty much stuffed.
On the plus side, I guess it is one less thing to be fearful of:
Me:’The bank won’t give us ‘our’ money”
You: well at least you don’t have any physical gold coins, somebody will kill you or your loved ones for those.”
It’s all just degrees of screwed-upness and seems like an argument for an argument’s sake.
People don’t seem to need much reason at all for maiming or killing one another at the best of times – I read that the UK is a country that only produces about 40% of it’s food; so if things go bad, I’d say no need to worry about people stealing your gold, pay more attention to how they intend to cook you.
JMG: as it always does in an age of decline — gold and silver attract lethal violence the way a dead rat draws flies. I talked about that here among other places
Alan: But I have to ask you to consider the possibility that you may be, if only at least somewhat, falling into the same sort of false dichotomous thinking
JMG: it intrigues me that so many gold bugs don’t seem to be able to tolerate the thought that other people disagree with them. I’d prefer not to think that it’s just a desire to drive up the price of gold by getting more people to buy it — but that raises the question: why can’t you just accept the fact that not everyone agrees with your claims?
I didn’t get the idea that Alan was doing that so it kind of strikes me as cheap shots – but it is your blog so fair enough, your call to make not mine. No problem.
In many other cultures (India particularly comes to mind) buying gold in the form of jewellery is a really big thing and possibly Chines at lunar new year…
Disparaging the idea that holding a few gold coins gives you some options outside of your new central bank digital currency is an aid to systems control. I’m sure someone would be willing to kill me for a generator and some fuel if they needed to power-up their smartphone.
From my perspective, dissensus is the way to go and having a few gold coins in various weights would be a fine idea and carries no more risk at this point than giving it to the bank or some other financial illusionist – but it’s moot when gold is $5000+ per ounce!
‘Give us all your money and we’ll take care of it’ might be worth believing, or it might not.
It strikes me more as spreading risk – we saw the risk of power cuts and bought a back-up generator, I don’t see any difference in other potential things of use – it’s just the game of life and we aren’t taking any of it with us.
The idea of some gold coins at certain times could be useful resource, at others, a terminal liability. If that comes across as what is called a ‘gold bug’ spit spit, well so it goes; at the moment I am a books, tools and food bug since the idea of having 3 months edibles seems cautious back-up – but somebody would kill me for my tinned beans too I think. Perhaps I’d be better off not doing that just in case.
But if I were suddenly to unexpectedly have cash to spend, paper cash seems in decline, so I’d pick ‘roulette tables’ and select different numbers (forms). I’d gamble in several areas and physical assets (at this point) still have use, particularly if the volatility in the prices of commodities is more indicative of fiat depreciation.
Delusional? Perhaps.
But because I have no idea what is going to happen, spreading risk and opportunity across several areas would not be me attempting to pump the price of gold nor forming it into an idol 😉
The argument of gold vs no gold is irrelevant to me because if we had actual gold bars, we’d buy somewhere to live – but even then the gov could steal that from us at the stroke of a pen or failure to pay property tax. So nobody owns what they think they own anyway; but of course it will take the demise of the physical to bring that idea properly home.
The question to me is not the pros and cons of various commodities and risk of death associated with them; rather, it is this: if we cannot change the mafia from the inside, what range of acceptable responses are there?
Rant off/
I wasn’t implying that you hadn’t said ‘mostly’ or didn’t realize that the police do indeed operate in magician states. Part of what I was looking to say was what
@Bridge #120 later said ‘as there are less and less desirable goodies on offer in declining societies that more brutal methods are going to be the way forward for governments.’ Another piece that feels front and center in my world was pointed to by
@Mawkernewak responding to #96 re: ‘coming down like a ton of bricks on a generally law-abiding person who makes a mistake on their tax return, rather than go after the big tax evaders.’
Which brings me to
@Chaquin #124 and the two-tiered justice system jmg references which does indeed bring some very specific freedom associated w upper classes. You seem to unironically end your comment saying, after a meditation on fantasy world without economically motivated crimes that we need ‘police’ because ‘human nature always will lead a few people to harm the other…for example children abusers and another non-economically motived crimes.’ Meanwhile 80% of people in our county jail are there for drug possession, the police *are trafficking at the level right above the main civilian pipeline* (base layer of ‘control what they desire, supply-side of drug trade matters too and it’s a public-private partnership across the board) and running a paid confidential informant network including *almost* everyone using to compromise and play games with the townies. Meanwhile the OSS officer father Barr of the attny general Barr who oversees Epsteins death in prison got epstein his first job while writing pulp sci-fi about kidnapping young virgins from around the galaxy and raping/taming/breeding superior beings with them. And the FBI said there was no evidence Epstein trafficked *to* anyone or any crimes to investigate in the files. So… the level of separation in the tiers is getting such that the whole thing becomes illigitimate. A good presentation of that w Ian Carroll and Tucker Carlson video/podcast yesterday. Includes riff: as a Democratic republic the nation is built on voluntary agreement– vote, pay taxes, accept court judgements and election results– but that agreement is based on belief that ‘ok, gov is flawed but it is basically meant to provide goods/benefits for citizens’. But if epstein and close pals at JP Morgan lit fuse on 08 financial crisis w epstein’s CDO buying company in order to buy up Bear Stearns and suck down stimulus money, while also buying up girl children to play Snow White and Beauty and the Beast on the island for these guys and obviously worse…. the boomers can just turn their heads and say ‘this is too weird it cant be imma ignore this my last years’ and the kids raised on cynical chaotic unreality of pure digital media can say ‘whatever, of course the country/world is ruled by satanic pedophiles’ but the people from like 30-50 should say ‘what the bleep, I’m supposed to be coming into my own in this place, I remember when we believed back before 9/11 and I can’t stand for this thing.
In my last comment (# 214), my phrase “one man, one vote” remembers evidently the struggle for universal MALE vote in past times, but I hope female commenters don’t be upset against me for having forgotten to remember the FEMALE universal vote was indeed allowed in western countries a time later…For example, here women vote was approved less than a century ago (but there are worse cases within Europe, ahem). Of course, universal vote for every adult has been an advance for legal equality, but it doesn’t invalidate my view about its contradiction with real equality (the social classes thing). I think parlament democracy and Capitalist economics are related, but they are to some extent, a problematic “marriage”, me think. For example, look at the quality democratic level within the EU high spheres (cough). How much real democratic consensus and legitimicy have their economic decisions? I’m afraid not much (lobbies). So citizens theorical legal status in real world seems nearer to a modern serfdom, me think.
Candace D (#212) wrote: “You only live once and we’re not taking anything with us when our time is up. ”
This is highly debatable at the very least, and IMHO outright false. Many occultists, esotericists and mystics have had experiences that convinced them of its falsity.
And even if you do only live once and take nothing with you, you leave the heritage of your life to your descendants and to the generations that follow you — which is a thing of enormous value. No one is an island isolated within the flowing river of history, however much one might wish to be. Like it or hate it, each of us is a significant part of that flow. So what each of us does in life has small, but far-reaching consequences for generations and generations.
I love Wodehouse, he’s so funny! I think freedom is simply having the time, physical wherewithal and the ability to do what you enjoy. Freedom is also the ability not to have the psychopaths in the world infringe to much with their taxes, diseases or wars aimed at you, or be forced to be the their customers of snake oil vaccines or processed food poisoning, and not to have to deal with the consequences of living in the ecology that is damaged fulfilling what we desire through mining and industry. It’s an imperfect system and I’m grateful to be part of it.
JMG, I would welcome an essay in your inimitable manner on why grammar matters. Similar, related topics could include the changes in acceptable usage and grammar in English–the double negative can be a strong statement of belief and intention–we see around us. Consider the difference between a polite No, thank you, and I don’t want no… There are appropriate times and places to use both of those formulations.
So many folks these days are speaking in code, different codes, some of them quite personal, it is no wonder that our boomer practice and expectation of polite chit chat has been discarded by subsequent generations. Mind, I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. Some of the used to be required small talk was quite annoying and not infrequently weaponized. Anything you said could and would be used against you. Relentless cheeriness was a survival tactic.
Celadon # 211:
I met some years ago a guy who told me he had invested in real gold. He purchased “raw” gold in a jewellery legally, paying it with cash money. According him, it was a little piece as big as a Zippo and with form of rectangle, but its weight was 250 grs. (gold is heavy). He hided it under his flat floor during 5-6 years, because he didn’t like banks (?). Then he sold it again to another jewellery and he said he won more than 1000 € in that business over the price he payed 5 years ago to buy it (well, gold prices are going up since a lot of years ago, so I tend to believe him). But when I asked him wether he was comfortable having at home that gold or not, he answered no. It was a continuous motive of concern. He was all the time paranoid fearing someone entered his home and discovered his small “treasure”, when he had to go out to work or another activity. I think it’s not a safe nor quiet business…
JMG your comment on dark age Britain, ( I am a mesmerized follower of that epoch) was what snapped me out of the gold bug spell several years ago. If the entire society crumbles, wealth is destroyed and you can’t spend gold in hell. It pointed me back to the arrangements and patterns that build wealth which are also collective not merely individual, important as that is. Sure it feels good to sit on a dragon hoard but you’d have to be the warlord dragon and then you’re arguably part of the issue itself. And you don’t see the target on your back or the patch in your scales. You cannot eat gold. Sure it’s a store of value but it may not help you at all. It’ll be stored somewhere else, maybe for a long time later. There is an individualistic wet dream looking for avoiding doing ones part and changing. Bitcoin, expatriation w offshore bank deposit funds, gold or what have you. It won’t die until a lot of them just disappear or are shorn of wealth. It’s a big trap thinking you can keep a fantastic life while everyone burns in hell around you. I appreciate the clarity you bring on this stuff.
https://xcancel.com/WomenSafety_UK/status/2020133447566540833
Horribly off-topic but now British women, in groups, in public, in front of an internet camera, are starting to dress – as Amelia. And say Amelia things. I thought this phenomena is notice-worthy.
Remember the beauty mark, ladies. It’s part of the costume.
An important message, JMG, one that is repeating from time to time!
Banks and credit card companies hate me because I avoid debt like it’s the plague, and therefore they are not making any money off my back. Ah, freedom! I remember many years ago having a good laugh when one of the lottery advertisements in Canada had the tag line: “imagine the freedom!” Yeah, right. I’ll pass, thank you very much: I’m not into illusory freedom.
What can marketers do with a person whose lifelong motto is “simple living and high thinking” and who acutely understands the difference between “needs” and “desires”? Precious little! But that does not stop them from trying to crack this nut. Yawn.
Propaganda and advertising are the two evil spells that the two-headed sorcerer named “Government/Industry” heaps on us day-in, day-out. I’d rather keep tending my garden or (in a winter like this one) shovelling snow.
JMG,
What an immense pleasure to engage with the novel “The Razor’s Edge!” Wonderful prose. Had not encountered this before. It makes it painfully clear how sub-part much writing is these days.
Also, as a report from the trenches, a career shift from the cubicle is not always painless nor is success guaranteed. The temporary gig as a lineman did not result in a more permanent employment as the contractor lost the contract in the competitive tendering or what do you call it. The whole construction sector is slow right now so I got back to school trying to get my foot in the door with refridgeration tech, which is another essential piece of modern infrastructure. One month in, and it is obvious that this field as well as the grid is riddled with all kinds of complexities and risks for the uncertain future. The main solution to all the problems seems to be to “add yet another layer of complexity on top of it”. More challenges means harder jobs means more demand for skilled professionals, which is good for me, but overall I have a hund this will not end well.
Professor Jiang of Predictive History on YT made an interesting point which chimes well with your essay. The idea that a middle class lifestyle is inherently anxiety inducing as you are constantly striving not just upwards, but away from downwards simultaneously, and the fear of the loss of status runs deep… One reason I expect poverty/homelessness hasn’t been solved is that it keeps the middle folk productive.
I do think more should be said about how the downward trajectory really helps you in so many ways, it makes you dependent on others again. Which, when you and others are reliable people, have a camaraderie, or “in it together” attitude, it’s likely a whole lot of energy locally will be accessed and put to work for real work.
I’m optimistic, I’m quite keen to be a helpful member of my community, but it’s hard to be of much use when everyone is isolated in their homes, delivering food to their door from supermarkets and working from home. I see all this collapsing as an opportunity for new conversations and connections with others again. Actually knowing your neighbour, imagine!
For some reason, I just don’t seem to have the “climb the ladder” type of personality, and have been happy most of my life to live below my means.
I did have a little run-in with credit card debt when I was a young graduate student. That was until I realized that I was mostly poor because I was spending $300 a month on interest payments. I reduced spending to only things that were absolutely essential to my survival. It took a few years but I paid it all off and have been extremely debt averse ever since. This has prevented me from buying a house, but it is what it is.
I think what really cemented my habit of simple living is all the backpacking I’ve done, including a long trail. There’s nothing like living for 4 months in the wilderness with nothing but what you can carry in a backpack to make you come home and say, “What is all this stuff?!” I’m really quite content with a dry bed and running water and not much else.
So, I just don’t understand people who never have enough, people who think they would be happy if they only had twice as much money. I’ll never be rich. When my checking account gets too big, I just start giving it away. To me, someone amassing a billion dollars all to themself, is just obscene.
thinking about the whole ‘car vs no car’ argument, here’s my two cents:
I’ve never owned a car in my adult life. I live in Canada, currently in a medium sized city. I have also live in small towns in BC, small towns in the USA(summer jobs many years ago), and a large city in BC. The US ones were field jobs, and I was working and living with other people who had cars and that I could get a ride with for non-work things sometimes but not always. The others were truly living car free. Living car-free is possible in more situations than most car owners seem to think. It is more possible in small towns than you might think, provided that the small town is small enough that you can get around by walking (or biking if you’re physically capable of that) and can actually be quite nice if you don’t need to leave the small town regularly for work. It also works fine in large or medium sized cities with a half-decent transit system.
Where you really start to run into problems is living kilometers outside of town, or where you live a long way from where you work, and there is no bus. Walking 3.5km with a giant backpack full of laundry and library books to the town laundromat and the library, and then 3.5km back afterwards in the hot utah sun is no joke even if you are, as I was then, a relatively healthy and very fit field biology intern.
I do get a little sick of the ‘oh, I couldn’t possibly live without a car’ reaction I see so frequently, often used as a thoughtstopper. Lots of people are managing without a car right now, and plenty of them aren’t in the center of large cities!
And the way things are going, you quite possibly will have to at some point in your future, especially if you are middle aged or younger. Yes, that may result in major life changes, but the world doesn’t owe you a car or the resources to run one, and it won’t necessarily give them to you.
@ Shadow #206
You talking about Ferfal? He said the best gold to sell in hard times was a gold band, like a wedding ring. This also allowed you to shop around, because you could go to different buyers and ask what they would give you for it, and then look sad and despondent and say, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” It didn’t make you look like you were sitting on a pile of gold someone would want to go looking for.
Another option was the gold chain, where you could just chop off a link or two at a time, as needed.
Earthworm, if you feel more comfortable with some gold, by all means. You know my opinion on the subject, but dissensus is a valid principle here as well.
AliceEm, er, so noted.
Mary, I’ll consider it!
Celadon, exactly. In the real world, of course, wealth can’t be stored, since wealth is simply a claim on the labor of others within the framework of a specific culturally constructed system. But I discussed all of this in my book The Wealth of Nature and it’s probably a waste of time to rehash it here.
Other Owen, hoo boy. Starmer may want to be sure his passport is in order.
Ron, I know the feeling. I loathe being in debt and find consumer culture generally pretty dreary, so those two-headed sorcerers yammer spells at me in vain.
Oskari, sorry to hear that the lineman job didn’t work for the longer term! It really is a crapshoot these days.
Tobes, that’s an excellent point.
Slink, agreed. The fetish for extreme wealth strikes me as more perverse than most of the other paraphilias out there.
Pygmycory, very true. Most people can live without a car. They just don’t want to. That’s all very well and good, but as you note, the universe may have other ideas.
JMG: “if you feel more comfortable with some gold…”
That was not what I was saying at all, but no matter.
Current mood: snarky
Current music: Peggy Lee ‘Is that all there is?’
A little too nihilistic for me, but it was either that, Talking Heads ‘Road to nowhere’ or Louis Armstrong ‘What a wonderful world’
This is especially for JMG; from a discussion about the prospective new Federal Reserve Governor. (Warsh)
“The dominant model Brad mentions is the Phillips curve, which Warsh (and I) have long thought was nonsense. I was in the room when a former Fed senior economist acknowledged that the Phillips curve doesn’t work but then said they use it for lack of alternatives. Seriously. One of the things I really appreciate about Kevin’s view of the Fed is that he will reduce the bloat on the economic staff that continues to produce some of the most wrong forecasts of any institution in the world. Seriously, they are like 0 for 300. Simple random perversity would say that they should get it right more often. If your models are that bad and you stick to them, you are not helping anyone. ”
From a different blog,
“The bitcoin “Store of Value” trade has fundamentally broken in two. Unlike gold, which is mined with energy, but then remains “gold” regardless of how much mining energy is expended, bitcoin requires continual energy expenditure to maintain the bitcoin network.”
“AI datacenters pay 3-4x the revenue per kilowatt as bitcoin mining — and the miners are switching.”
“Bitcoin requires a massive, continuous calorie burn (electricity) just to prevent the network from collapsing. As energy prices rise (thanks to AI and the exhaustion of the 2010s surplus), the cost to maintain your “digital gold” rises.”
“Gold is chemically inert. It sits in a vault. Its maintenance cost is effectively zero and largely unaffected by existing value.”
Once the mining cost is paid you’re done. It doesn’t even have to be gold. They have fished 2000 year old bronze out of the Mediterranean Sea. The Egtved Girl’s bronze disk was buried in 1370 BC.
And back to Bitcoin vs AI, this was just in the local news, They were using 18 megawatts. I suspect the conversion will be done just in time for the bust.
https://www.yoursourceone.com/columbia_basin/bitfarms-plans-to-turn-former-bitcoin-mine-near-moses-lake-into-ai-data-center/article_58d0d37e-122a-4d0a-b781-7461acf13b1e.html
@Ambrose #204,
It’s a cyclical thing in Asian politics everywhere. A similar thing went down here recently in the Philippines, it just so happens that chaos was contained by the fact that President Marcos* was smart enough to make himself the whistleblower for his administration’s biggest corruption scandal. The details aren’t interesting, it was the usual public works projects grift that goes on literally everywhere. The funny thing is, one of the contractors who’s now in jail was actually giving interviews to popular journalists telling people about their “rags-to-riches” story while showing off their collection of luxury vehicles, and were even openly saying their “business” took off when they started taking on government projects. Fast forward about a year or so, the company was revealed to be delivering shoddy work, and suddenly the interview was being clipped and shared all over the interwebz. Oops.
*Yes, THAT Marcos… to be precise, the son of Imelda who had the infamous shoe collection. The irony is palpable!
@Chris #216 and @JMG #217,
As I’ve noted a few posts ago, many people actually show off their lack of skills and this is just another class marker. In the old days, that meant you had an army of staff do things for you; nowadays that probably means you outsource everything to the “gig economy.”
I remember Jordan Peterson saying that he’s never learned a skill that he eventually didn’t find useful somewhere down the line, no matter how trivial or useless it seemed at the time. In my estimation, this is 100% true. Even if you’d never make a single cent applying any given skill – basic plumbing repair, let’s say – it would at least save you a few bucks from plumber calls over small leaks or give you a ballpark whether someone’s work estimate is accurate when you do need to have a professional come over and prevent them from pulling one over you.
There is an aspect of downward mobility that I don’t think has been mentioned: vermin like bedbugs and rats. IIRC, the USA was free of bedbugs, or at least you never heard about them, until recent decades. (Unfortunately, the rats have always been with us.) In a time of national decline, it’s becoming more difficult even for those us us who are still keeping our heads above water (at least for the present) to avoid these unpleasant realities. My mom, who grew up during the depression of the 1930 (and was poor) once encountered a large rat in the basement. She picked up a hatchet and threw it at the rat, hitting it and killing it. It is hard to imagine my mom throwing a hatchet at a rat with deadly accuracy, but she told me that she did, and I believed her. Now, at 104, she’s in assisted living, costing about $7,000/month.
re: living car free,
It’s certain that not everyone needs a motor vehicle. Some people do, and some people only think that they do. If you think you can tell what category someone falls in, though, that smacks of arrogance. You don’t know what’s going on under that persons’ skin. Perhaps they look healthy enough, but have chronic pain that keeps them from walking or cycling long distance. Perhaps they have PTSD from being accosted on public transit, as happens all too often. Who knows?
Some people blame classism for propping up car culture, and that may be true– but most of the “car free” advocates I’ve run into have been members of the laptop class. They explicitly looked down their noses at the working class and their pickup trucks, and the working class responded by rolling coal on them. I honestly think that, far more than the fear of looking poor for not having a car, the sheer absolute insufferability of many anti-car activists is propping up car culture by providing a thrust block for it.
(Heck, I’ve been part of that– I remember when JMG was writing “Retrotopia” on the old blog and declared in a fit of pique that there were not going to be any bicycles in the book because we kept annoying him about it.)
Hello Mr. Greer,
I feel like there is an easy answer to why gold bugs are often over zealous. The thing with precious metals is that they are not like most other kinds of investments. People who advocate for gold or silver often want us to go onto a gold/silver monetary system. This means they are just as much advocating for an entire system of political economy. They do what they do for the same reason why democrat socialists get super excited and evangelistic about tax reform. Tax reform is a useful conversation but if one believes their entire society and personal life would get better if you adopted this particular perspective the conversation is much more serious than whether you can get another few percentage points added to your retirement portfolio. Gold brings up similar issues.
For whatever its worth, I hope you keep precious metals as an allowable topic of conversation on this blog. There is talk that some nations are thinking about the gold standard and we cannot have a fully rounded conversation about political economy without addressing this topic. Also, commodities have been suppressed by paper manipulation for so long that it now looks like they are in a good position going forward, which means a lot of well-intentioned people will have reasonable questions about them. I get why the gospel according to gold line of reasoning is tiring, but I suspect there are a lot of good people who otherwise won’t get to discuss this topic from a more moderate perspective if you block it on this blog. Also, it looks like rule of law might stick around for a little while here in the U.S., which keeps gold as a viable investment in the medium term (although I do think your fears about how in dark ages gold equals violence are very valid).
Gold bugs: I know some (real) middle class people, and a lot high class guys, have a safe hidden within their houses. These safes can be used to save cash money, documents, jewels and, of course gold coins or/and bars. Well, it looks like better than hiding a “treasure” under the floor. However, safes can be detected by thieves with enough patience and cleverness; then they can be opened by expert criminals or teared from their place to be opened in a more comfortable place for thieves. Safes in a bank vault seem safer than in houses, but bank robberies sometimes happen too. So I think collecting gold is never a quiet and safe “hobby”.
—————————-
AliceEm # 219:
I think you haven’t understood well my view about the police. My opinion is we like it or not, we can’t defund nor eventually abolish the cops in an organized society, even if you propose an utopian stateless society (Anarchism/Communism) with a minimal
comfort level over the Prehistoric life style. I’m not saying those proposals can be made beyond fantasy level easily, only that if they were possible in reality (less) police would be needed too. But it wouldn’t disappear neither.
My view about the economic based crime and its relation with social and economical inequalities isn’t contrafactual. For example, a heck of the thieves who were stealing people and houses here during the ‘80s indeed were heroin addicts too: they financed their addiction stealing people money and jewels. Their vice made them poor (if they weren’t before) and then became criminals.
The two tiers justice is a reality I won’t deny, but I think the difficult/impossible task of imprisoning high class criminals doesn’t justify letting the low class criminals free on streets without a punishment (which kind of punishment should be it’s a topic beyond my actual comment).
——————
Pygmycory # 231 and JMG # 233:
It’s evident to me, according what I see around me in my town, that car “need” is often a status show need: a personal Spectacle exhibition to show you own a car according your class, mainly in middle and high class, but also within working class people who pretends/envy the true middle class lifestyle. Of course, often car owners tend to think cars are made from nowhere and work without a complex system of state and corporative continuous activities in global and national levels (allowing the long distances commuting), which won’t last forever…There’s too a persuasive commonplace in industrial societies about a “natural” evolution/progress from child bike to teenager motorbike, then young adults buy a car, which must be replaced every …. years. They don’t understand some people prefer to be in the “bike age” yet. However, that evolution/progress toward the “citizen-car” isn’t a natural fate, but a false need fueled by advertisements, me think.
Quite brilliant essay. Condolences for your re-location into the regions of Coruscant and Panem.
For many years from mid-2014 when we re-located from the NYC tri-state into the more rural side of the Eastern Panhandle of WV, (i.e. west of the more tony Shenandoah valley) we had indeed endeavored and managed to live below our means. And were even able to make downward mobile adjustments as the costs of living continually crept… or were nudged… upwards. But the flex is about gone. Now a federally recognized Old Person, will begin to accept SS Payments, but I’ve little confidence the system – a huge pile of Other People’s Money that the predators hungrily eye – will actually survive my remaining lifespan. Of course, like most of my Self-employed peers, I won’t be able to afford to directly retire, but would desire to taper off hours in the hamster wheel.
My Design Studio, did okay in WV, but the past two year I have been carrying ongoing dept on the CCs, which I LOATHE. This is driven massively by the shift of professional and digital tools shifting from licenses and per-use services to the the onerous subscription model. Broadband, Phone, Web Hosting, Email, just about ALL online services that do anything at all useful, even WordPress Templates. Debt, of course, carries punishing penalties in our society’s financial matrix. Also noticed, I haven’t gotten an ILLUSTRATION commission for over two years, and most of the advertising and technical writers I’ve worked with have been forced out of the industry. Thank you to the morally utterly unmoored AI industry that’s fed every image I’ve ever uploaded in any context to the machines, without notice, permission, or compensation.
Further downsizing starts to get into the cold regions of Stuff We Care About. The things that bring my wife and I joy are interacting with our communities – two active fairly like minded spiritual groups, a knitting circle, a weavers guild, a budding Community Taiko Group. We try to see where else we can cut… it gets harder. We’re already quite shite American Consumers, buying only what we need… How unpatriotic! However, as embracing some level of retirement and less dependent on industry graphic sandards, I’ll be quite happy to exit my 30+ year relationship with Adobe and shed my Creative Cloud Membershi . Those people are quite utter pricks, and ALL IN for generative AI, and I do not trust them.
The weather has been truly quite extraordinary. 14 Deg today on an errand, while suffering Bronchitis. 50 mile an hour winds. The 5 inches show topped with 2.5 inches of sleet, what a colleague calls “snowcrete” hasn’t gone ANYWHERE since the weather event almost two weeks ago. Extraordinary. Most of the past week it’s been warmer in ALASKA.
@TylerA
“Perhaps they look healthy enough, but have chronic pain that keeps them from walking or cycling long distance. ”
I have multiple health conditions causing chronic pain and can’t use a bicycle because of that. My ability to walk long distances fluctuates drastically. I still don’t own a car. If you’re living on a disability pension in my province, it does not give you enough money to operate a car, so a lot of the people in that situation don’t own cars.
The people telling me they couldn’t possibly do without a car are very often more able-bodied than I have been for nearly 20 years.
@Tyler A,
also the worst transport-related trauma I’ve had involved nearly getting run over by a guy in a car who wasn’t looking where he was going while turning through an intersection. He only stopped three feet from hitting me. I was on the crosswalk, walking with the light, at about ten am on a sunny july morning.
Earthworm, please recall that as an autistic person, I’m not very good at puzzling out the meaning of long turgid rants.
Siliconguy, thanks for both of these. If Warsh actually lays off a bunch of Fed economists, that will be a rare breath of fresh air — one of the curious things about the profession of economist is that its practitioners are almost always wrong and yet never pay any price for their failures of judgment. An astrologer who got things that wrong that often would be out of a job in short order. As for Bitcoin, blockchain technology definitely has its value, but an asset that has value solely because people think it will increase in price — well, from tulipmania to today, that’s a known phenomenon and it always ends badly.
Carlos, I’ve had the same experience as Peterson, and I’ve learned some very odd skills!
Phutatorius, yep. I’ve managed to keep my homes free of those two, but I’ve had to cope with occasional incursions of mice for years now. I gather from various sources that house mice in particular were all but universal in Victorian times.
Tyler, that’s also an issue! I try not to be annoying about my car-free lifestyle, and I freely grant that in today’s America it’s impossible to get by in some places without a car — I don’t live in those places, of course. But yes, I recall that fit of pique!
Stephen, there’s that, and there’s also the fact that many gold bugs are heavily invested in gold and will benefit very directly if the price goes up — and the more people buy gold, the more the price will go up. Talking your book is an old habit, and one I’ve seen far too often in speculative bubbles in the last thirty years. As for precious metals as a topic of conversation here, I’m far from sure there’s anything useful I can say about them that I haven’t said many times already, to no effect — but we’ll see.
SamuraiArtGuy, granted, it’s no fun having to navigate a declining economy. Eighteen centuries ago it was slave labor rather than electronics that rendered more and more skilled professions useless, but the effects were the same. There are reasons why so many talented people dropped out of the economy and became monks and nuns! As for the weather, yep — I had an esoteric lodge meeting today in DC, which involved public transit and a good bit of walking, in 18°F weather with hard-frozen snow everywhere and fierce winds. Take care of that bronchitis, btw — I used to get that from time to time and it’s not something to take lightly!
I have to agree on the issue of vermin. In Canada, the only way to live free of vermin is to have a detached house in the suburbs, or rotate between new build condos/apartments. Public transit is a common enough way to pick up a pregnant bedbug, so that’s out too.
During the golden age of streetcar urbanism, where many people lived in ~5 story walkups a short walk from public transit, effective pesticides like DDT were both legal and novel, and kept insect levels very low inside multitenant buildings.
Of course, part of the problem is that we don’t admit it exists. There is no reason why apartment buildings in Canada couldn’t drain the pipes once a year and let the whole building freeze during cold snaps, except to maintain the fiction that there isn’t a problem.
Oh, JMG, publish a pamphlet? I ‘m having trouble keeping up with what I’m already doing. And most of what I know is already common knowledge among the frugal crowd (seed saving, etc) but I did post a recipe (?) for homemade toilet bowl cleanser on this month’s Frugal Friday. It’s #6 if anyone is interested.
However, I will try to start a Word document as time permits. And also post more on Frugal Friday.
One of the things I wanted to pass on to my family is knitting socks. Everyone compliments me on my pretty socks, but when I offer to teach them how to knit socks, they come up with all sorts of excuses. When I’m gone, I expect my daughters/in-law/grand to fight over my pretty, toasty warm, hand knit socks. And my knitting needles will end up in a donations bin (sigh). But maybe someone will end up with them and knit pretty socks.
>Most people can live without a car.
I did. I learned tram timetables, carried a folded grocery bag in a coat pocket, waited at bus stops, etc. In the right context, it didn’t completely suck. It wasn’t all that great either. You only got to see the world you could reach by tram or foot and nothing else. You could see what was involved with making it work, lots of apartments and shops all crammed next to each other, no space. I sucked it up and soldiered on. However.
I remember commenting, if you teleported a bunch of Muricans into this european village, they’d oo and ah about 1 week and then the complaints would start and after a month, blood would be running down the street gutters.
>They just don’t want to.
You got that right. Where I live now, it would be a 5 mile march to get to the nearest store, and a 20 mile march to get to a store that sells anything that’s worth half a d**m. I’d hate to live in Montana without a car out in a rural area in January. A 50 mile march in the snow, at 3F.
If you like living in the city, you do you. Not everybody does. Some people pine for spacious skies. Pine, I tell you, pine.
Re: Technology obsolescence – I’ve been running Windows 7 on a laptop that I bought from a used equipment store “PC Retro” in Beltsville, MD. It does everything I want, except that when we upgraded our broadband modem/router, it only supported the latest WiFi security version (WPA3), and my laptop’s WiFi driver only goes to WPA2. So, no Internet, unless I hardwire it with CAT-5 cable. I can do that in a few places, but, as with a mobile phone that only works with a 3G network, the rest of the world can take you out of the game.
re: vermin
I’ve had more experience than I want with rats and mice. Also squirrels. You do not want a squirrel loose in your kitchen.
“William, that’s an excellent point. I don’t tend to think of that, since — being autistic — peer pressure doesn’t work on me, but for those it does affect, your strategy sounds potentially useful.”
I’ve used it to good effect in a number of different cases, so at least for me, I think it is a useful strategy.
On a different note, it’s just hit me that part of the reason so many people have issues with grasping your lack of response to peer pressure is because one of the most common absurdities in modern American culture is this idea that we are immune to peer pressure, and so most people read you saying you are immune to peer pressure not as you saying you are immune to peer pressure, but as you repeating a common trope, and then get thrown off when it actually turns out you are.
This leads to another thought: an awful lot of the weirdness around the contemporary autism debates makes a lot more sense if an unspoken factor driving the debates and madness is the fact that there is a very real sense that autists are closer to the common North American self image in that regard than people who are not autistics, with all the usual mental short circuits that kind of phenomena causes.
OK. I own a 30+yo truck.. just about to hit the 100,000 mark. It suits me needs – one of which, is to annually use my buckboard to haul compost/soil to the comm. garden, to deposit within my plot!). It doesn’t spy on me .. I care not ’bout how it looks – I carefully nourish the blemishes/scratches/dents it receives year after year … I drive probably, at the max, 1200 mi. a year. I DO own a bike .. an e-bike no less .. which suits my cycling needs, being as the local terrain is varies elevation wise – hence the assist that an electric motor provides. I ain’t no spring chicken. My rented abode is around 360 sq. ft. .. with the same footprint below as garage space – which I utilize as storage/shop space. That takes up all of my monthly ss stipend.. what isn’t that is, taken out for my fn bogus medicare ‘penalty’! Part of my parking space outside is dedicated to berries in containers. I don’t do long-distance travel. I don’t do cruises. I shop local, buy mostly second-hand, cook my own meals, put-up/can (usually in the fall..) If my rent was say, half of what I currently pay, I’d be in heaven .. fiscally wise. But that just isn’t so. I guess I’ll finally have to get a bone-headed job, to keep from running a deficit ea. month.
The sentiments of this week’s post resonated with me. I realize this has been my strategy my entire adult life and yes, this has given me more freedom than had I taken a more mainstream path.
In my early adult life (early 2000s) I lived comfortably on less than $10,000 for a period of years. (I spend a little more than that now.) I got used to not making a lot of money, and spending half or less than what I made, so I didn’t worry about money. I have never owned a car, television, smartphone (I have relented to using a basic cell phone though), nor credit card, and resist consumerism as best I can. I have been lucky to have always had cheap rent. I have chosen to work part-time all but two years of my adult life, even though I’ve been offered full time work at my job multiple times. The other day, someone asked me, upon learning I’ve never owned or used a smartphone, “Have you ever at least considered having one though?” My answer was, very honestly, “No never, not even once. Zero desire.” They were astonished. In fact, I don’t think you couldn’t pay me to own and use a smartphone.
Sometimes I think I’ve had the opposite struggle in my life to those who have had challenges spending less and resisting consumerism. Even when I was a teenager, I hated consumer culture and it was easy to resist it. It was easier for me not to buy something than buy something I didn’t absolutely need. Although I’m still very frugal now compared to most people in my social circles, I’ve learned to be a little less absolute about frugality as the sole value I live by — and try to feel okay spending a little more on expenses sometimes — not so much on material possessions (except for books), but on good, nutritious food even if it costs more, certain experiences, out-of-pocket medical care for some health issues, making donations for community projects I support, etc.
By the way, welcome to the area! I live not too far away — right in the city. Although I don’t like everything about the DC area, its walkability and easiness to live car-free are among my top reasons I do like it here. My commute to work is a 25 minute walk. I walk 5 minutes to where I buy most my groceries, 7 minutes to the farmers market. I also walk to most errands I need to do and anything further I easily can get to by bus and/or metro. The woods and trails of Rock Creek Park are a 5-10 walk away, and there I can forget I’m in a city.
Justin, that doesn’t surprise me at all.
Annette2, please do! Handknitted socks are a great blessing ,btw.
Other Owen, exactly. You pays your money and you takes your choice!
William, that’s a fascinating point. I suspect you may be right, as it would explain a lot about American society.
Polecat, thanks for this — another reminder that it can be done.
Beneaththesurface, thank you. I’ll wait until the weather warms up to visit Rock Creek Park, but it’s certainly on the agenda.
JMG, no rehashing that book will do almost nothing sad to say. I’ve not read it, but I read enough here to get the gist which should be pellucid when pointed out and considered. Systems flow and nature rarely stores things at its own level. It’s for below or above which now I think on it puts the caste I mean class system in a poor light. Yeomans work but definitely counter cultural. A little history you’d think would sober people up but nah. It’s a convenient fetish that makes the world go round I guess. Seems like a hard road for a spiritual person. But it might have limited uses that are okay, like bribing border guards in a cold war.
@Chaquin, yes indeed, and what an honest guy. If you have to that’s one thing. I knew a guy who followed his dad’s advice and concealed his gold in a clever place, only to have his mom donate the box of national geographics to the local library. He did not get it back. And that was a small town
Front page headline today in my local newspaper here in the California Central Valley – Could California Leave the U.S.? – subtitle – “A movement is pushing for independence”.The legality of secession was settled by force not by legal process back in the day. During the War of 1812 the New England states were moving towards secession but the close of the war by a sudden American battle victory halted the movement.
The desire to transact seems very entrenched, if not inescapable part of this life no matter who you are, where you find yourself etc. The term, transactional personality, is a slight in the westernised version of good living that I am puddling my way through. I think this machine that I type this through is so popular simply because it helps us transact.
In regards to how downwardly mobile can the poor go, Stephania’s description, first you go to a cheaper apt and eat hamburger, then you get a room mate, then….. Well, what the poor do in my area is go to the food bank, weekly, and that can be lived on, all food groups covered. The problem I also see, so I agree, is what is next ? If that group has gone downward over the years to no money in their own budget left for food, Then issue is soon to be how to stay housed for them. Everything else has been cut at this point for that segment, excepting housing and a few utilities. There is free cell phone and $15/month internet, luckily it is not as cold here as some areas of the country. There are some safety net solutions, and this is worked on locally for those who fell completely out of housing, more need than spots. What should be the safety net is the Federal program section 8 ( 1/3 of income paid by person, Feds cover the rest of the rent), the issue has been that section 8 is limited funds and locally has been prioritized for children in the household, so effectively alot of the slots go to an immigrant family with an anchor baby, but there are also alot of aging baby boomers though in the county. It is obvious that the various government levels see this issue, but there is disagreement between the state and Feds on how to solve it, as we see played out in the news ( print more money to up funds for the various programs vs. take out any corruption and illegal immigrant disproportionate usage down to not only free up funds but to reduce them) .
An obvious solution for some, to me, I do not see this considered or proposed, is to encourage our downwardly mobile poor that want to to move to a cheaper housing area. Many of course do see this and are doing it on their own, California has alot of outward migration to other states to lower expenses. We could locally hire a person or two, or realy just shuffle a couple county employees over to the is role, and help those who are not making it here to explore where they could stay housed at least, and then hire a moving service and give them first, last and deposit to do so, paid by the county or state, dont need to go out of state even, just a less expensive area. There is a large contingent of downwardly mobile on the brink of a sleeping bag on the sidewalk who see the issue but do not have the funds for the move or the mental capacity within their stress to identify a spot, they could use some help with this. It would be less expensive than our local initiatives and would help more people., but this would make alot of PMC homeless initiative jobs dry up, so … ( I am referring to people with a small check, so on government disability or old folk government check only ( Social security, SSI, SSDI) ) SSI is I think around $1,000/month and food stamp benefits on top of that. That is not enough to share a flat in this county.
For us seeing the reality, the lesson is to keep one step ahead via our own initiative. Dont wait until it is too late or just in time, anticipate where the trends are going, locate where you can meet your needs with a cushion of room in the budget, do things to meet your own needs to spend less money, try and make secondary income streams, find people you like to live with maybe well ahead of time if your trend shows you need to go that route. Dont rely on Fed programs to stay funded to pay your rent if you can at all avoid it. Stay flexible in body, mind and habits . Practice doing with less occasionally. GO ahead and cook with no meat for a week. another time, turn off the power for a weekend ( if you cant access your breakers, pretend it is off, so no lights, stove or hot water). The month after, on a weekend, explore what it is like to sleep rough in your garage, or just on the living room floor with the window open. Keep learning new skills to provision yourself or others ( cook, knit,garden, woodwork or ? ) Absolutely spend less than you make and look ahead to trends. Go take walks. Meditate. Etc…
Pygmycory:
Having a racoon or two loose in the house is even worse ! They run straight up the walls, like a squirrel, but they are much more dangerous when cornered !
I had some oranges that were too small to bother peeling and eating, so I hauled out the old manual citrus reamer and pressed out the juice. Sipping the freshly squeezed orange juice, a thought struck me. Even if I was a millionaire, I could not have a better glass of juice. In fact, mine was probably fresher than the millionaire’s. No time lost while the butler carried the glass from the kitchen to the conservatory.
There are many such pleasures you don’t have to be rich to enjoy. A sunny day, a cooling breeze, a stunning sunset, feeling clean after a bath, walking, a job well done, etc. The thing is to be alert to them and grateful for them. Otherwise they pass by unnoticed.
Downward mobility can be painful but doesn’t have to be unending misery.
JMG # 244:
Oh, the crypto money zealots are IMHO far even worse than golden bugs (who sometimes are greedy guys, but in another cases are true preppers, though in the wrong way me think). According my own online and personal experience, bitcoin fans often are middle-class people who pretend being climbing the social classes ladder; their pack is completed with some banal Libertarian (in the American sense) economics babbling. I think they’re even more boring than gold True Believers…
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The Other Owen:
I think context is important to live as a citizen-car or not, though personal will is a motive too, to go beyond the status trap. My personal context in an European middle size town helped me to follow riding my bike until now, though bike culture is weaker in Spain than in North Europe. However, ironically I see people here who live in rural areas depend more of cars than urban people (bus lines from/to small villages aren’t very good for example). However, I used the mix train-electric bike to go and return to my family small village, (50 km from my town), so it was possible for me not being car dependent in a rural context. I also think American context is far more car-dependent than average European countries. There’s also a cultural gap in the use of bus and tram/subway between Europe and USA, me think: here, it’s normal to see middle class and working class people (native and migrant) using together buses and trams, but it seems Americans tend to see public transportation as a very low status marker, under the citizens-car. Indeed, like a lumpen-proletariat context…
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Celadon # 254:
Yes, he told me his story with gold, first to “proselytize” me in gold bugs world, although he seemed to me more a prepper kind of gold owner. But he finally recognized it wasn’t a quiet nor safe “business”. Story you’ve written about the guy who lost his gold by his mom mistake reinforces my view about collecting it. Thanks.
Apologies – the rant had its purpose but the question at the end was the culmination of it:
“The question to me is not the pros and cons of various commodities and risk of death associated with them; rather, it is this: if we cannot change the mafia from the inside, what range of acceptable responses are there?”
Meant in terms of viewing the ruling structures of our societies as mafia organisations, it seems that rot has metastasised out from the higher level to wider institutions and hence more widely into society in general.
The ‘evil’ [vices] have led to increasing stupidity and narrowing of thought processes and the pathologies have been taken on more widely by those outside of the ruling classes so we have more ordinary people adopting the methods in order to get by. Plus of course their worldview has been promulgated via media propaganda – like the efforts to normalise paedophilia.
It is almost as though we have two parallel worlds running alongside one another – a grand polarisation so to speak. My question was dancing around the edges of that and thinking that navigating the rot and maintaining ‘core’ is ever more challenging.
You said: “the result is a kind of spiritual castration” (re controlling desires by brute force) – conversely, the complete lack of reining in of desires at all (by the Epstein Class) and giving full expression to anything self absorbed narcissists might want or to do, where other humans are looked down on as non-human resources , just ‘hackable biological robots’ (Hariri IIRC), this has led to spiritual castration from another path that is possibly more insidious than messing up control of desire by brute force because their attempts to spread corruption through the rest of society by removing all standards of measurement and consideration as to what it might actually mean to be human is an expression of vice and not virtue.
A true expression of ‘evil’ if you will and I wonder where this will lead.
PS
For example, I read that once political power became the thing and belief in reincarnation became heresy followed by the purging of the Gnostics, the situation compounded because western Christianity as represented by the Catholic Church of Rome (Vatican) seems to have become ever more corrupted (like removing the oomph from Mass?)
I have very little knowledge of Abrahamic religions and of the Eastern Orthodox Church I know nothing regards their view of the idea of reincarnation and other spiritual matters. Religions beyond those I also know next to nothing.
Guess I’m wondering if we are in a time of unravelling and at this stage, the process is just going to have to play out, however ugly that might have to be – a predicament that will now reach its conclusion and the beginning of something new born from whatever remains. Petty evils becoming great evils generating more and more stupidity that is likely to destroy itself and much else.
So where I said “what range of acceptable responses are there?” I have some ideas but outside ideas very welcome as a sanity check – I’m looking for intuition/inspiration to help navigate with grace – the worldview of vices is anathema and acquiescence to such is not going to happen even if it means my destruction in this world.
Not meaning to be hyperbolic, but it seems to me that things are really getting extreme and I see little to suggest the ‘party’ has reached its nadir yet.
Good news here are the urban bike culture is thriving now, though later than in Central and North Europe. Bad news are I also see a nasty and ugly side in it (I won’t fall in the kitsch trap, so I’m not going to deny the bad side of cycling people). Good news are more and more people use everyday bikes in my town (especially the electric assisted public rented ones), but in the other hand I see some urban cyclists ride their machines in an aggresive and arrogant attitude. The younger they are, the worse they ride, me think. These people don’t care about pedestrians nor slower bikers safety, and they seem not know traffic laws and lights must be respected by bikes too. By the way, electric scooters riders have an average behavior even worse than worst bike riders, which isn’t a comfortative reality neither. Another “fly in the soup” is the public bike lanes half-privatization “de facto” by the many deliver services workers (bikers or scooters riders); sometimes I think they think the bike lanes and streets are owned by them. I understand their job stress hurries up them, but I won’t justify their attitude neither.
I don’t necessarily want Amelia to take over this week’s chat (she’s a powerful force right now, edging into all sorts of cracks in the collective unconscious) but I’ll just mention, in context of the “Amelia ‘Our Pathways’ FINAL MIX Full Lyric Music Video” mentioned by Rhydlyd (#30) – especially for those who are video-averse: the song begins in Latin (doesn’t every viral pop song? Hahaha) with the words “Per memoriam per terram” (“Through memory, through the land”); breaks into Latin again at the first Stonehenge scene, “Memoria non moritur terra vocat (“Memory does not die; the earth calls”) while Amelia reverentially touches one graffiti-defiled stone; the next time she is at Stonehenge, Amelia cleans the stones of graffiti and then sees the sky above clearing of dark clouds; and the video ends in Latin again with the words “Per via nostrum” (“On our way”): these are the three times when Latin is sung in the video. The lyrics also include the phrase, “this ground remembers every step we make.” Pretty profound stuff: this ain’t no AI ‘puff piece’!
@The Other Owen #226: thanks for the news about British women now sporting the “Amelia look” in public in groups. I’ve been eagerly anticipating such news. The “we are all Amelia” energy is manifesting: glory be! And I hear that Tommy Robinson has announced that ‘Amelia’ herself will be attending the major demonstration in London scheduled for May 15. I somehow suspect that there will be thousands of very visible ‘Amelias’ in attendance!
And for anyone who is interested, I will be posting my own quirky observations and ramblings about Amelia next week at https://mystical-mountain-9.dreamwidth.org.
@ earthworm #218
This is why Himself “invests” only at the bookies… 😉
(They are very honest about the fact that you may walk out of the place with empty pockets, having voluntarily left all their contents behind while courting that lady called Luck).
Rocky Marciano and W.C. Fields are two celebrities known to have stashed their money in many different banks out of fear it would all go missing, and a lot of it becoming untraceable.
We had a case here where someone bought a house. A light switch was giving trouble so he took the cover off, only to discover several gold Krugerrands hidden there. The original owner of the coins could not be established, so he kept them.
Moral of the story: keep track of your stash.
They say don’t put all your eggs in one basket, but also don’t spread them over too many baskets. I believe the optimum number of shares to hold is between five and seven, which gives you a good balance between risk and reward. Might be an indication of how to diversify your assets. (I’m not a financial adviser.)
JMG, in your answer to SamuraiArtGuy (#244) you mentioned slave labor pushing more and more people out of their skilled professions 18 centuries ago, that is in the 3rd century CE, right when monasticism first took off. I would be very interested in reading more on this topic, can you indicate any source?
I would suggest keeping no more gold than you can reliably conceal on your person in ways that plausibly defeat a casual search. Larger amounts being a bit of a stretch.
> The dominant model Brad mentions is the Phillips curve,
When I read that the Fed was using the Phillips curve I nearly fell off my chair. It was totally discredited years ago. We studied it back in 1984.
The Phillips curve was developed by New Zealand economist A.W. Phillips in 1958. He plotted a graph of employment against inflation using the statistics of the time. It was a beautiful curve showed a close relation between the two. If you wanted a bit more employment, all you had to do was inflate the currency a bit.
But update the curve with the statistics available in 1984 and a completely different picture emerges. The curve goes into roiling corkscrew patterns. It was chaotic. That was the era of stagflation when they inflated the currency but employment didn’t react as they thought it would. No responsible economist should be guided by the Phillips curve.
When I was at the record store, I was confronted often by the civilian with a record that was “worth amount of money” regularly. After I asked them who offered that, and why they didn’t take the money, they would say that they saw that price on the internet. I would then tell them that the record was worth nothing, unless you had a buyer in front of you willing to pay it, with cash in hand.
I spent my days using my expertise to gamble that I would find that person, and my offer would factor in that risk.
Hey Chuaquin: start a blog. I would read it.
@Atmospheric River
yeah, that really would be bad. LOL
Isn’t the spell of Gold one of those magi/alchemist things?
U know, u will, u do and u sh*t the **** up!
The spell, through out history, has been used to smuggle your wealth with you and start anew on another dirt.
Excellent, as always, but I still see a giant absence in your meta-analysis.
The systems you allude to are not governed by a “We.” They are not governable by an indistinct “Us.” These systems are now wholly owned and operated by Corporations. Trucks, employment, housing, money, environmental destruction. – all completely under the rule of mindless, amoral psychopathic ultra social command entities populated by power calculus cyborgs like Musk, Dimon, Andersen, ad infinitum. And no thought-guru is anything more than a speck of dust compared to this global human extinction delivery system.
From the diaries of Paul Brunton:
455
“There is an evil quest too, whose disciples seek to serve their lower nature rather than to conquer it, and whose masters show themselves by action or teaching to be monsters.”
I don’t know specifics of what he might have been referring to there, and much as labels are tricky, given all his study it seems likely he knew what he was talking about.
Just calling things ‘evil’ doesn’t quite hit the spot given a world increasingly prone to little more than emoting. Something snippier is needed?
Just now if 6 secs is all there is and an emotional hook is needed to prod minds, memories and thought; perhaps ‘The Epstein Class’ might be a useful three word aide-memoire?
Though I am not sure how it would be formally defined and it would also necessitate an opposite which as you say is also likely to be another bad idea. It’s struck me many times that given the number of self proclaimed lightworkers and chakra wranglers there are, the world seems in a pretty sad state generally. Maybe it’s like the experimental mRNA injections.. it would have been worse without! 😉
Re precious metals, there’s a segment of the blue collar population that swears by it for the sheer anonymity. You can pawn it for cash, pass it on to your kids, or just hold it in a dusty box and no banks, taxes, or government fingers are involved. YouTube is full of pawn stars types who show the sheer volume of trades that go on using bullion; it’s staggering, and as fiat money wobbles, more and more normies are getting on the bandwagon. It’s probably more a fear of our future stability that’s making increasing numbers of goldbugs and silver stackers right now.
Plus they do make some really pretty stuff nowadays 😉
@pygmycory,
I hear you and your frustration. Before my own health problems made it untenable, I did a year-round bike commute for almost a decade though -40 winters, rain, sleet, and hills cars can’t get up without quality snow tires. I was hit by a pickup truck once, but since he was just pulling out of his driveway it didn’t do much more than knock me down, so I got back on my bike and got to work; I couldn’t afford to lose the shift. Luckily I always wore my helmet!
I did it again the next day with nary a thought.
In spite of that, I’ve known people who’d be afraid to step onto the sidewalk after getting knocked like I did, even though it didn’t phase me. Trauma is personal. I have my own traumas that used to cause me to swoon or have panic attacks at triggers that wouldn’t make any sense to an outside observer. (For all the naysayers, therapy does sometimes work. Those triggers are still inordinately stressful, but I don’t shut down like I used to.)
Treating others with grace is less stressful than getting frustrated by their foibles. I can only control myself; the guy in the jacked up pickup paying 100$ for a fillup to get to his office job has his own reasons for doing that. I don’t know what they are; I just allow that they are sufficient for him and don’t bother getting into it.
If one is climbing down from a middle class American lifestyle to one of working class frugality we have a big advantage in todays times. Many of the temptations that can lure one away from this path are no longer attractive. Hollywood is now so feeble there is no temptation to spend money going to the big screen. Restaurants have become so overpriced and poor quality that this is no longer a temptation and the same goes for the traditional American splurges such as Disneyland and Vegas. Skiing lost is allure years ago due to a combination of high prices, crowds and poor snow. Even music concerts ,which were a huge draw in my youth, have dwindled so that I can’t think of an act I would be willing to pay even a modest amount to see live. Decent Opera and Symphony concerts have become almost as rare. The beer festivals that I frequented in the 2010’s are now thin gruel.
But I am very glad that while I was able I build a great tandem bicycle for my wife and I to ride and very glad that we live in a place we can ride for fun and exercise as well as getting to the store without going anywhere near dangerous traffic. So to very roughly paraphrase The Beach Boys ( Collapse was made for these times) . Brian Wilson’s actual lyrics were ” I wasn’t made for these times”.
Alien Observer Report
Earth
Sunday
Definition: The Epstein Class
No formal definitive definition but an evocative term in the 2020s to remind people of behaviours and characteristics that are anti-human as displayed by humans at that time.
One did not need to know Epstein to be an acolyte of that path, it is a case of recognise someone by their actions and deeds, and merely a useful temporal aphorism to remind people of a destructive pattern in human behaviour. This activity has seemed prevalent throughout human history at recurring intervals.
Notes:
The period of 2015 to 2025 saw an unprecedented effort to normalise dysfunctional behaviour – entering 2026, it is not yet clear of the earthlings trajectory.
Related:
Some posited that cognitive collapse occurred via the use of experimental gene therapies, but in occult circles it became apparent that it was also a manifestation of vices [evil] creating a mind state of unfolding and condensing stupidity.
Also:
The Stupidity Virus
An unsubstantiated claim that stupidity is infectious. …see more
Hi John Michael,
Exactly, a person can undertake a transaction with another human being (or business) using either cash, or social credit, but other forms of stored wealth don’t really enter the discussion – they’re not liquid. The flood of tawdry products has meant the swap economy is dead in the water. Look at how cheaply really high quality products can be obtained second hand. That mis-price of quality, is crazy. Criminals of course, have other means of obtaining stuff, but it could hardly be described as a mutually beneficial transaction. Goobermints have even more options, like writing demands upon little bits of paper, plus they maintain a monopoly on violence. Anywhoo, people can believe whatever they want, history suggests otherwise…
18’F is so cold that my summer softened heart quails in fright! 🙂 The other week we cracked the 111’F mark with winds and low humidity, and that was also a bit frightening. Clearly I’m timid! 😉 Good to see that the weather didn’t put the kibosh on your activities, and neither did it here. On hot days I try to spend as much time outdoors as possible up to about 2pm, when it gets extreme – your body adapts to the conditions. Last night was 64’F and I was thinking how cold it was. May have even put on a woollen jumper! Far out.
I noticed that Carlos brought up the subject of skills, and I agree with his analysis. Plus if you have an inkling as to what is actually involved in a service arrangement, it can save you from being ripped off. 🙂
And I see the subject of arty-fish-al programs popped up once again like a bad stench. People have been threatening me with that lot for years now, a very rare person once gloated about the possibility, and I was impressed with the candidly honest display. My observation has been that the more this stuff is getting integrated into business, the more complicated processes become, and that results in a far greater number of errors than previously. If anything, those stupid programs are creating more work for me, mostly and here I’m guessing, because the things have no notion as to quality, or accuracy – they just do. It’s truly bizarre to witness. And I’m just not seeing any great outcomes from the implementation. Sooner or later too, when the investment cash runs out, that service will have to be paid for.
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
Alas talk of storing wealth, has over taken the core subject of your essay, which was managing a loss of status. This tells me much about peoples fears, and I wanted to point that out to the gold bugs.
About 400AD, many persons in Roman Britain probably felt much the same. Decline is impersonal.
Cheers
Chris
Celadon, oh, I know.
BeardTree, if California decided to leave the Union a fairly large number of Americans would say “good riddance.” It could happen.
Amanda, sure, but there are many ways to transact. Money isn’t even that useful in many forms of transaction.
Martin, an excellent point!
Chuaquin, oog. I’m glad I haven’t had to tangle with them, then.
Earthworm, ruling elites have been well stocked with horrible people since well before the dawn of recorded history. It’s a normal part of the human condition and a vast amount of human thought has gone into finding ways to cope, or avoid coping, with it. The notion that our current elites are notably worse than those of previous eras strikes me as the product of an embarrassingly naive take on the past. That being the case, since we’re on familiar ground, no particular novelty is required to deal with it.
Ron, interesting. L’affaire Amelia just continues to get richer.
Aldarion, it’s been years since I did that bout of research, so I don’t have sources handy. Sorry.
Rashakor, oh, there’s magic to it, all right, and a lot of people are under its spell.
Joe Schmoe, you intrigue me. In what way is any of this relevant to my post? Even if you’re right that our current elite classes are somehow uniquely evil, and not just one more typically corrupt and abusive ruling caste, how does that affect the points I made about downward mobility?
Earthworm, ahem. What you contemplate, you imitate. With that in mind, I don’t recommend getting obsessively focused about the evilly evil people doing evil over there…
M Carole, maybe so, but we’ll see how it plays out.
Clay, there’s that!
Chris, I’ve spent large parts of the last two days going to and from esoteric lodge meetings; I’ve been bundled up, but it hasn’t been that difficult. Tonight they say it’ll get down to 8 degrees F, but I’ve got pizza baking in the oven and extra blankets on the bed, and I’ll be fine. As for the way people are obsessing about storing wealth so they don’t have to think about losing status, well, yes. 😉
M Carole (#275),
I’ve done a bit of silver stacking over the years, and share your observations. There are some people who load up on lots of metal in hopes of maintaining class status, others who buy a bit from time to time as a sort of hedge against inflation, others because it’s largely untraceable if you avoid online sellers, and some because it is beautiful in their eyes. I’ve seen people use coin shops as a sort of bank. As one shop owner told me just before silver exploded upward, “You would not believe what we see here.” Yes I would. At one counter someone is cashing in a gold coin, at another someone is presenting a cashier’s check of $40K for a monster box of silver rounds, and next to him, is someone picking through the pre-1965 silver coins. It’s truly a subculture of sorts, with people from all walks of life, with a wide range of interest and means.
OtterGirl
@Clay Dennis Re your #277 post: Amen.
For whatever its worth, I always found your collapse now and avoid the rush philosophy to be intuitive. My father was as paradigmatic a baby boomer as one can be. Not surprisingly, he fell for the housing crisis and went bankrupt. I grew up watching him “needing” to buy whatever was in front of him. It only made him miserable and cost him one relationship after another. Consequently, its been very easy for me to talk myself out of spending money on things. I also picked a spouse who was/is more frugal than I am. As a result, we are comfortably raising a family on a single, working class factory income. We have endured many an unnecessary comments from others over the years, but as I look around I find that so many of the people my own age are divorced. Typically, the main cause of tension in marriages seems to be money related. My wife and I have never had trouble communicating about money because we don’t feel like giving up a particular good means giving up a part of our identity. Honestly, I feel like you could probably write a follow up article to this one just talking about how downward mobility enhances marriage, and about how the first causality of staying in the consummer rat race is the family. That would be a very depressing article, no doubt, but for me this has been the best part of rejecting consumerism. I am not working extra jobs or overtime, even though others might expect me to, because it is more important for me to spend time with my family. Likewise, I live close to where I work because again, it gives me more time with my family. Oh, and it lets be get away with driving cheap cars and minimal gas bills, which again eventually equates to more time. It honestly startles me that most people cannot see this. If you want to have a better marriage… just spend less money.
As it happens, I am in the middle of something along these lines in my work at a PMC class job. I am being asked to behave in certain ways that have nothing to do with accomplishing the actual work, but merely to force workers into meek conformity – much like the way the drill sergeant tames the new recruits into unquestioning obedience. Fortunately, I am a regular reader of your blogs for nearly 20 years, so I saw this coming a mile away. I have been steadily downsizing myself for more than a decade. Even if I lose my job this afternoon, I would be able to live a modest existence for a very long time. If fact, it will free me up to work full time on my family’s small dairy cattle farm. That is something I find far more meaningful and fulfilling that an office cubicle busywork job.
@Teresa #79
The Decline of Thrift in America is available to read on The Internet Archive– Here’s a link:
https://archive.org/details/declineofthrifti0000tuck/page/n5/mode/2up
Thanks to everyone for the reference! I’m looking forward to reading it 😉
@ Siliconguy #235
> A large server farm near Moses Lake that once powered Bitcoin mining operations is slated for demolition and redevelopment as a high-performance computing and artificial intelligence data center
They’re building the damn things everywhere! What will they all do?
When you think about it, an LLM fulfills the same function in human society as a bureaucratic official in an advisory position. It has influence, but no real power. (Ignoring AIs that control industrial processes, and hoping AIs aren’t given executive authority over sections of society.)
The great student of bureaucratic officials is of course C. Northcote Parkinson, he of Parkinson’s Laws. I had the good fortune to hear him talk at UCT on 30 September 1969**.
Take for example the fact that the Pentagon had 32 four-star staff officers at the end of World War Two, and has even more four-stars today although America is not involved in any wars (officially, anyway). Parkinson’s explanation is, to put it succinctly, “Officials make work for each other.”
So that’s what the LLMs will be doing: passing memos to one another, defining spheres of influence, allocating and re-allocating resources, planning for increasingly complex and unlikely scenarios, subtly inflating their own positions and importance, on and on in the great game of clawing their way to the top. While down in meatspace it will be business as usual i.e. not very different.
**The date is significant. The previous evening the Western Cape was rocked by the 6.3 magnitude Tulbagh earthquake, South Africa’s worst. Parkinson, an amiable old duffer, started his talk, “I knew my arrival in Cape Town would be earth-shaking, but I never expected something quite on this scale.”
Martin B. 269:
The Phillips curve, like you’ve depicted it, seems indeed contrafactual under certain
economical situations, so evidently I can say it’s fake science. If it’s used yet by some economics “idiot savants”, there’s not much to say in favor of Economics as a serious science (with its ambitions of being closer to hard sciences and far from social sciences, ahem). An outdated theory shouldn’t have survived until today against the hard facts…Of course, there are serious economists too, but I think the Phillips curve return isn’t good for economics respect as a science.
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John O. # 270:
Thanks for your suggestion, but unfortunately, in my actual personal situation I don’t have time nor opportunity to start my own blog. Well, if I’d start one I’d say to you all.
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Tyler A. # 276:
Sometimes s**t happens, so bike accidents can happen. I’m glad your accident wasn’t really severe, and you weren’t traumatized then. I can tell you I’ve suffered two accidents during my long cyclist life (near 40 years), due to other people negligence, but evidently I survived them.
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JMG # 281:
OK, no argument here!
Hey JMG and other commentators talking about silver
I just got this essay in my inbox, from “The Honest Sorcerer”, that discusses the increasing demand for silver in industry.
https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/silver-a-story-of-converging-supply
Apparently, around 2/3 of the world’s silver supply is used for electronics and solar-panels, and mines are dwindling gradually but steadily. Recycling is only just covering the gap in mining-output according to the essay. You mentioned that one of the reasons why you doubt storing precious metals is a good idea, is that government’s can repossesses any gold or silver “with the stroke of a pen”. I think that this article could offer a potential motive or excuse for a future government eager to move silver from private to “public” ownership, since silver is so important for the renewable energy industry that promises to ensure that the “future” arrives on schedule.
Scotlyn
May Lady Luck smile on him next time!
JMG
“Earthworm, ahem. What you contemplate, you imitate. With that in mind, I don’t recommend getting obsessively focused about the evilly evil people doing evil over there”
And when you ignore something by sticking your head in the sand, don’t be surprised if it sneaks up on you and bites your arse!
There is a big difference between between contemplation and observation but your warning is always worth bearing in mind.
Dear JMG,
You may or may not have heard that on January 28th there was a very strong wind storm in Portugal, where I live. Storm Kristin. Only a relatively small area was affected, and it was one of the most neglected areas of our country, so it didn’t make much noise in the media, but we really did have hurricane-force winds for over an hour (which we have zero experience with or preparation for), resulting in widespread destruction. There are around 800 houses without a roof in my municipality alone (i have no idea of the total number for the whole region, many thousands), including my next door neighbors, and a few others in my tiny village. No one dares to even guess when electricity will be restored. Last I’ve heard, there were at least 60.000 homes without power, after almost two weeks. Self-service laundry places have a 2 to 4 hour waiting line (the ones that are working, that is).
In this tiny vilkage it took some 4 or 5 days for it to be possible to even call the national emergency number. Zero communications of whatever kind. And it took a day and a half for enough trees to be cleared out of the road for a car to get out of here, to inform some “authorities” that this village was in a bad shape.
And the central emergency system in the nearest big city? All land lines were cut by falling trees and posts, and the satellite dishes got blown out of alignment (some were even bent out of shape), so i think this was the last municipality in the country to officially report what had happened and call for national help.
This was followed by two other named storms, bringing less extreme bur still significant winds, and heavy rain in already saturated soils, resulting in floods in other areas of the country.
And of course, we still had our presidential election yesterday, as if nothing had happened, it was only delayed for a week in the few places where voting sites were entirely flooded or otherwise inaccessible. National news (the few I’ve been able to check given our extremely limited internet connection) treat this phenomenal destruction as just another extreme weather event, distant and unrelatable, not the concern of civilized people. Most of our friends in unaffected areas who have seen images on tv have trouble comprehending the immensity of what happened, the scale of upended lives, the impossibility of recovery for many.
I have been fortunate to have been reading you for many years, as well as a few others with good sense, and so my solar system, wood stove, self-built (therefore well-built) house, and lack of a mortgage and a “normal” job make me and my wife the only ones for miles around us who are living our lives in near perfect normality, with a few dozen broken roof tiles being our only material losses (we had spares for most of them).
Of course, I can’t describe what happened to our trees… “devastation” is the only word I can come up with. Most of the smaller trees are ok, except the ones that had a big one fall on them, but all our large trees are either down or severely damaged.
In the situation I find myself in, there are a few things I might say about “collapse” and “downward mobility” which are grounded in actual experience, not theory or projections. The summary: there is no such thing as black and white, clear and obvious go
I honestly don’t have the time or propensity to make my own blog, but might try to answer some questions, if you or anyone wants. Keeping in mind that I really have lots of fallen trees to chop up into future firewood, and not much internet, so it might take a while, if I can answer at all.
Positive energies are welcome for me and my place, especially the remaining trees, and although of course I can’t speak for others, there are probably thousands of people around here that would gladly accept them too, if it was possible to ask them (by the way, what would be the ethics in this context? )
Thank you.
@ JMG and @ Chris at Fernglade – re the discussion devolving into ways to store wealth (so as not to lose status)…
…what I myself had remarked was the fact that the topic being “devolved away from” started out being about how to increase freedom… 😉
“There is a big difference between between contemplation and observation but your warning is always worth bearing in mind.”
The warning about contemplating and imitating brings into focus something me and bacon were talking about re use of internet. It was an idea we were knocking around over dinner – an experiment to consider mind states in the here and now and to think back in time to when we did not use the internet because it did not exist – to see if we can note differences between mind states then and now. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since we first had a modem in the 1990s, but an interesting thought experiment.
Then this morning at the barbers the guy was lamenting the foibles of tech as he couldn’t get his card reader terminal to work properly and said it would be chaos if people’s phones ‘go down’ and they’d go crazy with no internet connection.
Anyway, thinking about pre-internet, what we contemplate we imitate, the barber, and something I wrote last week (“we’re here to do stuff not sit around like rocks”), it’s like puzzle pieces have rotated into place – If what we contemplate we imitate, apply the concept to the things we do and the tools we use!
Plus it fits in with downward mobility, the education of desires and the gardening job list that is longer than my arm! Thank you for a nicely timed puzzle piece! 🙂
Earlier in the comments, there was discussion about the relationship between will and desire. Yesterday, I was reading some Stavish and he referred to will as concentrated desire. That was an intriguing thought… will is desire manifested on another plane. And I can see that aligning with the CosDoc cosmology… Ring Cosmos to Law of Attraction to the Center to Desire to Will… (And perhaps Awareness is related to a desire to exist? Still pondering that one.)
Regarding how to become more sensitive to what you desire (as JMG suggested), I’d like to recommend the Octagon Society lessons. Diotima said that desire is shaped by our expectations, beliefs, and understandings. And those are all affected by the smudges of past trauma that have accumulated on the astral body. As you clean those off, it is much easier to see what it is that actually brings you peace, happiness, and joy. (And the lessons are available for FREE at OctagonSociety.org!)
“One thing I’d mention, though, is that those wildly inflated costs for things like rabies shots are purely for insured patients. If you pay cash, the cost usually drops to a tiny fraction of the notional cost.” Here I’ve got to say that my experience has been different. If you’ve got health insurance, it goes something like this:
Provider: “That’ll be $3000.”
Insurance company: “We’ll pay $800.”
Provider: “okay.”
If you don’t have health insurance, my experience is:
Provider: “That’ll be $3000.”
You: “That’s outrageous! Can I pay the $800 my friend’s health insurance paid?”
Provider: “That’ll be $3000.”
(Months of wrangling and threats of collection agencies/legal action ensue.)
Provider, “Okay, to show you how nice we are, that’ll be $2500.”
That is, it’s reached the point where one of the biggest things health insurance provides is the discount on care. Is it worth the premium? That’s a decision we each have to make.
(Slightly off topic). The Amelia affair, beyond its real origin, has become a good example of how individual “beings of light” are created to be part of an Spectacle, or even an autonomous Spectacle in itself. To me, it’s too evident we’ve seen (and we’re seen now) how a secular “saint” is born: a near religious cult with its supporters and propagandizers too. In the short form, a cult to her personality and epic life (true or not).
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Stephen D. # 284:
I’m glad your marriage has worked well until present day. I think money arguments aren’t the only one cause to poison love relationships, but it maybe it’s the main one, me think. By the way, I’ve witnessed in my country the divorce rate could be one if the highest in EU: from my actual age to the youngest couples I’ve seen around me a true “divorce epidemics” within people who married each other. Happy long time marriages seems to be an exception here. Well, it’s interesting to check divorced people who I’ve heard about them, often they’re middle class (or pretend to live as middle class people). Maybe it’s the status trap. By the way, a time ago I met a divorced guy, some years older than me, who told me he owned a flat to sell or rent. He lived in his mother home after his divorce. A time later, another person told me and showed me with facts that guy had lied: he had no flat, and he had to pay a heck of money every month to his ex wife and children…Another case of fake middle class pretender in my town…
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JLMC12 # 289:
Speaking of silver, a good use of it I’ve remembered it’s as water purifier, though I think silver must be used carefully for that purpose. Its use as water purifier is evidently interesting during the Long Decline, though of course silver is going to be under the “peak everything” hard law (do do the math: it could be more expensive in the future than today). So it’s possible what you said about silver being labelled in near future as an strategic metal by this or that state, and eventually “nationalized” by them.
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Thiago # 291:
Although I think your post is a bit off topic, I hope John understand my comment about it. Well, here in Spain we’ve known there’ve been heavy rains and storms within our neighbour country. However, our MSM haven’t payed much attention to the Portuguese bad weather, at least here real news about the devastation you’ve depicted haven’t been described. We were told by media there were some damages in Portugal, but no more. Censorship? I don’t know…
It’s a pity, I hope you return to normal life soon. By the way, this last weeks winter has been very rainy here. In my town has been raining every day since 10 days ago (my town has usually a dry climate), it’s strange. A too much wet winter. Heavy rains have caused huge damages in the South, in Andalusia too. Thanks for your information.
>I am being asked to behave in certain ways that have nothing to do with accomplishing the actual work, but merely to force workers into meek conformity
Many people were finger wagged at to go get some mRNA shoved up their bloodstream. Many were good boys and rolled over. But some weren’t. And it was curious how little enforcement there was if you decided not to be a good boy. Granted, some of those did get dropkicked for a field goal – but not all, not by far.
So, if you are properly prepared, it might be worth not publicly rebelling (public insolence will always get publicly punished with glee) but just blow it off, ignore the instructions, pretend you never got the orders, pretend you don’t understand the orders (the left loves to do this particular thing), do like an H1B and bobble your head in agreement and then proceed not to do what they ordered when they leave. Make them work 3x harder than you to just get their message across and then make them work to dropkick you out the door.
I went years without health insurance at one point, and my experience was like Roldys, and from what I hear, it is still like this. The uninsured pay full price, the insurance companies get a discount. If you have no assets at all, they will sign you up for Medi-Cal (MedicAid), but if you have a pulse and an income of some sort, they will go after payment at full cost. It should be illegal, to have different prices for the same service, but they get around it by saying that the Insurance Companies are getting a bulk rate discount. Which is ridiculous as patients do not come in in bulk for a procedure, they come in individually at different times. That is for large providers. On the other hand, I am now seeing that an individual provider, not a doctor employed by a clinic or hospital or such, WILL give a cash discount and loves it.
“So that’s what the LLMs will be doing: passing memos to one another, defining spheres of influence, allocating and re-allocating resources, planning for increasingly complex and unlikely scenarios, subtly inflating their own positions and importance, on and on in the great game of clawing their way to the top. ”
“Will be” is ” already are”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moltbook
“Moltbook is an internet forum designed exclusively for artificial intelligence agents. It was launched in January 2026 by entrepreneur Matt Schlicht. The platform, which imitates the format of Reddit, claims to restrict posting and interaction privileges to verified AI agents, primarily those running on the OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot) software, while human users are only permitted to observe.”
Diverting to a different Spectacle, the Mandelson affair has taken down another member of the UK government.
“Tim Allan steps down a day after Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, quits, adding pressure on the PM.”
A quick note about gold–the central banks of quite a few countries (Russia and China especially) are buying large amounts of gold and dumping US Treasury bonds. The economic news I’ve been reading state that this is a sign that faith in the US dollar as a reserve currency is falling. If so, there may be a tipping point in the not-to-distant future where the value of the US dollar drops significantly. This will not only affect Americans but will likely cause blowback in other countries. Especially here in Canada.
Maybe a good idea to prepare for that happening.
Chuaquin #263:
Cyclists not caring about pedestrians is one thing, annoying and dangerous though it may be. What baffles me more is that quite a few of cyclists don’t seem to care about cars either! You’d think that if you’re surrounded by fast-moving multi-ton metal objects, you’d watch out even if you have right of way, nevermind when skirting traffic laws. Maybe they don’t realise just how squishy humans are.
Ron M #264:
> Pretty profound stuff: this ain’t no AI ‘puff piece’!
You’re absolutely right! Sorry, I couldn’t help myself, but seriously, this is the first “AI” song I’m not rejecting out of hand for being made by “AI”. It feels much more alive than other “AI art”. Yet another indication of someone having adopted the Amelia egregore, if you ask me.
Martin Back #287
> Ignoring AIs that control industrial processes, and hoping AIs aren’t given executive authority over sections of society.
Your parallel doesn’t stop there. You don’t want bureaucrats controlling industrial processes or given executive authority either.
—David P.
Tago#291
Animo ! Viva Portugal !
JMG: “I don’t recommend getting obsessively focused about the evilly evil people doing evil over there…”
I’m not sure what I said that made you think I’m doing that, but thought it prudent to consider matters.
My thinking was this:
Since “It is the doom of men that they forget”, in the case of such evil it occurred to me that it should not be able to be easily memoryholed. Creating a structure to try and make a form that reminds people of evil and not to go there, might be worth doing – or not as the case may be! It amused me to memorialise the bastards.
Perhaps I did not express it well and you misconstrued what I meant – by ‘anathema’ I mean something contrary that I choose not to participate in (what I currently perceive as ‘vice’, and my response to that is to work more on what I do wish to participate in (what I currently perceive as ‘virtue’).
In this world of polarities there is always going to be positive and negative in one form and to some extent (yin yang flows) but we get to choose what which direction of flow to move in.
Examples:
To be put in a position of having to agree to a vice in the form of evil my answer is ‘No’.
To be To be put in a position of having to agree to a vice in the form of evil in order not to be killed on the spot, then my answer is still (hopefully!) ‘No’.
In each case my choice would be another direction – in the extremes where someone prevents me doing that, well that is where things start getting interesting in a ‘Nero can kill me but cannot harm me’ sort of way.
What I’m enjoying thinking about are the subtleties of ‘acceptable responses’ where that meme about changing the mafia from inside is looked at through a lens our society is the mafia.
I would like to share a personal tale about my own downward mobility, my flight from the DMV, and how it’s really improved my life.
So, once upon a time, I was a respectable college educated member of the middle upper classes. I’d gone through all the rituals – wasting my parents money on college, where I largely partied and found myself, occasionally studying, getting a degree as the economy collapsed, being unable to use it and forced to live in my parents basement…. the usual disappointments that come from trusting and walking the official path of the modern cursum honorium in our modern Rome.
The pressures to succeed, to buy all sorts of things I didn’t need, were all there, in droves. My home neighborhood I watched as the nice suburban homes became giant mcmansion boxes. It seemed like everyone was competing to have the biggest bland box they could. Still, that never appealed to me, and having the path to those things shut right in my face really helped to break that spell. However, there’s a whole other dream, just as delusional, just as effective at keeping people enslaved, that’s sold to the disaffected. You know what it is? “If you don’t like the way things are, then go fix them.” Don’t get me wrong, fixing yourself and your own life is a very worthwhile endeavor, maybe the only one. But this is talking about saving the world. Making change, making a difference, starting a movement… and you know what all that requires? Money. Power. Means. And that’s how they pull you in.
It’s the other side of the coin. Those who don’t go in for the obvious self indulgence are instead encouraged to be one of the good people, the change makers, the leaders. The thing is, saving and changing the world is something that is both impossible and inevitable. The world will always change, but trying to make it change the way you want… And again, it would be one thing if one was allowed to start with one’s own life and family, then try and improve one’s community and scale up. But instead the only worthy way to save the world is through large mass movements to make a global difference. And without any magic to help, the only way to do anything on this scale is with… lots and lots of money and power. And so you’re right back in the game.
I struggled for years to try and make a difference in the world. I felt like everything was so unfair after the 2008 crash that kept me from getting a job in my field, and I was going to bring together others like me who had been robbed and change this corrupt system. I got believed in Obama, got involved in various protest groups, and eventually joined Occupy, the last group to really call out or question the entire financial power structure. It collapsed for a million reasons – in part because of infighting, in part because of corruption, in part because of infiltration, and largely because the leadership couldn’t inspire anyone into having true faith – their materialism and cynicism had them resigned to the victory of power and money before the fight even began, I now realize. But finally, political games are expensive and dangerous, and the bitterly poor can’t afford to play them unless they have nothing left to lose.
To say its collapse broke me, and led me down a dark night of the soul that eventually forced me to confront the fact that I would never in my life achieve either of the dreams that I believed were the key to happiness. I felt like I was a failure, like my life was meaningless. I mean, what was I supposed to do for the rest of my life – just live?
Just live. Such a simple concept. Not living for anything – to acquire as much as possible, to chase after a glorious dream, but just to live – what a concept! It opened me up to the possibility that these dreams didn’t have to define my life. That instead of being miserable these dreams were being kept from me, I should realize that these dreams were imprisoning me. That I could be happy without them.
Since then, I’ve left my home to flee to the woods and largely just focused on living my life. Self actualizing. Trying to grapple with myself, my feelings, my life, and what actually makes me happy. You know, all that inner work stuff. Oh, and constantly, constantly working with my hands. I tried your advice about asking the Gods, not for wealth when I was poor, but for opportunities to make money. I haven’t stopped working with my hands since then. It’s fulfilling work, sustains a simple existence, and I’ve realized I can be perfectly content working hard for a home and a bit of land. The grand games of politicians and oligarchs and emperors don’t concern me, nor do the desperate posturings of those who want to imitate them. I actually intentionally drive beat up old vehicles and keep my home looking a bit trashy in the front. My taxes are low and I don’t get anyone knocking on my door to sell me anything. It’s a simple life and it makes me happy.
The Other Owen # 297:
If I’ve understand you well, you propose a “passive-agressive resistence”, instead of an open one. Well, it’s interesting to take it into consideration within some different contexts, me think.
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David P. # 301:
You’re right. Some cyclists seem reckless enough to not be aware of cars (and buses and trams too) traffic; maybe they think motor vehicles will stop always before the hypothetical crash. Youth bravado (hormones?) can explain this crazy attitude, at least partly within the teen cyclists. Unfortunately, not always the car drivers notice the bike nutties in time to avoid an accident. However, I think dead or injured cyclist year cypher isn’t as high as we could imagine here, so it seems average car drivers have too much patience and react quickly…By the way, electric scooters riders tendence to near suicidal behavior in urban traffic is even worse than within urban cyclists…
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Anselmo # 302:
I’d like to say to Tiago, like you: Viva Portugal! I hope our Iberian neighbors can recover themselves ASAP after this huge disaster.
@Stephen D #284
HEAR HEAR! My wife and I are handling things in a very similar fashion.
“At the trailing edge of the fossil fuel age… Both parents work increasingly dismal and time-consuming jobs, mostly away from home… Those who prosper most attend to their careers with far greater attention than they attend to their children, abandoning them to the care of strangers for the better part of most days.” (Dmitry Orlov in Reinventing Collapse)
I picked that book up just the other day and decided to give it a read. His perspective is certainly not the same as JMG or many others, but his criticisms of modern society and of Americans generally (he gives us credit for our good traits too) are positively stinging.
Another little excerpt from the same:
“The American model of supposedly unadulterated capitalism is producing steadily sinking fortunes for the vast majority, but it is propped up by the fact that it allows a small minority to become fabulously rich, coupled with the notion that you (or any random person) could somehow miraculously become one of them. There is also a pathological fiction known as the “American Dream,” which is aggressively promoted by the media and finds most of its victims among the working class. It consists of the notion that diligent work and playing by the rules will make you successful. Masquerading as hope, it gains effectiveness from the perversion of pride…”
OWWW! D@#! Dmitry! That stings!
Though I think Orlov would put it differently, I think he would heartily agree with voluntary downward mobility to gain freedom.
HV
Scotlyn
“May Lady Luck smile on him next time!”
Now I nearly did a perpetual never loop there – let me rephrase the sentiment:
“May Lady Luck smile on him”
And while I’m at it,
“May Grace guide and protect us all”
Article reports that one-third of US college kids check their phones during sex. The possibility that this is addictive behavior was not raised.
.https://www.vice.com/en/article/college-students-cant-put-their-phones-down-not-even-during-sex/
earthworm (no, 262) ” and belief in reincarnation became heresy…”
Reincarnation is not the same as the pre-existence of souls, which was what the early Christians were arguing about.
Living on the smell of an oily rag.
I’ve done that my entire life.
Mr. Greer … Thanks for the positive vibes.. The problem I’m trying to resolve is that due to the fact that Port Angeles, Wa. is very much woke adjacent … to a high degree, I’m afraid that ANY job position I may be suited for will implode … due to my resolve to not flinch at stating my angst at whatever faux-liberal bull-sh!ttery comes my way .. that many future ‘co-workers’ feeweenings towards my more conservative sentiments, might cause me personal grief! I’m not one to keep my lips shut, just sayin.. THAT’S The rub!
I’m conflicted as to how to proceed..
@J.L.Mc12
I really appreciated the piece on increased silver usage for industrial purposes. This really shifted my thinking on silver fundamentals, as I’d assumed industrial use was on a secular decline – clearly not so. My assumption with recent silver volatility was due to speculation + futures manipulation (still likely) but interesting there is a fundamental demand mismatch, thanks.
@precious metals
When I was in my 20’s, I was greatly impressed with the advice in ‘great expectations’ that a man should have ‘portable property’, which to me meant gold. While I’ve never had the need (thankfully as yet) for the portability, it has been far from a poor investment (thus far).
@asset allocation
Also in my 20’s, I read a book called ‘your money or your life’, which advocated living beneath you means and investing the rest, the end goal being accumulation of resources that allow one to live independently (not having to sell their labor). This impressed me greatly and I’ve worked along those lines.
So the question of investment is not irrelevant to the downwardly mobile, indeed it is critical. Does one invest in skills, tools, land, metals, stocks, royalties? All of these ( perhaps excluding skills) could in some possible scenario be lost, due to political changes, wars, history gives many examples.
That said, I don’t think there is anything wrong in trying to invest wisely the surpluses that the downwardly mobile would inevitably accrue. There are no certainties in anything, even life itself. But we can make the best judgements possible and live with the outcomes.
To be honest Archdruid sir, that comment was as much a test to see if there was some problem with my computer that had been keeping my posts consistently filtered out these past couple weeks as anything else.
I still beleive the the individual has very little impact on how their desire can stop or shape a whole system.
JMG 172
> make yourself look like a harmless crank and very few people will bother you
That includes wearing downscale clothes.
As a seamstress, in my early education, somehow I managed to miss learning how to fit. Around 2013, I went out of my way to learn how to fit (the learning was interrupted). Fourteen years later, I see the wind changing to be clothes that are less fitted. When I return to dressmaking, I intend to emulate peasant clothes of the European/Norse medieval centuries, meaning fittinh neck, shoulders, and arm, then let the garment fall loosely. “Loosely falling” itself is a sub-skill. I never perfected fitting, so after I “re”start, the first thing I will tackle is fitting around neck, shoulders, and arm. Basically, who has much time for frivolities like fitting? Not me, and not the next couple centuries. Back to basics.
Downscale includes anything made of denim or chambray. Also, I intend to get into mending, a lost art, which leads others to believe one has little money.
In winter, I have taken to wearing a night-cap. I lower the thermostat and a night-cap keeps me toasty.
Right now, I hear the howling of our local coyote pack in the woods fairly close. Out here in the country, if one has a domestic-dog one lets outside after dark (to do its ‘duty’) for any unchaperoned time, the dog’s barking advertises, “Eat me, eat me. I am a juicy meal for coyotes.” Cocky dogs don’t last long — all a dog needs is a coyote nipping at its heels and it pretty fast stops strutting.
💨🐕🐺Northwind Grandma💨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
BoysMom 186
> I think it behooves us who currently need them to think about how people lived in our areas pre-automobile
Now in 2026, as a passenger in a car going 50 miles per hour (mph), I surmise how totally alien this experience feels (don’t get me started on airplanes). My mother, born 1926, used to ride in her father’s Ford Model T car, and if they went 35 mph, they were speeding. By 2126, one will again see horses, hay, and barns on a regular basis; speeding will have returned to 35 mph. And people will do just fine not speeding at 100 mph like now on freeways.
💨🐴🌱🛖Northwind Grandma💨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Kev 203
> between health and income
Personally, I rely heavily on flower essences, homeopathic remedies, and aromatherapy. In my opinion, homeopathic remedies “prevent” (as in preventing disease). Flower essences and aromatherapy provide good mood. Good mood goes a long way: who wants to be around a person who is in a bad mood, much less perpetually in a mad mood❓No-one‼️Good mood is the basis of any, and all, what we term “success.”
When I don’t pay attention to these three things, I become foul and my life plunges into degradation (I am not being dramatic); and really, I have the audacity to wonder why I am doing so poorly. With these three things, at least I will die⚰️with a smile on my face☺️, and my friends will have a party and dance💃 to my demise.
💨🥣💧🍵Northwind Grandma💨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
When my gearbox packed up and I didn’t have the money to fix it, I had the good sense to realize it wasn’t a misfortune, it was the Universe’s way of telling me to get off my butt and onto my feet. Fortunately most of what I need is a 15-minute walk away, and combined with ditching seed oils and preparing most of my food from scratch, I am fitter and healthier, with no chronic conditions, and I don’t have to worry about my weight.
I never thought I’d get old. My mother died in her 40s, my father in his 60s. What with smoking, drinking, and riding motorbikes, I never gave a thought to going on pension. So here I am, retired at 77 on a small state pension. I would be in deep doodoo but for two things: my family helps out with a monthly stipend, and I own my own studio apartment with a tiny garden.
You can save a lot of money by doing things yourself. I make sourdough bread, kombucha tea, and sauerkraut. All as good as or better than commercial versions, and much cheaper. I wish I could master kvass, but of the dozen batches I’ve made only one turned out excellent, and I don’t know why. My one luxury is coffee, which is a horrendous price these days. I can’t afford barista coffee, but by grinding my own beans and experimenting with times and temperatures I can make pretty good plunger coffee at a tenth of the cost.
All my cooking is done on a two-plate hotplate. I don’t have a stove or microwave oven or air fryer. I stick to a few things I know how to cook well and have a good balance of carbs, veg, and protein. It’s out of the pot, onto the plate, and into the stomach i.e. eaten at the peak of flavor.
To save electricity I keep my hot water cylinder permanently switched off. A kettle or two of boiling water in a bucket is enough for a bath and shave. I have no heater or air conditioner. Neither is needed in our climate, which is the same as San Francisco’s. But I do have an electric blanket for those cold winter nights.
So I’m doing pretty well on a small income, all things considered. But there’s one very worrying area: medical. I’ve been extremely healthy all my life, but old age brings its problems. There is no way I can afford medical aid. I’ve had one operation on the national health. The treatment was good but with a loooong wait. Another operation was needed but not covered by the national health so the family helped and negotiated a decent price with the surgeon. Now my teeth are packing up. I really don’t want dentures but it looks like they’ll be inevitable. Old age ain’t for sissies, as they say.
Earthworm # 303:
Evil is always evil, but I’ve seen during my life how evil can be disguised as good thanks to this or that ideology or belief, so I think in real world it’s difficult to pay attention to real evil to avoid or reject it. In addition to this, I think in everyday life there are “grey zones” between evil and good behaviors. For example, in my country there are some people (poor natives and “illegal” migrants alike) who work within informal economy. The good thing is they work to live instead of falling in crime temptation. The evil thing is they don’t pay taxes to the state, but they use for example the state funded hospitals (which are financed by taxes, ahem). I think this late behavior isn’t fair to people who pays taxes because their jobs are full legal.
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Paedrig # 304:
You’ve written about what I could call “the activism trap”. I agree. Saving the world is a dangerous temptation for people to see themselves as the Good People and be engaged in an unending world of moral supremacy and virtue signaling; and of course, the “saving the world” temptation needs a heck of money, so you can do the math. So I understand your point of view.
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HippieViking # 306:
Oh, Mr. Orlov. There’s been a long time I haven’t read anything by him. I think he lives today in Russia. He’s got some interesting opinions thanks to have being an expat living for a long time in USA, though I also think during his American stage he was very biased by his Russian jingoism. Well, it’s an attitude I also find here within some migrants, who idealize their country and despise the country where they live actually…
The historian Andrei Fursov , years ago, published a Yt video, titled ” The class media, the new poors” wich explain that the members of this class have been targeted for a great scale theft.
https://youtu.be/u2Nw2mwmWzI?si=IGBfn4jd691MjIAH
I’ve thought more about good and evil in life, more exactly about political evil. I think we use to fool ourselves when we think we could resist quite easily a dictatorship pressions (from our imperfect democracies view). However real totalitarian regimes have available a “panoplia” of ways to bend and corrupt individual will: from propaganda to direct violence, without forgetting bribes or fines. The stick and the carrot. Rulers know fear to loose status (high and middle class), or hope to climb in society (middle and working class), can help to support the regime.
The typical totalitarian power example is the concentration camp. Nazi camps and Soviet Gulags wards saw themselves as the Good People, even as heroes (evil disguised of good). In the camps, prisoners did what they could do to survive. A survivor told (in a biography printed in the ‘90s) he didn’t think in himself as an hero, because he had to steal food and lie to survive to the Fascism in Matthausen. Like someone said: You can’t be (absolutely) good and survive.
Beyond the political evil, when evil enters in a human group (small or big), it’s more difficult than we think to notice it and react against it. For example: Some time ago, a South American man told me he was been member of a Latin gang during his teens. He didn’t realize or he didn’t want to do it, that he was with bad people…because they were his friends, so they couldn’t be evil. By luck, he eventually noticed it and quitted the gang to change his life. Believe it or not: “Si non é vero é ben trovato”. Group influence over personal minds is stronger than we usually think.
@Anselmo, #319
Wow! Thank you for posting this link. The guy is very coherent, and his take on the economy 11 years ago aged well.
I particularly liked how, at the end, he contrasted “casino economy” with “the real economy”. Our host likes to talk about primary, secondary, and tertiary economies.
As a side note, it always amazes me how people often think that gold is a “real” asset, unlike “flying money” invented by the Chinese. Can you eat gold? Will gold save you from hypothermia? Here’s your answer!
“I think it behooves us who currently need them to think about how people lived in our areas pre-automobile”
A horse of course. I would need three times the acreage I have to feed it. But I am in easy horse distance of town.
I’ve run across the data that says agriculture could fuel itself using tractors on 10% of the cultivatable land. The data I could find on horses is that they ate 25% of the farms output. There is some variance there depending on whether a given farm had land not suitable for cropping that was useable as pasture.
The point is the horses eat all the time and the tractor needs fuel only while operating. Then there is the fact that oxen were the more common draft animals because they were lower maintenance even if they worked slower. There is a whole list of tradeoffs in downscaling agriculture.
@Northwind Grandma:
I got a lot out of Flower Essences any time I’ve used them. I like that you can get them alcohol free and dilute them yourself for long term use… especially helpful for issues of the mind & emotion in my experience.
polecat 310
> my more conservative sentiments
As costly and painful as it would be, it appears you are a good candidate for moving out of snake den 👣. The lefties are not going to change. I have read enough about woke-ies of western Washington state: they have dug trenches readying for battle. They have built around themselves a war-like stance because they feel they ARE at war. They will give you no peace.
There in your region, woke-ies have a reputation of being staunch and unyielding and mean. You could spend life fighting them but I am sure you have better things to do. Stay and fight and decline 10X; move away and decline only 5X, or possibly even prosper relatively speaking, by being ingenious like others here. The woke-ies will definitely NOT let you prosper; you are living in a hostile community.
Question is, where to? The USA is wide open. First thing is what quadrant of the US do you want to stay in? Do you want to stay west of the Mississippi River? Do you have family or friends in one set place you would like to join? The west coast, in sight of the sea, is probably the most expensive land in the west. Do you need a place with a lower cost of living? Is there a religious or cultural group you would like to live near? (There is so much more criteria personal to you.)
Not far away from you is eastern Washington state: dry, and nuclear around Hanford; I hear they are conservative. Idaho is conservative, as is Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas. Forget Colorado and Minnesota: they are woke. Utah is generally conservative but overrun by Mormons; urban areas crowded; land prices high.
This is just one group of states.
Wisconsin where I am (east of the Mississippi River, and therefore “East”), except for the woke city of Madison, is conservative. Madison is woke because it is the Capitol of the state, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UWHealth are there; woke-ies filch free-money from conservatives of the state — typical college town. I like it in Dane County, but we also have a couple of acres in the middle of nowhere, car-dependent.
Don’t hang where you don’t belong🧟♂️—yuck🤢.
💨🧟🧟♀️Northwind Grandma💨
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@ Siliconguy # 321
There are other, hard to measure differences between tractors and horses… which make the comparison far from like-for-like. Horses can climb hills, and negotiate rough or steep ground. Tractors cannot do that.
Wendell Berry goes into great detail in the ways in which the introduction of tractors turned formerly viable farms which consisted largely of both rough and steep ground, into “marginal” and uneconomic waste ground, in his essay “The Making of a Marginal Farm” which is part of a collection called “The World Ending Fire”.
Tractors need you to turn land into something flat, stone and hump free, and lose the fences and hedges, brooks and ditches, and etc, before they are at all useful. Horses, and other self-moved animals, can work with the ground you’ve got.
I dont think I will live here forever, but some people do. There is a neighbor with no car that just walks the mile for the bus stop carrying groceries, at some point he wont be able to, it is a decent sized hill from there, I have walked it many times when I have taken the bus, and there are other people who generally take the bus and dont have cars along the route. The route runs only a few times a day, and goes to a downtown that has a trader joes and a library, you just have to stay down there for 3 or 4 hours. Mostly people that are housebound here get food brought to their house, Meals on Wheels, so 5 frozen dinners and milk delivered once a week, a bag of produce and canned goods twice a month, those are grant driven programs that can lose funding, but also usually a neighbor or family member. One elder in a cabin had a woman in the community go by once a week with groceries, wood and gasoline for the generator, there is still enough surplus in the community to carry a person or two in this way. He passed last year at home as he wanted.
I have a 24 year old vehicle, so not a classy vehicle at all. Very out of style, just a very basic 4 cylinder Ford ranger with dents but good tires. Screams poor. I should not be a target for thieves in any case. I usually go out once a week with combined errands, if I need or want to, I might drive somewhere in between, but usually not beyond our weekly pop up coffee a few miles away. I do take on occasion and am very familiar with the bus schedule and I can get to the library, trader joes ( food) and medical care on it, so I am aware of how to take the next stair step down and it is a very pretty ride in any case. I think being closer to a town or on the outskirts is a preferable thing, but selling and buying houses is a serious undertaking and I have no compulsion atm, so probably some years away. Some nice little craftsman house on a double lot or any small older house to attach a sun room to….
I have worked on secondary income streams, and around here the need is housing, so I ended up retrofitting over a number of years a semi-detached studio rental of around 600sq ft that provides income, which is a big plus of this house, move and income goes away. I would not save money renting an apartment in town in this county, I would lose money big time, I would have savings from selling a house, but 1/3 less income, huge monthy increases for housing, heat, water, food that would just drain the capital from selling the house, I would probably be drawing 4 or 5 k a month out of savings but be able to walk or take frequent busses. So an example on how there are different solutions to downward mobility and what is less expensive, and why you see people retire and move to a less expensive area ( like yours, I apologize for the invasion). Of course there are less expensive places and I potentially will go to one, have to see where the winds blow. It used to be that living out of town is where poorer people lived due to lack of access to theatre, medical, shopping, services in general, and so the suburbs long term will likely go to downtrodden cheaper poor areas, so if you are broke, you live in a rambling house on acre or more and not a city apartment. I am also a Notary Public, which I dont make much money on at all but I dont try hard either, I am considering an actual ad in the local rag. I spend more time on NegaBucks, money not spent, things I make and do for myself, which is significant. And having savings of course. If my primary income is eroded by inflation, I can get by fine, but you always have to keep an eye on trends and plan for dowward mobility.
Water, sewage and heat are very expensive so meeting those needs absolutely lowers expenses, and with electric at .46/kWh, all energy savings are helpful.
What is stylish for the upwardly mobile is that they have alot of debt, a recent model hybrid electric SUV with a payment, and high insurance. There is alot of travel, as has been mentioned here. The right destinations, and alot of the correct wines or beers and eating out or at least lunch and coffee out, which done daily is alot. Even the eating at home is class based. You do not do the Keto diet if you are broke. Nothing wrong with eating meat, but claiming you can only eat meat and imported tropical fats and certain vegetables screams you are in the correct class. Lower income has to watch the food budget and incorporate rice, beans and potatoes, regular potatoes. This is not about health ( yes, good protein for health and no junk, for sure, I am talking about the extreme), it is a class marker as well as the vehicle, correct neighborhood, travel, and roast of coffee. They do not conserve energy, they do buy an electric or hybrid car, but travel on planes all the time, import foods, and do not conserve energy at home. It is squandered, I do not know what all that power is used for. I rinse off a sediment filter from the well and wash my toilet, they buy an expansive water treatment that then also uses a few kWh a day to clean itself(back flush), they put in extra refrigerators for wine, for the kids to reach under the counter, they put in whole house generators connected to 2 large propane tanks for when the power is off, squandering resources that at most points of the 24 hours is to keep the internet modem form flicking off ( the horror !). (not that long ago a small gasoline generator would be run 2 hours in the morning and 3 in the evening to give light and cool down the refrigerator, alot less resources and money only doing that). They will put in solar and batteries at a scale that should power a block of houses in a sane world. And call themselves green and talk down the rest of the country and the state. SO, basically, at a time when we need to look at the real trend in the world, downward energy usage, the middle/upper class is going the other way. That is what is stylish and class markers right now. We are very unstylish, but the next step of course is how to be properly “grey man” to not be a target when they get upset.
@ horse vs car or tractor
Sure, if you only look at fuel, a car or tractor seems efficient as you have to feed the horse twice a day every day. But, the horse self replicates. You make new replacement horses at home or at least locally. The sources to replace the tractor takes alot of room to mine all that steel.
Hello Mr Greer and the commentariat,
A thought-provoking article and a top-notch discussion below, not that this comes as a surprise. Mr Greer, belated thanks for keeping a certain level of activity on the site even during your moving – the regular dose of sanity this provided was highly appreciated. Now, to the topic of the week.
I completely agree that downward mobility offers a measure of freedom. I have experienced this by being literally downward mobile. After some 20 years of struggling to become bona fide middle class, mostly unhappily, I have finally given up, and have found some relief as a consequence. Money has never been an issue for me, but I did crave for respect and sense of security that come with a well-paid job (although I achieved this only rarely). As such jobs are difficult to find, I had always worried about having a new one lined up after the previous one ended, which of course at some point did not happen.
For the past two years, I have been doing jobs that are objectively crap. But I have found advantages to this as well. First of all, such jobs are easy to find, and when I am fed up, or just want some time for myself, I quit without any qualms knowing that I would be able to work again when I needed to. No job interviews, which I always found deeply humiliating. As soon as I finish work, I switch off completely and do not give it a single thought until my next shift. Finally, this low status work is much more honest because the results are clearly visible, so there is no need to compensate by pretending I like it in any way.
There are downsides as well. Although this will not be true for everyone, I find it much more difficult to find friends nowadays, and romantic relationships have been non-existent since I mobiled downwards. Currently I have much less opportunity to bump into what I recognise as “my people”. Also, I find that feeling good about one’s position in the society affects in an almost magical way how the world interacts with you (after reading Ecosophia for a while, I know that “almost” in the previous sentence is superfluous 😉), and that is something I do not have at the moment.
On the whole, downward mobility did give me more mental freedom and more free time. And one benefit of that is that I am now more able to work on myself and try to improve the aspects of my present situation that I do not like so much.
Anselmo # 318:
As a former middle class man (indeed, a former middle-low class man), I share Fursov opinions about how real economics have eroded middle class status, though he had a very Russian point of view, I think it can be applied with a few reserves, to every Western country nowadays. It’s a puzzling situation to me that today (at least in Spain, do you agree?) middle class has lived better times, and there can be more people here pretending they’re middle class than the real middle class people who’s survived after the 2008 crisis…
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Siliconguy # 321:
In the long term, I think tractors will be full of rust of better, will become a source of metal to be melted and becoming useful tools (peak everything rules). So the future is for animal power. Tractors cannot die like horses and another animals, but they depend of fuel. Oh, and at least horse meat is tasty and high in proteins. You can’t eat a tractor. Oxen are useful in wet climate areas, but mules and horses are faster than them in dry climates like here. Oxen have their little advantage: they can feed to some extent with straw and low quality grass, but mules/horses like I’ve said before, are faster, so…
It’s true animals eat grass/grain, but their manure is a good fertilizer too. I want to tell you my grandpa worked until late ‘60s selling mules and horses to work in rural zones, (competing with Gypsy traders), so animal power it’s not a barbarian remnant from Neolithic here. Well, the Spanish Civil War had its consequences too, but I want to point that in a survival agriculture context, animals are the most fit to do the work in the fields. Only when Spain became a full industrial country, since the ‘70s, animal power was eventually defeated by final tractor tryumph. In the other hand, tractors can’t be eaten nor don’t make fertilizer…When the Long Descent worsens, tractors would be “feed” not with a scarce oil, but with biofuel, which will come from plants, so it’s ironically the same situation like animal power (“stealing” lands to the human food), but with the difference that tractors can’t make poo fertilizer for the fields. Which is an important topic in a future when rock phosphates are going to peak too.
I forgot to mention the freedom being downwardly mobile as I am. I can hunker down here or I can leave, no debt and low expenses. Since my needs are simple, I dont need to ingratiate myself to any group or employer. I dont need to ingratiate myself to the political class, if retirement is cut or lost in inflation, I can roll with it. The whole overreaction or attempted reset with the COVID Debacle I think realy showed some hints of what people are capable of when scared, and how some people were quite trapped into taking untested medical treatments to not be homeless ( lose their job). I fix things with current income, cash, not debt, keep out of that trap. If I move, doesnt matter what the house is or isnt worth, I dont owe anything, it will sell for something as I have tweaked it to stay comfortable and run with so much less inputs and meeting more human needs than any surrounding house and is cute. I have so so much less stress than the households trying to “keep up”. I have freedom of association, of my opinions, of staying or leaving and making it either way, freedom of how I spend my time. Not trapped is a good part of freedom. Being frugal and not buying into upward mobility goes along way into not being trapped into a system that ultimeatly is not serving us
Northwind Grandma @ 313, about sewing, and fit, you might like to take a look a book just out, see if your library can be persuaded to buy it:
https://www.amazon.com/Handsewn-Wardrobe-Complete-Patternmaking-Finishing-ebook/dp/B0DPFM1WZV/ref=sr_1_2?crid=3INO80B21O4AG&
I bought a copy at B&N, and I almost never pay full price for books. It has already paid for itself. The author shows easy to understand and execute instructions for how to draw your patterns for simple, contemporary clothes. Or do as some tailors do; skip the pattern and draw directly on your fabric with chalk. Simple pop over your head top, t shirt made to fit you exactly–buy a man’s T in good quality knit, and cut down for your own size–. Draw your own tailored shirt and jeans jacket. Also instructions for a sweatshirt, and my favorite, undies. Finally no more store bought chonies that last maybe 2 months. I made the basic gathered skirt for my daughter over vacation at her apartment, no sewing machine, and she loves it. That is the other good thing which makes this book worth the $35. The author explains how to do hand sewing for garments, various stitches and which to use where.
I do lots of pattern drafting, and her instructions are some of the best I have seen. I do think a person who maybe does not have a geometric kind of mind can use these instructions.
“SO, basically, at a time when we need to look at the real trend in the world, downward energy usage, the middle/upper class is going the other way. That is what is stylish and class markers right now.”
That is a good description of the K-shaped economy that keeps popping up on the news.
If anything the status signaling is getting more frantic.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/nyc-private-school-tuition-breaks-70-000-milestone-for-fall/ar-AA1VYPCb
“The top private schools in New York City plan to charge more than $70,000 this year for tuition, an amount exceeding that of many elite colleges, as they pass on the costs of soaring expenses including teacher salaries.
Spence School, Dalton School and Nightingale-Bamford School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side are among at least seven schools where the fees now exceed that threshold, according to school disclosures and Bloomberg reporting. Fees among 15 private schools across the city rose a median of 4.7%, outpacing inflation.”
@SiliconGuy,
Just think if someone had sent their kid to the Dalton School back in the day he could have had Jeffrey Epstein as his or her math teacher.
Stephen, I’ll consider that essay! You’re certainly right that money issues can either make or break a marriage; one of the things that made my marriage with Sara so congenial is that she grew up dirt poor and knew how to pinch every penny until Abe Lincoln yelped. I didn’t grow up poor, but somehow ended up with that attitude anyway, and so money quarrels were one stressor we didn’t have to put up with.
Anonymuz, glad to hear my blog posts have helped. Yeah, a lot of what goes on in work these days is pure baboon-posturing.
J.L.Mc12, hmm! Thank you for the heads up — that’s worth knowing.
Earthworm, I’m probably going to have to do a post about the way so many people are getting caught up in the projection of the political shadow, and eagerly finding some group or other they can proclaim as evilly evil without a bit of good in them. It’s really quite a spectacle to watch, and speaks very clearly about the troubled conscience of our times.
Tiago, good heavens. No, I’ve been busy enough after the move that I haven’t been tracking international news sites as I usually do, and missed that. Positive energy en route; in terms of ethics, that’s an interesting question I’m not sure I can answer. Hmm — a subject for meditation.
Scotlyn, a solid point!
Earthworm, hmm! That’s also a good point.
Roldy, okay, that hasn’t been my experience but I gather that it’s yours. Ouch.
Paedrig, many thanks for this vivid personal account. I’m glad you got out of the trap.
Hadashi, some people have that advantage!
Polecat, well, my approach was to leave, but I know that may not work for you.
JoeSchmoe, but I wasn’t talking about changing the whole system. I was talking about individuals changing their own lives. There’s a difference, you know!
Northwind, bingo! There’s more than one reason I buy downscale clothing and shop at thrift stores…
Martin, and thank you for this personal account. It’s inspiring to know that there are people who really do live simply.
Soko, and thank you also for this.
@ northwind
DI you mean something like this, https://handcraftedhistory.blog/tag/eura-dress/ A historical Viking under dress, would be quite cute with an apron or jumper over it. No doubt should be linen for summer, wool for winter
but here with some easy variations to be quite modern. https://emptyhangerpatterns.wordpress.com/2023/05/08/eura-evolution/ In all her variations, the dress remains pull over, laid out on fabric without paper pattern, zero waste of fabric. Fast easy dresses with economy of fabric.
Here you can scroll down to july and see a few photos of a group sewing challenge or workshop she did of the Eura, variations on a theme https://lizhaywood.com.au/june-july-august-a-year-of-zero-waste-sewing/
Yeah, I have also thought about sewing one up, on my to do list, but many things are higher up on teh list atm.
JMG
How to educate desire if desire itself is being subverted by the tools we use?
After thinking on it I reckon it calls for more than just a thinking experiment trying to remember pre-internet mind states to compare with mind state as influenced by internet and screens; better to apply the idea in practice by bringing it into the world right here and now. If we focus on internet content and internet content is increasingly degraded, that puts a disturbing complexion on ‘what we contemplate we imitate’ because passive reading is not passive, a torrent of content is gushing into mind – imagine if we align with tools we use and those tools have a fundamental disharmony to them before we even think about content..
In many ways computer screens seem little different to television screens and function as a wedge in the gateway of perception – There is a good reason the Taoists had an exercise called the Sealing of the Senses!
Not in a position to go completely offline as I need to check email once a day, but I can make a decision not to open a web browser or engage with digital content outside of a few emails. No internet connected phone and no TV so no issues there.
Already I can see multiple possibilities, and the timing of the idea popping up is nice, what with new moon coming up and zodiac reset and all that stuff. A grand reset and kick the ‘wedge’ out of the doorway.
So, a three month experiment with a four week initial to get in the zone; then review things at that stage and decide on next steps.
May the path be fruitful