The sense of fun from writing...
smoked pot first time in a while.... reminds me of first thought best thought... that kind of thing.. the power of intuition and the importance I laid on that word in my younger years.... intuition... don't think just do... say, write, do... intuition... makes sense if you don't think about it........ but where from here? Things make sense in the written word... it's in the mind that finds some level of struggle.... one of the main struggles of human brain existence is the conflicts that arise... conflicts between my own being and the IDEA of certain other beings... or their egos, their identities.... and this world so caught up in identities... rarely acknowledging the other aspects of consciousness separate from the name rank and serial number that we're pressured into identifying as. SOOO..... A large amount of the struggle of my consciousness is the idea of other consciousnesses, or rather, the identities those consciousnesses are attached to... and the idea that those identities may want to attack my identity. Having suffering slings and arrows in the past.... the tendency is to imagine it happening again... and such a painful imagining of something that hasn't happened.... Thus it is imperative that those imaginings are banished.... I must imagine great things! Best case scenarios! Whether I fear the worst or anticipate the best... whatever happens happens.... but anticipating the best makes it all worth while whilst fearing the worst makes fools of us all... taints the taste of existence itself..... SOOO.... seems important to be an optimist... because even a blind optimist sees the glass half full... the blind optimists has a better time than anyone.
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What are we?
Here we are floating on earth.... just jiggling around... there's no sense to any of it..... Oh you are 32? What the hell does that mean? Oh you've revolved around the sun 32 times whilst on earth.... good for you What is the meaning of life? Oh you are already enlightened, didn't you know? You thought there would be fireworks? You thought you had to climb a tall mountain first? You thought you had to accomplish great things? Who did you think was the judge? God? Buddha? the great ghosts and spirits? Nope! Here you are, just existing, reading this stuff.... turns out you didn't have to accomplish anything... you could just be a person existing .... and then exist some more... and then not exists..... and no great beings were even paying attention. There is no score... no grade... no measurement of your success.... no one cared enough... you are just you.. living life.... then dying death.... isn't it fun? You are already enough, there is no score... there is no accomplishment, no such thing... you didn't need to lift such a burden... you could just be! Isn't it great? Or does it bug you? Did you think you needed to "do" more? Well you didn't. You are already enlightened. And I love you. What if people who weren't thrilled with their jobs had a place to go?
People who don't want to join the armed forces... people who disagree with war on a fundamental level... people who desperately want and need work that they believe in.... What if they had a place where their efforts were meaningful? A place where they worked towards clean energy, air, water, and so on. A place where they didn't need a degree? If this place paid more than their meaningless jobs... they would join. It could be called the Clean Energy Force. Let's imagine a place... one or two or four places in each state, that they went to build solar panels and wind mills that generated clean energy. Myself... working as a journalist... my friends with their random jobs.... and millions of others working at starbucks and applebees and so on.... what if they worked to build solar panels? millions of people working 40 hours a week building solar panels could produce enough solar panels to power millions of homes in the first year... millions more the next year, and america could be on 100 percent clean energy within a few years. I only make 30k a year roughly.... no health insurance, no retirement plan.... and I'm 30 years old... I was a straight A student. I did what I was supposed to do and yet find myself struggling to make it in America. My friends and I, and by extension, millions like us, would jump at the opportunity to make 40k a year to make solar panels or other clean energy at a place.... lets say you got a little room with wifi... and you can bring a laptop.... and get fed decent food... oatmeal and berries for breakfast... a salad with a piece of chicken for lunch... a meat and potatoes dinner... organic of course.... sustainably sourced and ethical..... how many solar panels could 10 million or 20 million americans build in year if they put in 40 hours a week, or even just 30 or 20 hours a week? What if it paid decently? I looked into the peace corps when I was 20.... it was 27 months of service and you only came out with 12 thousand dollars... not enough to do shit with. Couldn't pay for college or even rent a place for a year. So what if there were an opportunity that did that? Millions would sign up, and leave their starbucks jobs... their shitty office jobs that didn't pay a real living. And they would be working for something they believed in... not war... but sustainable ethical living... clean energy... clean water.... clean air... what if there were a "clean the ocean force" instead of the navy... people that went out on ships and cleaned the plastic out of the ocean... millions would sign up if it paid a living and they could save that money or send that money home to pay off a house or pay a family's bills. It's not that farfetched of an idea! Millions of people care about clean energy, and saving the earth, but don't have anywhere to spend that energy. millions of Americans workout at gyms... lifting up a piece of iron and putting it down... running on treadmills that go nowhere..... millions billions trillions of calories being burnt in the effort towards health and vanity. Were those calories to be burnt on something meaningful..... entire countries would be 100 percent clean energy... bridges could be built, roads fixed. And millions of people working jobs they don't find meaningful, flipping hamburgers for people who could cook for themselves... cutting hair of people who could cut their own hair........ these millions of working class folk could and would sign up to do meaningful work were the opportunity there... that paid a real living... and do it with a smile on their face a larger portion of the time because the work they were doing would be towards something they believed in. I was 16 when a friend made a MySpace page for me.
My url was something like GonzoJacob, a nod to Hunter S. Thompson. Before that I remember chatting to people on something... maybe it was MSN/Hotmail messenger, or AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I didn't have a cellphone until I was 20, and there was also a time in 8th grade/age 14 when we made a page in computer class that was like an online profile... saying our name, likes, and so on. It was like an 8-bit version of what we'd all go onto. MySpace changed things. Suddenly I could talk to girls from other towns and other states, girls I maybe had more in common with. I'd post a poem or some kind of creative writing, and people would like or comment or whatever options there were then. Custom backgrounds and a music playlists, a blog right on the page, it was cool. Suddenly instead of writing and taking pictures and filming little things alone that no one saw, suddenly I could share them. The blog showed me how many people read it and it was quite a few for my small number of followers. I had new friends. I had girlfriends. It was new and exciting, and the possibilities seemed endless. I felt like a little celebrity, like the rockstars I admired. MySpace seemed to fade and everyone migrated to Facebook around 2008 or so. Facebook didn't have a music playlist on your page nor a customizable background. But that's where the people were. Their "notes" function served as a blog, and I continued to post creative writings there, longer and more elaborate posts on any variety of topics and people seemed to like them. I got my first cell phone in 2010 or so, a simple slide open phone that wasn't practical to use with Facebook. In about 2012, I deleted my Facebook after saving my Notes in documents like where i saved my MySpace blogs before they went tits up. There was always a neurotic aspect to the social media sites. Although I enjoyed MySpace, it was neurotic. Facebook was worse. Although it helped me connect to future girlfriends, it also made me jealous if another guy liked her posts with a smiley emoji or heart emoji. Everything seemed shallow and addicting, and I eventually just deleted the damned thing. Somehow between 2012 and 2015 when I started a new page to try to make some new friends or reconnect to old ones or whatever reason, Facebook had become inundated with memes. The nature of the posts people shared seemed to change from pictures or thoughts of their own, to generic memes that they shared. The politics shared on the site became more prominent, the nature of the comments became more volatile, and everyone's bosses and parents and grandparents and aunts and everyone else joined up. Luckily my parents never joined. What was at one time a cool place for young people to hang out and have some privacy to hold make-out parties and smoke pot and be funny was crashed by the establishment, the bosses and parents, the authority figures, and it wasn't a fun party anymore. Worse yet, these older adults began acting more childish. I deleted Facebook again, only to have to create a new page to use for work. I left my picture blank and I don't log on. I encouraged friends to delete their's too. Instagram I held onto. I started my Instagram when I was about 23 or 24 in 2013-14 when I got my first smartphone, an iPhone 4s. I enjoyed the idea of the app, a sort of online photo album. Over time it added a chat feature, somehow more casual than texting, and making Facebook messenger even more unnecessary. It also added the stories feature, competing with SnapChat which I was never into on that app, but came to enjoy on Instagram. However, the stories feature seemed to quickly do what had happened to Facebook: it increased the memes, and the politics, and the unoriginal content. Suddenly it was a photo album with pictures of words about some political thing. It wasn't photography, it wasn't even foodie photos and cat photos nearly as much as it was another neurotic, volatile place where old lovers and old acquaintances and old people from high school and bosses and parents were hanging out, everyone checking in on eachother. Everyone was a minor celebrity: housewives fancied themselves Martha Stewarts; everyone was a fashion model; rednecks were now in their own truck commercial, mudding and listening to patriotic music; everyone with a guitar was showing off the scales they learned off of some app; anyone who sang along to the radio was now a minor celebrity, even if they only had 500 or 50 or 5 views likes or comments. Andy Warhol's credo that "in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes" was coming true. Misinformation spread like wildfire as now average joe laymen now had the same soapbox to stand on as experts, and the sheer numbers of the average joes meant their megaphonic voices drowned out the voices of the experts with their actually researched facts and truths. People, with an ever dwindling attention span, preferred to get their information and their opinions from memes and acquaintances and "friends". Never mind what the scientists said, AverageJoe666 from InstaBook TwitterTube said his side of things louder and flashier and has quite the following. With their newfound mini-celebrityhood, people had a fanbase of 50 or 500 or 5,000, or millions to talk to, to keep engaged, and they had to do that by building their "brand", continuing to posts things that are on brand, sharing memes that are on brand.... humanitarians feeling a pressure to make sure and advertise that they believe in human rights, and that they care deeply about the civil issues of the day; people were sure to show that they supported Red Issues A, B, and C, or Blue Issues X, Y, and Z....... if they didn't share these things on their little profiles, how would people know they cared about these issues? People would think they were ASSHOLES or the ENEMY if they weren't weighing in on each flavor of the month issue to come out. I disabled then deleted my Instagram about three weeks ago. The first few days I would impulsively pick up my phone, as usual, and impulsively, unconsciously open the Instagram app, usually the first thing my thumb reached to. When I opened the app to see a login screen, and remembered I disabled the account, I could feel the de-conditioning in my brain, a twinge of electricity as if I was being held back. My brain learned that there was no water in the well, and so it quit going there, which felt so good I decided to ultimately delete my whole profile. I was still able to see Joe Rogan's new studio through his Twitter.... somehow Twitter never took on the same addictive hold on me. Occasionally I've liked to post a joke or joke premise there, but never used it weekly let alone daily or multiple times a day, like Instagram was becoming... an addictive impulsive bottomless scroll of people I don't need to keep tabs on and National Geographic photos I could see elsewhere if I wanted to. The few things I miss I could find if I needed to: comedians posts, new jokes, their videos, and so on. I have my real friends numbers, and I know how to find the newest from artists I like. I have been reading a little more than before, and I am addicted to dumb games on my phone, like a simple racing game that only gives me 8 race tokens at a time that then slowly regenerate, which helps limit my time there. When I logged back onto Instagram to fully delete it, rather than leaving it disabled, I took a look at what was there 10 days after disabling, and I saw what I already knew, that I didn't miss much. The best benefit is feeling less neurotic, and not pouring gallons of poisonous goo into my brain multiple times a day. The timing was nice for The Social Dilemma to come out. Tristan Harris either wrote or was the subject of an article I read a few years back about how social media was designed to be addicting, like a slot machine, and he speaks about that in the film.... our data being recorded and sold for ads... artificial intelligence, if not actual people at times, learning who we are based on how many seconds we look at a posts, or who's post it was... if you like these politics, these hobbies, then they'll show you these ads and these people.... the data tracking is disturbing to say the leasts, and the manipulation of people to have certain opinions, and keeping them in opinion bubbles, is having real damaging affects on the world. Unplugging and stepping back for a moment is eyeopening, and challenging. I can see social media apps in the future taking off, and they have to take off to be affective, where the atmosphere isn't neurotic. And I suppose I will be creating a new Instagram with my same username to lock that down, but don't want to get sucked back in, but I need a place to share my blogs! If a blog is written, and no one is there to read it, does it even exist? ..... But until then.... Turn off, take control, log out |
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