Why I Prefer Wisdom and Why I Am Thankful I Was Never Attractive To Anyone

Posted on May 23, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

‘Pretty privilege is real says ‘invisible’ mom in her 40s’ is an article I read online just today. I guess with me being a man who always identified himself with his brain power, I have the opposite issues. I was rarely noticed, often ignored, and occasionally demonized for having a mind and trying to use it. This came from everyone, but even my own family occasionally demonized me for thinking on my own and seeking knowledge. Now that I’m in my 40s, people are only recently starting to notice me for my mind and wisdom. Might be why I don’t get nostalgic for my youth or the past. I’m in my 40s, have congestive heart failure, severe mental health issues, yet I am overall far happier and more productive in my 40s than I ever could have imagined when I was in high school. Yet, I’ve been saying the same type of things since I was in 5 years old. When I was 8 years old and figured out on my own Santa Claus didn’t exist, I immediately thought “What other lies am I being told”. I was angry, but not because Santa Claus didn’t exist. I was angry because my authority figures didn’t think I could handle the cold truth and lied to me. First crack in the wall of why I don’t trust anyone in authority. Definite breach of trust to my 8-year-old mind. When I was 10 and my mom told me where babies came from this was my first reaction.

10 year old Me: “This is the only way babies are made, right?”

Mom: “Yes.”

10 year old Me: “Everybody knows this is how babies are made?”

Mom: “Yes.”

10 year old Me: “Then why do adults who don’t want babies have sex in the first place? Sounds stupid if you ask me.”

It was perfectly rational in my overactive 10-year-old mind that was perfectly rational for adults who don’t want children to, you know, not have sex in the first place. As the years went on and precocious teenage me discovered girls, I started asking girls out on dates. Vast majority of the time I was told no, sometimes very brutally. In my entire life I dated only three women, well two if you don’t count my female best friend from high school (who ironically is still my best friend in my 40s). I couldn’t even get a ‘yes’ for something as simple as a cup of coffee. To this day I still don’t know what I was doing wrong though I have my suspicions without any real way to prove them.

After my only long-term relationship ended in 2006, I was so beaten and discouraged by then that I just gave up. It was the same year I applied for disability and went to the mental hospital for the first time. Now, 17 years later with my chronic health issues and chronic poverty, I couldn’t get anything beyond casual friendship anymore. Besides with divorce rates hovering around 50 percent for decades, most people still don’t know how to sustain a relationship in the first place. I point blank asked lots of people for many years starting in high school, “What am I doing wrong?” I always got answers like, “Keep looking. There’s someone out there.” or “God will provide” or “Wait until college”, etc. And I was always like, “That is not what I’m asking.” Hell, I had far worse luck dating in college than I ever did in high school. Yet another lie my authority figures told me. I was always told nerds did better dating wise than jocks in college. And I wasn’t a jock in high school; I was a nerd who went to a small enough school I was on the football team for three years because there were only 35 boys on the football team in a school of less than 100 students in grades 9 thru 12. Most people don’t even realize that places that small exist. I’m a nerd even though I didn’t discover I liked Star Trek until I was in my thirties. Didn’t read Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ until the pandemic.

Now, instead of being seen as a smartass having discipline issues like I was well into my 30s, I’m now seen as a middle-aged sage. What changed? I have never gotten any kind of straight answer. I’m still unnerved and unused to this kind of power and influence even among close friends. I have never been in any kind of position of authority. I was never even on student council in my tiny high school of less than 90 students. Freshman year of high school I ran for class president and got only 3 votes. I can remember only three times in my entire life anyone told me they were proud of be before my 40th birthday. People have told me they were proud of me hundreds of times since. Where was this appreciation back in my younger years? I’m not doing anything different now than when I was in my 20s and failing at minimum wage jobs. Since I’m starting to gain appreciation from my social circles for my smarts and wisdom, I now so want to make it to a ripe very old age. I’m going to do everything I can to keep my kindness and smarts. The best people I ever knew were elderly wise people who never lost their kindness. I always loved the idea of the ‘friendly genius’. I guess while some people, namely women, had ‘pretty prestige’ in their young years, I’m starting to have ‘intelligence and wisdom prestige’ in my 40s. I’m so thankful I didn’t die from heart failure a year ago. I’m also realizing my dad was right when he said “Nerds will rule the world” when I was 13 back in 1993.

Job Loss and Regaining Meaning

Posted on May 17, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

Got a letter from the Oklahoma City Housing Authority a couple days ago. It stated that they would have an apartment for me as soon as one was available. It also gave no time line. It could be a couple weeks. It could be over a year. I’ve heard horror stories about people waiting for several years to get into a low income apartment. Even with social security disability insurance paying for my doctors’ appointments and treatments, I couldn’t have afforded to move out of Nebraska if I didn’t have family help.

When I first applied for social security disability insurance in 2006, it took until 2008 to get approved. I was denied several times and ultimately hired an attorney to speed up the process. For two years I was dependent on my family for almost everything. I had zero income other than what my parents gave me under the table because I couldn’t handle even a minimum wage customer service job. The factory job I held for a couple months wasn’t bad until my work suffered from sleep deprivation. I did well in work that didn’t involve working with the public. Even people who donated to the Goodwill store where I worked on the loading/unloading dock were often nasty and barbaric.

Sadly, most jobs I ever had available to me were customer service jobs. There were a few factories in Kearney (the town I lived in from 2005 to 2022). But those jobs were tough to get because everyone wanted them. Factory work was far better than customer service, at least for me. Paid better too. But there really aren’t nearly as many factory jobs in my nation as there were in the past. The 20 something barely making a living working even 40 hours a week at a fast food place and living in his parent’s basement would have probably been working a factory job and had union protection if he was born 100 years earlier. Or he would have been a self sufficient homesteader growing his own food and eating meat from his own herds had be been young when the Homestead Act was passed. They used to tell young people who couldn’t find jobs in their hometowns “Go West young man.” There is no frontier anymore, at least not until space exploration ramps up.

People talk about how US companies are moving manufacturing out of China and back to the US (this is often referred to as near shoring). But even most of those jobs will be automated. Even fast-food drive throughs are starting to be automated. I imagine that any job that can possibly be automated will be once automation becomes cheaper and better than human labor. Our managers don’t care about the work you put in. If they did, they wouldn’t have outsourced your job decades ago. I get so frustrated when I hear someone go on about how hard they work. You do realize that your boss doesn’t care about how much work you put in. Ironically, I kind of don’t either. You just as well be a draft horse to most bosses. And draft horses eventually got replaced by tractors and automobiles. Putting in lots of work by itself doesn’t make you special, certainly not in eyes of the people paying you.

Bosses have been outsourcing jobs for decades because it was cheaper to have it done in third world countries with fewer labor laws, fewer unions, and fewer environmental regulations. Eventually third world countries will resort to automation. I totally understand why people start their own small businesses, buy rental properties, buy farmland, and do the digital nomad thing. I imagine that self-employment, subsistence farming on small homesteads, and free lancing will become very popular again. Those were the historical norm until the Industrial Revolution. In most African countries, these never truly went out of style. Maybe they are just ahead of the developed world in that regard. Even illiterate peasants grew most of their own food for most of history. The modern worker doesn’t even do that.

I lost my career to disability. It took a few years before I came to terms with the fact that my career died. I went through all the stages of grieving and death. While it wasn’t a physical death, it was the death of my career and possible family that I was grieving. My previous self who was poised to be a very productive member of society and a great father died. But the building of something new is often built upon the ashes and ruins of the old. My reborn self became a blogger and independent scholar. While I doubt I will ever make above poverty wages, I am content with what I do. I guess this blog will be the closest thing to a legacy I will ever have.

Tyrants Fear Peasants Getting Knowledge and Making Money

Posted on May 16, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

Been having a rough go the last several days. I think most of my friends have been too. I just know something is bugging my friends, especially my bestie out in Denver. I rarely hear from some of my friends anymore. I guess I came from one of those very rare families where cutting people off and going completely silent just wasn’t a thing. I may have to tell my family numerous times or even yell at them occasionally, but we have never let the lines of communication completely die. It wasn’t until recently that I figure out that the vast majority of families aren’t like that.

I’m in my 40s and actually have a better relationship than ever with my family. I still find it unnerving that I can do things and say things to my family as a 42 year old man that would have gotten me in severe trouble as a teenager. I grew up in one of those families in 1980s rural America where things like yelling at your kids for yelling at the parents first, regular physical discipline, which I have zero problem with until it’s used excessively or as a first resort, parents always siding with the teachers, even when it was obvious that I was in the right, and ignoring things like bullying. I think it’s one of the reasons I became self sufficient as much as possible. Even on disability and being in a wheelchair (at least for long distances) I try to be as self reliant as possible. It’s just not worth the hassle to get other people involved.

I love using computers and typing even though my typing speed never exceeding 35 words per minute. I also love economics. Yet I never took computers and economics in high school because of the only teacher who taught such things in my dinky rural school just had it out for me and a few other students. She used to call me ‘stupid’ in front of the whole class. I took her for only one class in high school, typing. Got a C+ in that class first quarter. It was the only class my freshman year I got below a B+ in. Yet, it was enough to keep me off the honor roll. But, had I never gone to college I would have never discovered my love for computers or typing. I actually far prefer typing to writing. I find it encouraging that grade schools in my country are now teaching computer and typing skills to kids. I had an inkling that I liked computers as I started taking computer classes when I was in fourth grade. We had a good computer class teacher. But that one high school teacher that I had several run ins with almost killed my interest in things that I found out I have an ability for in college.

I cringe every time I hear someone say ‘college is worthless.’ In reality, being able to learn and relearn new skills even into old age is now more important than ever. It’s only going to get even more important in the future. The era of being able to specialize is dying, as many white-collar workers are figuring out with automation and AI. And it’s not just rich countries like USA, EU, and Japan that are automating. China is starting to automate much of it’s workforce. Probably why 1 in 5 Chinese recent college graduates are unemployed. Youth unemployment is no longer an American issue. It’s actually worse in China and EU. Multi generational homes are becoming more normal now. In the Renaissance, most rich families had as many as four generations living in the same house or on the same estate. The kids usually inherited the property and houses after mom and dad died. These estates and fortunes stayed in the family, and even grew larger, over the course of the centuries. The idea of children leaving home without support at age 18 and then getting sent to nursing homes as elders is quite recent. In fact, the age of adulthood even in the US was 21, not 18 for most of our history. The voting age used to be 21 until the 1960s. Even I wouldn’t have been able to vote for at least the first 50 years of my nation’s existence as I’m not a property owner. With as much as some politicians are trying to make voting harder to “counter voter fraud”, I imagine that someday some politician will propose changing the voting laws to allow only property owners and income tax payers the right to vote. As if the peasants, like me, who have to rent don’t have a stake in this country succeeding. I’ve read bloggers proposing this exact same thing as far back as 2013. I swear that we now have a society that actively wants to make things tougher than they used to be. Any wonder why there’s more hatred between the generations than there has been in recent history.

And it’s not just the different generations that hate each other. Workers and bosses hate each other too. It seems like that most people I know just can’t wrap their minds around the fact that no one can make it on minimum wage anymore. And any time workers try to unionize anymore, they are dealt with by firings, outsourcing, and automation. I wonder how long it will be before striking workers are getting shot and killed, like at the Homestead Steel Mill strike in the late 1800s. And that is just one example of strikers getting killed. Small business owners often complain “no one wants to work anymore” when in actuality people don’t want to work for unlivable wages dealing with unreasonable customers and stupid work policies that actually destroy productivity and morale. These kids you complain about “not wanting to work anymore”, many of them are working in gig jobs, starting their own side hustles, starting their own small businesses, and even becoming “digital nomads” by being able to work from anywhere in the world that has wireless internet service (i.e. everywhere on Earth anymore). I myself would have become a digital nomad if not for my mental illness. So I did the next best thing, I became a digital monk. Even one of my college friends recently suggested I would have made it as a monk. But, the church I grew up in didn’t have monasteries. I mean, a life of study, prayer, contemplation, isolation, and making money from selling anything from baked goods to theology books sounds like it would been good for me. Certainly better than trying to survive on minimum wage with retail jobs while waiting for disability to come through.

Many employers are downright ungrateful of the workers. And the customers are even worse. One of my best friends from college was laid off from an IT job in a major urban center even though he had been there for almost ten years, had two teenage children, and a wife with terminal cancer. And he was classified as an ‘essential worker’ during the pandemic. Caught covid at least three times. Still got laid off. I’ve already talked about my work experience in previous entries. What I got was mild compared to most people. And people, mostly under the age of 45, are using social media to talk about such problems. Since we are sharing our stories, and finding out that we aren’t alone, is probably why those in power want to shut down and regulate social media sites like reddit and tiktok. It has nothing to do with foreign nations spying on citizens. Every nation spies on their own citizens and everyone else. Besides, all of our online information has been public knowledge for many years. How do you think Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube remain free and their companies remain massively profitable. Pity they don’t share a pittance of that profit and pay us for said information. Even mining and oil companies in the early 1900s had the decency to pay land owners for the use of their land and mineral rights. We are truly living in Gilded Age, version 2.0.

I don’t see things getting better for workers and renters anytime soon unless we can elect some politicians who will actually get legislation passed to reel in the worst abuses of big business and landlords. We used to have such politicians even in the early 1900s like Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan. We don’t even bother to enforce anti trust laws, which have been on the books since the 1890s). That’s precisely why we have ‘Too Big To Fail.’ Greed is every bit as bad now as it was back then. We are essentially living Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’ except we have computers and gas powered automobiles. I swear some people will fight against progress no matter what. The same people who complain about ‘no one wants to work’ were the exact same people who fought against labor laws. People in the early 1900s were worried about big businesses cannibalizing the world and killing democracy and capitalism. Changes in attitudes by a younger cohort of politicians and younger industrialists like Henry Ford and Milton Hershey might have saved capitalism from it’s own abuses, and thus saved democracy.

Unfortunately, even in the early 1900s positive changes didn’t start happening until elder cohorts of politicians and business managers started retiring and or dying off in large numbers. I see the same problems in the early 2020s. I say this in fear of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but it looks like just enough people in places of power and prestige want the current state of things. It like some people actually want civilization to fail. It’s like those in power don’t want the masses to learn for themselves. I think would be tyrants fear the thought of a few billion people all over the world figuring out how things can be a lot better than they are. People aren’t angry because they don’t have electricity and running water. This ain’t 1900 no matter how bad some want it to be.

People are starting to realize how far below our potential we are living. It’s why younger workers want more work life balance. They’ve seen their parents and elders work for decades at the same place, often to be laid off and outsourced due to management’s short sighted greed. They’ve also seen their parents pensions getting cut and their parents 401(k)s become near worthless. One of my best friend’s fathers worked as a travelling repair man for a tech company his entire career. He lost a significant chunk of his retirement when his company went bankrupt. Now he’s working as a museum tour guide to supplement his social security. These managers are intentionally killing the gooses who lay golden eggs. The younger workers know this. And they are very angry, especially since they found they could be just as productive working from home, get their work tasks completed in only two or three hours (rather than the minimum eight in an office), have time for their children, and have time to cook healthy, better tasting, meals. Heck, even I lost over 180 pounds in the last three years on a disability pension while not being able to exercise much due to heart failure. I did far better on my own and in long term care during the pandemic than I ever did with nutritionists and Weight Watchers. Now some companies are trying to get rid of the work from home option entirely. I’m glad the workers are fighting back. I think the managers know work from home is productive, they just don’t want to give up their power. Some of these companies should just remodel their office buildings into cheap apartments. The futurist Buckminster Fuller (pioneer of the geodesic dome and prefabricated housing among numerous other innovations) predicted work from home, downtown offices going vacant, and said offices being refurbished as low income apartments for displaced workers as far back as at least 50 years ago.

I’ve read some news articles about work from home people are sometimes able to work more than one full time job just from their home laptops and collect multiple full time paychecks. I see zero problems with this because we don’t stop people from owning more than one rental property or business. It’s the same principle except it’s the working class getting in on some of the action. Online investing platforms like Robinhood and Stash allow poor and working-class people to invest on their own. Pity these weren’t available ten years earlier. I’ve seen plenty of articles about students being able to pay of hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans by investing their stimulus checks or start small businesses off their earnings. Most of my friends invested their stimulus checks. I invested most of mine too, still have most of it in the market, and had over a ten percent year on year return, which is better than the whole market did. Half of hedge fund managers and financial planners can’t beat the market most years.

Some of my friends did better than even I did. Some more than doubled their money but still left it in the market. Before you dismiss that as the exception and not the norm, the Fortune 500s started out of garages are not the norm either. Besides, many successful business men like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, etc. got started by borrowing some money from their own families. Elon Musk came from a wealthy family in South Africa. Mark Zuckerberg was a college dropout, but even he dropped out of Harvard, not University of Alabama. The original modern business magnate, John Rockefeller, borrowed $1000 dollars in 1860s money from his own father to buy his first oil refinery. Even my dad had to borrow some money from his father in law to start his dental office in rural Nebraska because the banks wouldn’t lend him money. And he stayed in the same practice for 30 years, sold out to a young dentist, and that dentist is still practicing in the same office. The banks were too short sighted to see that our rural county needed another dentist. Sometimes the people with the most money aren’t the smart money. Even Warren Buffet missed out on the computer and internet revolutions. And his company is making the exact same mistake with AI. I’d invest even more in the market but social security won’t allow anyone on disability to have more than $4000 in savings at any time. Otherwise I’d get kicked out of the program and lose my medicaid. In short, I stay poor so I can keep my necessary treatments. That provision not only chaps my hide, it’s making me less prosperous and self-reliant. God forbid poor people be able to make a little more money and be a little self reliant. Used to be the US government encouraged self reliance and even enabled it through things like the Homestead Act and GI Bill. Those days are long gone.

Investing isn’t that risky, especially if one were to buy into dividend paying stable mutual funds like the Dow Jones or S&P 500 and just put in a little every time you get paid. ‘Pay yourself first’ is the advice I got from every business instructor I ever had in college. It’s a crime against humanity that money isn’t taught in most grade schools and high schools. It’s why guys like Robert Kiyosaki and Dave Ramsey are worth millions, they are merely filling in the knowledge gaps that our schools won’t. They recognized that the public at large didn’t know much about money. Their advice has freed millions of people from debts, allowed others to get out of dead end jobs and start their own businesses, and taught the poor and middle class how to make money work in their favor instead of against them. I applaud such people. I wasn’t required even a year of personal finance in high school. I hope that’s changing. Lack of knowledge about how money works can be just as destructive as unrestricted greed. Even poverty stricken people on disability are learning these lessons. I am far from the only person on disability who has had some financial education. Amazing what one can learn from a few books, youtube channels, and a few years. It’s why tyrants fear peasants with knowledge. Heck, tyrants might fear peasants with knowledge as much as they do peasants with guns.

Possibilities of Mass Technological Unemployment

Posted on May 11, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

This going to be a long post, but please bear with me. I have a series of questions as a bit of a thought exercise and discussion that doesn’t often get discussed in public, not even by futurists: How soon do you think it will be before we see mass technological unemployment and the 21st century version of The Luddites? Only in the last few months has the mainstream media started even talking about AI replacing and augmenting human workers even though I first read about in on futuretimeline.net back in 2013. Read Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity Is Near and all the works of Peter Diamandis shortly after. Neither of these guys, nor any other techies I’ve read in the last ten years, have discussed in detail how we as a civilization manage this transition. Every mainstream economist seems to think automation will create more jobs than it eliminates because that’s the way it’s always been. High rollers like Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger say AI will amount to nothing, at least publicly. But these are the same guys who missed out on the computer and internet revolutions years ago. Their investors missed out on a lot of profits by these two not putting even a few percent of their holdings into Silcon Valley firms like Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, and Google when they first went public. I was telling everyone I knew to buy a few shares of these companies back then. I would have but forums like robinhood didn’t yet exist. God forbid peasants like me make a few bucks through the stock market.

Been trying to tell everyone I know about this ever since 2013. Most people outside my facebook techie groups, until recently, thought I was a hopeless dreamer at best and a liar at worst. It’s only a matter of time before the mainstream media starts discussing technological unemployment as a daily lead story. And I am convinced the public at large will panic in unexpected ways, like people hording toilet paper during covid. But far worse.

Been recently reading about The Luddites in early 19th century England burning down textile plants and killing factory managers. These skilled craftsmen were suddenly without means to support themselves even though they spent years working on their craft. Imagine if college educated white collar workers with tens of thousands in student loans and hundreds of thousands in mortgage debts find themselves unemployed by the millions over the course of several years? Half of Americans already have less than 500 dollars of emergency savings. Almost half of current retirees have zero saved up besides social security in my country. Social security is a “pay as you go” system. Has been ever since it was instituted in the 1930s. And it’s funding comes from taxing current workers to pay for the retirees and disabled like myself. There are US government projections that the social security fund could run dry by 2035 if massive changes to the tax system and funding aren’t implemented. Since congress seems determined to fight among itself and do nothing, this could become a reality.

If this industrial revolution we are currently living through destroys more jobs than it creates, like some in my techie groups on facebook have been predicting for several years, how do we get the displaced workers and fear driven public on board? In my country, debt to gross domestic product (think annual wages if nations were individual workers) is already over 120 percent. Granted this isn’t as bad as many places, but my congress already wants to massively cut programs. That’s why it’s very possible the US could default on its loans eventually. Over half of this money is owed to US citizens. Only 4 percent is owed China anymore. They, along with dozens of other nations, have been slowly getting out over the last several years. So even foreigners know something is fishy about US money. Discussions on raising taxes haven’t gone anywhere for decades. We’ve actually been lowering taxes for years. My countrymen still complain about taxes even though are tax rates are lower than most developed countries. In theory, we can print money as long as people are willing to us it. Granted that’s how hyperinflation happens (meaning money becomes worthless). It happened even in the very advanced nation of Germany in the 1920s. Currently happening in Argentina, Turkey, among others. That economic collapse ultimately resulted in the Nazi Party taking power. Don’t think it can’t happen again in other rich and advanced nations. I’ve been scared of something like this happening in my own country ever since I read ‘1984’ and ‘Fahrenheit 451’ twenty five years ago. I’m more scared of it than ever now.

How do we handle the displaced hundreds of millions workers who simply don’t have the skills to level up or self educate? Do we try to institute a UBI system with our current economics and politics? Knowing my countrymen like I do, this will probably not be popular even if 50 percent of the workforce loses their jobs to automation. We can’t even get Universal Healthcare or High Speed Rail even though most developed countries have had these for decades. Do we drop the prices on everything so even people living on part time gig work and welfare can afford the basics? Do private foundations pick up where government can’t go? Do we just put 3D printers in every home, vertical farms in every town, and make money as unnecessary as possible? The ‘Not In My Backyard’ attitude is strong in my nation. We’ve known we have a shortage in affordable housing for years and we still won’t build cheap housing in most places. Personally, I’d rather live next door to a nuclear power plant than a cattle yard or oil refinery. Can we solve homelessness with rapid 3D printed homes and just sell these homes for cheap or even outright just give them away? Knowing my countrymen’s attitudes towards the homeless and poor, this doesn’t look like that will fly either even though we already have the tech to make this work. Most people in my society simply have no empathy towards the struggle of others until tragedy effects them directly. It’s why we had over one million people die from covid even though we were among the first to rapidly produce vaccines and effective treatments. A significant chunk of the populace, including most people I personally know, still feel lockdowns and mask mandates were a violation of personal freedoms. This is the case even though most people in my social circle know at least one person who died from covid. Some people are epically heartless and soulless. And most people in my social circles are regular church attenders.

I don’t know the answers to any of these. I haven’t seen any of this discussed by the public at large. This isn’t even on most politicians’ radar. Andrew Yang discussed this in 2020 only to get one percent of the primaries votes and dismissed as a communist. I still remember the press and his political rivals dismissing him as Comrade Yang. This isn’t the first time a fringe candidate was dismissed but years later proven right. In 1992, Ross Perot warned that globalization and free trade would destroy the middle class in America and most developed nations. He was dismissed as a crank by everyone from CNN to Saturday Night Live. Sadly, he was proven right years after the fact. We can’t count on most governments as they are decades behind the curve. It wasn’t until recently that the Biden administration appointed an “AI czar.” They are about ten years too late. I’m interested in hearing how other nations are planning on dealing with this. I truly believe we can have a great future as a species where even the poorest of poor people live well. But we seem to have no plans to manage the transition. Any thoughts? I always enjoy hearing from my readers.

Yet Even More of What’s Been on My Mind Since I Moved to Oklahoma City

Posted on May 10, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

Talked to an old childhood friend earlier tonight. She was telling me stories about the horrors she deals with everyday at her job in a pharmacy in a college town in the midwest. Caught one of her coworkers smoking pot while on the clock recently. Her boss did nothing. No write up, no drug test, no firing, no verbal reprimand. I’ve been listening to horror stories about working in customer service from my friends, people on reddit forms, youtube videos, etc. for the last ten years. I have a few stories of my own, like getting told off by the owner of the McDonalds I worked at my very first day on the job when I was 16. I told him it was my first day and he said, “I don’t care.” None of my managers and coworkers stood up for me. I was fired a month later supposedly because I wasn’t quick enough on the grill. And yet, I saw coworkers eating on the job, literally taking burgers and chicken out of the storage and eating them while they were working.

That’s mild compared to what I saw at other jobs. I would go into detail but no one believes me. Even at the factory job I had I was threatened with death when my work was suffering because of sleep deprivation. I worked the 11pm to 7am shift, five nights a week for less than 10 bucks an hour in 2006. My work was suffering and one of my line mates yelled at me, “Quit f***ing around or I will kill you godd*****it.” Everyone on my line saw it. No one reported it. I had talked to my foreman about previous problems with this same coworker. Nothing was done. So I knew nothing was going to be done in this case either. So I went to the bathroom, told my foreman I had gotten sick and needed to take the rest of the night off. The next day I put in my request for a transfer to day shift. It was immediately denied. So I quit. Turned in my ID badge and safety equipment right there. The sad thing was, the job itself wasn’t stressful at all, certainly not as stressful as working with the public every day. While it was physically demanding, I could still do it because I wasn’t dealing with unpredictable public every day. But I couldn’t sleep during the days very well. After two months of sleep deprivation, my work was suffering and I was becoming a danger to myself and others.

I could do that job easily even if it was physically demanding. The setup sucked as did the people I was working for. If they would have just worked with me a little, I would have been at the job probably for years. That is, until I developed heart failure. Had I been able to stay at the job, I would have never had to apply for disability even with schizophrenia as I would have been covered by my employer’s health care insurance. Would have also been eligible for a 401(k). I found out in college I had a talent for stock picking and investing. I would be a hell of a lot better off personally and a financially viable member of the American workforce for years if not for the short sightedness of my employers. Needless to say I wasn’t surprised at all when I found out that same factory shut down like ten years later and moved it’s manufacturing. I could work in the right circumstances. I was never given a chance. And because I lived in a rural area, I had a lack of options. I didn’t quit work because I was lazy and didn’t want to work. I quit because the setup sucked, management treated workers worse than animals, and the customers were even worse. And that was in the 2000s.

I left my last permanent job in 2012. It was a great job for me even with my disability. I didn’t go full time because I was afraid of losing my disability insurance and full time was never available. I left because I actually did the math one night and found out for every dollar I made through that job, I lost seventy one cents via lost benefits and increased rent (I was on a sliding scale in low income housing). That was before taxes. And to think people complain about even sales tax of 6 percent.

I stay on disability even though I have a talent for stock picking and investing because Universal Healthcare isn’t a thing in my country. Even though Universal Healthcare works in most European Union countries, Japan, and Canada, I fear it would never work in America even if it was instituted. Seeing my dad’s experience with the VA makes me think that Universal Healthcare would be worse than even the mess we have now. We don’t even have decent mass transit here. People were all up in arms over Obamacare. And that was just health insurance, not universal health care. I still remember people like Sarah Palin talking about “death panels” on live tv. Universal Healthcare will probably never be instituted in America (at least not in my lifetime), but people will actively fight against it even if mass unemployment comes via automation (like I fear it will). We still have the Puritan work ethic and the idea that people that don’t work for money are worthless. As if God put a dollar sign on everything in the Cosmos. Heck, people are still fighting against renewable energy and electric cars in my country even though it’s already cheaper than fossil fuels in most cases (even without subsidies) AND already makes up 20 percent of our power grid. I chuckle when I think on the fact that more renewable was installed in my country under the Trump administration than in any other previous administration. He howled about bringing back coal jobs (even though mining jobs were largely automated even back then) and wind turbines causing cancer. We still pulled off this feat with the US being the only nation to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. It’s the economics. Even if Climate Change isn’t a thing, the energy revolution is underway because it’s now cost effective. Granted, not as fast as the Al Gores and Greenpeace people of the world would like. “It’s the economy stupid” to quote James Carville.

People like to complain about how “no one wants to work anymore.” My dad does this occasionally. Makes me kind of annoyed every time I hear him say this. Yet, most of the jobs that are readily available are part time (that’s how most fast food and retail gets around paying benefits), and the hours are unpredictable. I explain this to people, but I just as well be speaking to myself. About the only people who get it are the people who have worked such jobs in the last twenty years.

In 2023 America and European Union, with our level of technology and know how, you shouldn’t have to be in the medical field, an engineer, in finance, or in the trades just to afford a small house. Don’t tell me, “be an Entrepeneur” either. Most people aren’t cut out to be self employed. Most new businesses fail within the first five years. Serfs in medieval times were hardly self employed even though they grew most of their own food, built most of their own shanties, and protected by the lords of their lands. Most people can no longer grow their own food or build their own houses. With our technology, we can get away with only a small percentage of the work force being farmers and carpenters. My dad’s dental office would have failed in the first five years back in the 1980s had my mom not been working as a nurse. In fact, my dad tried to get back into the Air Force as a dentist in the early 1980s when we were struggling. But they refused to take him because he was on blood pressure meds. I think some of the standards have changed since then.

Most places are now doing away with work from home, so a worker can’t even count on a move to a cheaper rural area and work via internet even though we have the tech to make it work for the most part. Covid proved that. And it would revitalize dying rural communities like the one I left a few months ago. I’ve been reading about people leaving California and the East Coast since the start of covid. But people have been leaving rural areas since at least the 1930s.

Large tech firms like IBM, Meta, Google, and Amazon are laying off highly paid technicians and replacing them with AI. I’ve been saying this would happen since 2013. Other than my futurist groups on facebook, the only people who believed me were my best friend and my mom. Looks like the STEM degrees people were hyping when I was in college are no longer safe. Even now, over 40 percent of scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley are immigrants. Many of them aren’t safe anymore either. I never want to hear “no one wants to work” ever again. The fact that over 30 percent of workers between the ages of 20 and 39 are working more than one job proves that. That’s the “triggered snowflake” millennial generation.

Now, everyone is telling these kids, “college is worthless”, “join the military” and “go into the trades” and that “some plumbers make more than most lawyers and doctors.” Fools don’t realize they are going to create the same bubble and wage crash in the trades in less than fifteen years. Those jobs will get oversaturated if college stays expensive and automation keeps taking jobs even though trades won’t be able to be automated probably not for decades, if ever. Even some medical and some STEM jobs are no longer safe.

Speaking of the army, a lot of traditional soldier work is now being done by drones, cyber hackers, and robots. The US Army was using robotic pack mules as early as Afghanistan. I think it was Boston Dynamics that demonstrated a drone on treads that could shoot faster and straighter than any human. And that was circa 2010. Besides, modern warfare doesn’t utilize thousands of soldiers on a battlefield, like World War 2. Much of the fighting is done by highly trained special forces, air strikes, drones, etc. Ukraine is proving with advanced drone tech and guided missles they can hold their own against a vastly larger nation like Russia. Just a few days ago, Ukraine shot down a Russian hypersonic missle with American Patriot missles. Patriot missles have been around since at least the early 1990s. Last I heard, over 190,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion (according to some estimates). So not even the military needs as many young recruits as they did in previous eras. That’s why a draft wasn’t issued in the years after 9/11. Not only is this not your grandfather’s Vietnam, it’s not even my generation’s Iraq.

College got too expensive for most people without going into debt. Most jobs could be learned in a year or two with on the job training and don’t even need a college degree except that most employers require it. Artificial barrier to entry if you ask me. My two best friends from college are in their forties and they are still paying off student loans. One is a high school teacher and the other trained as an IT guy but got laid off from his firm even though he had been there for almost ten years and was classified as an essential worker during covid. And people still have the gall to complain about no one wanting to work or a lack of loyalty.

Workers have been losing protections that were taken for granted by previous eras for decades. People know they are poor. Even people in third world countries know they are poor because they have smart phones with youtube and TikTok. Speaking of third world countries, those countries that some of my countrymen and politicians dismiss as “s*** holes” are regarded as “potential clients” by our Chinese rivals. Matter of perspective I suppose. People know they are being screwed by greedy sociopath bosses and politicians who no longer care about the voters. That’s why I said greed will kill capitalism and democracy faster than kids reading Karl Marx and Mao Zedong. I have zero patience for people who say “we were poor but didn’t know it and were happy.” You were happy because you didn’t know you how bad you were getting screwed over. Even kids in Africa know they are getting screwed. Knowledge is power. Peasants with knowledge are dangerous to abusive tyrants. Tyrants fear the masses getting enlightened as much as they fear an armed populace. And you know what, they should be scared if history teaches us anything. Knowledge can’t be unlearned. There is no going back now.

The fact is I make less than $1000 a month from all sources, get my meds paid for by social security (which would cost over $3000 a month without insurance), eat three meals a day, have a roof over my head, and am suffering from schizophrenia, heart failure and am wheelchair bound. People tell me I am lucky that I can’t work. Sadly, they are right. I am luckier than anyone working the vast majority of service and manufacturing and farming jobs even though I am making poverty level wages, lost my career, lost any shot at a family, and will probably die earlier than most of them due to my heart failure. Welcome to the desert of current day reality. We are underachieving as a society and a species.

Thoughts On Anger, Greed, and Living Below Human Potential

Posted on May 7, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

We just had another mass shooting in my country this weekend, this time it was a mall in a suburb of Dallas. Now some politicians are starting to blame our daily mass shootings on untreated mental health problems. As if we mentally ill aren’t already demonized. Statistically, a very small percentage of violent crimes are committed by mentally ill people. Mentally ill people are far more likely to be victims of violent crimes than neurotypicals actually. I’m convinced it’s because many mentally ill live in poverty. Granted, some people I know claim that no one who has electricity and indoor plumbing is truly poor. Maybe in the 1920s. Today, over 80 percent of the world now has electricity. Of the eight billion people in the world, over five billion now have regular access to internet. I heard one of my elders saying “internet is a luxury” as recently as 2019. In 1999, that was true. A lot has changed since then. When over half of the world’s population has access to free education and news, a large percentage of whom make less than 5 dollars a day, it’s no longer a luxury. People used to think indoor plumbing and even being able to read and write were frivolous luxuries. Elders in ancient Greece used to complain that reading and writing were killing mental power and making people stupid. Things change and stay the same.

I am convinced that people are, by and large, more angry and stressed than we’ve been in living memory. Sure we have a world where 90 percent of the population isn’t starving. But the anger is still there because most people have only recently become aware of what is truly possible. Even an illiterate ten year old working in a cobalt mine in central Africa for only two dollars a day probably has heard of the Kardashians, Nicola Tesla, and Elon Mask if he has access to a smartphone or tv. Indigenous tribes in New Guinea knew who Neal Armstrong was back in the late 1970s and were asking visitors who was going to the moon next. People are very angry. Not because they are ungrateful, lazy, or not wanting to work. People are realizing how far below our potential we as a species are living. We no longer need wars. Even young men in Russia with their levels of internet and media censorship, realize that fighting a war in Ukraine is pointless and are voting with their feet. Young people in China are “Lying Falt” and “Letting It Rot” because they are realizing there is more to life than working and buying stuff you don’t need to impress people you don’t respect. Brad Pitt was talking this in the 1999 movie “Fight Club.”

I don’t like using the term waking up as the word “woke” has so much baggage in my country. But people, thanks for free information via the internet and universal literacy being a thing in even the poorest countries, are starting to figure out we can do better than we are. It doesn’t matter your race, creed, sexual orientation, age, political beliefs, or even economic ideals, the vast majority of humanity is not benefiting nearly as much from our science, technology, and education as is possible even now. I’m convinced it’s unrestrained greed that is the root of many of our problems today. I think unrestrained greed has always been at the root of most problems. Greed has been universally condemned by every major religion and legal code since the start of civilization. Greed’s even more dangerous now.

Banning books in libraries and book stores is becoming more common in my country than I can ever remember in my life. Sure, a lot of literature isn’t age appropriate for grade school children. Then again, neither are most parts of the Bible. Neither are some tv shows. My parents had no issues with me watching war movies like Rambo, War Games, and Red Dawn back in the 1980s. But The Simpsons and Al Bundy were completely off limits. Some states are starting to revoke tenure for college professors and scholars. Others are repealing some of their child labor laws. Some states are banning foreign social media like TikTok. Who benefits from these changes? As far as censorship goes, Martin Luther was excommunicated by the Catholic Church (meaning he was damned to burn in Hell forever) partially because he thought Christians should be able to read the Bible for themselves. Since the printing press had recently been popularized, it was only a matter of time before the Church of that era to lose their monopoly on literacy and information.

What is the internet other than the 21st century’s printing press? The most popular book to be printed on the 15th century printing press was the Bible. The second most popular were manuals about how to spot and persecute those who practice witchcraft and heresy. Some of the early explorers, like Christopher Columbus, were inspired by reading about the travels of Marco Polo. The printing press did lead to mass literacy, mass education, etc. But, problems came too. Some of the bloodiest holy wars, like the Thirty Years Wars (1618-1648) between Catholic and Protestant kingdoms of Europe and the English Civil War probably would have never happened without the printing press. Then again, neither would the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, rediscovery of mass democracy, rights for women and minorities, end of slavery, etc. Same can be said for the internet. I’m old enough I didn’t get an email account until I was 18. Personally, I love that children can do real time Google and Wikipedia searches if they think an authority figure is talking nonsense. Google and Wikipedia are what old codgers like me use. For all I know, some of these children are using even better sources of information that I am not aware of. Censorship ultimately failed after the invention of the printing press. Censorship will fail even worse now with easy access to information.

As much as I love the internet, it’s only the first of several breakthroughs that will define the 21st century to future historians. Advances that are only in recent years becoming commonplace include artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, regenerative medicine, renewable energy, etc. are already impacting the world. Just a few days ago, IBM announced they were laying off almost 8,000 employees and replacing them with the AI tech we already have. I’ve been saying this was going to happen since 2013. I am surprised it’s happening sooner than I thought. Naturally, there is no talk about retraining the displaced workers or even providing some kind of safety net while these displaced workers look for other sources of income. IBM laying off a significant chunk of their workforce is only the beginning. I expect headlines like these to become common faster than most people think.

I’m all in favor of allowing machines to take over some work duties as long as the proceeds get passed on to the public at large, whether it’s though reduced prices on robot produced goods and services, taxes on robot labor (which is favored by some tech gurus like Bill Gates), etc. But that’s probably not what’s s currently happening. And it won’t happen in the near term, at least not without serious social unrest. I’m not sure most people realize the parallels between our current Information Revolution and the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. I think we are still in the phase of unregulated greed and ambition. If we as citizens were smart, we would be electing senators and presidents in the mold of Theodore Rosevelt. I’m convinced he did as much to make industrialization beneficial to everyone as any politician of his times. I’m convinced he even saved capitalism from its own excesses. In our current world, we have hit the point where most of the world’s people see the possibilities of better standards of living for everyone regardless of what country they live in.

What’s truly holding us back is plain old fashioned greed. There is a fine line between self interest and greed. Unfettered and unregulated greed will do more to kill capitalism and democracy than kids reading Karl Marx or Mao Zedong. It will also kill life on this planet just as dead as any nuclear war if we don’t reign it in. And we are all guilty of this, not just the wealthy and powerful. Manufacturing wouldn’t have been outsourced or done with slave labor ever if people weren’t addicted to cheap goods. We could make all of our electronics and household items in our own nations if people were willing to pay higher prices and employers more willing to raise wages. Just today I saw an episode of Shark Tank and a young married couple were pitching a product that cost $15 to make with American labor and selling for $24. And it was making decent sales. But the “sharks” were saying they wouldn’t fund this couple because the profit margins were “too low” and they “should move their manufacturing to China.” This young couple was already profitable. It’s not like they were losing money. It just wasn’t enough for the sharks to provide any seed money. Greed caused this project to be held back.

Recently saw lots of articles that a majority of people under the age of thirty have an unfavorable view of capitalism. Naturally, some pundits blamed the education system being communist. But, the only capitalism these kids experienced is seeing their parents lose their jobs and houses in the 2008 crisis while Wall Street got bailed out. They saw a lot of businesses go under during covid. They saw the shortages in grocery stores and retailers with their own eyes. They see the homeless camps every day. They undergo live shooter drills in their schools. They see people carrying firearms in malls and churches. They see people have to file for bankruptcy for having to go to the hospital. They themselves are working more than one job just to afford food and an apartment. They have never seen a world where a father could own a house, two cars, and support six children on only one income from the factory or the mine. They have never seen a world where 80 percent of the population were either farmers or factory workers. They’ve seen their parents factory and office jobs get sent to China because of lower wages, no benefits, and fewer environmental protections. Now it’s automation that’s coming for their jobs. Jobs that employ millions of people like drivers, warehouse workers, accountants, much of legal, etc. are no longer safe from automation. The only reason those aren’t automated yet is because it isn’t cheap enough. Give it a few years. Even cheap labor countries like China are going heavy into automation. Too Big To Fail, profitable companies not paying taxes, state sponsored capitalism (in China), mass layoffs, etc. are these kids experiences with capitalism. They have never seen a world where most businesses were local and large corportate jobs payed livable wages and provided pensions. The Founding Fathers, Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises would have argued against this style of capitalism. Even Adam Smith talked about “enlightened self interest” back in the 1770s. I take enlightened self interest to mean don’t be a greedy jerk.

Human nature may not be completely changeable, but it can be regulated and restricted. The most free people in human history were Stone Age hunters. But even they had over half of their children die before they hit puberty. Giving up part of our freedom for the prosperity and stability that comes with civilizing ourselves is part of the deal. People today are angry because they know greed is slowing down our progress as a civilization and as a species. The old appeals of nationalism, racial bigotry, ideology, sexism, etc. were losing their appeals even when Carl Sagan talked about them in his Cosmos series in 1980, the year I was born. These are even less appealing to the mass of humanity now in 2023. Things like Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party protests of a dozen years ago were only the start.

Thoughts On Friendships

Posted on May 4, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

Overall, I am happier and more free than I was in the long term care home. The biggest thing I miss about the long term care home is friends. I made several friends during the eight months I lived at that small town hospital. It was fun seeing people younger than me having successful marriages, careers, and families. I haven’t been around people younger than me much in my entire life. When I was in school, I spent most of my time with people my own age, like most students. In college, most of my friends were a couple years older than me. I didn’t like the socializing part of high school, at least not during school hours. I absolutely loved the socializing in college. My college had less than 600 students, but we had students from a majority of states and a few dozen countries on six continents. In my fraternity (I was in a frat the first two years of college), our president and vice president were foreign students. One was from Netherlands and the other from Japan. My longest dating relationship was with a woman from Iowa, and she was a couple years older than me.

When I applied for disability and moved to low income housing in 2006, I didn’t realize what a hit my social life was going to take. I was the youngest resident when I moved there. Some of the elders didn’t like that I was there. Some thought that I shouldn’t be on disability because of my intellectual pursuits and how well I was managing on my own. That’s the cruelty of invisible disabilities. I’ve been to church several times and out in public a few times since I moved to the suburbs of Oklahoma City three months ago. I’ve noticed that some people are actually more helpful and sympathetic now that I am in a wheelchair, at least when out in public. I no longer get questions about ‘what do you do.’ Even though my mobility is gone, it’s kind of a welcome relief to not have to lie to people about not having a career. Most people, I have found, don’t have the attention span for me to explain that I have a mental illness that prevents me from sustainable employment. Sure, people in general are more sympathetic now than twenty years ago. But I still fear most people don’t entirely get how real mental illness really is.

I still haven’t made any new friends since I moved here. I am starting to put faces to names my parents have been talking about for the last few years. Most adults my age and younger I have met here are married, have families, and careers. My oldest nephew is going to graduate from high school next week. Seeing my brother and his wife’s oldest son grow up is making me realize I missed out on a great deal because of my mental illness. I would have never acknowledged it in my twenties, but I am now convinced I would have made a good father and husband had I never developed mental illness. I think I would have had a pretty cool career too. My brother and his family made me realize just what I lost due to this illness. I imagine it will hurt even more if I live long enough to see my nephews and niece have children and careers of their own. It will hurt seeing my brother and his wife grow elderly together and have decades worth of memories, prestigious careers, their own home, and have lots of loved ones in their elderly years. The big reason I moved down here rather than stayed in Nebraska is that I fear that I will need my brother and his wife to help me out after our parents are dead. Seeing my elderly parents up close every day for the last three months made me realize that they are not the healthy and vibrant people of my teens. These last three months I’ve spent more time with my parents than probably the previous eighteen years combined since I graduated college. Even in college, I didn’t go home very often. I was just too busy enjoying having a decent social life for the first time in my life.

My five years in college was the only time in my entire life I didn’t feel like a complete outsider. I loved being around people who shared my interests and thirst for knowledge. I loved the class discussions. In college, I discovered my love for writing. I discovered my love for economics and investing. Learned some really cool stuff in my chemistry and biology classes. Read a lot of books, many of which are making their ways unto banned book lists (those are the exact kind of books teenagers and college kids should be reading). Read a lot of the classics of philosophy, literature, history, etc. Found out I have a natural talent in picking good stocks. Kind of a pity social security disability puts a cap on how much one can have in savings and remain in the program that’s so low.

In college, I met people who were nerdier than me. I mean, I met dudes who built computers, wrote computer programs, played in garage bands, played trivia games, collected comic books, played Dungeouns and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, etc. I even had friends who did Civil War reenactments and attended Renaissance Fairs during school breaks. I never knew anyone who did any of those things in high school. I would have loved all of that. But, I didn’t have many close friends before I went to college. Most of the guys at my rural high school liked to hunt, fish, drive ATVs, go to beer bashes in cow pastures twenty miles from the nearest cops, etc. The kind of stuff my parents wouldn’t allow me and my brother to do. Looking back on it decades later, I’m glad they never let us do that kind of thing. When I was thirteen, my dad told me that people should be kind to nerds and dorks because they would someday rule the world. Like most thirteen year olds, I thought he was full of it. Turns out he was right. Even as a first grader, I knew my mind was going to be my future. I enjoy being an adult far more than I ever did being a kid, even with heart failure and mental illness.

Even as much as I love about being a wise middle aged man with a few gray hairs and chronically bad knees, I do miss a few things about my youth. I miss my best friend. She and I are in our forties and have been besties since age fifteen. I miss my health. I’m starting to realize that it’s not the ‘good old days’ the elders miss nearly as much as it is the health and vitality. I miss my health and vitality, but I love the knowledge and wisdom I have acquired. I love that I am still in contact with the best friends I ever had. I love that I have adapted to my mental illness and am able to talk about it with a large audience. I hope this blog stays up in one form or another long after I’m dead. Makes me wonder if medical science will eventually find a cure for mental illness. I think eventually it will be cured, just not in my lifetime.

More Overnight Musings

Posted on April 30, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

Just today, I read an article on CNN.com that it’s forecasted by the World Economic Forum over 14 million jobs worldwide could be lost to automation by 2027. While I am glad that even traditional news outlets like CNN and 60 Minutes (when they interviewed the CEO of Google about AI and automation a few weeks ago) are starting to report this, I am disappointed that it seems like none of our elected officials (at least not here in USA) are discussing this. Back in the 2020 election, the only candidate that even addressed this is Andrew Yang. I highly recommend watching his interview with Joe Rogan on youtube even if it is a few years old. I also recommend Rogan’s interviews with Elon Musk.

I am convinced that mass technological unemployment is coming by the early 2030s, at least in developed countries. I’ve been convinced of this since 2013. As much as I love economics as a subject, I haven’t seen many economists discuss even the possible problems this could cause. Traditionally, automation has created more jobs than it destroyed and lead to enough resources and revenue being produced that social safety nets like unemployment insurance, public education, social security pensions, disability insurance, and Medicare could be funded. But, will this always be the case? If not, how do we adapt our society and cultural norms if it comes to where we have a society where less than half the working age citizens can even find employment that pays livable wages? Seems like a lot of people are at least 20 years behind on what the tech is already doing, let alone what it can do in the near future. Politicians are even worse, at least in my country. Then again, I don’t look to politicians to solve problems related to tech and science. Most simply can’t as most are lawyers by trade, they aren’t trained to solve problems related to tech or psychological problems associated with a loss of meaning and purpose.

Yes, tech has made it easier to communicate and learn new skills. Yet, has it made us happier and more hopeful overall? Probably not. Physically, our lives are far less taxing than even our grandparents. Yet, they are also more mentally stressful. Maybe that is why we are seeing more cases of mental illness, mass shootings, extremist politics, doomsday preppers becoming normal, and conspiracy theories becoming mainstream. Our Stone Age hunter brains are simply not adapted to dealing with issues like loneliness, information overload, abundance of resources yet lack of meaning and purpose. The human mind reacts to things like getting cut off in traffic or dealing with internet bullies the same way our Stone Age ancestors dealt with tigers and bears. Fight or flight may have been great survival strategies for most of our history, but it’s now causing us needless anguish and pain. I think one of the main reasons most people I know are nostalgic for past decades is that the world is changing technologically and culturally faster than most human minds can process and adapt to.

I don’t know how many of my readers have heard of the concept of Technological Singularity. But it’s a term for a hypothetical time in the future when our science and technology advance to the point where the changes are too fast for the human mind to comprehend and civilization is changed in ways that can’t be reversed. Some futurists, like Ray Kurzweil (chief AI engineer at Google) are convinced it will happen by mid century. Others, like Michio Kaku, think it won’t happen until the 22nd century. Others are convinced it won’t happen until centuries from now. Others are convinced it’s not going to happen ever. I imagine if our great grandparents could see the world of 2023, they would think “Aren’t y’all already there?” While I’m not necessarily worried about a Terminator or Matrix scenario, I am worried that most people simply won’t be able to mentally and emotionally keep up with changing skills and careers every few years. Being obsolete (at least in terms of job skills) is more likely than war against the machines I think, which will cause lots of problems on it’s own. Even I can barely keep up with just the news of changes in tech, culture, and geopolitics and I have the time to research these because my disability pension takes care of my basic needs. I think mainstream media is doing the public a disservice by not devoting more time to science and tech advancements. That’s why I haven’t watched 24 hour cable news since 2007.

Some people I know can’t do a proper Google search, get frustrated with automated customer service, and hate self check out at the Wal Mart. Yet I know children as young as five years old who can already use computers and smartphones, I know children who can already write computer programs and games, I know teenagers whose knowledge of internet, 3D printing, and robotics I probably will never be able to match. I worry about the widening knowledge gap even more than the widening wealth gap. Personally, I don’t bother with self check outs because I get everything delivered to my house. I even had Amazon delivery when I lived in the long term care facility. I guess my opinion on self check outs taking away jobs, well, people said the same things about self service gas stations in the 1970s and gasoline powered automobiles taking away jobs from horse stable workers in the early 1900s. Besides, delivery drivers and warehouse workers will probably eventually get automated too. As much as I love my parents and have known some really cool elderly people over the years, I fear the cynics may have been right when they said ‘science advances only one funeral at a time.’ I think the same could be said about cultural norms and social attitudes.

Speaking of funerals, there are now doctors and scientists who are researching longevity treatments and even age reversal medications. They’ve already been able to double the life span of lab mice and even reverse some aging in mice already. But this tech creeps me more than even book banning and cancel culture. Part of me hopes they fail, like everyone who has ever looked for the Fountain of Youth. I just fear that if we are successful in finding longevity medications that we will have a stagnation in culture and science. We already have wage and economic stagnation. Also, the gaps between the generations and the socioeconomic classes will become impossible to navigate. OK Boomer and Triggered Snowflake could just be a warm up for what’s to come in the next few generations. I mean, we already have 80 year old politicians and businessmen who obviously don’t need the money and past their prime who refuse to retire. I guess that power and prestige are just that addictive. I wouldn’t know. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Altered Carbon and Black Mirror. But even the Bible and ancient folklore talks about elders who lived for over 900 years. Maybe that really is possible with the right treatments. We are only in the beginnings of a new industrial and scientific revolution. Our institutions like politics, education, organized religions, legal, etc. have lost the confidence of the public at large. I think it’s because we haven’t figured out how to adapt to this new world, at least not yet. We’re just figuring this out as we go like with every other revolution. It could get real bumpy before we adapt. Buckle up.

These are just a few of the thoughts I’ve had in recent weeks even though I’ve been studying these topics for years. I am convinced that many people are not prepared for the advances coming within the next several years. We weren’t even ready for the covid pandemic even though pandemics have happened many times over the centuries. I don’t think we as citizens, our politics, or our institutions are ready for what could happen in terms of science and tech that we are already researching. There’s a Chinese saying that goes something like ‘May you live in interesting times.’ Could be both a blessing and a curse at the same time.

Advice To My 18 Year Old Nephew

Posted on April 29, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

My oldest nephew is going to graduate high school in a few weeks. He’s going to the same college his parents did to study electrical engineering. Since he was in an advanced study program all the way through high school, he already has most (if not all) of his general education requirements out of the way. This post is my advice to him (and other 18 year olds) about life after high school. I’m doing it as a list of things I’m glad I was told at 18 and things I wished I knew in high school. Here goes.

Things I Knew At Age 18 That Most People Didn’t

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t want to get married or have kids. Marriage and kids aren’t for everyone. Focus on your self development and early career first.

Dating is more dangerous and difficult now than it was in previous generations. It only takes one out of wedlock pregnancy or one accusation (even if it’s false) of misconduct to ruin your entire life. Don’t feel guilty if you struggle with dating. Sometimes it’s not worth the trouble.

Never stop learning. Especially now.

You’re probably going to change careers and even industries several times in your working life. Forget about retiring at age 62 like your grandfather. Social security alone won’t be able to support you in old age. Life expectancy could be crazy long 40 years from now.

If you truly want to get rich, your best chances are with starting your own business. Even then, the odds are against you. Some of the best business leaders would make terrible employees.

The industry you will be working in at age 40 might not even exist yet.

Be flexible when it comes to working. This is even more important now than twenty years ago. Entire industries can rise and go obsolete within ten years.

Don’t expect loyalty out of your employer, employees, government, etc. The world is changing real fast. It’s going to be even more insane twenty years from now.

Don’t participate in any conversations you wouldn’t want going viral on TikTok

There are no secrets anymore. It no longer pays to be a jerk in business. If you are unethical, you will get found out by the entire world. The internet never forgets.

Things I Wish I Knew At Age 18

You can do everything right and still fail. Chance and luck play more into life than anyone wants to admit. No such thing as a truly self made man.

Divorce isn’t necessarily a failure or the end of everything. But, it’s the kids who get hurt the most.

Getting laid off from a job isn’t a failure on your part. Getting laid off is normal now. We’re all independent contractors and hired guns now.

Coworkers are not your friends. Office politics are real and exist everywhere.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t own a house by your 30th birthday. As much as the job market changes, it might be best to be a renter and able to move to another city or even nation for job opportunities.

Don’t dismiss working overseas. Cost of living is lower in many nations, most developed nations have universal health care, and many countries have better attitudes towards work life balance.

You are competing against the entire world now. If your job can be done cheaper overseas and or by a machine, it will be eventually.

You will probably be worse off financially and standard of living wise than your parents and grandparents. It’s no reflection on you. It’s just a sad fact of living in a declining culture. Hence, don’t rule out moving overseas for your career.

Land is a good investment if you can afford it. But even the Chinese are making man made islands anymore.

Investing in the stock market isn’t necessarily risky. Being short sighted and trying to time everything makes it risky. Don’t panic when the press tells you to panic. Screw the press. You want to be buying when everyone is selling and selling when everyone else is buying. Bulls make money. Bears make money. Sheep and Hogs get slaughtered.

Don’t watch 24 hour news channels. They will only make you bitter, hopeless, angry, and fearful. In fact, don’t even own a TV unless you own a gaming console.

Don’t major in something that can be learned in a few years of binge watching youtube or Khan Academy. In fact, don’t even go to college if you aren’t studying something for a specific career or industry. Many employers are dropping their college degree requirements.

Don’t major in something that can easily be automated or outsourced.

Sometimes the best education is free. Even more so now than ever with internet.

Don’t feel guilty about drinking Starbucks instead of putting the 5 bucks a day in a 401(k). You’re probably not going to retire at 65 anyway. In fact, you could probably easily live to 100 with as fast as medicine is advancing. Expect the social security age to be much higher than 65 before long. Sticking 5 bucks a day in a retirement account probably won’t make you rich. You’re better off trying your chances with starting your own business.

Keep up on science and technology advancements. They can provide good ideas for undervalued investments. They can also make you tougher to replace with robots become our overlords.

Don’t be nostalgic for the past. Your elders are full of crap when they talk about the ‘good ol’ days.’ The world wasn’t better in the past. Those elders were just in better health and less cynical and bitter. Actively fight against being a grumpy old man who complains about everything.

Middle of the Night Musings About Tech, Economics, and the Near Future of Humanity

Posted on April 29, 2023 by alifeofmentalillness

I’m up in the middle of the night, again. My mind has been far more active than what was normal the last several months. Maybe the move to a large urban center has stimulated my mind. Maybe getting my heart problems under control made me more hopeful. Maybe seeing my parents everyday has given me more food for thought. Whatever it is, I’m enjoying these new changes.

I saw my new general practitioner a couple days ago. I’m guessing he’s in his forties. I liked him right away. I liked the nurses and office staff too. Even though I don’t have my new insurance card yet, the office lady was able to find all my info pretty quickly. I’ve found medical staff, social workers, and even fast food employees to be more helpful here in Oklahoma City than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. It’s definitely a change living in a place that people actually are moving to in large numbers. It makes me feel like I’ve officially joined the 21st century rather than just read about it online.

Been reading a lot of articles about tech advancements since I moved to Oklahoma. Some of this is advancing faster than even I would have thought. Ten years ago, I never thought I could talk history and economics with an AI Chatbot easier than I could with most people. Certainly not as soon as 2023. And I use a free low end service, it’s not even ChatGPT as far as I can tell. And the fact that people are already using chatbots to aid in the office jobs and even work multiple full times, I would have not imagined that even in 2020. Makes me think the possibility to make workers far more productive with AI is already here. It makes me think that some companies will automate as much of their white collar staff as possible if they aren’t already. Much like blue collar factory jobs were outsourced and automated in the 1980s, I think the same thing is starting to happen in office and tech jobs. I can now understand why some plumbers, electricians, and welders make more money than some lawyers and accountants.

I imagine that if AI and automation become as big as I think, that alone will make college education pointless for most people. I could see more apprentices and on the job training. We already have that to a degree with unpaid internships. Personally, I think unpaid internships are a modern day version of serfdom. Even most academic instruction is done by graduate assistants making poverty level wages and no benefits or tenure, at least for undergrad. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t get a career in academia. For awhile I was pursuing a career as a college professor. I wanted to teach investing, finance, and economics. These were my favorite business subjects in college. But that was until I realized that the majority of college professors aren’t full time, don’t have benefits or tenure. And since I wanted to teach more than do research, it wasn’t for me. I also didn’t want to spend years in college racking up a small fortune in student loans to get a PhD and do obscure research that only a handful of people would actually acknowledge. Even my small blog has more readers than most doctoral dissertations.

Another thing I didn’t like about working in academia is that I felt too much pressure to specialize my knowledge. Personally, I think specialization is too narrow for most workers nowadays. As fast as technology is advancing, a worker starting out today is going to change careers at least a few times. The days of getting a job at age 22 and staying with the same company until age 65 are over. I think that businesses today would be wise in hiring more Humanities students and philosophers, especially AI firms. Not only most employers no longer that loyal, the tech advances and economic changes mean that they can’t afford to be as loyal as they were 100 years ago. The world is simply changing too fast to ensure life long employment. Life long employment was a bigger deal in Japan and Korea than even the USA. I try to tell my teenage nephews and niece that people like their dad and mom who stay with the same company for over twenty years after graduation are not the norm. The only career advice I give to any teenager is ‘be flexible and never stop learning.’ Some of the most lucrative careers in 2023 didn’t even exist in 2000. I think the most lucrative businesses and careers of 2045 haven’t even been invented yet. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the world had its first trillionaire by then, and probably from an industry that only now on the drawing board.

Not only do I think we are entering a future world of mass technological unemployment, I think in some ways we are already starting to see it in real time. Big tech firms have already laid off almost a quarter million workers since mid 2022 even though most of the firms doing the layoffs are profitable. Even tech companies in China and India are laying off some of their tech workers. Youth unemployment among recent college graduates in China is a major problem, though they don’t have the student loan burdens most American students have. I also think real estate and land prices will only continue to rise even if interest rates keep going up, which they probably will to combat inflation and encourage saving and investing. The days of cheap credit are over. So are the days of cheap commodities like oil and food. 3 dollar a gallon gas, 6 dollars for a dozen eggs, and one million dollars for starter homes are only the beginning. And, yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. At least not permanently.

I imagine eventually science and tech advances will make everything cheaper much the same way electronics and computers get better and cheaper as the years go on. I mean, we can already 3D print everything from tools to houses, to even guns (so abolishing the 2nd amendment will do no good). I think even chemicals can now be 3D printed. Eventually we will be able to function in a world were less than half of working age people have full time jobs. I think that reality is already technically feasible though not economically, politically, or culturally feasible. It’s definitely not feasible economically in most developing countries. It’s definitely not culturally feasible in nations that find meaning and purpose in careers. I think technological unemployment will be far tougher for the US to adapt to than most developed nations because we value employment so much and don’t believe in the social safety nets that some nations have already implemented generations ago. I see it getting really ugly in the US because of our attitudes towards work, education, and social welfare. I think the homeless problems, prison overcrowding, working poor, political divisions between the Left and Right, drug abuse, mental health crisis, and rates of suicide getting worse in the next 20 years. So much so that I think that America won’t be the richest and most influential country in the world come 2030. I don’t think we will collapse into Mad Max (even though some of my prepper friends are actually hoping and praying for this), I think the world of America being the only superpower no longer exists.

I think eventually we will achieve a world where even people on poverty level wages can have a decent life free from starvation and access to decent health care. We already have more overweight people than starving people by a nearly 3 to 1 margin. Obesity is no longer just an American problem. In fact, for most of history being overweight was considered a sign of wealth and prosperity. Now people consider it a sign of poverty and a lack of discipline. But I think it will be long and painful process to get to that world. I doubt I’ll live to see it.

I know it spooked a lot of people, myself included, when the World Economic Form was talking about a Great Reset and “owning nothing and being happy.” Debt resets and failures of currencies are nothing new. Even the Old Testament talks about debt jubilation every so often. Nowadays, some people would say you were a dirty socialist or commie for even suggesting such a thing. Maybe God Himself was a socialist in ancient times. The Founding Fathers thought that conquering a nation via debts was as dangerous as standing armies. Now that everyone is in debt to everyone else, and we as nations and individuals are needlessly suffering, the wisdom of their words concerning debts are more obvious than ever. A debt reset is probably the only way we are going to not saddle those yet born with unpayable debt. Besides, it’s not like our money is real as most countries went off gold standards decades ago. And, it’s not like we owe money to aliens or God. We owe these quadrillions to ourselves, not other species.

Going back to having most countries on some kind of gold standard wouldn’t be as tough as most people think since almost all gold mined in the last 6000 years still exists. We’re not burning through nearly as fast as we are oil, natural gas, or even rare earths. Granted it would severely jack up the price of gold and make countries and individuals that have lots of gold suddenly wealthy. In theory, we can print money forever even though said money would have far less value. Some countries are talking about having their own blockchain crypto currencies tethered to some kind of gold standard. In theory, you could make anything be a stable currency providing it was limited and people would accept it. Things like beads, salt, sea shells, livestock, grain, and even dried yak dung have been used as currency over the centuries. Cigarettes and candy have been popular currencies in prisons for generations. Even prisoners believe in a means of exchange. Even if we have a world wide economic collapse, we will recover. At least as long as we don’t engage in a nuclear war.

I guess that’s enough for one post. I actually enjoy writing these types of posts where I branch off from mental illness. It gives me an outlet for all the knowledge I’ve acquired over the years. Besides, I don’t believe in specialization. The world needs more renaissance people (or at least aspiring renaissance people) than it did when I was growing up. I think we need more generalists and people who can learn fast because of how fast our tech is advancing and our culture is changing. We are living in a new industrial revolution as I write this. It’s going to get even more interesting in the next thirty years. Stay tuned.

A Life Of Mental Illness

The Joys and Pains of Schizophrenic Living in a Chronically Sane World

Why I Prefer Wisdom and Why I Am Thankful I Was Never Attractive To Anyone

Job Loss and Regaining Meaning

Tyrants Fear Peasants Getting Knowledge and Making Money

Possibilities of Mass Technological Unemployment

Yet Even More of What’s Been on My Mind Since I Moved to Oklahoma City

Thoughts On Anger, Greed, and Living Below Human Potential

Thoughts On Friendships

More Overnight Musings

Advice To My 18 Year Old Nephew

Middle of the Night Musings About Tech, Economics, and the Near Future of Humanity

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