Everything You Can’t Have

Story of my life. Get here for a virtual hug!

While I'd not be as spartan and ascetic as yourself I too 90% identify with your quote: "I want enough money to be left alone". I definitely will want a few dozen things I don't have now but I am also very convinced I'll know when to stop.

> No, the central crisis for me is that my standard of living depends on taking from others.

This can very easily spiral into extremes. Even Buddhist monks, to whom all life is sacred, laugh at those among them that don't dare weeding out the monastery garden lest they kill a worm while doing so. No disrespect to you meant, in fact I very strongly relate to you, but you do sound like you want to minimize harm in a way that's just not realistic and will end up burning you out in a different way compared to what you experienced working for the man.

I don't lose sleep over the fact that me ordering a $6.70 item from AliExpress maybe stimulates a guy running a sweat shop to keep exploiting people. I am not responsible for that and even if I have tilted the scales slightly here and there in my life I still view all of that as a fair transaction: if they couldn't offer it at that price then they wouldn't. But they do, so I order it and consume it after.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

With that being said, I'll always agree that we need to learn to consume the minimum because the way humanity is living right now is absolutely not sustainable and it will bite future generations super hard. That much is true. But I don't order napkins from AliExpress, no, so I am excused for wanting to try a curious novel (to me) shaver or buy my girlfriend a butterfly-shaped hair pin. Simple pleasures that hopefully harm nobody.

> But the wealthy don't do that. They just keep taking more and more and more, giving little or nothing back.

As another commenter here said: most people are not fit to be rich. They get rich too quickly or too easily and then realize they have no purpose, no hobbies, no goals, no struggles, so they spend the rest of their lives desperately trying to fill the internal void with material items which ironically they are well-aware will never gonna happen but feel trapped and hopeless so they keep trying anyway.

...Or date other rich people, which fails even more spectacularly.

...And they love pulling the ladder after they climbed it.

> But I've struggled for so long that it's all I have really known, to the point where I've lost sight of how to improve my situation.

Time for the next virtual hug as I am almost the same. I'll hit 43 next month and I am already dead-tired of all this circus and all the dumb charades and pretenses. The only thing that truly keeps me going is the absolute angel of a wife that I have, whose optimism and positivity are kind of contagious, and I want to show her a better life for both of us. Maybe along the way I'll find self-love as well, who knows.

> Surely there is at least one willing and able to speak out and step up.

I hate generalizing people so I am pretty sure benevolent rich people exist but (a) they are part of a much smaller group and them speaking up might actually be very harmful to them because others in the same group might actively sabotage them and (b) I completely understand somebody who fought for their life not wanting to spend the rest of it fighting for other people's lives (I know that if I make it I'll be one of the most anonymous rich guys you could think of).

You do get tired and burned out after all. Fighting with your own life is quite enough, and then some more even. You and I understand that pretty well.

That matches my experience too. With a bad, cheap guitar or shoes or a computer, I yearned for a better version thereof. Now I am playing a good guitar that I bought 10 years ago and I do not really feel any need to buy a more expensive one.

During the pandemic, I found out that my superpower is that I can't get bored, I just dissociate. And I've noticed that wealthy people tend to prune off possibilities rather than explore them like I do, in other words, they never seem to daydream, but live in the hard reality of making difficult choices almost dispassionately, without imagination.

I had one bad day with covid where I couldn't get off the couch due to headache and dizziness, and felt an odd inclination that I wanted to play video games, because I couldn't. The last time I had felt an impulse to do something from inside was around 1992 (had a bunch of life-changing events the year after, and then went off to college and career). Ever since then, mostly the entirety of my life has been spent reacting to and dealing with external demands. So the feeling of motivation, however brief, was like tasting nirvana or glimpsing the sublime. Guess I'm still trapped in the 90s.

Anyway, I've spent so much of my life in that state of superposition that I solve problems almost automatically. People tell me anything at all, and my mind races through the branches and edge cases, arriving at the solution before they finish speaking. Like I solve problems in parallel, while others seem to do it serially. This is what I think the term neurodivergent is getting at.

The downside is that I don't perceive the difficulty of the problem, only the friction and artificial barriers preventing me from implementing the solution. Everything feels so contrived or even sabotaged (the theme of The X Files) that sometimes it feels like living in a nightmare where we all do everything the hard way by design, which is why I struggle so profoundly in a world designed for neurotypicals.

All I need is a minimum of time and resources to get ahead of the daily grind to get real work done. But those are the things that I can never seem to have. Because the people who favor tradition over outside the box thinking have the wealth. Which keeps us all stuck in a 20th century economy like The Matrix. Rich people seem to want to be the Merovingian, not Ironman or Batman.. at least that's how they present themselves as influencers, titans of industry, tech bros, etc.

But at the end of the day, I'm learning to let all of these preconceived and self-limiting beliefs go. Wealth is a construct, as are the generalizations we use to lump individuals together into stereotypes. Which means we hold the key to changing our own mindset. There's a power in surrendering to the unreachability of a logical solution and shifting to the reality/timeline in which it's already been solved. That's what magical thinking and manifestation and The Secret are about. I'm straying into the metaphysical now, but anyone who is self-aware or conscious or woke can do this. It all starts with meditation and bringing the outer reality into balance with the inner reality by reconnecting with the divine. But it's a red/blue pill thing, nobody can prove that it works or disprove it, we all just have to try it for ourselves.

I liked your response to my other comment, but figured I'd reply here. We're below the fold anyway now, but your insight deserved another.