Building a Better Tomorrow

The future used to be certain - at least for the Americans after WW2 until its eventual decline in the late 70s. Manifest Destiny is gone. What happened to building a better tomorrow? Just follow the money trail and you will know that governments all around the world do not have any ideas on how to put it to good use. Financial institutions were made exactly to hedge against uncertainty. Nobody knows what to do with their resources anymore. We save money and hoard stuff endlessly to prepare for an indefinite future.

Perhaps we should look more into ourselves. Real change starts from within. Even if there's such a thing as a global superpower, concentrated groups of people wanting to make good positive changes in the world, there will be too much mainstream resistance. If the abundance economy is coming, what do you think will happen if world leaders start announcing that money is becoming obsolete, and everyone is free from employment? Roam free like the horses. Resistance is what you will encounter.

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Be the change that you want to see in the world. So let's talk about us and life in general.

Life is a little too complex to consider everything without conflicting thoughts. Our mental capacity is limited at any given time, made worse when snap-decisions are required. Think of a few large numbers now. Notice those numbers emerging from the clouds of your mind. You may take your time selecting those numbers, but you have no complete control over what appears in your mind.

We are creatures of double standards, and we may never completely vanquish all forms of hypocrisy in us. Perhaps part of the pursuit of happiness is to lessen hypocrisy through practice. With thoughts, before they manifest into actions. Thinking is a skill just like anything else. And like what they say, it may take up to 10,000 hours to master your thinking - constantly fixing up patches of blind-sights and inconsistencies. I believe this is one of those important keys to unlock the door to great happiness. Like what Gandhi have said before:-

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony."
--- Mahatma Gandhi

I mean like - who in the right mind wants to be born out of nowhere just to be forced into education and go through the hassles of earning a living? I'm lucky enough to be born into the hands of a great, responsible mother. But we all know things could have been completely different for us. There is a deep need in us to make it right for all the world's children. The wholly inefficient socioeconomic system of the world at large ain't working out. It is a freakshow, an evident one when the poor dies by the side of the road from starvation while Walmart is filled with racks of expired food. I even find it difficult to write and post something like this when I know people want positivity and light-hearted stuff.

You may say that it's 100% personal responsibility - to get oneself out of the rut. That notion is debatable. I'm sure most of us have realized that everything is connected and not as isolated as it seems. If you love babies, then you'd have to agree that we can all do better.

And then in some corner of the world, preying on insecurities is some twat.. a success guru saying "If you're still poor at 35, it is your fault!", not really knowing that anyone's success is the product of many people's failures. The world operates on a winner-takes-all effect: you can see this phenomena in the obvious disparity of wealth distribution. People flock to famous things, assigning trust and attention to them. Kodak goes bankrupt because of something like Facebook. Friendly Bob operating in your residential area's grocery store might've even committed suicide because he couldn't cope with those gigantosaurus supermarket behemoths. Generally, it is comply or die. Success is not clearly attributed to sheer human will. Your best might not even pass the test.

"Is it that, we collectively thought that, Steve Jobs was a great man? Even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children. Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit. The world itself is just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our commentary bullshit masquerading as insight. Our social media faking us into intimacy, or is that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new, we all know why we do this. Not because Hunger games books makes us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. Fuck Society."
--- Elliot, Mr Robot

There's a roll of dice in our birth conditions and whatever that is filling up your consciousness at every moment. A simple example: some people are born "beautiful", some people are born "ugly". Genetic lottery. Good for you if you went for facial surgery. It's nothing wrong, except that it's all kinds of wrong because of our socioeconomic system that generally benefits palatable faces, while also supporting the notion that "ugly" is unfavourable and perpetuating the idea of a certain kind of look.. imposing it on our children and future generations. This example of sheer will on our own effort to modify our looks is analogous to the success guru's idea of "success" and "hard work". The blind-sight to this: nose jobs can by chance, go wrong. Is it the patient's fault, the surgeon's fault, society's fault, or simply a faulty knife? These are just four things that may contribute to failure. And what if someone refuses to go for facial surgery, but ultimately couldn't get past feeling ugly and insecure? It renders her pretty much inoperable in our society. Do we tell her to just suck it up? Is it her fault for not able to be successful before 35? Let me say this again, success gurus might be smart and hardworking, but let's not discount the fact they're lucky ignorant twats.

Nothing against successful people, but saying things like what most success gurus would say to bring your defenses down is a true testament to the saying "having your head high in the clouds". Words like that put ideas into people about the quality of worthiness and worthlessness in others.

Besides that, not everyone is cut-out to be a cog in the wheel in our society, just like how not everyone is going to be able to play football if the entire world runs just on a game of football. You don't say shit like what that success guru and so many other successful people felt authoritatively enough to say if someone can't play football. Some people just cannot place themselves anywhere in this economic system if survivability, authority, and entitlement requires a threshold of money - not something any form of human activity can generate.

Our current system rewards selfishness, deceit, and harsh competition - but not goodness, selflessness, and cooperation. I wouldn't be on the same playing field if I'm just a good Samaritan not seeing any point in "rendering services" to "customers". This is a situation that I'm sure many of us know and feel. But we are just wilfully ignorant about it, especially if our lives are comfortable enough.

However, I believe that no one is really at fault. Everything is being shoved by something else. I've been hating my marketing job for dog years thinking that it's meaningless, but perhaps the whole point is to make good use of it to deliver content effectively.

The entire system that we live in is the one in conflict with our "true" values of love, kindness, and all the good stuff. That is why we will never find constant "happiness", barring the natural fluctuations of our happy (or sad) hormones. But I'm hopeful enough because there are technical solutions to the conflicting double lives that we subject ourselves in. One of it is The Venus Project (although they need to be open to the idea of cryptocurrencies instead of being hard-headed on instant societal transformation). There are plenty of sound solutions out there. And I believe that cryptocurrencies will be key. And Steemit is part of the movement, made up of sovereign beings. We just need to hit critical mass as a collective, putting in the time in to make a real change.

And thanks for everything that you're doing. May the Force be with you.

"My father picked me up from school one day, and we played hooky and went to the beach. It was too cold to go into the water, so we sat on the blanket and ate pizza. When I got home, my sneakers were full of sand and I dumped it on my bedroom floor. I didn't know the difference. I was six. My mother screamed at me for the mess. But he wasn't mad. He said that billions of years ago - the world's shifting and oceans moving brought that sand to that spot on the beach, and then I took it away. Everyday, he said - we change the world. Which is a nice thought until I think about how many days and lifetimes I would need to bring a shoe-full of sand home until there is no beach. Until I made a difference to anyone. Every day we change the world, but to change the world in a way that means anything, that takes more time than most people have. It never happens all at once. It’s slow. It’s methodical. It’s exhausting. We don’t all have the stomach for it."
--- Elliot, Mr Robot

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---kevinwong/[email protected]