It’s been a very sleepy day.
Guess it’s time for one of those sleep debt payments. I think perhaps it’s REM sleep in particular that I need because my sleep has been very, very deep.
Like, the kind of deep that leaves me feeling like a coma zombie.
It being the middle of August doesn’t help either as the afternoon heat can turn any dream into a fever dream in nothing flat.
So I am feeling pretty deep fried right about now. I will doubtlessly feel better once I get some food and hydration into me, but for the moment, I feel like boiled crap.
As usual, I am doing my best to remain mellow about the whole thing. It’s not like I had hot plans for the day anyhow, so sleeping through the day is no big deal. My video games will still be here when I need them.
Therefore the eagerness to play that tends to lead me to become aggravated and frustrated when I have one of these sleepy periods doesn’t make a lot of sense. It might feel like what I know and love is being pulled away from me like a separated twin, but it’s not actually going anywhere.
I’ll be back for it and to it after my much needed trip to the Land of Nod is done.
It’s a rough place, that Land of Nod. I can see why I don’t go there much.
Speaking of video games, had a scare this morning with Baldur’s Gate 3. A couple of times, the game crashed while I was trying to level up my main character for the first time, and I was faced with the prospect of not being able to level up at all.
Which would make the game unplayable. obviously. If you can’t level your characters up in an RPG, the game is going to get real hard real fast.
Luckily, the third time around, I thought to just make my choices really fast and thus evaded the crash.
I am, on occasion, quite clever, as befits my adoptive species.
As I wander through whatever strange land I find myself in, I have picked up traveling companions, as I knew I would.
In this type of RPG, you never travel solo. And if you try, you get your ass kicked.
And I am more or less fine with that. There are times when my cranky Taurus loner side rears its ugly horn’d head and grumps about having all these people following us around and slowing us down, but for the most part, I like having others around.
After all, they’re interesting and useful characters with their own colorful personalities and points of view who really enrich the experience and who have to do exactly what I tell them to do most of the time.
And those are the kinds of companions I really treasure.
Right now, I am trying to figure out how to get someone down from a wooden cage suspended from a tree by a rope.
And she is not making it easier by being all haughty and rude and entitled about it.
But I am sure I will get her down…. eventually.
More after the break.
Is wealth bad for people?
I think a compelling argument could be made that it is.
First exhibit : Elon Musk, for fuck’s sake.
In this case, I mean “bad” as in being spiritually and morally bad for people. I think becoming and/or being rich has a cancerous effect on the human soul and it thrusts people into the jaws of decadence like nothing else can except power.
And power and money are basically the same thing anyhow.
I think the rot sets in once you start living surrounded by people who work for you. That might be employees, subordinates, live-in house staff, or even your own family if you are the person who decides who gets what when you die.
And the greater the power disparity between you and the people you deal with, the more toxic the effect. Also, the longer you can go without ever having to deal with anyone who doesn’t work for you, the worse it is for you.
Wealth infantilizes people. It makes them regress emotionally to a toddler level of consciousness, where everything in their world revolves around their needs, wants, sensitivities, and desires.
No wonder it makes people sociopathic. It eliminates all need to negotiate relationships with your fellow humans and without that need people lose their minds.
We are a social species. We need the company of peers in order to be healthy.
I think that one of the reasons you see a great deal of socially aberrant behaviour in the wealthy is because their societal expectation is that if they are a thousand times richer than the average person, they should be a thousand times happier than them too.
And that is simply not possible. But our societal programming is so strong that even the wealthy can’t escape it and so they will continue to try to be that happy and become very angry that they keep failing to get there.
So they lash out at convenient scapegoats, like the poor and the taxes they have to pay and so forth and so on. That way, they can continue to believe that there is some amount of money or level of personal freedom that will fulfill that promise of happiness in proportion to their wealth.
Dang it, if it wasn’t for those welfare bums, I’d be rich enough to be happy!!!
The truth is, there is an upper limit on happiness and it isn’t even that expensive. It starts at roughly $80K/year and past that point more money simply leads to more extravagant and ludicrous spending as people try to find that promised proportional happiness that society insists exists.
The truth is, those people in the house on the hill aren’t any happier than you, any more than you are happier than people poorer than you. No matter what the wealth level, it’s your normal, and expecting to be proportionately happier than those on a lower socioeconomic rung than you is a fool’s bet and merely yet another delusion created by our social status instincts, which were never meant to handle this level of power imbalance and social breadth.
In fact, those people on the hill might well be absolutely miserable because not only are they no happier than you are, their repeated attempts to get that happiness they were “promised” have left them jaded, callous, selfish, and unable to maintain any kind of real relationship with anyone, even their spouses and children, because their wealth has so infantalized them that they have lost all ability to give and take in a relationship and you can’t connect with people if you, like the brat you are, insist in having everything be your way, all the time, and anyone suggesting anything else makes you throw a tantrum.
Except your tantrums come with lawyers.
Once you realize what a nightmarish trap wealth can be, you are well armed to see past the social illusion and the compassion surpressing effects of envy and see that the rich can be just as much of a victim of a fucked up system as anyone else.
Oh, except that unlike you or I, nobody has any sympathy for their pain.
Is it any wonder they behave badly?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.