A rant aimed at the top
The past week has been fairly reflective. I've been a bit inundated with AI stuff creeping into my peripheral with regards to our collective future or lack thereof.
I, like most of you, consumed too much world news about how we're all about to be blown up or priced out of existence (while I thank any of the available gods that my bicycle works again and I don't need to pay €2.41/L to get stuck in traffic).
I've looked at my bank account and the assets I have and realised that my financial future is sound enough as long as we never move apartments, I question every extra purchase as if I am twenty years in the future and need to answer why that money didn't go into an ETF to bankroll some asshole billionaire so I can have some scraps of whatever is left over ("please Sir, can I have some more?"), and that honestly, it's boring as fuck and I wouldn't mind if the lottery that I don't play because I don't want to waste the money and statistically it's stupid, would just decide to give me a million so I can just put THAT into ETFs and retire off the gains (all while still lining the pockets of billionaires).
Bah, this is tiring. And I don't even have kids, so really shouldn't complain.
I was watching this fella a while back on YouTube (which somehow sinks its claws back into me every so often) build this tiny house on a tiny plot of land and reflect on his life a bit and why he had chosen to get into this lifestyle. I really appreciated Anders' approach: focusing on feeling more with less, trying to reduce impact as an individual (which is admirable, yet I believe the burden lies almost completely on massive corporations working to bleed the planet dry), and finding a sense of peace by living in harmony with the land and what it can offer us.
It's touching and speaks a lot to me, yet I find myself complacent in our apartment, hanging out in my job that is challenging, but I can see that I'm becoming the tentacles of the AI brain, sitting in the chair while the cloud moves my limbs. Is it that hard to break out of this shell of saving for the future, scrounging for what is left for us?
Maybe my desire to win the lottery says a lot about who I am as a person: perhaps expecting free rides as opposed to working hard, bootstraps, yada yada, to get to a place of comfort and security. Maybe I'm actually contradicting myself from the two previous paragraphs in that I still think, "if I just had enough to get free money to get by, then I'd be happy", as opposed to just living off what we have, what the planet has for us; as Anders does.
I was reading with my colleagues yesterday something about all the billions that some dickheads in the US have, and we saw that Elon Musk is worth like $800bn. A year ago I made a video talking about this topic, and at the time, he was worth $200bn. Cool.
Maybe this is what I am feeling: this absolute travesty of a social paradigm we are in, in that these monsters simultaneously evoke so much rage for their hoarding when this could be put to such better use (curing world hunger, eradicating diseases, lifting people out of poverty, providing basic infrastructure for everyone in the world), and at the same time leave me with a sense of jealousy that they can do whatever they want at any second. I don't even think it's about the money. They can do anything they want. We must sit under the table and grab whatever crumb falls to us (and if you get in my way then you're in trouble!).
So let's go ahead and start more wars, watch big fat pricks like Trump, Putin, and Orbán syphon money from us to all their fat friends pockets instead, deflect away any action that might be considered charitable or good for humanity because, you know; profit, and collectively twiddle our little toesies and thumbs while the planet heats-the-fuck-up and we all get real hot, real fast, and watch tens of millions of people run away from whatever climactic shitstorm they've been trapped in: likely in our direction up her e in the north.
Fuck it, I'm going to buy a balcony solar panel and repot my plants which I didn't do last week. Stupid Claude, bet you can't even mix soil with Perlite. Dumbass.