Well off, but unhappy. in Journal of life stuff

Now that 2019 is close to being over, a lot of people are posting the “Bitcoin Minimums” to counteract the natural FUD cycle that comes and goes with cryptos.

2012 – $4
2013 – $65
2014 – $200
2015 – $185
2016 – $365
2017 – $780
2018 – $3200
2019 – $3400*

• so far.

Note the 2014/15 timeframe, that was the last time there was a huge rush like there was in 2017. Mt.Gox (the largest / only?) bitcoin exchange at the time failed (got hacked, lost liquidity) and the price crashed as a result. The run in 2014 was actually larger than the 2017 run by a decent margin. Anyway though, you notice the trend. The value goes up. And yet, in spite of that, I can’t help but be terrified that something is going to go wrong and that I have to have a career and job in order to be ‘safe’. I can’t look at my bank account and say “No, seriously, you can afford to not work for years even if you lose all your investment funds!”. I can’t find any peace.

I’ve always been super conservative. It’s what got me here. Right now, it’s more annoying than helpful. I share all this to set the stage for the anxiety that is driving me to write this entry.

“If you could do anything, what would you do? If you had your life savings locked up, what would you do?”

Life savings I choose to define as ‘if you earned as much money, after tax, as you did when you were employed’. In reality, that would actually mean I’d earn a lot more than just the same salary, because health care is stupid expensive, and without a job one must buy their own health insurance. If a health insurance that only covered ‘major’ things, like cancer, surgery, etc was an option, and it wasn’t stupidly expensive, I’d aim for that. The concept of using insurance to go for a routine doctor’s visit is just…so weird to me. That shouldn’t be an insurance interaction. But whatever.

1. I would not have allowed the companies who want to interview me to push those interviews out to next week.
2. Tuesday of this week I would have packed a bag and driven down to Pigeon Forge, TN.
3. I would have spent 3-10 days in Pigeon Forge enjoying the sights. I would probably have gotten to feeling lonely after the first day, but I would have asked around and tried to find someone local to the area who was from a poorer family and essentially paid their way just so I’d have company. I choose not to see this as evil, even though there are several legitimate arguments for it being so.

That’s the main thing. Now we skip to a higher level:
1. On one hand, I want to live somewhere that I don’t have to deal with snow in the winter. On the other hand, I want somewhere that I don’t end up spending $100+ a month on air conditioning. Perhaps just get a southern home with a basement and, if needed, lay pipework underground for some geothermal cooling. Or whatever you call using the earth as a heatsink.

1. Go to Wegman’s (I recently visited the new one they opened near me, it’s massive, the size of a walmart or bigger!) and try alllll the tasty sweets they have. The chocolate dipped peanut butter cup cookies. The cookie sandwiches, the Reese’s bar, all the things. They all looked so tasty. And yes, I know I can make all those at home. But I want one of each, not 30. Portion control is hard enough as is. >.<

2. I want to own a Tesla. I look forward to never needing to buy gasoline again. I look forward to acceleration at any speed I’d be driving at. I look forward to the quiet ride. Whether I’d get a S, 3, or Cybertruck remains to be seen. I’m still in shock about the Cybertruck’s looks. It’s not objectively ugly like the PT Cruiser is, but it sure ain’t beautiful either.

3. I want a garage to park my car in so that I can rotate the tires myself instead of needing to pay someone to do it for me. Ok, sure, I could do this outside. Really the garage is only ‘nice to have’ if I live in a place that it snows or where I’d have to scrape ice off the windows frequently.

4. I want to find a way to interact with people. If social pressures/norms/fears weren’t a thing, I’d say some sort of after-school thing for high school students. Teaching them life skills, like how to file taxes, pay credit cards/debit cards, how to write a resume, how to handle interviews, college and career advice. But also, sometimes, just talk about life. Share fun stories, laugh at memes, listen to their problems, offer advice. I want to be a human to people who will listen.

To be honest, the fact that they are high schoolers is the least important thing to me. And the only reason I pick them is because that’s where most of the questions would come from. I don’t care if you’re 26 and have the same questions; I’m happy to answer them. I just don’t know how I’d find a room of 20-somethings who actually wanted to learn and socialize.

The problem with this dream is that I’m a white guy in his 30s. The second I dare speak about being around high schoolers everyone assumes I’m some sort of fucking pervert. Hate has gone too far. Yes, there are perverts, yes they are evil, yes it is a problem. But the moment you go so far with your hate toward that evil that good people are terrified of even trying to help? That’s too much.

I guess this point can be summed up as “I have a lot to give back to people. I want to give to them, without thought of reward, and I certainly don’t want to live in fear of being punished for giving either!”

1. Failing 5, I want a business idea that works. Louis Rossman is a version of me that found a way to make money for himself instead of having to work for other people. He and I have so many personality traits in common and yet our lives took such different paths. My own parents have had the same problems with contractors that Louis is facing right now, and a huge part of me says I could make good money just being a contractor who didn’t suck at what he did. But I have few to no actual skills a contractor should have. “Learn then!” I also have no real desire to work outside in the middle of summer or winter. I’m lazy. That’s the problem.

But the business is a means to an end for the same thing I want in #5, I want to give something back to people and have them love me for it. Not romantic love, appreciation. I can sit in my apartment for 6 months and never have anyone call or ask if I’m still here. I want to matter to other people.

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So yea, that’s my list. I feel like I’m leaving some stuff off, but once I got 5 and 6 out of the way, well…those really encompass the thing in my life that I want which I don’t have. It’s why I set my entire life up to provide for a wife/family as the sole breadwinner. And then I never got a wife. I never got a family. I created everything for a purpose, and now that purpose is denied to me. I’ve known I need to find a new purpose for nearly 10 years, and I still haven’t managed to make progress on that because…no other purpose feels fulfilling. I don’t want to be loved by 10,000 people. I want to be loved by maybe 10.

But I don’t know how to find peace in life, or make progress towards a goal that fundamentally requires another person to validate my existence. “Keep meeting people!” Like I ever stopped? I could do better, sure. I need a way to handle all the times I meet people and they want nothing to do with me. I see each one as a failure. A failure I don’t understand the reason for. And because I don’t understand that failure, I can’t grow. And because I can’t grow, I’m performing the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I want to scream with the force to level buildings. My mind can’t take it.

Yet, if I take a step back, I realize how blessed I am. I read the struggles of the people on this site: bad marriages, lonely lives, chronic illness, poverty, on and on. I have none of these problems. I’m just alone. I am, objectively, wealthy. Not the 1% by any stretch, and I will work hard in my life to avoid ever joining the 1%. Nobody needs that much money. When the Bible teaches that being wealthy isn’t a good thing…it’s not lying. Take it from me; the lessons it teaches about wealth are true. That said, being broke sucks too, and the gap between being poor and being wealthy is not a fine line at all. It’s more like a decent sized river. It’s entirely possible to have enough money to be comfortable without being so much money that you succumb to evil due to that wealth.

So…if you were expecting me to try and say “be happy you’re broke!”…hell naw. Be pissed off you are broke. Some greedy-ass motherfucker is stealing your lunch money and I hate that motherfucker as much as you do because they spend 7 years of my career stealing my lunch money too!

The media is full of Bernie this and Socialism that. Socialism has murdered more people in the last 100 years than Christianity, Islam, and Catholicism have murdered in all of recorded history. You will never convince me that, for all our inequality problems, socialism or communism are the answer. It is foolish to believe so. The solution to inequality is a society that doesn’t tolerate that inequality.

In the US, we are taught to see ourselves as having no rights. When you’re taught about unions, you’re taught that they existed because people burned to death in factories where the doors were locked to try and keep people on task. But when those same workers went on strike for better working conditions, ‘scabs’ were brought in. Generally, Irish immigrants who were escaping famine in Ireland. You are taught that even if it’s bad for you, someone else has it worse, so you can’t make your own situation better because the man at the top will always find someone with a worse situation and put them in your shoes, leaving you in that person’s old shoes. The lesson is, ‘be grateful that the man at the top is only screwing you over as much as he is, because it can always be worse!”

A society that rejects inequality realizes that burning that greedy man at the top’s life to the ground is a totally reasonable thing to do. People don’t want to be greedy when their greed might literally get them killed. That said, killing shouldn’t be necessary. Burn the rich man’s mansion to the ground, break his car, steal his things. Reduce him back down to near your level. Make his life suck, remove the privilege and power from it. In such a society there is no way for the man at the top to make your life worse when you complain, because you realize all you have to do is gang up on one man. No man can fight 100 and win. It’s impossible.

I don’t know how to convince a society that there’s a better way to live, and the only thing they have to do to improve their situation is stop accepting it and take action against it. There will ALWAYS be people who have more than others. Equality must not be the goal. The goal must be a reasonable life for everyone. Reasonable…a word modern society seems to have forgotten the meaning of.

Oh, and if you think I’m wrong, remember that Daniel Carnegie was more wealthy than Jeff Bezos, but people who met/talked to him really liked him. The same Daniel Carnegie who hired strike breakers to MURDER union organizers and their families to keep his factories running. Yet the Carnegie institute exists, and he has a good reputation, why? Because a newspaper ran his obituary early and the man realized his legacy was to be that of a man steeped in blood and despair. He changed because that newspaper article made life not fun for him. It didn’t undo all the lives he ruined in his decades of decadence. But it did change him. If he can change, so can any greedy man. My fundamental premise isn’t wrong, even if my methods are more extreme than are actually needed.

Lots of rambling to say a simple concept: I understand I am well off and I ‘shouldn’t complain! Others have it worse!” and I fundamentally and categorically reject that argument. It is possible for everyone to be miserable, no matter how well off they are. Sometimes that misery is self-inflicted, and sometimes that misery is the result of them being legitimately evil people. What the miserable person needs, in every case, is perspective on how to change their life to something they want. What that miserable person wants is a path forward out of misery. I’ve asked for help many times over the years and always been told to ‘shut up’ and ‘you don’t know how well you have it’. Only now do I finally understand how evil all those people saying that shit are. Just be excellent to each other. Help those in need. Lift everyone up together!

If the Irish weren’t hungry from their potato famine, then there wouldn’t have been Irish scabs to fill in the striking union workers. Help everybody. Lift everybody up. Act like a society and misery goes away. I’m tired of feeling sad because I see a reality nobody else seems to want to accept or embrace. I’m tried of being told I’m wrong when I absolutely am not. I just want my life to be able to serve its purpose.