Friday, March 18th 2022

Well, that was fun. Purim has come and gone. It’s a little bit before 9:00 a.m. and I guess I have things to do today. I have not actually managed to get up yet and I don’t really even care about breakfast. I do want to at least get the last two boxes filled up. And maybe the guy will show up with the shit today. Aside from that, I don’t really have anything I need to do. 

Next week I’ll start moving dirt into the boxes and probably, the first layer is going to be from what will be our bean field. I am a huge fan of being organized and frankly, I just don’t really trust my ability to walk in the garden without having specific paths. Locally, people don’t do that. They plant to the distances required by whatever is going in the ground and then they just walk lightly between them. I don’t have this cat-like precision on my feet anymore. Maybe I will in the future but right now I don’t so I’m going to go with the same symmetry as my garden boxes and give one and a half meters to the plants and one meter to myself. That’s kind of a fat path and I know I’m losing ground but if it’s a place that I’m going to have to work and visit everyday, I want it to be organized and neat.

I guess this is kind of the opposite of how I saw things last year. Last year, I was really quite content to let things grow. Nature has a way of doing what it wants to do and if you have the capacity to admire the beauty of the randomness, you don’t really want to disturb it so much. Human activity is not always very beautiful and for the most part, it’s unkind to Nature. I suppose it would have been great if I would have had the resources to just allow my field to do what it wanted to do and only augmented it with fruit trees and berry bushes. But now I understand that I really do need to grow my own food. It’s going to be a vital necessity for the remaining time that I need to live on this planet.

I can also admit that the problem solving and planning is kind of satisfying. I don’t really have much business to do these days and working out the problems and even doing the physical labor to make things happen it’s kind of fun. I’m not really sure that fun is the right word. I’m not really sure I remember what fun feels like.

What is fun?

I’m not sure that what I’m doing here fits the description according to this. I don’t know anything in my life that is light-hearted anymore. I don’t see any reason to have a light heart. I mean, I understand that life is generally a box of shit universally these days. I can also say that I truly understand how bad life in America was when I was growing up. And for sure if we were to count nothing but the mass shootings, racial problems, 50% of the people voting for insanity, we can’t say that the place got any better. But I can understand why people literally eat children just for the sense of light-heartedness that they do not get from life. For a while, you could appreciate a light-hearted moment here and it wasn’t any kind of a problem. This place is no longer conducive to that and people get kind of brutal when you get in the way of their lightheartedness. It’s kind of a paradox there that people scream at you violently for not allowing them to be lighthearted with you.

We could blame the Russians but then we would have to blame the United States for the Russians. Another paradox there.

The last section of yesterday’s blog was kind of fun. Chalk that went up to Purim. Again, none of the things I was going on about were really light. I wasn’t thinking in a childlike manner and I didn’t physically feel any great sense of freedom. I just relaxed at the end of a rather long, frustrating and painful day. I’m kind of proud of myself for some of the work I did. It was probably beyond my physical capacity but I did it anyway. 

At the end of the evening, I had a really complex thought that I wanted to express and I just decided to enjoy the journey getting there. You could say that most of my writing these days is in exactly the same light. I get an idea in my head, some negative truth that I really want to express and then I figure out how to get there from 0 to 100. I just make a plan that makes sense to me and try to be grammatical and honest along the way. Sometimes I can be smarmy and sometimes the sarcasm gets the best of me. I guess you should call me a socialist social satirist for a little alliteration. I’m not really a very good journalist and I’m not really a columnist per se. I guess I’m a blogger but I don’t really feel like I fit that mold very well either. Maybe I’m a philosopher. That’s the word that makes more sense to me than anything. For sure, I’m not a politician. A philanthropist? Philanthropic idealism? A teacher. Okay.

The point I wanted to make last night was that we could just vote on all of these social issues for real. We have this amazing electronic placebo in Facebook or Instagram or tik Tok. I don’t do tick tock and I don’t publish pictures and I never go on Facebook anymore. I got sick of being placeboed to death. And I feel foolish really to have been sucked in to believe that speaking publicly actually meant that you were speaking publicly. The social networks are incredibly horrible at this.

I’m talking about Americans now. You can’t speak to Americans. Americans cannot be spoken to. There is something deeply wrong with America because they are completely inaccessible. You can’t talk to them, you can’t really be friends with them, you can’t really understand what’s going on in their heads and yet they never get out of your face.

There was a while here where I think people really did buy into the social networks. There was a time here where people genuinely spoke about social problems and the social networks were the only place that you really knew what was going on. But this was a couple of years ago. The social networks have been crushed by the politicians here over the last few years. During the Belarusian elections, they literally stopped the fighting simply by turning off the internet. The town calmed down almost immediately. Maybe this is a drug and a crutch thing but it was the easiest thing in the world. Almost as easy as creating phony elections. More placebos. They give people toys to play with and it keeps them happy.

What is real apparently is they like to use rockets and guns and bombs. All of this social network stuff is bullshit because they like to do old school power and just murder people so they know who’s boss.

I thought it was about voting though. My thought was that if we didn’t use the social networks as light-hearted fun and easy electronic drugs and actually used it as a tool for knowledge and social change, we could probably fix the world’s problems, you know, in a very short period of time. If people felt that their vote counted and that it was real and their opinion was real, something could really happen. 

We should also extremely limit the amount of corruption we allow in government. I mean, I’m not really sure people understand what the purpose of government is anymore. I don’t know, let’s check the Oracle on this one.

What is the purpose of government?

I guess we don’t really get a good answer from Google this time. They went to the United States Constitution for this one that has a few nice words.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more per- fect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…

Justice, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare and allow the blessings of liberty. I usually think that food, clothing and shelter, practical education and available medicine solves all of these ideals. As for common defense, we would simply have to decide what we are defending ourselves against. For example, if we didn’t like our children to be eaten by wolves, we would have to create some kind of anti-wolf structure separating ourselves from the forest land. Humans could live in human compounds and we could have maybe an electrical fence separating ourselves from the forest. We can make roads so we can visit neighboring communities but if we just decided but we didn’t need to murder each other anymore, everything else would get kind of simple, wouldn’t it?

This was the point I was trying to make about voting. If people genuinely had the ability to give their opinion on what was going on and we generally started with a vote of whether we actually want war or not, I think we would take a giant leap towards our list.

I wonder if there’s a Google answer for that.

What percentage of human beings want war?

Why do humans want war?

A major motivation of warfare is the desire of one group of human beings—usually governments, but often the general population of a country, tribe or ethnic group—to increase their power and wealth. The group tries to do this by conquering and subjugating other groups, and by seizing their territory and resources.Mar 5, 2014 psychology today

Are humans always at war?

There is no scientific proof that war is ingrained in human nature, according to a Rutgers University-Newark study. There is no scientific proof that humans are hardwired to go to war, says R. Brian Ferguson, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. War, he says, may not be in our nature at all.Dec 4, 2018 Rutgers

Why do humans have so many wars?

In most cases wars are initiated by governments, not by populations. And, most of the time, they are the result of disputes over resources and land, or of a government’s desire to increase its influence and power.Aug 5, 2014 the guardian

Again, it’s a little bit complicated to answer but the answer does seem to go along exactly with what I was thinking. People do not want war. Anybody who understands that war is pain and misery would of course avoid it and look for a better solution. And if we’re not talking about starvation, deep cannibalistic enforced poverty and continual brainwashing and exploitation, nobody would ever really want to get violent.

So basically we are being run by a very small group of people and they are very good at running us. The way we get run, is they keep us insane to prevent us from talking to each other and coming up with better solutions for ourselves. As long as we are crazy, they remain in power and they acquire enough wealth to buy whatever they need. 

The end of this situation comes the day we realize that we can vote. The day that we agree that human beings have a right to Justice, tranquility, reasonable social security and the freedom to enjoy their lives, war dies. Probably poverty dies immediately. Racial prejudice of course goes away like nothing. Misogyny and discord between the sexes gets relegated to history books. Class divisions go poof and the air and water start to get cleaner. The Earth regenerates itself just like our bodies regenerate themselves when we give them a day off. In fact, the funniest thing I’ve learned about nature is that the moment you stop poisoning your own body, you start getting healthier. You don’t need a corporation to invent a machine, you just need to stop poisoning yourself and you get better.

So I guess it was fun trying to make this point. I guess I’m kind of making the same point right now. 

It’s a journey. Life is a journey. All living things get their time to walk around on the planet. I guess my only trick is that I never agreed that me or you is the proper way to think. It’s always occurred to me that me and you makes more sense. Maybe I can express that mathematically.

Me or you = war

Me and you = peace

I like simple mathematics. I like to keep things simple. I don’t like to make things too complicated. Having things be too complicated makes everything frustrating and more expensive. If the concept of fun means easy and light-hearted, keeping the world insanely complex isn’t any fun.

I should add in one more thing to this argument that has always been amusing to me to think about. The word fun doesn’t actually exist in the Russian lexicon. The concept of fun to my way of understanding it has always been something that you do purposely and specifically for your own enjoyment. This goes along with the thought of having fun which grammatically and literally means to engage in the process of owning your own time for the purposes of your own enjoyment.

It used to be possible to enjoy yourself. People used to like having fun and being light-hearted. And then the Russians outlawed it so that no one would ever forget that the government was more important than anything else on the face of the Earth. The Russian government has made it clear that me or you is the slogan of the entire planet.

If you voted for them, or anybody like them anywhere in the planet or if you voted for commerce and business and money, you fucked up.

***

It’s about 1:00 p.m. and I’m taking a bit of a break. I would say that this is the best leg day I have had yet and I have managed to accomplish more with less pain and then any other time this year. As to why this is, perhaps it was the procedure in Minsk that helped. This would be my third day which would be the normal day to get used to anything. Perhaps I’ve gotten used to my new situation and this has led to a lot of comfort. It also could be that yesterday was Purim. It’s a good idea to clean the pipes now and again. To me, it’s important how we clean the pipes. But pipe cleaning means clean pipes and maybe that has something to do with it. Why not?

I’ve managed to clean up the debris from what will be our bean field. This is just the weeds and spent brush that got left on the field over the winter. As per advice for planting beans, I am going to arrange the 8th or 10 piles of weeds and grass I’ve managed to rake up where we are going to plant and burn them. I’m not the only one burning today and there’s quite a bit of smoke in the air. 

There’s also the noise of some asshole cutting wood with a gasoline chainsaw. Maybe I should sell giant saws that can be run with two people or one. That works pretty good. I took apart a whole tree in a half hour yesterday. I’d say that’s good enough.

I will let that be yet another green business in case we ever get any investors anywhere who think I know what I’m doing.

I also managed to fill in my last two boxes. That was actually the first job that I did today. My thought is to take the first layer of dirt that goes to those boxes from a place on my bean field where there is a willow tree. The tree overhangs the field and is just on the other side of the canal. But I like it because it’s very beautiful and right now it’s covered in these delightful little pussy bulbs, I don’t know how else to say it. So my thinking is that I want to dig there for my next layer for the garden boxes. Whether or not we get shit, I have to cover the leaves and dirt with something. 

So I will try to make 40 or 50 runs with this and then we’ll see what the possibilities are to finish off the boxes. It’ll be either shit and then planting soil or just good topsoil. And because I doubt that we will buy the topsoil this year, money has obviously become a ridiculous problem. I know exactly where to dig for it that will do the least amount of damage and have the most positive results for my garden. I don’t want to hire anything just to make my own life better. I think I have a win-win solution for both myself and the health of the forest.

Also, and I don’t know how much this will cost, I would love to acquire a bit more land. I have two ideas for this. One is the house next door to mine which is basically abandoned. I have never actually met the owners. I don’t want to say anything bad about them but I don’t really think they need or want this place anymore. And if I can get that, I will also look for the forest land extension in back of that property. And honestly, that’ll be enough. That will be plenty.

Not that I believe any of this will be easy. Most probably, this will just be one of these nice dreams that I have that never come close to coming true. I dream a lot of things that would be really good for a lot of people but nobody’s ever interested in these things.

When I tried to tell someone what I’m thinking, they just stare at my body. They don’t visualize the idea or what could come from the idea, they just stare at me and they never see anything else. They see a shape with its mouth moving and the noise coming out of it and they assume that I’m speaking with my belly or my penis or something like that. Certainly my egotism is in play and that’s all anybody ever sees. Well that and my nationality. And when I say nationality, technically it would be my American passport except that here it also means that I’m Jewish. Jewish is not a religion here in this country or in Russia, Jewish is a nationality to them. It’s all racism or anti-Semitism or both no matter how you cut it.

If you’d like to know what I’m talking about, here is this from Saturday night live:

I guess it’s a play on the Scopes monkey trial:

The Scopes Trial, formally The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, and commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was an American legal case from July 10 to July 21, 1925 in which a high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school. The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.

You know, normally I would say that this is complete ridiculousness. Normally I would say that passing laws disallowing the teaching of evolution would be outrageously ridiculous. Who on Earth would absolutely refuse to have Darwin and his theories allowed in basic education? Why would the basic observational science be ignored? 

Oh, that’s right, it was Christianity. You couldn’t talk about scientific evolution of the species because the Christians wouldn’t allow it because it went against their own theoretical teaching. That’s right! How foolish of me. If people started thinking that human beings were actually animals and that we had monkeys as our ancestors, this would make all Bible teaching and the control that it holds over so much of the population (and is one of the manipulating agents of almost all the corruption in the world) why, this would just set the world free? This would allow for voting and universal democracy. This would be the end of pollution and manipulation by charismatic politicians preening for the camera and doing everything possible to maintain their power and control. Why, if we stopped believing that the Bible was the truth and science doesn’t exist, we might just have clean oceans and better air quality and better quality of life for everybody alive. We might not have to be at war anymore. We might not have to hate each other because of the way we look. We might not have any of the evil in the world anymore because suddenly, the world would just make practical sense. People could open their eyes again and see. They could open their ears again and here. They could go ahead and take a good whiff and understand what they smell.

Excuse me, sometimes I rant a bit.

What I’m saying is that last year I came up with some great business ideas that would be pro ecology and pro local economy but nobody listened, gave a shit, helped in any possible way and it was just me talking to myself.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Clarence Darrow

***

Incidentally, the tool I am looking for is known as a Bachi Gata. They come with short handles or long handles and I would prefer the long handle because I really don’t like working bent over all that much. Also, I am pretty sick in the arms and shoulders so I don’t mind the weight and actually appreciate it. It’s a very good digging tool and it’s excellent for breaking ground or working with difficult land. Also it’s great for weeding and scraping. I guess you can understand that by just looking at it but truthfully, it’s probably the only tool you need really. Well, I have a middle rake that I’m quite fond of right now and I like the three pronged Russian cultivator tools. They have three sharpened pointed blades up front and they are generally used for collecting potatoes. I like how they fluff up the land as well. I haven’t found one of these bachi gatas yet but I’m looking. I wish I had one right now.

***

It’s about 4:00 and I am going to quit my fieldwork today. I feel pretty darn good actually. I just took a picture and sent it to my ex partner and actually got a compliment. That felt good and the work felt good as well. No, I am not looking for a job anywhere doing anything for anybody. No, I’m not interested in speaking about my disability, rehabilitation, any political deals concerning anything and absolutely I am not considering any invitations to do landscaping. But I feel good and I like what I see.

I am no expert in farming. I know a few things because I took the trouble to study. But a lot of the stuff I know I have learned from doing and just keeping my eyes open along the way. The things that make sense to me, make sense to me for a reason. 

My chicken neighbor just came home and God damn that car stinks. How can they live with that fucking thing? They are cackling about something right now. They are disturbing the peace and the ecology of this planet. Somebody should pass a law against them. Somebody should call them in for re-education.

Anyway…

I agree that I’m probably going to make some mistakes and that some decisions I make might not actually be as practical as other people might think. And I am absolutely aware that I am going against the grain of what might be considered traditional for this region. But I don’t care. I don’t care about any of that. Truthfully, I don’t care if I fail absolutely and completely. I just know that I believe I’m doing the right thing and I believe I’m taking care of myself in a good way.

When I started this year’s writing, I actually thought it was going to be more of a restaurant review blog or even meeting vegan people. I really didn’t think it was going to be about home agriculture or growing your own food. When I started, I knew that I was going to be having a hard time leg wise. But I also knew that I would be getting better and that the more I tried, the better I would get. Today seems to be kind of a testament to that. I am not anything competitive to anyone else in what I did today, not even somebody’s grandmother. But from where I am sitting right now on the blue bench next to my house, I definitely made some progress. I can see where we are going and I can see that we might just have a lot of food coming from this place.

I really think that’s what it’s about. I really think it’s about food. 2 years ago, I happily dove into politics thinking that I would be at the right place at the right time and would be talking about the most important issues on the planet. Well, that was kind of heartbreaking but I did it. Last year, I made the declaration that the only subject we should be talking about is ecology. I still believe that but in the end, that was even more depressing and heartbreaking. Not only because people don’t want to hear anything about ecology, it doesn’t make them money, but that their ears are closed to everything that means anything in terms of sustainable living or just living in a reasonable habitat. Just the stupidest generation in the history of History.

This year, I was pretty much expecting a heartbreak from the first sentence. I had no feelings and I have no feelings that anything good will come from this work. But I’m doing it because I feel I’m doing the right thing.

I’m not looking for stardom. I really don’t like being paid attention to. I mean, I like people who listen to what I have to say and especially when I’m really trying to say something important and real and add my opinion into an argument that I feel is very important. But I don’t like being the object of conversation and I certainly don’t need anyone staring at my body and thinking they have the right to make decisions about it. That is unwelcome trolling as far as I’m concerned and kind of an insult to all of the work if you think about it.

But it is about food. It is very much about the food we eat. If people paid more attention to what they put in their mouth and started thinking about tools instead of crutches, about fundamental nutrition instead of Epicurean excitement, the world would be a much better place. If people even considered the nature of the species, forgive my Darwin there, we would be looking for fruit and nuts as Staples of our diet and not afterthoughts. And certainly, if we allowed even a shred of reality into our consciousness concerning food, we would not be attempting to digest flesh and certainly not at every bloody meal. Just the statistics alone for hypertension, high blood pressure, heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, bone deficiencies, erectile dysfunction, breast cancer, I could make a list that goes on and on and on. Cancer. Just cancer. Meat is a carcinogen. Put a period at the end of that sentence. Meat is a carcinogen. It is just not the correct food for our species.

I mean, let me put this into perspective. Let’s say that you drop a lot of money on an aquarium. You have in your head this vision of beautiful fish swimming around and how amazing that will make your apartment look. Well, when you get into the necessities of building a habitat for a particular variety of fish, do you think about what the maximum possibilities of stressing them should be? Would you think of seeing exactly how much nutrition you could deprive them of and yet keep them alive? Of course not. I mean, would you look for the food that absolutely had them lunatic insane and attacking each other? I’m sure there are some assholes who exactly do that but I think most people would think that I’m citing an extreme example of cruelty. Most people would not want a cruel aquarium in their house.

But just as insane as that is to think of keeping an aquarium just to distress the fish, why on Earth do we do this to ourselves? Or worse, why do we choose such ungodly aquarium keepers to oversee our collective public funds? Why exactly do we vote for people who take away our freedoms while screaming that the people who are trying to keep the infrastructure running are the thieves? I don’t see this as an answer and truthfully, since I decided consciously and purposely to leave animal products out of my diet, there has not been a day where I have not been healthier, more awake, more alive, stronger and with more ability to recover from everything than I was before. Not a single day has been worse.

Over the last few days, I have been enjoying the joys of cream soup. You can think of Boston chowder if you’d like but without the seafood. You could think bechamel sauce if you’d like. You could even think mac and cheese. And I have been doing a ton of this with split peas. That’s right, literally the cheapest dried food you can pick up at the market makes the most remarkably tasty cream sauces you can imagine. You can use this for anything and it makes everything delicious. Add a little bit more salt so you feel more at home and more cheesy and you’re there. A few nuts to add a little fat to it, and you’re enjoying your soups and sauces. It’s nothing. It’s easy. And it is unbelievably healthier for you than sexually assaulting a cow to drink her secretions. Why on Earth would anybody even think about doing that?

Okay, a few thousand years ago maybe we were worried about clean water. Maybe a few hundred years ago, there was no other way to survive a winter. Maybe we’ve handed down this habit through the generations because it worked and kept us alive. But it’s just not needed anymore and if anybody takes the trouble to actually study a little bit instead of believing that what grandma was thinking is still true today, you can get a lot better, a lot healthier, a lot cleaner and eventually, a lot smarter by going a different direction. And it’s cheap and amazingly plentiful. Hell, it’s even easy to grow yourself.

So this is what I’m talking about. I think it’s about the food we eat. And sure, you can say that I’m just making a show so I can prove my point and that I’m doing all of this for the gallery. You could say that I’m trying to make myself into some kind of a media star and just using all of this to make my point. I don’t know what I can say to argue that point except to say that this is not really what I’m doing. What I am doing is thinking very hard about how I live my life, what my actual resources are, what my actual needs are and how I relate to my environment with all of the above. What I’m trying to do is be as conscious about my life and how I live my life as I possibly can. And I’m doing all of this writing as much for myself as for anyone else because when I open my mouth to speak, I really want to make sure that I say something that I believe in.

When I go back and I read my previous work, I believe what I say. I don’t remember rereading something and thinking that I’m full of shit. It’s really true. Sometimes, I can see that my logic gets a little screwy and sometimes I lose track of my point. I’m not looking for any excuses but you try going left to right sometime and keeping your shit together. It’s not easy. You have to have a lot of practice to be conscious of what you’re doing and keep all the moves in your head. It’s kind of like being a chess grandmaster and remembering all the possibilities around each move as well as your original plan. Not that I’m calling myself a grand master, I’m just saying that 99% of the time, not only do I agree with myself but I also make sense.

And exactly right now I’m having a bit of a poignant moment. I was just visited by the first butterfly of the spring. But I feel bad about this. He flew right to the place in my garden where there used to be quite a few ragweeds, if that’s what you call them. Those were those natural high-rise plants that the butterflies absolutely go crazy for. Unfortunately, I dug up quite a bit of that Garden for two trees and a bunch of berry bushes. If I don’t work very hard to keep the garden clean and allow everything to grow, berries and weeds, there should be some ragweeds coming up with them and the butterflies will have something to eat.

I guess I should blame this on the war. I guess I should blame this on the misery of human civilization. On the one hand, I’m happy to have all of this work and exercise, on the other hand it was really nice having those butterflies hanging out at my house.

And exactly as if directly on queue, down on the field that I cleared today there was a tiny bit of a whirlwind that picked up some dust and grass and made a twister for just a second before breaking up and flying away. I am not a religious freak if you are a Torah reader, you might get the idea that God is with me again. And now there are two butterflies looking for something to eat. Nature is starting. They’re all coming back. All my friends from last year will be here again this year. It’ll be really nice to see them again. 

I better make sure that I leave as much of this space wild as I can. I agree that I need some beans and I agree that I need some vegetables and I agree that I should be growing my own food. But I also have to remember to leave as much wild space as I can so that the bees and the butterflies and the crickets have something to eat too. This is not just my home, it’s theirs as well.

***

Okay, it’s about 10 minutes to 7:00 and I only have a few sentences to add to this. Maybe it’s for symmetry but that’s okay. We have to learn to live together. We have to learn to be together in all of our actions. Being adversarial has led us to ruin universally and quality of life everywhere in the world suffers. Possibly some tiny percentage at the top of the pyramid have enough money to soothe any burdens they may have but everyone else just suffers a life of slavery fighting for pennies. This is not the natural order of the world, this is not the only way to live and packaged food and internet media and saving all of your money for an apartment and a car is not the only possible lifestyle choice. If anything, this is the worst possible lifestyle choice we can make. My only thought is that we can do much better.