Life is surprisingly simple

Life is surprisingly simple, when you think about how much complexity we build around it. At the end of the day, everyone wants the same thing. That is of course also the exact source of the problem.

You want a small cottage in the countryside, built over a century ago by craftsmen out of brick, straw and wood. You want to have a goat and some chickens or ducks. You want to grow some sunchokes and other vegetables.

You want a wife or a husband and you want to have three young children together before you turn thirty. Once a week you want some guy to tell you what the meaning of life is and what happens after death. You want to be able to genuinely believe what that guy has to say.

You want to raise your children to be happy and healthy, you want them to marry and have children of their own and then you want to draw out your last breath in your own bed, with your family at your side.

That’s really all there is to it. That’s how simple it is. You’re a slave of your genes and happiness is the reward that you get for doing the things that brought those genes into existence in the first place.

Everyone already knows this deep down. That’s why they get so angry at you when you point it out, because it’s not really available to them. In our society you go to school, then you sign up for college, you graduate with a huge debt and then you get to live in a big city in a small apartment, paying off the debt you incurred.

Generally speaking, if you live in the Western world you can’t even afford to have children anymore. People won’t say “I’m too poor to have children”! What you generally get instead are neurotic vegan women in their late thirties, who hold emotional diatribes where they complain about how global warming makes them afraid of having kids.

If you’re in your twenties now, you’re generally living in a flat with a bunch of randos you call “roommates”, or you’re living with your parents. You literally don’t own a room where a child could sleep.

This is what you want.

This is what you got.

This is what you want.

This is what you got.

I could go on like this forever, but it’s kind of in poor taste by being so obvious and I have Tumblr for pictures like this. Of dreamy cottages with flowery meadows that is, not of bearded lesbians in skirts.

You wanted to go mushroom hunting in the forest at dusk, before returning home to your cottage, throwing some logs on the fire and sitting down in your rocking chair as you drink a cup of homemade valerian lavender tea.

Instead you’re staring at a screen. You share your walls with your neighbors and work at some IT company with “solutions” in its name and you’re horrified to realize your colleagues truly identify with the bullshit that constitutes their job.

Sorry, I’m just not buying any of this nonsense. I don’t believe people who genuinely like sitting at a desk and coding accountancy software genuinely exist. Nobody likes doing that. Nobody likes doing a customer service support job. Nobody likes being a social media specialist. Honestly, nobody likes any of this nonsense.

The world would be a much better place, if people could just say out loud “I hate this stuff, but I grew up without a nest egg and we live in a densely populated post-industrial service economy on a planet with eight billion people, where most people think they’ll drop dead if they engage in actual physical social interaction, so this is what I spend my time doing”. Unfortunately when you say that out loud, you’ll simply enter the next layer of hell, unemployment.

You’re not designed for any of this stuff. You’re constantly overstimulated, to the point where you don’t even have the attention span anymore to read a book. Sexual overstimulation is the same principle. When you see some fat guy with a beard in a woman’s dress on a lesbian dating site, do you think that I’m a transphobe who doesn’t recognize that this is really just a person with a structural difference in some obscure part of his brain that turned him into a woman in a man’s body? Or could it be that this is some overstimulated freak who watched too much pornography and developed a strange fetish?

As the world grows more efficient and rational, it grows uglier. But people don’t seem to notice this, or just don’t care, because their minds have grown ugly too. I want to live in a world where witches gather in the dark forest under pale moonlight to worship the devil. Or at the bare minimum, I want to live in a world where people still believe such things happen.

You’re born into this world without owning anything. Then at eighteen you sign up for debt. You enter a debt, that allows you to start working, to earn the money that you need to survive in this world. Your dreams? They can wait until you’re 65. By that time, you will have forgotten what they were.

In my case, I’m now kind of, sort of, halfway to the point where you can skip out on that whole process. If you have half a million Euro, you have enough money to never need to work again if you don’t want to. It won’t be luxurious, but it can be done. Now I just have to learn to say no. Oddly enough, perhaps the biggest problem I face is the social pressure, from my environment. People really don’t want you to drop out, even if you can afford to drop out.

I would say you’re genuinely done when you have a million euro. You spend half a million to buy a house far away from the normies, the other half is a portfolio of cheap stocks earning around 20% a year, enabling you to spend 90% of your wake hours doing things not related to earning money. You do this for about ten years, then you throw the money into a value ETF or you buy some real estate, so that when you drop dead your wife doesn’t have to worry about anything and your kids don’t have to pick up the phone and talk to the customers when they’re adults themselves.

Me, I’m still in that awkward zone where you probably reached net worth escape velocity, but can’t be entirely sure of it. If I were a twenty year old guy without any real savings today, the road I would take wouldn’t be cryptocurrency, as most of them seem to think. The road I would take would be investing in websites. You spend a few years working hard, then you spend the rest of your life hardly working. Some basic explanation can be found here.

Of course I know the counter-argument to what I’m saying here: There are people who genuinely like their boring cubicle jobs. If that’s the case, my counter-argument would be that your job eroded your personality. I know that’s true for me. I’m more boring than I was five years ago. Your personality changes to adjust to your external environment. If your environment consists of staring at a screen, your personality changes to reflect that.

What I’m explaining here, is what I wish someone had explained to me when I was a teenager. People don’t explain this however, because they have higher hopes for you: They want you to become a bigshot in the adult world, as opposed to becoming someone who figures out how to stop working as soon as possible.

I recommend against this. Don’t go to college. Yes, we all wanted to be paleontologists and astronauts as children, but statistically speaking you’ll just end up in a cubicle. Live with your parents. Find some stupid job you can do from home, ideally on your own without a boss. Throw your savings into something that will let you stop working before you hit thirty.

That’s it. That’s really all there is to it.