I literally live in a small house with minimal furnishings, a weight room well equipped and a garage with a workshop also well equipped right on a Louisiana bayou where a good part of our protein is trapped, fished and hunted.
This honestly is not the life I was forced into , if I'm to be honest. It is the life I chose.
A scrap of meat, raised or captured on my own, with vegetables I grew myself and bread baked on my own hearth , by my own fire is far more desirable and satisfying to me than a gorged belly laying at the feet of a master in his house granted by his bidding.
I don't know what that says about me. But I'm too old to question it anymore. I just accept it for what it is. And what I am.
I'd rather steal than accept any charity. Because in my own mind, at least I earned it. I'd rather fight to the death than submit and live. Because at least I got my due.
I don't ask anyone else to understand. And I accept whatever it means.
I'm going to just sit here and listen to the bayou talk tonight. I don't know what that means. But it somehow makes sense to me.
Later Bud
Materialism should be viewed from the position of a blind man.
Does a Ray Charles really care if he's in a mansion or a small home with modest furnishing or even just sitting on a chair in the forest.
Our eyes are what lead us down a path to disaster.
Nietzsche pointed out that there were two types of people, masters and slaves. Masters had high energy, slaves had low energy.
The problem with this is that it's a misinterpretation. What Nietzsche is at heart or what he actually was in real life was an ascetic, a genius, but he was hardened by his choice as a writer and the poverty it brought him from the tiny pension he lived on. Bread, water, chair, paper, pencil that was his life.
However a bunch of people misinterpreted it to mean to go out and crush those that stand in your way, to dominate, step on, grind bones, indulge in a fanatical lust for power. This isn't what he meant, what he was getting at was mankinds need to transcend the limitations of himself through the use of his creative power, but others insisted that it was a desire to exercise authority over others and that is the ultimate problem today, those in power that want to exercise all forms of authority from the guy standing in front of you to the guy that runs your country, someone is always trying to dominate.
Materialism is the way many people fill their lives with meaning today. The purchase and ability to purchase is all these people have, it is a sad state to find yourself in. The sooner one learns to control this, to deny himself the purchase, the day will come when he has to face himself honestly, do the hard work that was doggedly neglected by pretending you had already solved your most fundamental problem, which was to own lots of stuff and form the outside standard of success, at least that's the goal in our society, that is the crap that we've been handed.
It should be the goal of mankind to put his toys away and focus his energy instead on not measuring up to others, instead developing his ability to see through everything around him, to deconstruct the world and break it down to the point he no longer needs the toy to calm his anxiety, he accomplishes the ultimate feat which is to eliminate all forms of anxiety, but that only comes when he/she is no longer burdened by the toy and the fear of losing that toy.