tomfoolery wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2020 1:47 am
I’ve been pretty unhappy this year. Let’s discuss what makes us happy and unhappy with a goal of trying to identify actionable steps toward increasing happiness and decreasing unhappiness. Let’s help each other find the path to their happiness that is sometimes difficult for us to see for ourselves but easy for an outside observer.
Happy:
Meeting people that share similar political ideology, which seems increasingly rare, because otherwise I feel like I’m the crazy person surrounded by 99.99% who disagree since they tend to be the most vocal. My concern is surrounded myself with only like-minded people and not growing or learning and becoming trapped in an echo chamber myself.
Happy:
Meeting people with different political ideology and changing their mind, if only slightly, toward my ideology of greater freedom and less government regulation. For example, a democrat voting massage therapist who reconsidered her political views when faced with a $500 city licensing fee, and regulations for her to prove she isn’t a prostitute that cut significantly into the $30k a year she makes. I never expect to have anyone make a 180, but if I can get them to course correct a few degrees, I’m happy. Unfortunately, it seems like my success rate on Internet forums is 0% although in-person is closer to 80%.
I got the most liberal extreme person I am friends with to admit if he had children he would send them to private school and would live in an area without poor people. Which was shocking given how he believes all private schools should be shut down because their presence threatens public education and takes funding them from, whether via charter vouchers or simply because rich people don’t donate to their public schools they don’t attend. This friend is very very liberal, probably more so than doodle, and when really pressed to consider the situation, he saw my side, a bit at least.
The same man refused to call 911 on a homeless person who was sexually assaulting his friend in public, because of fear the police would kill him for being black. And yes, he’s a college professor, and so is the female friend who was being assaulted who concurred it best not to call 911.
Unhappy:
Being told by the government I can’t go to the gym for 5 months this year. Gaining 30 pounds due to it, in combination with stress eating due to that the government was controlling my life too much. My solution was building a home gym inside my apartment that cost 5-figures. And future planning to become as independent as possible from the government.
Oh, you like to eat meat? Maybe there’s a shortage due to government regulations and the government orders private grocery stores to ration, and forbids “price gouging”, which leads to shortages. I wouldn’t have thought this possible until this year. Solution? I plan to move to a small ranch in a rural area and raise my own livestock.
Much like Harry Browne said of gold, if you don’t hold it, it’s not yours, I will say if you don’t own the thing, whether it be gym equipment, or a cow, or chickens, then the government can take your ability to transact those items and services at gunpoint.
The result if everyone thought like me would be a 90% drop in GDP as people modify their lives and living situation to be more independent from government control. Because moving to a rural area and spending time raising livestock and everyone having their own $10k home gym that sits unused for 23 hours a day is really inefficient use of resources. But, we’ve learned it’s not possible for a group of people to pool their resources together for gym equipment and share it, to reduce times when it’s not in use and thus gain economic efficiency. Because the government can say fuck you, no one gets to use that shared equipment you bought as a collective in the form of gym equipment.
And one man or woman can do it. Unilaterally. All it took to close gyms was the governor signing a piece of paper in many states. No legislative body. No judge. One person. And when a group of people decided fuck that, and made plans to kidnap a governor, these people are the monsters and vilified. The governor who fucked over their state still has their job, and a judge months lar3e said no you can’t do that, and the governor said “L-O-L Oops my bad” and shrugged and that was it.
So what makes me happy is focusing on how to separate as much as possible from relationships that are regulated by the government and making plans to shrug.
