One of the purposes of this newsletter is to piecemeal build content for a book, written for my children - effectively a guide to life.
Lessons come at a cost.
The cost can be financial or pain (mental or physical).
I want to capture the main rules that I live my life by into Family Commandments (not to detract from Biblical commandments). The goal of this is to save my children and generations of children beyond that, the pain of lessons learned.
Lessons are worthwhile but they do come at a cost. If you can have a lesson learned from someone else, saving you the cost - all the better.
First Opinion then Resources
You live your life in chapters. At first you know nothing and absorb everything. At some point you start becoming opinionated. However the ability to act on an opinion is separate and primarily constrained to the resources that you yield.
As your resources grow, they at some point give you the freedom to say yes or no based off your belief system or moral code.
For example having to take a vaccine because your employer deems it necessary to do so. This is a perfect example. It is your body, yet some administrator has ruled it and due to you needing an income are forced into an dilemma.
When you have the resources to do so, your ability to steer the ship becomes a reality.
One should aim to encourage children and youth to experience as much as possible. Then to slowly start forming opinion and as rapidly as possible, resources.
Ethical Framework
As I’ve grown older, my opinion and resources have grown.
I was just recently at a point where we needed a second vehicle. We’ve managed to go three years with only one vehicle. This includes two separate jobs as well as children both in competitive sports.
Quite an impressive achievement.
We knew it was time that we needed a second car. One of the underlying reasons was that the mileage of our single car was creeping up, approaching an unsustainable point.
The price of cars has become - for lack of a better word - insane in recent years; further delaying my action on the subject.
Surveying the landscape the two options were - new for a crazy price or second hand but they have such high mileage relative to the cost.
Slavery System
Understand that the current financial system is a Slavery System that works by people swapping their lifeforce for nothing in return.
Unpacking this - when you go to a bank to take out a loan (Credit) the bank magics money out of thin air. You spend 10-25 years of your life and effort in exchange for something they made up.
If all loans (credit) were repaid the system would collapse and fiat money would not exist. No Credit = no money in supply.
A slave in Ancient Egypt would toil for 10-25 years, giving their life force in exchange for nothing. A similar yet different experience. Sure - they were working in the direct sun doing physical work. The mechanical advantage we command through technology negates some of this laborious work, however we are still slaves, producing value for the Elites above us.
In ancient times - Usury (charging of interest for a loan) was considered immoral and in some cases banned. Let us bring focus on this.
Opting Out
I will not support this system. I will not take out a loan therefore not producing credit, therefore not being part of their system. If everyone did the same, the system would not exist.
I chose to buy a second hand car for cash. This was only possible because I had the assets to sell to fund the purchase.
An alternative scenario would be that I would have taken loans against the assets to fund the purchase. This would allow my wealth to grow but at the cost of supporting the system.
Your choice.
Opting out of the system comes at a cost. It affirms that you living by your beliefs, but just like the film the Matrix - being outside of the system is a cold, dark, stormy place. You don’t get to participate in the upside of fake money.
If you were an eager participant in the system - you would take out a loan against your assets and use that to invest in the Stock Market. Said another way, you would opt into the system, support the use of slavery and be eager for your monopoly money returns from mal investment (where capital flows to shitty ideas as a result of trying to chase higher and higher returns due to a distorted environment).
I do feel good in manifesting choice and explicitly starting to opt out of the system.
Generational Wealth
It is imperative that we achieve generational wealth so that we have optionality in helping our families.
My goal is to back my children with interest free loans and effectively be a family bank. In order to do so, wealth must accumulate.
This way we can opt out generation(s) of family from the Slavery System.
Ideals
I typically talk in ideals. While I have implemented this - it is an ideal.
Different people at different stages in life will and wont be able to do this. This is understandable.
Awareness is key and ideals are just.
The worst part of the old, dying system is the expectation that you perform emotional labour voluntarily. Prior to AI, intelligence was a scarce commodity meaning tokens of intelligence (i.e. - "education") was the only pre-requisite for intellectual work employers valued. Now that AI has turned such intelligence into a freely accessible service, those tokens are now worthless, and the only labour that has any long term value is emotional, the kind AI cannot and never will be able to perform.
We were never compensated for being miserable for 8 hours while we traded our intellect to a corporation or government that thought of us as nothing but replaceable human resources. Nor were we compensated for bringing that misery home, being absent emotionally for our family, very often leading to many among us to lose them.
Our mental health stagnated and collapsed while our parents and the system they built told us to just "suck it up," and work through the pain of knowing we were giving the best of ourselves to bosses, CEO's, shareholders, bureaucrats, and politicians who really couldn't care one way or another if we lived or died.
All the while the ones who were the true source of wealth, happiness, and meaning (our family, especially our children) suffered the consequences of our absence.
Thank God that system dies on the alter of AI, which may be able to think and reason infinitely faster than we do, but absent the nervous system that makes us human, will never be able to feel and be present the way only we can.