Ever noticed that - March 2024

The economical perpetual motion machine, staring vs focusing, and the inner child in all of us.

This is a series of monthly posts where I plan on writing down my ideas which are worth more than just tweets, but not fleshed out or important enough to be made into standalone essays. These snippets would probably become full essays if I had enough time and energy, but I need to prioritize, and right now writing is more in the middle of my list, as working on my comic is on top.

My intention with these is to share observations or ideas that all center around paying attention. This might sound incredibly plain, but attention is a very rare thing nowadays, even though it is the central piece of living fully in my experience.

For instance, paying attention to the social world that coerces individuals, or to the simple beauty of the natural world that we don't appreciate because it is quite literally everywhere, or the hilarious jokes that seemingly come out of nowhere when we stop taking ourselves so seriously, or the tremendous power of our body and intuition when we reconnect with them, or simply sharing about some stuff that has been going on in my life. If you think this sounds all over the place, then good, that's my intention as well.

This month of writing though is particularly pessimistic in its tone though, because it is the backlog of many hours spent in the office having nothing to do, which meant that complaining about the world I live in came rather naturally. Apologies if this makes your day worse, but at least you've been warned. I would highly recommend taking a look at my essay on somatic hazards beforehand if you haven't, because this here is certainly a pretty significant one. So don't forget to continually stay present with your body if you decide to read this.

Society is not materialistic

Many claim quite confidently that our society is materialistic, but is that really the case? I read this short passage from the Apocalypedia by Darren Allen which suggests otherwise, and I think he's completely right.

Modernity is not materialistic, it is a deeply dissociated and idealistic collective. People want the status from something more than the thing itself. People want to feel safe by being told reassuring lies rather than actually being safe and ownership of their lives. People are so out of touch with their body that they get stuck in loops of rumination and pointless worrying. The technological system numbs our bodies through never exerting it, our emotions through never allowing them to come up, and our minds through rewarding obedience as opposed to genuine thinking.

And on top of that, the ideals that people pursue become their own justification, untethered from the ground of providing something genuinely valuable. This process is what I've come to call hollow thinking: all form, no substance.

• GDP becomes the only reason to do things in our world, as opposed to increasing the quality of life which GDP may (or may not) correlate well with.

• Or equality becomes the target to aim for, even if it means homogenizing women and different cultures into the same gray soup of non-culture, all working for the system of course.

• Or democracy becomes the target, as opposed to having a functioning collective that can steer towards something better.

People are stuck in their mind, and become worse and worse at perceiving reality as a whole. Everything is seen through a tunnel, an opinion, a belief, and simple physical reality itself and neglected more and more. It's a bit like ignoring Earth and wanting to build straight to Heaven. Except that in the process you are only digging into Hell.

The gray dystopia

The gray dystopia is the term I've come to give to the evil that spreads through the lesser evil, the really boring and mundane form, the one that controls and removes options, all done in invisible ways. For instance, creating incentive structures that only allow people who are in favor of the technological system to rise to the top, or providing so much distraction and "entertainment" that no one pays attention to what is going on. This is in opposition to the overt totalitarianism of 1984 or the Luciferean evil of many of the villains in popular culture.

This type of evil always has reasonable and somewhat virtuous justifications to keep acting that way, the main one being safety but there are others, which is why it is the lesser evil and why people would rather have it. For instance, using more technology and control to deal with the problems of the technological system:

• We will solve inequality! (even though the kind of inequality we find nowadays is only possible with a highly complicated and thus bureaucratic system)

• We will deal with environmental issues! (which are caused by the processes of acquiring the energy or resources that our entire system is dependent on)

• We will help 3rd world countries! (who have lost their traditional ways of living through the exploitation of 1st world countries)

• We will provide support for mental health issues (which are caused by a society where having a basic sense of freedom in how one earns one's living, a supportive environment in the form of family and friends and other crucial needs in life are made incredibly difficult)

And even though it always promises safety and promotes values of 'non-violence', it is at the end of the day incredibly violent because coercion is the only way it can spread its way of living. From the total and mind-numbing coercion of children being forced to spend years of their life in school, to the third world country farms where workers aren’t treated much better than slaves, to the armed conflicts over scarce resources that go in all over the world, the system is most certainly violent, but of course, we are used to it, which is why few people bother talking about.

We know we live in a soulless and highly exploitative world, where even the ones who “win” - the richest and most famous people - are still miserable. But the whole thing is … kind of boring. The problems are too long term, too distant, the processes too diffuse and complicated in their operations. Better to talk about a few individuals like Trump or Putin, which by doing so will certainly give you approval amongst your peers.

Elaborate fraud

Economics, particularly finance, is probably the most elaborate form of fraud I have ever seen. The idea being that if you formalize something with mathematics, then it must be more rigorous is an absolute joke. The reason is in fact very simple: if your assumptions are insanely detached from reality, then none of your results hold up in the real world, no matter how "elegant" your formulas are.

It's a bit like how people delude themselves that they've built a perpetual motion machine in physics: by building something so complicated in their mind that they can no longer track where it fails. In the case of economics, supposedly smart people have no problem whatsoever assuming that we can maintain exponential growth, for the centuries to come, on a finite planet. You would think that it would be the kind of statement that a child would make - more, more more! - and that adults would kindly remind them that the world doesn't work that way, but no. Our very serious system run by very intelligent people - supposedly - can keep getting better forever, no matter what the underlying ecological constraints have to say about it.

The difference between physics and economics is that is that society's version of the perpetual motion machine works for a while because mimetics isn't as hard-cut as physics. We can delude ourselves for a bit, live above the carrying capacity for a short while - a few decades or maybe centuries for us, but which is nothing relative to the human race or the planet at large - but it won't last long.¹

In my experience, the main point of economics and finance is to justify to other humans beings the activity of the technological system. It is that system which is in charge of where we are headed, not conscious human decisions.

Economics is sometimes described as the study of wealth, how it is created and how it distributes over time. I would argue that it is the study of scarcity, because the mindset of competition and game theoretical analysis show up all over the place in that field. I mean, would someone who is genuinely content in life aim to maximize their utility, whatever that word means is? This obsession with looking at the world as filled with scarce resources to compete over leads to, for instance:

• The resulting monopolies or pseudo-monopolies that dominate our world: Amazon has far more power than most countries today.

• The market pressures that corrupt human values, through the focus of making profits and competing with other businesses, as opposed to improving the quality of life of human beings. See also this excellent essay on Moloch by Scott Alexander.

• Empires that can no longer expand and thus resort to extracting human beings, such as the enshittification of software, forced updates, planned obsolescence, adding wood pulp as a filler to food, amongst many many other things that are no doubt hidden from us.

• A general alienation and lack of safety about the world that surrounds us. Feeling behind, inadequate, unloved, losing control in one’s life, in competition with one’s peers.

The simple fact that the theories of economics and finance don’t even acknowledge that financial crises are the norm considering how often they happen, and not an anomaly that we can simply fix with more regulation, is one of the many, many red flags to not trust this field. There are simply too many incentives for economical discourse to be distorted, because it is directly tied to power.

World of middle management

Or maybe management is even more bullshit than economics, I'm not sure, I've never studied anything related to it. It probably is. Perhaps the field stinks so hard that I've never bothered approaching it, thereby creating a survivor bias in my sample of what fields I think are utter bullshit.

Anyway, the world we live in is one of increasing middle management. In my essay on bullshit jobs I argued that they arise because of 2 simultaneous effects: 1) the technological system needs to keep growing, because it is what it does, and why it's so powerful that it has covered the entire globe, and 2) there are a lot incompetent people who need to take part in the system through 'working' and consuming.

That's essentially why there is so much middle management in my opinion. If you can't do something, at least you can supervise others doing it, because even if you do literally nothing, then the critical operations do not break. Unfortunately, 'doing nothing' is far better than what a lot of middle management accomplish, because their meetings take precious time away from otherwise productive employees.

But far worse than those bullshit managers who at least have some good intentions are the people who straight up play the game of being a parasite. The opacity that a highly complicated society creates, i.e. the opposite of transparency, leads to corruption and leeching:

• Financial operations to avoid taxes (tax avoidance is the set of legal operations to pay less tax, tax evasion is illegal)

• Making the world even more opaque and in general suited to benefit them. Unsurprisingly, if you make a good chunk of money not doing a whole lot, you'd want to keep your position and the society that allows it. So of course you would want more bureaucracy, i.e. more middle management

• Maintaining the world where incentive structures are misaligned, the main one being that industries maximize for profits, not for the quality of products or quality of life of their consumers.

But to come back to management specifically, is it surprising that the managing mindset - top-down orders as to what needs to be done - also trickles down into people’s lives? Numbing our body when it screams at us through the form of stress or a headache or digestion issues or trouble sleeping. Repressing our emotions which desperately want to be expressed. Micromanaging children instead of listening to them.

As it turns out, this might be the real trickle-down aspect of the system.

Video games feel tedious now

I haven't played video games in a while, and the main reason is that I find them tedious now. They just aren't fun. It's very likely that I am the one who changed, probably for the better, but I think something has definitely changed. It seems to me that the main drive behind video games in the past was to build something cool. Now the main motivation seems to be to build something that people play for as long as possible, even if there is nothing interesting going on.

It is quite obvious for the games that are glorified slot machines, like the ARPGs in line of Diablo 3, but it is also true for multiplayer competitive games, where the matchmaking is in many ways a slot machine. But even single player games these days feel to me like a long list of fetch quests: get X so you can get Y that allows you to go to Z and talk to A and ...

I don't know, this is a half-baked thought, but it's sort of the point of these monthly posts. Maybe most video games always had this obsession with making the player do things, even if they were meaningless, but I certainly didn't feel that way when I was younger.

Eyebrow tension

I've been paying more attention the past few months to how much tension people hold in their eyebrows. Some people are tense all the time, but they seem completely unaware of it. They don't simply look, they stare, usually at their phone. Their attention is focused on a narrow point in their visual field, and they completely lose track of their surroundings.

Another variation of the stare is the constantly shocked expression, one that is always looking for danger by darting their eyes all over, because they never feel safe. These same people also carry the weight of their troubled sleep, in the form of the bags under their eyes.

There is a great channel that discusses how to improve your eyesight naturally, called Myopia is mental. He notes how a series of bad habits regarding eyesight, which includes staring and losing track of one's peripheral vision, contributes to the degradation of one's eyesight, and that it is actually possible to improve it back.

Quite crazy isn't it? I would have never thought that eyesight could be improved naturally. Really makes you think about the state of healthcare and what we actually know.

Rider Waite Minor Arcana

I got the Rider Waite Tarot, which is actually my second deck after the Symbolic Tarot of Wirth. I tend to prefer the more simple Major Arcana of the Wirth Tarot, though its Minor Arcana looks just like a usual playing deck, which is why I got the famous Rider Wait deck. Every card in its minor arcana beams with uniqueness, which is especially nice if you're using it for divination because the symbolism is a lot more apparent.

Do I believe in divination? I don't really know. I like the aesthetics and symbolism of the Tarot which is actually the main reason why I got into it. I feel like divination requires a lot of experience to start becoming useful, such that I can't tell if it works or not, but I have enough faith in it to not dismiss it as bullshit.

The most basic reason why divination is useful is that making random moves is actually a good idea in life. Plans have a way of running into the same blind spots over and over again, because we are blind to our own assumptions and limiting beliefs, so adding randomness is actually a wise decision.

But beyond that, can it do something else than just provide suggestions for random moves, such as insights about one's future? I don't know. Humans know far more than we can rationally explain, and the Universe is a far more mysterious thing than our culture makes us believe, so I'm staying on the side of open mindedness and I would say that it's probably real, but not without a great deal of experience and nuance. There are most definitely charlatans, like in any field really.

Magic and honing focus

I'm getting back into Franz Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics (IIH), which is something I gave a half-serious attempt several months ago, but which I'm now ready to commit to because I know what I want to do with my time: work on my comic.

I don't know if it's a good idea to talk about it publicly, since it is said explicitly over and over again that magic is best done in secret - in fact the 'occult' in 'occultism' literally means 'hidden'. There is a way in which talking about your plans has a way of dispelling their power, and that's even true for more down-to-earth projects like trying to lose weight or working on a creative project. On the other hand, sharing about it has a way of making it very official. If I were to stop pursuing this path, I would share about it and it would create a bit of resistance in me, such that I'm more likely to continue.

My approach is to stick with a rhythm I'm comfortable with, such that I never quit. I have noticed many times in my life that even a half-assed meditation session is a lot better than nothing, so the decision to never stop is one I wish to stand with.

What are the practices about, more specifically? Before I knew about magic I frankly had no idea what it would consist of. Even though I knew that in fiction there would be all these strange circles drawn on the ground to summon various eldritch entities, I didn't know that those were based on something real. While there is a similar thing as performing a ritual to summon an entity in real magic, this isn't what IIH is about, at least in the beginning.

Many people quit the early practices in IIH because they're too boring: meditation exercises, doing your usual chores without any external distraction, introspection exercises to reveal all your major weaknesses and strengths, and breathing exercises. I am not too bothered by this because I have a clear goal that interests me, such that magic is a means to build the life I want. All of those exercises have a way of really honing your focus onto something specific, which is something I've lacked for essentially all my life. Even the simple act of committing time each day forces you to be clear about what you want, because you have less time to squander around.

This version of magic - focusing your attention into a laser-like force and removing all distractions - might sound really boring compared to the evokation/divination/spellcasting/potion-making type of magic, but I find it far more practical and grounded, which is why I'm fond of this path in particular. There are other traditions in magic more centered around rituals or divination, such as the Hermetic order of the Golden Dawn that John Michael Greer represents from what I understand (he is also a druid and has studied other traditions, so it's hard to tell for me what exactly he focuses on). But I find that in an era dominated by the internet and thus rife of distraction, being able to direct one's attention and connecting back with the body to be really crucial skills, and it's nice to have a set of practices that one can commit to, as opposed to trying to come up with your own curriculum which has a way of being unstructured.

Remembering your inner child

Speaking of occultism, one of the common practices there is to keep a skull, so as to remind yourself of your own death. That is because death is the clearest test to see what is important in your life, versus what isn't. While I don't keep a skull in my bedroom, I do keep a photo of myself as a kid, smiling. And looking at it always reminds me of what's important.

May you also not forget. (This isn’t a photo of me by the way, it’s just a stock photo I found online)

1. In Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, he uses the excellent analogy that no civilization has managed to reproduce the equivalent of flight - living sustainably - but delude themselves into thinking that because they hover in the air for a bit - manage to build things for a while - they’re on the verge of discovering flight. In reality, all the past civilizations, as well as ours, are all doing the equivalent of jumping off a high cliff.