Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 05:31:44 PM

Quote from: AlcoHoDL on Today at 07:11:03 AM

Nice discussion! Just too many things happening IRL that I can only skim through the posts, let alone replying...

Quote from: Torque on June 20, 2020, 04:19:42 PM

[edited out]

"So I got out", you said. That's what I mean by not being a wage slave. You saw that you were becoming one, so you decided to change things. Wage slavery is when you are afraid to make changes and endure a life of misery by spending half your life doing things you don't want to do, especially when you know you can do much better. I consider myself blessed in that respect, because I'm currently getting paid very well to do things so interesting and exciting that I would gladly pay for to do. But if things go south and I feel I need to change something, I will certainly try to change it.

It seems to me that anyone could get sucked into a kind of complacency, and I cannot even really blame them for getting sucked in.

The more curious that you are, and the more that you continue to attempt to build your skills and to make sure that you have options, the less likely that you might get sucked into one profession that either becomes boring, or you feel that you are being exploited because you are not being advanced through the ranks in order to be able to transition into the learning and development of new skills.

Surely, if the promotion rates are small or the industry is shrinking, we could end up kind of getting fucked because we might have and some false reliance upon the direction of the industry and whether our skills were going to be valued with the passage of time.

When I was gaining my independence in the 80s and 90s, I had recognized various computer related programing and development to be lucrative and future oriented skills, but I never personally developed those skills because I had other interests, even though I could recognize a decent amount of future-poofing into developing those kinds of skills - perhaps so long as you do not get too trapped into some jobs that are too narrowly focused.. that might end up not giving you either upward promotion potential or the ability to laterally move if you were to want to exercise such option.

Of course, tying this into bitcoin could be that someone who has a decent amount of skills in software, hardware and firmware (whatever the fuck that is?) could develop bitcoin skills on the side, and of course, many of us also realize that we might not need to know shit about any of the technicals to be able to invest in bitcoin, but investing in bitcoin might still take 10-20 years or even more to really get to fuck you status, especially if you are only able to garner $100 per month (or some modest amount) to be able to invest into stacking sats.

Whether we are talking about personal employment skills or even side investments, each of us continues to have some obligations to attempt to secure our own future by trying to make sure that whatever investments that we are making, whether we are investing into building skills or we are investing financially is to be attempting to avoid getting trapped without hardly any options, so of course, when we are younger, we might have very few skills and maybe very little finances to be able to exercise a wide variety of options, but if we have any kind of brain (even if we might be mentally challenged) we can strive to build our skills and our finances in a way that builds our options.. Most humans have abilities to learn skills, but it takes work too, and sure there is luck involved too, while ongoing preparations and not going to crazy with burning your capital or your bridges will likely lead to more situations in which you are able to run into "lucky" breaks along the way.

Yeah, it's true that our status can change (more likely to worsen than improve) due to life/society/world changes beyond our control, and life can change from kind to nasty, and even cruel. So we shouldn't be reassured that what we currently have and how we've currently arranged our lives can be maintained indefinitely. Same (even more so) applies to Bitcoin, which can turn our status from "fuck you rich" to "fucked up" and back again in a short amount of time, so short that we should not really plan our future based solely on Bitcoin. That's why it's important to have a solid base level of (more or less) guaranteed financial status and ability to maintain a minimum but acceptable standard of living, to which Bitcoin can add the small (or larger) perks and "fuck you" elements that will satisfy some of our desires.

Life is short, and the more you explore the world, the more you realise how small you are, how little you know, and how small our time on this planer really is. It kind of tragic, really, if you think about it. I guess that our perception of time is fine tuned in such a way that we tend to ignore it and assume we'll live forever, and act as such. The older and the wiser we get, the more we realise that there's so much more out there, so much knowledge and experiences to gain, but so little time. It's kind of like two aspects of our being, working against each other: the body gets weaker, the brain/mind gets wiser, up until they cannot support each other (and then the brain fails too, and that's the end of it).

What does all this have to do with Bitcoin? Probably very little, I guess it's those leaves I'm smoking that still have an effect...