Safety third

One of the things I despise about the current Western civilization is the “safety first” attitude.

I know where it comes from – basically, the ideology of human rights, where right to life is the most fundamental right everything else is derived from; can’t have property if you’re dead, can’t have any other rights if you’re dead, can’t have any freedoms if you’re dead. Let’s ignore the slightly inconvenient issue of the abortion rights which negate right-to-life for the sake of a normally inferior freedom of choice, but otherwise, it’s logical that safety would be the first priority because if you get killed or you’re gravely injured, this would make any possible gains moot.

The implicit assumption is that nothing could possibly be worth more than your life; thus, logically, safety comes first, and everything else second.

However, that’s not how I prioritise things. To me, it’s mission first. The reason why I’m here has precedence – that’s, basically, what my life is for. Using it up in order to achieve the goal is the point. What else would I be doing here? Taking pictures of nature? Sure, there’s a place for safety. If I get killed or badly hurt prior to accomplishing my goals, this compromises my ability to accomplish said goals, and this is not good. If I get too poor and thus unable to function in the world in ways that allow me to accomplish my goals, that would also be bad. This makes safety and prosperity valid secondary goals, but it’s always in the context of “mission first”. Never earn money in ways that would compromise the mission. Never try to be safe and survive if that compromises the mission.

The mission, of course, is stay focused on God, do whatever needs to be done, and return to God in at least as pure and powerful a condition as when I came here, but hopefully improve.

Of course I’m not evaluating daily things, such as buying bread and coffee, in this manner – how does this exact brand of instant coffee help me attain my goals? That would be idiocy worthy of Socrates. I don’t feel the need to constantly prove that something is good, true and useful; however, when I really find myself between a hammer and an anvil, remembering that I’m not really trying to survive or to enjoy myself, but I’m here on a mission, and the only thing I need to know is whether I’m still accomplishing it or not. If my death accomplishes it, and prolonged life doesn’t, death is preferable. If suffering accomplishes it and pleasure doesn’t, suffering is preferable.

Most things, understandably, fall into neither category. It’s for the most part completely irrelevant whether I run Windows, Mac OS or Linux on my computer; the articles I write are going to be the same. It doesn’t matter whether I shoot film or digital, or whether I shoot Canon or Sony; the pictures are going to feel the same. It does, however, matter whether I shoot pictures on a really poor camera, or on a really good one, because there is going to be that “thing” about good equipment that allows me to express my vision well, without technical issues standing in the way. Also, really bad equipment already caused visible issues – for instance, I edited the cover of my first book on a Windows 98 machine with insufficient RAM, and it kept freezing and crashing on me so I couldn’t finish resizing the big TIFF image properly, so the cover is somewhat “off”. The printers also messed up the colour calibration of at least one other book – the colours are several hundred kelvins too cool and saturation could be better, so yes, equipment can definitely cause issues. Fortunately, I never encountered a technological issue that would actually prevent me from writing a text, but it came close – MS Word on a very old laptop, for instance, lagged so badly, I had noticeable delay between what I typed and what showed on the screen, due to spelling checker doing its thing. Sure, I turned it off when I figured out the problem, but it’s never pleasant, so when someone asks why I buy expensive hardware, or, in general, why I pay so much attention to any particular thing, it’s because I probably had problems with that kind of a thing in the past, and I am trying to minimise the probability of it getting in my way in the future. I don’t want to have only one computer, because it will eventually update the OS for hours, or its hard drive will fail, or it will just die, and at that moment I won’t have a backup. It happened before, so now my backups have backups. I had situations where I couldn’t get my only computer on the Internet because the drivers for some essential piece of hardware were on the Internet. Having a second computer, or a second car, isn’t necessarily a matter of comfort – it’s a function of putting the mission first, and for that, everything has to work, and everything needs to have a backup in case it doesn’t. Sure, the car I drive is safe, but it’s safe because safety is useful if I want to accomplish my goals, not because it’s safety first.

Basically, if it’s safety first, it means your life doesn’t have a purpose, but is a purpose in itself, which makes it pretty much irrelevant. I see my life as a resource that is being spent in the process of achieving its purpose. Other things, such as money and physical resources, are spent on maintaining my life and abilities, so that I can achieve my goals here. It’s, basically, goal first, maintenance of ability to achieve goals second, and safety probably third, if even that. The third place is still high enough for me to hardly ever compromise safety, unless it’s actually essential for the mission. Comfort is also quite high on the list; probably four, because comfort includes good health, and comfort in general is quite important if you are trying to maintain prolonged focus on hard problems in order to solve them. This, however, means I’m quite willing to disregard comfort if it’s in any way useful for almost anything of any significance, but I still find it useful if I’m trying to work, and I will not intentionally seek discomfort for the sake of some kind of asceticism; also, if it can’t be helped, I’ll shrug it off, but if it can be helped, I will prefer comfortable and practical solutions. After comfort and practicality there are even lower priorities, such as aesthetics, which basically means that I will prefer something nicer if I have a choice and it doesn’t compromise anything more important. In reality, it means that if I have a pen and a notebook on my desk all the time, I prefer them to look nice, but a piece of paper and any pencil will do in a pinch. Even things as seemingly unimportant as status symbols have their place in the list of priorities – for instance, if it allows me to be more efficient in daily matters, I might want to present myself outwardly in certain ways that don’t create unnecessary obstacles; for instance, when doing business, it helps to look like someone who belongs there, and not have to go through several layers of “what’s wrong with you?”. Can I manage without those things? Sure. However, I’ll take all the help I can get, because what I do is hard enough as it is.

I have to repeat that I don’t actually go around and weigh every action against a list of priorities, and I would qualify a person who does as certifiably insane. It’s an unconscious, almost instinctive thing that I just bothered to put into words and made it sound much more formal than it actually is, but in reality it’s in the order of “try to make things look nice and clean if possible” and “get a car that isn’t obviously unsafe, is comfortable and fast enough, and passes the general social scrutiny that everybody instinctively does to evaluate business partners”, however it’s all goal-oriented – until goal is achieved, try to stay capable, in order to be capable stay alive, in order to stay alive stay safe, if possible stay comfortable, in order to increase comfort maintain a clean and pleasant environment, and so on.

The arrogance of skepticism

I just finished reading the comment section of a recent youtube video where someone comments Rogozin’s skeptical claims regarding American Moon landings, and it was a profoundly depressing experience which left me with a belief that stupid people should never attempt being skeptical. They should just believe what the authorities tell them, because whatever that is, they have at least some probability of being on a right trajectory in life. If they try to think for themselves, they are absolutely certain to get it wrong and destroy not only their own lives, but also throw the world into chaos. That’s how we got materialism and atheism, when stupid people tried to think critically based on “reason and evidence”, and everything they ended up with was absolutely wrong in every conceivable way, and resulted in mass slaughters and chaos, from the French revolution onwards.

Stupid people don’t know how physics works, they don’t know how rockets work, they don’t know how gyroscopes and inertial guidance works, they heard something about radiation but don’t really distinguish between alpha, gamma and beta kinds, they heard that Van Allen belts are bad but they don’t really know what they look like and what’s the actual problem with them, they don’t know how computers work but it’s intuitive to them that you can’t do shit if you don’t have an iPhone, and they don’t know how photography works but they look at the pictures from the Moon and think they can see all kinds of issues. They think that if they can’t get a good cell coverage, it’s obvious that NASA couldn’t communicate with Apollo all the way to the Moon. I read all this and it makes me feel sick, not because I couldn’t answer any of those supposed issues, but exactly because I can, and I understand what the actual problem is. The problem isn’t even that those people are scientifically ignorant. That’s actually expected – it takes quite a bit of work to become scientifically and technologically proficient in various disciplines, to the point where you can actually understand how a microwave transceiver works, how a computer works (in a sense that you understand how to build a microprocessor with NOR gates alone, because that’s all you have), how you can integrate data from accelerometers into knowing your position and speed, what miracles you can do with very weak computers if you code everything directly in machine code and design the user interface so that you actually have to know what you’re doing to use it, instead of wasting a supercomputer on making something that chimps and cats can use. No, the problem is not that ordinary people don’t have the ability to understand the technological and scientific intricacies of space travel. The problem is that ordinary people have been trained to think that all men are equal, and if they can’t understand something, nobody can. They are trained to be inherently arrogant, they are trained to believe in democracy and rights, and they are trained to be skeptical.

Skepticism is a terribly destructive thing, and even the sharpest minds should use it very sparingly. This might sound strange until you see all the conspiracy theorists who completely lost not only their minds, but also every connection to reality, just because they were skeptical of everything. Not everything – they are never skeptical of their own ability to understand things. This is the difference between them and me. I am always skeptical of myself and my own abilities first, and I always started with faith first, using skepticism extremely sparingly and carefully – if you can imagine a prayer to God for guidance, keeping God and the truth that He is constantly in my mind as I carefully questioned, explored and eventually revised my views. If skepticism is combined with arrogance (of thinking you’re the measure of truth and knowledge, for instance), you’re lost. You’ll start believing that the Earth is flat, that men didn’t go to the Moon, that there are no satellites in orbit, and eventually you’ll go so crazy you’ll question reality of gender and thinking men can be women if they feel like it, or something equally insane.

You can now respond by stating that blind faith in authorities is not a good thing either, and that all those people, who got vaccinated with American bioweapons four times just because they unquestionably believed the authorities, are now about to taste the consequences of that, and I will agree. However, it’s not their fault that they believed the authorities. They can hardly do much else. It is the sin of those in power who mislead them. You see, St. Augustine would describe civilization with an image of a flock of sheep guided by shepherds, who are assisted by sheep dogs, who guard the flock against the wolves. The sheep are normal people who mind their own business baking bread, milling wheat, fixing roads and plumbing, making cars and computers, and so on, and simply have neither the interest, ability or time for other matters. The shepherds are the priests, philosophers and scientists who devote their time to understanding God, righteousness and truth to the best of their ability, and guide the people in the right direction, so that they can live a life that will be grounded in truth and reality, and have a trajectory towards God. The guard dogs are the worldly powers – the army, police, courts and administration, as well as healthcare, fire departments and so on, who take care that the crimes are punished, that those in need are taken care of, that the sick are healed, that the fires are put out, and that the foreign invaders are stopped and fought. The wolves are evil people who want to disrupt, seduce and destroy. If the wolves infiltrate the system to pose as guard dogs and shepherds, you can hardly blame the sheep for being confused, or victimized for following them. You can’t expect a baker or a plumber to be an expert in theology and science, and to see fault in something that requires a PhD in biochemistry. No – if the shepherds and guard dogs fail in their duties and are compromised, the flock will be lost. If the sheep don’t understand that they are sheep, and try to skeptically question the shepherds, they are lost, because they don’t even understand what it takes to be able to understand that stuff. The problem with stupid people is that they think hard stuff is actually easy. I think it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. I think the media actually encourages this in people, by oversimplifying issues so that everybody thinks they understand them, and encouraging everybody to have an opinion about everything, under the assumption that everybody can do it. Sure, you can have an opinion, but you are all but guaranteed to be wrong. You can’t integrate acceleration across time but you think you can have an opinion about spaceflight? You can’t differentiate between gamma and beta radiation but you heard radiation is bad and you think the astronauts couldn’t cross the Van Allen belts? You heard that lightning is caused by electricity and now you no longer believe in God because God doesn’t make lightning? As I said, skepticism is dangerous and even the smartest people should first be skeptical of their ability to exercise skepticism safely and without losing the grip on reality, but for stupid people skepticism is absolutely fatal. The only thing a stupid person – and by that I mean you – should be doing, is making a choice on which expert to believe, based on their inner feeling of reality obtained from prayer to God. If you follow this diligently, at some point you might actually evolve to the point of being one of the experts, very gradually, and at some point you might carve out a new, yet unknown path to a greater truth than what was previously revealed. However, the “I don’t understand this so it must be wrong and stupid” kind of skepticism, that ends your journey towards the truth then and there. And if your inner response was “I’m nobody’s sheep”, you’re either a wolf, or you were indoctrinated by them. You see, the wolves define sheep as stupid followers who are exploited by the shepherds. God defines sheep as good beings that follow the voice of God that leads them from space and time into salvation and eternity.

Don’t be a sheep if that’s your choice, but those, who don’t follow His voice into eternity, shall perish in time.

American dream

Regarding the attractors placed within this world, America obviously has a prominent place, but let’s analyse the obvious elements first.

The American dream is that you can go there and “succeed”, you can “make it”, and it’s usually defined as “you can become rich and famous”, which means you can distinguish yourself from the grey irrelevant masses of bland unimportant lookalikes. There is a specific astral beacon associated with this promise of success, the beacon that points to the vaguely defined finish line of success, making you feel it’s all going to be worth it, in the end. There’s also a feeling that America is special, it’s where the meaning of life is, it’s where you want to be if you want to be a part of great things that await mankind in the future. This is what I mean by the term “attractor”, and it’s obviously created by associating some pretty powerful source of spiritual energy with physical entities, the way one would put a tasty worm on a hook to deceive the fish.

Let’s first analyse the promise of the American dream. First of all, it’s obvious that we’re going to deal with lots of survivorship bias here, because I’ve seen stories by the Croatian immigrants into the USA, who suffered terribly working on building the railroads sometime in the 19th century, and regretted the moment when they had the idea of going to America to find a better life, because what they got was hell, filled with incredibly hard work, suffering and eventually death. If you look only at those who actually did become rich and famous, and those do exist, you will get a skewed perspective, the way you would get a skewed perspective of the Russia’s post-Soviet 1990s if you only interview the oligarchs. It is a fact, however, that the post-WW2 America did in fact have a period of widespread wealth, and a very rich middle class, which was definitely not the case before, when you had widespread misery and very few extremely wealthy oligarchs, or “captains of industry” as they used to call them.

So, let’s ignore the pre-WW2 times and focus on the golden era of the American dream, when an ordinary person pumping gas could earn several times more money than the European engineers and other elites; life was easy and good in America even for the wide masses, but let’s see what “success” meant. Usually, it’s a house in the suburbs, with a pool, several nice cars, one for each family member, a promise of a wealthy retirement that included carefree travelling on a cruise ship somewhere abroad, you had a nice family and could send your kids to college.

Let’s now see what this material paradise actually means, spiritually. It means that the siren call of the attractor remains elusive, and you never actually have a feeling of “arriving” at the goal; every material thing you purchase comes with an initial “rush” of satisfaction and fulfilment, but it’s very quickly normalised, and so you try to acquire the next thing, trying to check every single item on the list – got a good job, check, got a house, check, got married, check, had children, check, got all the nice appliances for the house, check, got a nice car, check, got a nice car for the wife, check, got all the newest gadgets and status symbols to impress the neighbours and coworkers, check, got the kids to Harvard, check, got a million dollars in the bank, check. At some point, you can decide that you’re fine, and you don’t mind that everybody else around you is the same kind of fine, which means you’re not particularly distinguished in any way, but at least you’re not distinguished in a negative way, so that’s great, or you can get depressed because you invested all that energy and made so many sacrifices and compromises, and the best you can say is that you have a nice, ordinary middle-class life. At worst, you get divorced because you found out that your wife was cheating on you with a pool cleaner while you were busy working for all those material things; she got half of everything, and you are now in a hotel somewhere, thinking about putting a hole through your head. The emotional result is between mild satisfaction at best, and bitter depression at worst, and when you poll the wealthiest, most successful and famous people in America, they seem to be the worst mess of them all – divorced multiple times, undergone all kinds of plastic surgery, addicted to drugs and alcohol, with scandals, depression, suicide and depravity. You obviously don’t have people who are completely blissed-out because they attained the goal the spiritual attractor promised them, that feeling of euphoric bliss and greatness that was promised. There’s just work, sacrifice, spiritual compromises that have to be made along the way if you want to succeed, pieces of your soul that have to be sold or denied, cocks to be sucked and arses to be licked on your way up the ladder, and whisky you have to drink to try to forget and wash out the aftertaste of cock and arse. Then you bling yourself out with expensive trinkets and put on a fake smile entering that cocktail party, pretending you’re happy without a single worry in the world, because you’re living the dream, making a short pause every now and then to snort some cocaine.

Analysis from a spiritual point of view shows that all those people keep investing spiritual energy into the system, trading it for material things, and are on a perpetually energy-deficitary downward path, where they end up completely depleted, but surrounded with lots of meaningless things, having traded the things that actually matter, such as their spiritual energy, dignity and integrity, the things that actually bring fulfilment and joy, for things that promise a lot but actually don’t mean anything. The American dream, in essence, states that physical things will bring you happiness, and this is initially convincing to people who are poor and thus believe that poverty is the cause of all their problems, but the truth is, wealth will only solve the problems that can be solved with money. If your problems are caused by the lack of food, medical care, housing or transportation, then wealth will easily cure those. However, if you actually miss God and that feeling of blissful fulfilment and joy of expanded consciousness that you had in heaven, before, but you don’t know what it is, and the attractors placed by Satan can convince you to seek them as mirages in this spiritual desert of a world, you will keep losing yourself until there’s nothing left.

That thing Jordan Peterson said, that I mentioned in the previous article, is very relevant here – namely, that there’s only so much joy one can experience in human existence, so there’s not much you can add even with infinite wealth and success. There is, however, a terrible and deep pool of suffering and misery of human existence, and if you can keep that away, that’s basically 99% of total possible success you can actually have here. Everything beyond that is trinkets and bullshit – you wear a Rolex instead of a Seiko, big deal. Nobody cares, or can tell anyway. It’s the same with cars; you can get a better car up to a point, but after that it’s exponentially more money for chasing mirages. This means that the promise of the American dream is not all false; there’s some truth in it. Physical wealth can indeed improve things for you if you’re poor, because poverty can cause all kinds of terrible things to intersect your existence. However, you exhaust the pool of possible improvements very quickly, and you exhaust the pool of really significant improvements even more quickly. Basically, it’s like hunger – it’s a real issue if you have nothing to eat, but once you eat something there’s only so much you can do about it. Once you had enough to eat, eating more will actually make you feel worse, and that’s the first lie of the American dream – that having more will always make you feel better. It won’t. In fact, once you managed to leave the pool of abject misery, trying to have more and better things will actually cause you to neglect the most important things – God, your soul, your mate and children, your friends, and so on. If trying to be more successful and famous causes you to make compromises that will break you, this means accepting real harm and real injury in the place that actually matters, in exchange for mirages and nonsense. This is a bad trade by all measures.

Avoiding failure

I recently saw a video clip of Dr. Jordan Peterson saying something that struck me as very insightful: if you want to advertise something to humans, the obvious idea is to frame it as offering success and well-being, but this is wrong. The humans don’t in fact care much about success and well being. They care about not suffering terribly and failing miserably. This is because “success” and “well-being” don’t really have much to offer, because human capacity for joy is quite limited. The threat of terrible suffering, however, is the primary motivational force, because the pit of doom is endless and promises untold horrors, and people would do anything to avoid that.

This struck me instantly as true, and it explained something I struggled with previously, which is the issue of status symbols. You see, status symbols are an obvious trap, something the super-wealthy people produce (thus increasing their wealth) and the people who are barely out of poverty buy, wasting their money and crippling their chances of ever becoming well-off financially. Essentially, one would do much better buying shares of LVMH or some other luxury-item business on the stock market, than buying their products. Basically, those luxury goods are upper middle class aspirational purchases, where someone who is barely out of poverty takes whatever money it is that makes him not poor, and throws it into fire. So, if you never want to make financial progress in life, do buy luxury goods and status symbols, because that’s the way to go. The reason people do that in such overwhelming numbers despite obvious reasons against it must obviously be very powerful, but the exact formulation eluded me. I used to think it was an equivalent of a peacock’s tail – a boastful show of opulence that serves no purpose for survival, and is in fact a hindrance to survival, so if someone can still pull that off, it’s a sign he’s really well off. An example of such a status symbol is a lawn. Initially, to have a piece of land in front of your house under grass or some aesthetically pleasing but non-productive trees was a statement of wealth – “you see, I have so much land already, I don’t have to plant something useful by my house, I can just waste it”. This explains other status symbols as well – they are intentionally wasteful displays, a show of how much money you can piss into the wind, because of how rich you are. Of course, when the poor or middle class people try to imitate that, and waste critical resources trying to look rich by doing what rich people do, they are completely ruined, but none of this still explains why people do it at all. Rationally, a response to “how much money can you waste on stupid bullshit” should be “none at all”. Also, wastefulness might be a show of opulence when really wealthy people do it, but when poor people do it it smells of despair and fear, like a scared cat puffing itself up to look bigger, not a peacock’s tail. This is where Peterson’s explanation clicked – they don’t do it because they want to achieve something positive, like being successful and happy. They do it because they desperately want to distinguish themselves from the grey, hopeless masses of poor, disenfranchised, doomed people barely clinging to the bottom rungs of the society ladder. There’s an instinctive recognition of dangers of being invisible, never seen by anyone important, never recognized enough for anyone to pay attention to you in any way because you are not distinguishable from the bland, grey, unimportant masses of people who barely make a living, working for slave wages. People are afraid of being losers, of being dismissed and mocked as irrelevant and unsuccessful, and will do almost anything to avoid this humiliation, and this explains sacrificing critically valuable resources at the altar of the false gods of status symbols.

However, there’s more to it than that. This is only the lowest “octave” that everybody recognizes, the physical one. It also extends into the spiritual realm, and I think that’s where the real issue lies. People don’t want to be mocked by Satan for being losers and failing his “tests”, and will keep investing their spiritual energy into attempts to achieve enlightenment in this world, to Satan’s great joy of course, because that’s how he can keep milking them dry. The spiritual equivalent of a Rolex or a Porsche are the spiritual achievements such as samadhi, or various demonstrable siddhis. Those things won’t necessarily get you any closer to any worthy goal, but they are a spiritual Rolex you can casually wear to some equivalent of a spiritual cocktail party, at least in your mind, and you think it will make you acknowledged, seen as worthy and accepted. In reality, the spiritual abilities that are of greatest use are usually the least “flashy” and “showy” ones, and collecting “experiences” like butterflies for your collection only shows your insecurities and fears of being unsuccessful and unimportant. It’s not necessarily even the experiences and abilities – sometimes it’s the spiritual titles, belonging to an established lineage and similar nonsense that gets people involved in cults and submissive to all kinds of weirdos who carry flashy titles, but that, obviously, seems like a path to being a weirdo in an orange robe who is generally recognized by others as spiritually successful. It’s the same circus as the Rolex and Ferrari crowd, only a different wagon, because if you know you’re not successful, you will go to great lengths trying to persuade others that you are. If you actually are successful, you won’t give a fuck. But of course, there are fakes who understand that and thus pretend to be the successful ones who don’t give a fuck. 🙂

Obviously, trying to fake achievement is something people devote an inordinate amount of time and effort to, in every sphere of interest and activity, and one could say that the same amount of effort, if invested in productive venues, could produce actual results. However, it seems that people actually give up on believing that they can actually do that – that they could achieve something real, be actually successful at something real and worthy, and trying to fake it is a sign of that. It’s a sign of someone who believes he has no chance of real achievement, but is desperately afraid of the depths of the pit of doom that awaits the losers.

The irony is, acknowledging that you’re a loser is the way to win.

When Satan mocked the souls that they would be nothing without constantly being in God’s presence, the “losers” acknowledged that, stating that God is everything of value and without Him they are nothing. Those “losers” are still with God in heaven, while those who wanted to be cool, emancipated and successful “winners” got lost here in Satan’s maze of reflections, illusions and quagmires, without God and all hope, still desperately trying to “achieve” and “succeed” in order to avoid Satan mocking them as losers.

Even in purely material things, avoiding the pitfall of posturing, acknowledging that you’re poor, saving and investing all your money, acquiring skills and living a modest life, are something that will eventually result in quite a portfolio.

So, what’s the lesson here? Trying to avoid failing miserably is probably the strongest motivational force in human life, and it can convince people to do the most desperate and counterproductive things. Also, people don’t “fake it until they make it”, they fake it because they gave up.

Recession

Take this as an observation based on my personal experience with several recessions and growth cycles over the decades.

The way you can tell we’re at the peak of the growth cycle is the generally positive social attitude towards overt displays of wealth – people driving expensive cars, wearing expensive watches and other trinkets, and so on. The social attitude is, basically, aspirational – “good for him; we’re all doing well, some are doing better than most, but we all aspire to be there”. There’s abundance of money in the system, and there’s an abundance of people having lots of money, as well. The attitude is that if you don’t have money at that point, it’s your fault.

The way you can tell we’re entering recession is that the attitude towards boastful displays of wealth grows increasingly negative – an increasing number of people either lost their jobs, or had their salary cut, or the prices grew; the pension funds went bust, some people couldn’t pay their mortgage and so lost their homes, and so on, and the attitude is that we’re all basically fucked and trying to make ends meet, and the goal is no longer to make the most money, but to survive to the other side of this. The attitude towards wealth is no longer aspirational, because it’s seen as a dream we had to abandon and will most likely never reach, so displays of opulence are seen as someone poking at our wounds, intentionally reminding us of our misery and loss, and the rich people who don’t understand that the times had changed might find themselves at the wrong end of the stick.

I’ve been noticing this souring of attitude towards fake and real displays of wealth for a while now, which, to me, signals recession, and not only recession, but widespread pain of recession, that is not being acknowledged by the media, which makes it worse because it makes people assume it’s probably just them and not everybody else, and they feel as if they should keep up a facade of opulence in order not to stick out and be seen as losers, and keeping up the facade is increasing the financial pain. So, whenever they see someone who is buying a fancy new toy to show how well they are doing, they feel this as pressure to keep the expensive pretence and hasten their financial ruin.

Usually, when it’s publicly acknowledged that we’re in a recession, there’s a collective sigh of relief because then people feel they are allowed to show signs of adversity, because it’s seen as something that happens to everybody – they can keep wearing old clothes, sell the expensive car and get an old beater, not buy wasteful trinkets as holiday presents, and so on. Even the rich people usually have enough sense to tone it down, because they don’t want to be seen as the only ones not suffering; when everybody is doing well, doing better is good, but when everybody is doing poorly, doing better might single you out for retribution.

We are in an unacknowledged recession.