Are you having fun yet
/0 Comments/in Long Articles/by Rudolf HuberIn the 2008 film Hurt Locker, Jeremy Renner plays a Staff Sergeant who defuses explosives in the Iraq combat theatre. One day he stumbled upon an IED that was so powerful that despite all his protective gear it would have shredded him to bits if it exploded. After examining the situation, he decided to remove the protective gear. When his commanding NCO asked him what he did he replied that if he had to die, at least he wanted to be comfortable.
He could not bring himself to deny the reality of his situation. If he failed to defuse the IED, he would surely die. No amount of unicorn piss would change this cold, hard fact. So, he decided to make the best of the deck of cards he was dealt.
Fast forward to the real world of 2024. We are constantly being peppered with bad news from all corners, which surprises us when it should not. Most of what befalls us today could have been seen years, often decades ago.
We refused to tackle the 2008 financial meltdown and indeed every single financial crisis before and after. Instead, we printed mountains of money to buy our way out of trouble. This money had no collateral to be backed up with in the real world. It was a figment of our imagination that there would be real value attached to it and for long enough, the fiction held up.
Now we are surprised about painful inflation eating away at our savings. We did not want to see the reality that spending money we don’t have now will come to bite us later. The latter is now and will be for many years. There is no free lunch.
We refused to give real painful consequences to Russia for its actions in countries it defines as near abroad for about 2 decades. Now we are surprised that Putin has kicked off and wages one of the cruelest wars we have seen close to Europe in many decades in Ukraine.
We embarked on a journey of green madness and are surprised when high energy prices make us freeze in the winter and make basic goods unobtainium. Replacing what works economically and in any other way with things that cannot survive one single day on the open market without massive handouts that are expropriated from tax- and ratepayers cannot go on forever without crushing an economy.
We have given in to every whim of a radical diversity culture while denying our own cultures and now we are surprised when a tiny subset of the population dictates how the vast majority must live, breathe, and think. We refused to confront activists when they got stupid and now, we are surprised that those people go completely overboard with their demands.
If we close our eyes before real problems, those problems might be camouflaged for many years but under the surface they fester and snowball. We sure often have the impression that problems have gone away, and I know from first-hand experience that most people from all walks of life are champions when it comes to deluding themselves. But those problems never go away. They are no fine wine. Time does not make them better.
Reality is a hard place to live in and a hard truth – especially about oneself – is virtually unacceptable to most people. Those willing and able to live in the real world are a rare breed and will remain so.
How do we deal with all those problems then?
Would voting for a different bunch of politicians solve anything? I doubt that. Can we take matters into our own hands and fix what ails us? Nope, the record on that is atrocious. Can we rattle and shake the silent majority, so they act and create the necessary momentum, so deciders pick up on that and feel compelled to fix what needs fixing? That has never worked beyond the very small level and with that I mean a small town at best. And even on those the record is abysmal.
So, we can’t fix it, we can’t hope for other leaders to fix it and we can’t bring the majority to see it our way. We are a small minority of people, and this won’t change.
I was born in 1969, the year of the Moon Landing. It was also the year of the first Arpanet (Internet) connection, the year of the Concorde airplane, the year of the Jumbo Jet, the year of Woodstock, Monty Python, the ATM, and the UNIX operating system. 1969 was full of changes, innovation, and feelings the future might indeed be stellar. Anyone alive back then would have been right to assume that we are on a never-ending trajectory of ever-better lives for everyone.
I was a little toddler back then so aside from being born I did not notice or even care about any of it. Getting my next fill of baby formula mattered much more to me then.
Being born in 1969 makes me one of the older members of Generation X, the generation after the famous Boomers. As small as we are as a generation, we are the last generation born in a non-digital, non-nanosecond world. Call us untainted if you want.
We played in the dirt and climbed on trees. Video games came to us in our juvenile years only and were extremely primitive by today’s standards. Most of what we did outdoors was way more exciting. We preferred hanging out with our friends over bikes and in public places and swam in rivers instead of surfing the net.
We still know how stuff works in the real world, but we have seen enough of the virtual world to feel sufficiently at home in it.
Why do I bring all this up?
I turn 55 this year. This makes me rather old but not old enough to be irrelevant and considering how fast the world we have gotten used to has turned to mush over the last 5 years, we will need all our skills to prevent our own lives from careening off the cliff.
And that’s the only thing we can confidently have control over. What happens to us on a larger level must run its course. There is very little we can do about it. Not the news you would like to see, I guess.
You may have hoped I would map out how this all can be prevented and there is no shortage of others who will tell you so in endless videos and other analyses. You may like to hear it because it offers you a soothing and easy solution and hope and that’s better than the cold, hard, ugly reality staring into your face. That said, if you watch my videos or read my blog, you may not be made of sugar and spice but rather of the sweat and the scars of past experiences, as I am.
No amount of watching others give you messages of rage, resistance, and hope will ever change the reality you live in. Only you can do that. Only you can prepare for what’s upon us.
If you live in Europe as I do, you are looking at 30 bad years, possibly more. Yes, I will be no less than 85 years old until things start to improve. And there is no guarantee that it won’t take longer. For most of us, this reality is the last reality we are ever going to experience with our fully functioning senses.
There is no easy way out of it. The silent majority plus ruthless elites will prevent the hard ways from being engaged in until everything is so broken that societal collapse is a realistic option.
There will be places on this planet where things are not nearly as bad and where there is light, there is a lot of shade as well. You may escape to one of those places and if you can – good for you – but most won’t do that. All you can do then is to be ready for life not to turn out the way you imagined for the last 30 or so years.
Knowing all that, you might just as well have some fun. How can one have fun when things are so bad around us and there is no prospect for improvement you ask? How does a prisoner who does life in jail have fun? How does a terminally ill person have fun?
The reality you live in won’t change because you are miserable. It will just make anything you experience much worse. We need to swallow the bad bits so let’s make the best of it and enjoy the good bits. And when dirt poor people can find good bits in their lives, then it’s quite deplorable if we can’t.
You can look at the future and be miserable or you can see it as the challenge it is and have fun. Challenges are fun if you want them to be.
A person willing and ready to see the world for what it is, a person who accepts the current reality, a person who smiles and has fun no matter what such a person cannot be broken.
At the end of the television series Shogun, Lord Toranaga says that he does not shape the wind. he studies it. And he used the wind no matter how it blew to his advantage. He sure had fun as well.
Welcome to my world.
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