Monthly Archives: July 2011

With a brilliant light

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It is better to walk in the light than to curse in the darkness.

I was thinking of this when I had to wait for the doctor until the last minute, and then when I walked through the rain in the city waiting for the bus home. I had felt that I was being treated unfairly, that I was not being shown the respect I had expected. But why was that MY problem? My task was to shine with the brilliant white light of divine love, as shown by my Lord and hero Jesus Christ. He was certainly not treated with the respect he deserved when he was flogged and mocked and suffered a humiliating death at the hands of the people he was trying to save. In comparison, I did not really have much to complain about. Yet at that time, Jesus Christ shone with a spiritual light that has continued to shine throughout almost 2000 years since.

I was thinking of this again tonight. As expected, I have bounced back to my normal carefree happiness, more or less, before I am even out of the home. What really got my goat about this moving scandal was that my landlord just off and sold the house as if it did not matter that I had a written contract with five months warning, rather than the couple weeks he gave me. That is a pretty harsh insult. But if he has committed an injustice against me, as he technically has to some degree, that is a damage to his soul. I am under no obligation to damage my own soul in return by anger or bitterness. On the contrary, I am obliged to shine with a brilliant white light of divine love, so that I may if possible help heal his soul as well as my own. (Which is pretty near fully recovered by now – took it long enough!)

It was not just Jesus.  In the early church, suffering injustice of various kinds was more or less the way of life. The apostle writes to the Hebrew church that they had “accepted with joy that your belongings were robbed”, as the more colorful Norwegian translation puts it. If someone had walked into my home, pointed a gun at me and started carrying off my stuff, I might possibly have accepted it… at least it beats being dead. But with joy? Now that is a tall order. Of course, there was a reason for their puzzling attitude: They knew that they had something better waiting for them.

Heaven is not (primarily, at least) some place where things are pretty. It is first and foremost a state of mind. If the insult and injury of life can cause us to see and crack loose a small bit of the fossilized dung that covers us, and the divine nature born in the deepest core of our heart begins to shine visibly, then paradise is right there, and the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near. That is what I believe.  The Kingdom of Heaven is said to consist not in food and drink, but in justice, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.  Sure, we would want the Kingdom of Heaven to come in the form of other people doing justice to us, but wouldn’t that mean that they would also be the ones getting the peace and joy? Ever thought about that?

Of course, none of this will make any sense for the hedonist, who expects everything to be over when he dies. Well, he is kind of right. All the things he has been living for will be over when he dies. To exist as pure desire without the things one desires is not a fate I would wish on a mortal enemy, much less someone just making a mistake. But I cannot change the fate of another directly. The most I can do is shine with a brilliant light, a refraction of the Uncreated Light which gave us all light and reason.

There is only so much time during which we pass through life as a whole, much less an individual trial. That is our brief opportunity to shine, so that when we are gone, there will only be a brightness left, and a faint call: “Follow me into the Light.”

That’s what I aim for, but that’s not quite where I am, I think… so on we go!

Google+ +1

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Privacy issues is the most cited reason why people move from Facebook to Google+.  Me, I’ll probably be both places until all my friends are on Google+.

As a long-time fan of Google (I wrote about them when they were just a research project), I applied for my Google+ account about a day after the news broke. I got a couple invites from early adopters, including one old friend now working at Google, but it still took until yesterday late afternoon before I got in. Ironically, I first got through on my mobile phone.

If none of this makes sense, “Google+” is the name of Google’s new social network. Google actually had a couple of these before, Orkut being popular in some non-English-speaking countries, and Buzz being popular mostly with rabid Google fans and the extremely social. (Needless to say, I was on, but  squarely in the first category, so it was mainly used as en echo of my Twitter and Blogger accounts.) I would never join a social network whose name reminded me of workout.

Google+ has been so hyped in media lately, I really expect you all to have heard about it.  The question asked in mainstream media is: “Is Google+ the Facebook killer?”

I don’t think it is a Facebook killer, simply because  Facebook has ruled the roost for so long, it has picked up virtually all the people who don’t really care, and just joined because everyone was there already. They are not going to leave unless Google buys Farmville.  So Facebook will probably continue to exist for the foreseeable future.

The question nobody asks yet is: “Is Facebook the Google+ killer?”  The answer to this is clear: It is not. Only Google can be the Google+ killer, and with the current popularity they would get a lot of badwill if they shut it down. If they commit some atrocious privacy blunder, like reversing the visibility of entries or something, they may yet lose. Otherwise not.

Google+ is simply superior. It caters to the people who actually care, the people who join a social network to stay in touch with people they actually know (or, in some cases, wish they knew). In Google+, you don’t have just a gray mass of friends all being created equal. You have circles of friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, alumni, in-laws, ex-laws, and people you met during your vacation. Well, actually only the first three of these were predefined, but you can create a new circle simply by giving it a name and dropping someone into it.

Whenever you post something, Google+ has a line under the post showing which circles you are posting to at the moment. If some of these are not on Google+ yet, it also offers to mail them your update instead. If you see some circles that you would not want to read your post, you just x them out. If a circle is missing, you add it. There is of course also an option to post it to all your circles simultaneously. Or for the more bold, extended circles, which is the circles of your circles. In other words, friends of friends. Or you could pull out all stops and make it public, so that anyone in the world who googles for your name may at some point in time find it. Kind of like I have done here since 1998, you know. I’m still alive, but then again I have not insulted the Prophet (peace be upon him) and have no intention to start now.

In addition to total control of who sees your post in the first place, you can also regulate who gets to repost it on Google+. Obviously you cannot stop people from using cut and paste, but in that case the trace ends with them, and it is up to them to prove they didn’t just make it up (or photoshop it, in more extreme cases). Or so say the wise: I have not tested or even looked for this feature. It is not really made for someone whose white boxers have been on the Internet for years.

If you go in the other direction, extreme attention-seeking, you can also add a notify request. Normally people are only notified when you add them, but you may want to have Google send them a notify mail if you have to break an appointment, for instance, or if someone in your family dies, I guess.

Google+ comes with two types of chat, three if you count the mobile “huddle”. One is an ordinary text chat, which I am not sure whether now also supports video. Quite possibly, but I only have video camera on my job machine, and it is extremely secret.

The other type is a group video “hangout”, in which a person starts a video chat alone and Google+ broadcasts to whatever circles he allows that he is hanging out. Up to ten people can stop by and chat at the same time, like a video conference.  (Not sure how common those are in the first world, here in the zeroth world they have become pretty ordinary.) They can also watch YouTube together. Hey, I know some Happy Science promotional YouTube clips if you insist. Seriously, I don’t see myself ever using Hangout. It sounds about as much fun as Hangnails.

The mobile client is currently only for Android, but the iPhone client is supposedly waiting for Apple to allow it on their market.  The Android client has a clean, simple interface (as has the web version, of course; it is Google.) It has two features of its own: Huddle, and direct photo upload.

Huddle is another type of group chat. It has been compared to group texting, but seems to use the Internet rather than the SMS protocol so presumably is free if you are in a wifi zone or have a flat rate plan. I haven’t tested. It is probably less useful than the marketing implies, unless it somehow has the power to make your friends’ mobile phones ring. Or people get into the habit of staring at their Google+ mobile application when they don’t do anything else. Seeing how I always do something else, I am probably not in the target group.

Direct photo upload is probably the easiest to misunderstand, but luckily it is actually better than it sounds. When in the Photo part of the mobile app, you can watch your own and your friends’ photo albums, but there is a small camera icon at the top. Using it brings up a standard mobile camera screen (I suppose all smartphones have camera these days) and you just snap a picture as usual. But instead of saving on your phone’s SD card, it uploads it to a private photo album in the Google cloud of servers. From there, it is up to you to share it with your friends or just look at it at night before going to sleep. Whatever. It is like a huge memory card in the sky, basically, which you can access from wherever you can sign in to Google+.

Google+ also has a news stream, Sparks, which brings up the latest on whatever topics you have marked as your interest. (For instance Meditation,  Kindle books.) It is really just a persistent Google search which you don’t need to retype every day. The reason why it is grouped with the social software is probably that you can share it with your circles easily. Or perhaps Google just likes to search for things.

What is conspicuously missing yet is simpleminded games, but comments in the code imply that games can be added easily. I wonder if it will be possible to turn off incoming game requests. Possibly, since this is something people hate about Facebook.  I don’t notice it much, since very few of my friends are of the type that play Facebook games. But I understand some people get reams of purely game-related message on their FB page.

Anyway, it is pretty much as expected. I like it. +1

Doctor yet again

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Nothing dramatic, just the foot. Didn’t get time to look at it last visit.

My new shoes did indeed help, in the sense that the pain in my foot is not getting worse and worse for each passing day. It is not getting better either, beyond a certain level. It seems to have stabilized there. I can go to work and back without intense pain, but no more long walks. I also invested in a pair of sandals, but that does not seem to help either.

So, despite my experience that seeing a doctor VERY rarely has any effect except on my wallet, I took some time off from work to see my regular doctor today again. After all, I did NOT do this when my arm felt this way, but soldiered on for a couple years. And now that arm is permanently damaged. I can write naturally, since I automatically take pauses when I am on my own. But at work I cannot do much typing before the pain returns. Perhaps 10 minutes at a time. Now the foot is in a similar situation, and I don’t want that to become permanent if I can avoid it.

I got an appointment at 13:45, but an hour later the waiting room was empty and there was still no sign of the doctor. It was still half an hour until I had to go for the bus, though.

One minute before I would have gone for the bus, the doctor showed up. There is no way he could know about my bus routes, so this was an obvious case of Divine Intervention. Seems God has found me worthy of a couple small tests lately. Seeing this, I decided to clean my soul of this impatience so it could shine brilliantly with the bright white light of divine love. Well, that is my aspiration. I suspect it is still more like a dim glow to the random observer, if it can even be seen at all. But at least I got the opportunity to see myself.

As for the doctor visit itself, it was fruitless as usual. He wants me to take an x-ray on Monday “just in case”. Apart from that, he wanted to give me painkillers with an anti-inflammatory side effect. Unfortunately, they also have the side effect of weakening the stomach lining, which is already one of my few weak spots. 16500 Americans die each year from stomach perforation caused by over-use of painkillers (or simply because they did not know, or neglected to inform their doctor, that they had a tendency toward ulcer before they started taking this stuff.)

When I had the problems with my arm some years ago, there existed a second type of non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs, of which I got one called Vioxx. It did not affect the stomach at all, but was withdrawn from the market while I was still using it, thanks to the FDA. A few people got heart infarcts after using large doses of it for a long time, longer than the clinical trial that had originally found it safe. Because of this, FDA banished the whole class of drugs completely from the market, and the drug companies withdrew it from the rest of the world as well. And so the undertakers can look forward to their 16500 new cases each year, and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief that the government is looking out for us as usual.

I am starting to think prayer and fasting may be a better alternative. Fasting in particular, since fat is scientifically proven to be a pro-inflammation agent, both in the blood and on cuts and scrapes. But before we go into wholesale fasting, let’s see how far we come with rolled oats and an exercise bike.

 

Trade(off) day

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Who is the mysterious Taiyou Sorano, and why does he teach people that their soul, rather than the body, is their real self?  (Promotional picture from animated movie “The Rebirth of Buddha”.)

If you wonder why this is not about my moving to a new apartment today, that’s because it is delayed till Tuesday. As far as I am concerned, it could be delayed for another ten years and I would not complain (much), despite the icy cold winters and the poor bus connections. Anyway, until then, life more or less goes on.

***

Today was Trade Day in Kristiansand, the city where I work.

Extremely regular readers will know that this day is a recurring temptations to two groups of people. One is the chubby women from the surrounding villages who are drawn to the super cheap (and mostly useless) goods that are on near fire sale this one day. The other is me, who is drawn to the chubby women. Even though I don’t have any further designs on them, they are still a pleasant sight.

After the youthful lusts subsided a few years ago, I generally felt it was OK to look at women as long as I took care to not stare or otherwise appear suspicious. It certainly did not contradict the Golden Rule (do unto others etc). It was not like I wanted to pry them away from their husbands, if any, and mate with them myself.

However, after being exposed to a higher degree of spiritual light, I started to pay more attention to the “compass needle of the mind” as Ryuho Okawa fittingly calls it, and found that it can move greatly even when the body does not respond in the way of men. So I have recalibrated, as it were. This way, I can have the struggle of temptations all over again in my advanced age. Wheee!

***

In the evening, I watched my copy of an old Happy Science movie, Hermes – Winds of Love. It is actually the only Happy Science movie you can buy in American without going through a Happy Science temple, I believe. For some reason it was a hit in Japan and a flop in America. I guess the cultural difference was too large. (And of course, Ryuho Okawa is a household name in Japan, although I am not sure if it was that when the movie came out. It looks really old.)

Apart from whatever encouragement it may bring me personally, the movie also set a great mood for working on my JulNoWriMo novel. JulNoWriMo is like the less gifted younger cousin of NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month. Even the name is stumbling a bit: “July Novel Writing Month” does not really make much sense. But it is an excuse to write again, so I’m on it, although with the move and all, I don’t expect to come anywhere near 50 000 words.

Like last NaNoWriMo, my attempt is a first-person story by a member of the TSI, the Taiyou Sorano Institute, the equivalent of Happy Science in the parallel world seen in the movie The Rebirth of Buddha, conveniently made by Happy Science. Both of my stories take place in the USA, which is not shown in the movie, so I have expanded it with features from the real-world Happy Science and my own imagination. I feel it is pretty true to the spirit of the movie though. Of course, as a fanfic I can’t actually sell it or anything, so it is more like a writing exercise.

The second story is not a sequel. It features another main character with a completely different background. But of course after a summary of his earlier pathetic life, he has an encounter with the Truth and learns Master Sorano’s Teachings of the Mind, and his life changes for the better. Cute girls and spiritual adventures in the Other World are waiting, but it is bedtime now.

Noisy brainwaves at night

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Ah, from now on there won’t be anything like this anymore. Or will there? While the picture has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I think it conveys a bit of the nostalgia of leaving a dreamy place and time. (The text is from the song S.S.S! (Sun Shiny Day), which is quite like that.)

One of the things I am likely to miss after moving to the apartment, is playing my stereo in the wee hours of the night. No, I am not rocking it out, quite the opposite: The sound is LifeFlow 2, a delta brainwave entrainment track. By passively listening to this, more and more of the brain is synchronized with waves of 2 Hz, which is close to the frequency of deep, dreamless sleep.

I don’t think such induced brainwaves are a complete replacement for sleep, but on the other hand this deep sleep is something we tend to get less and less of as we grow older. It seems to me, as purely subjective experience, that I am actually less tired at work when I have woken up 3-4 times in a night and turned on the delta track. This could be coincidence, of course. I won’t say it happens every single time.

But what happens almost every single time is that I fall asleep pretty quickly, since I don’t have to worry about whether I fall asleep or not. I’m good anyway, which is the ideal condition for falling asleep in the first place.

Obviously a stereo by the bed will be less popular if you share bedroom with someone. Well, unless they go to sleep at the same time, I guess, in which case it should be just as useful for each.

Earphones can also be used, but are kind of unwieldy, depending on your favorite sleeping position. Ear plugs are supposedly less effective, unless you can make sure they are inserted exactly to the same length in each ear. That won’t work for me, since my ears are quite different in construction. Standard ear plugs will fall off my left ear almost at once, but stick just fine in my right.

Supposedly the entrainment effect has very little to do with the volume, as long as it still reaches your subconscious, so I suppose I may try to keep playing, just more softly. Or perhaps by now I may be able to induce that frequency just by deciding to. I doubt that, though. It is one thing to do it with alpha waves and upper theta, but delta is not something you normally synchronize while awake.

Meditation in The Sims 3

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In the Sims 3, meditation requires visiting China and learning Martial Arts. In real life, you can easily learn it from the Internet (link with sound). On the other hand, the floating and trippy colors are subjective at best.

I guess there are not many people who meditate and play the Sims 3.  The two don’t quite exclude each other, but they largely appeal to different types of people. Meditation calms and quiets the mind, while computer games tend to excite.  (With the Sims 3, that depends a bit on your play style, I guess.) Games tend to be an escape from the real world, while meditation is a grounding in something even more real than the manifest world. So they are quite a bit apart. In light of that, I find it a bit amusing that meditation in this game has become quite a bit more realistic than before.

In the Sims 2, meditation was unlocked by the Logic skill (usually at level 4), and basically froze your sim’s motives – you did not get more hungry or tired etc, as if time had stopped for you. For your sim, I mean. After a long time spent in continuous meditation, you would start floating in the air and be able to teleport.  Not exactly a fast way to travel, since it took the day to get that far.

In the Sims 3 meditation is much more realistic, although there is still the floating and teleportation at the end, which is (in my experience at least) not realistic at all. (I hear some people feel like they are floating, but that is pretty much it.) For the rest, though, the skill has become more realistic. I am not sure tying it to the Martial Arts skill was a good idea, it could have been a separate skill. But I guess it beats logic as a starting point. Anyway, you now grow hungry and your bladder fills up etc much like you were just sitting there. The only thing that happens right from the start is that you start building up “meditative focus”.

This focus lasts for a while after you end your session, and improves the quality of your work and the speed of your learning. Fittingly, it evaporates if you use the “magical” ability to teleport.  Magic is not the best use of meditation, after all.

Once you have spent a long time in meditation – not hours, but a noticeable part of a normal lifespan – you become a master of meditation. I am not 100% sure this is a feature rather than a bug, but it seems the meditative focus now becomes permanent. It says 15 minutes left, but it has said so for half a generation now.

If that is intentional, it is actually a pretty good approximation of real life. If you do keep it up for many years, meditation will really change you and make you better able to live your life, learning things and doing things better.  Quite apart from any mysterious or seemingly magical experiences you may or may not encounter along the way.

Tame oats

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Rolled (pressed) oats are a wonderful addition to my fruit yogurt. They add texture and makes it feel like I have actually eaten a meal. The food stays longer in my stomach, and the oats contain fiber and slow carbs that are not broken down until the great intestine, if at all.

Ironically, the fact that oats are not as much “pure energy” as wheat, rice and maize is probably a reason why it has remained marginal, grown mostly in areas where wheat yields are low or the growing season a tad on the short side. Oats contain more fat than wheat and rice (but less than maize), but due to the structure of the fibers, the fat is not quickly absorbed into the bloodstream.

This natural functional food also reduces “bad cholesterol” (actually low-density lipoproteins, which are – as the name implies – proteins rather than the cholesterol itself, but LDL supposedly has a tendency to drop cholesterol at the artery walls). Finally, it regulates blood sugar. Which makes me think, considering that my ancestors have lived in oats- and grazing land for probably a few thousand years, that my parents’ diabetes may have been more than anything a case of oats deficiency. Now that we could buy fine wheat flour, the oats faded into the background. Nobody considered that our ancestors had been under intense selection pressure to adapt to that particular grain.

I am not planning to make the same mistake. Milk products and oats with a little fruit is smack in the middle of my ancestral diet. Let’s see how the body reacts to THAT.

Waiting for Google+

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“Don’t mix 2D and 3D!” That’s how it used to be, but with Google+ the so-called Real Life is invading cyberspace, for better and for worse.

It is all over the news, at least the kind of news I read. Google’s new social media will finally challenge Facebook on its home turf. Or rather, Google intends to extend its home turf over to where Facebook is now. Naturally I have requested invites wherever I can, using any tricks I can find, but I’m not getting in.

This may be a good thing, actually, since I may be one of the few humans which the Google+ system does not work well for.

The basic philosophy of Google+ is that we don’t have a big mass of contacts that are all simply “friends”. Rather, we naturally relate differently to people we know, depending on where we know them from. We have something in common with coworkers, but something entirely different in common with relatives. Chances are that the two groups don’t overlap much. While there are some things we want both of these groups to know, there are some we reserve for one of them. Then there are groups connected by a shared hobby, or religious activities, or shared education, neighbors, former neighbors, or interesting people we just stumbled upon on the Net. Parents – or at least mothers – keep tabs on the families of their children’s friends. Over the course of a generation, this can rise to epic proportions, with some otherwise mentally normal people having 4000 contacts in total.

Obviously for those who are not monks or something similar, there is a great boon in sorting these people into groups from the very start. It makes the crowd manageable. It makes it easy to get the right message to the right people. And you can still send important messages to all of them at once. Such as the death of your Significant Other, or the lolcat videos that are a must see. Things like that.

Me, I differ from neurotypicals in two  important aspects here: One, I have very few friends. I don’t easily get to know people, as I generally don’t contact people unless I have some important message that only I can give them. If you know me and are not part of my birth family, you probably contacted me somewhere. I don’t mind that at all, of course. I just don’t do it unto others.

Second difference: I like to learn viewpoints that I don’t necessarily agree with. It is easy for me to hold in my mind quite complex viewpoints that are completely different from what I consider true or even completely sane. A few of my friends are Christian conservatives, a couple others are gay liberals. They would probably mutually enjoy dancing on each other’s graves, so I can see the benefit of keeping them separate. But I don’t want to keep them separate from me. I practice the teaching of Johan Oscar Smith: To listen, even if to a drunk in the street. People are born into this world for a reason, and even if they mess up many things, they all have something to teach someone. That someone might be me.

So what bothers me is that when we all move to Google+, as any reasonable person would do unless they make some disastrous mistake, I may stop seeing many of the messages I see today: Messages that will now be sent only to certain groups where you expect your message to be accepted and lauded. I may not be one of those. The liberals will probably only send me notices of entirely superficial things, not what they really think. Quite possibly, unfortunately, the same may apply to the Christians and the Buddhists. I’m part of nobody’s in-crowd, except my guardian angel I guess.

So, I’m not really in a hurry with the Google+ thing. But I will at least try. I fully expect all of you to move over once you find out how awesome it is. Well, unless the Big Surprise form Facebook is a total revamp after the Google+ model.  We’ll see how it goes. I’ll keep you posted if I get in.

 

A week without heroes

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Sunset for superheroes? Probably not, but possibly for me. Or it may be just another of my fads. (Archive picture.)

I think this past week was the first week I have not played City of Heroes since the game came out, more than 7 years ago. Yes, that includes vacations, the Holiday season, the flu, NaNoWriMo, everything I can think of.

At first I just skipped it a couple days because I had gotten two expansion packs (cheap) for The Sims 3, and I only had so much time for gaming after all. After those couple days, the urge to play it has not yet return, as it always did before. For now at least, it suddenly just does not interest me anymore.

One thing that may have influenced me is the announcement, which happened just after those first couple days, that the game is changing payment model. This fall it will become free to play, but with a lot of restrictions that you can only get around by buying the advantages you want piecemeal, or continue to subscribe. This should draw in a number of cheapskates, I suppose, and it is not like the subscribers lose anything. New content is being developed as usual, at least for now. It seems likely that some of the oldtimers are also going to drop their subscription and play the reduced version.

I don’t know if I am going to do either. Probably. It is a good game. In fact, on a scale of good versus evil, it is probably the best I have seen. It casts you as a hero fighting to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. But still fighting. I am currently not in the mood to fight imaginary characters.

You’d think that this would be the ideal way to get out some aggression after losing my beautiful home. But instead I have been playing the Sims 3. My self-sim, the best representation of myself in the game, has worked his way up from a broke high-school student living alone in a small home, to a famous scientist. He has mastered the skills of gardening, painting and sculpting and raised his adoptive daughter from a toddler to a smart and successful teenager. I really enjoyed that, more so than fighting giant robots.

It’s not like I’m growing up or anything, don’t worry. But whether it is a lasting change or just a pause, I thought it was worth documenting.

“Austerity measures”

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My own austerity measures: The first sacks of things to throw away before moving to the smaller place. More sacks to follow.

I have written a few times about the near future, after peak oil and peak metal and so on. What I have sketched is not a disaster scenario. Disaster scenarios are good for selling books, and I agree that if we act like complete morons, we can make a disaster out of it. Then again we can make a disaster in paradise itself, as the Jewish creation mythos so beautifully explains. This tendency lies in us all and must be watched.

Seeing pictures of Greeks rioting in the streets not only brings home this human tendency to make a mess of things, but also an even more ingrained human tendency: To never give up something you already know from experience that you can live without. This is not a pure evil: It is kind of helpful for a marriage, for instance, that you won’t give up on your spouse at the first bump in the road, even if you survived for several years before even meeting them. But for the most part, it is people torturing themselves.

I am going through my own austerity measures these days. Getting less for the same money is the trend of the future, and I have started (somewhat unexpectedly, in my case) since I have to move from a house to half a house for the same rent. In the process, I am once again going through the things I’d like to bring along, and sorting out things that I won’t realistically have room for. The thing is, I started my adult life with much less than this. It took many years before I even had my first bookshelf. It is like my material riches have increased by 1000% and now I have to go back to 800%. Not really something to riot over, I think.

I can see how people who planned to retire at 50 will be upset that they can’t. The whole thing I am going through now is an exercise in how to (not) react when you find out that people break their promises if they have the power to do so. That is unfortunate, but when the promises were a bit too good to be true, when we were living our dream, simply going back to reality should not be the end of the world.

Retiring at 50 or even 55 is certainly dreamlike, at least if you have a job you hate. But the best response to that is to either get a job you like, or like the job you have. Almost all jobs consists of helping other people (because that is the only thing people are likely to pay for, if they have a choice). So by rising your love to a very high degree, you can usually find satisfaction in any work that is not contrary to law or decency.

I have every intention of working till 75 if my health holds up. That is not a certain thing, of course. But as far as I see it, retirement is not natural. It should not really exist. Rather, people may get disability pensions when they are no longer able to work, whether it happens at 20 or 90. If you want, you can of course quit your job at any time, but I don’t see why one should be rewarded for that. The way Europe at least has organized this, people have paid for other people’s retirement for decades, so it stands to reason that they want to get their money’s worth. But that money is not saved anywhere. It is already spent, on other people’s retirement. So it is not like you can give them back the cash. Given that we all face a period of austerity, I think it is more important to support those who are actually ill, over those who are actually lazy.

When the money is gone, it is gone. The tooth fairy won’t bring it back even if you break somebody’s teeth. It is like that with all things. The only certain thing about anything on earth is that it will end. As the Buddha said: “All things that have form are subject to decay.” I hear even the protons will decay some hundred billion years from now. We should salvage the happiness we can find during our journey through time, collect the good memories and learn from the unpleasant. For each of us there will come a time when we won’t get any more memories from Earth. There is more joy to be had from austerity than from rage. Believe me, I have tried both.