It's a strange and possibly vicious cycle: the more humanity has strived for this thing called "civilization," the more we have reinvented ourselves as a Human Have-ings rather than Human Be-ings.

There is just so much we seemingly "have to" in order to merely sustain the very basics, and somehow we have become slaves to that idea. In the conventional sense, I will be "retirement age" in 6-8 years, but there's really very little chance that actual retirement is likely to come. Crypto remains my side gig, and while it would be lovely to think that every blog post and comment helps secure a little bit of our future, I'm only too aware that the ostensible "value" could be erased overnight by any number of factors.

Self-sustaining hermits are rare... knew one back in Denmark, a former college professor of philosophy who lived in the woods in a shelter he'd built from hand gathered materials and was left alone by the government in a barter arrangement of sorts... which made him not really a hermit, but he did live off nature within legally specified parameters. Even so, he was still "in the system" by uploading his philosophical musings to YouTube from the public library and having a Patreon account but he emphasized a 100% gift economy. In other words... we can't really get away.

I find it a bit ironic that the conspiracy peddlers like to stress over Bill Gates wanting to decimate the global population... it seems to me that we'll probably take care of that, all by ourselves, over the next 200 years.

What I keep waiting to see is a rise of cooperative "techno-tribal" villages where groups of maybe 500-1000 people acquire substantial tracts of land and essentially "decentralize" from outside norms and standards... not in a "cult" or "sect" way, but by gathering voluntarily in ways where each can use their strengths while benefiting from the scale of a larger group. Maybe utopian idea, born out of having been close to Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, Damanhur and the likes...