Opinion Re-think the things you value

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It wasn't until these last few years that I've really been re-thinking about the things in my life that I value and if any of it's worth anything at all. Sometimes I like to imagine that if I were to someday become a father, what things I would like to pass on and share with my children. It wasn't that long ago when I would have imagined passing down my hobbies and interests in computers, science fiction, and video games, but I've reconsidered these things in retrospect because I don't see very many positive values in any of it.

I'll admit that I don't have a complete picture of the world in how things came to be or where things are headed, but much of what I've garnered as treasures thru my life were accumulated knick-knacks and litter from an artificial material culture defined by marketing trends and propaganda. Video games and computers were cool because I knew of nothing else as engaging and entertaining - it was all I had, and so I adopted them. I liked cartoons, comic books, toys, and other things growing up too, but to think any of this as having a value I should share with my hypothetical family would be pitifully laughable because I see nothing in these things that could ever sustain a life of peace, joy, and love. It's actually embarrassing to me now to think that any of these hyper consumerist pastimes and activities were once something I identified with.

This isn't something I usually write about, but I saw a video recently suggested by YouTube in their recommended sidebar which caught my attention. The title was "How Did We Get Here?" I try to stay away from doom and gloom stuff on the internet because I believe it's made to capitalize off of disenfranchised people seeking to vicariously project their personal faults and failings onto an imperfect world rather than fix anything in themselves. I skipped thru most of it because I wanted to hear their conclusion, which I made into the following snippet because I think it highlights a particular compromising sentiment among people that have good-intentions but are burried so deep under a consumer culture blinded by distractions they don't even yet realize.


Click here for source

Comic books, arcade games, Chuck-E-Cheese, and Ninja Turtles; what's the value in holding onto these things? This nostalgic notion isn't just a counter culture protest to prevailing trends, it's yet further more demoralization among a society that's completely lost its vision. While some people choose to wallow on trash in the streets, which is highlighted in the beginning of the original video, wallowing on trash in your mind isn't that so different. You have to go all the way in removing yourself and your family, if you have one, from these worldly influences and to tell them why instead of lying about it. Holding on to childish memories as if to say "things were once good but now they're not, I keep you in this bubble for your own good" isn't going to help anyone. At best, it would just rewind the time a few decades back for a moment of bliss before shortly picking back up with a grim reality.

There's nothing of this world that'll preserve you or your family. If you want to return to something, then return to the roots of family and start from there. Aim higher for real and honest relationships rooted in unconditional love for one another. What's needed right now isn't more freedom of expression, but a revival of faith and family. Look out for one another and give lasting gifts that won't spoil or errode away.

Thanks for reading my blog!

Date: 2025-12-02
 

At least he figured it out before he died.

I think you can have some nerdy interests, as long as they don't consume you and stop you from having relationships with others (or take the place of them).
 
I never cease to be amazed at people spending major dinero on huge storage lockers as a permanent fix for having too much stuff. Just simply get rid of your useless shit, when you fucking die your kids will simply load up the contents of your lockers and sheds into a dumpster and have it hauled to the dump. That's what ultimately happened to my grandparents house when they died, we loaded all their junk into a truck and hauled it to the landfill. I've been whittling down all the shit I've accumulated over 50 years of life, and I found that most stuff is literal garbage. I have some mementos with sentimental but not monetary value. In my will I gave all my personal possessions to Stanford University. I never attended there but I'm a fan of the rail baron who founded it and I admire some of the tech innovations that came out of there. Just having three undergrads in anthropology digging through my junk while saying "holy fuck, this guy was a fucking weirdo! Why are we wasting our time digging through some schizo's shed in the asshole of California?" would be a final shitpost to be lol'd at.
 

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”​

 
Everything spoils and erodes though. We live in an entropic universe. Not even half a century from now 99% of whatever you are or cared about will not matter one fucking bit and all will be left will be some myopic characterization twisted through the biases of other people. No wait that’s just your existence right now too lol
 
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"Things I liked as a kid are stupid because they're not Grown Up and Adult" is, ironically, a very childish view. It smacks of a teenager trying way too hard to seem grown up. It's the emotional equivalent of a young child putting on his father's clothes and saying "look, daddy, I'm grown up!"

Instead of focusing on how POWERFUL AND MANLY your interests are, try focusing on what makes you happy as long as it's not to the detriment of other things. If you're a useless loser, forcing yourself to replace video games and comics with woodcutting and bench presses is just going to change what flavor of loser you are. The problem is never the avocation. It's always the mindset.
 
It's the ultimate fate of the consoomer. For non-disposable media, every book, game or film has a memory within it of what you did during that time or how you felt experiencing it.

Consoomers don't have that, most of what they buy will never get a glance, and they will mainly play new media to get on track to buying and playing the next thing, without thought of why they are even doing it.

Eventually they will look at shelves upon shelves of Mario games, Deadpool comics and Capeshit and realize that they just burned their money for shit that they don't even remember if they read.
 
You have to go all the way in removing yourself and your family, if you have one, from these worldly influences
That's retarded. I suppose you and your family are just going to sit in a circle all night every night discussing the Bible? Get a grip nigger, you're allowed to have fun, they are too by the way. Play a videogame once in a while. Idiot
 
As you hit midlife, you realize all your effort goes into home repair and improvement along with kids.

You sigh. You just want to sell it all, abandon your kids and do Thai hookers and blow. But nope, instead you got to focus on this kitchen tile job that is TAKING FUCKING FOREVER ARRRGHHHHH~
 
We've systematically seen western art and music destroyed and all efforts stopped at cultivating cultural appreciation for enduring cultural artifacts. The only mode of engagement in the arts for dead white men is now critical, and simply appreciating beautiful, skilled art or music or poetry or theater is no longer really something you're supposed to do. Theater is for politics and DEI, art is for politics and DEI, music is for politics and DEI.

They took away all the stuff you were supposed to grow into, the parts where you found lessons about art and music appreciation stuffy as a kid and then thought longer about some of those pieces and why people valued them for so many generations, and then started to feel more connected to pieces of it and therefore to those generations of your ancestors, and it's a little like you're all there at once, listening to Chopin or watching Shakespeare.

They took it from you so they could put Mass Effect in there instead.
 
I never cease to be amazed at people spending major dinero on huge storage lockers as a permanent fix for having too much stuff. Just simply get rid of your useless shit, when you fucking die your kids will simply load up the contents of your lockers and sheds into a dumpster and have it hauled to the dump. That's what ultimately happened to my grandparents house when they died, we loaded all their junk into a truck and hauled it to the landfill. I've been whittling down all the shit I've accumulated over 50 years of life, and I found that most stuff is literal garbage. I have some mementos with sentimental but not monetary value. In my will I gave all my personal possessions to Stanford University. I never attended there but I'm a fan of the rail baron who founded it and I admire some of the tech innovations that came out of there. Just having three undergrads in anthropology digging through my junk while saying "holy fuck, this guy was a fucking weirdo! Why are we wasting our time digging through some schizo's shed in the asshole of California?" would be a final shitpost to be lol'd at.
All of the beautiful fields that dotted my summer drives are being ripped up for ugly storage units and bughive apartments nobody can afford. I cannot understand why anybody would want to pay money to not have something in the house. Donate it or dump it.
 
I never cease to be amazed at people spending major dinero on huge storage lockers as a permanent fix for having too much stuff. Just simply get rid of your useless shit, when you fucking die your kids will simply load up the contents of your lockers and sheds into a dumpster and have it hauled to the dump. That's what ultimately happened to my grandparents house when they died, we loaded all their junk into a truck and hauled it to the landfill. I've been whittling down all the shit I've accumulated over 50 years of life, and I found that most stuff is literal garbage. I have some mementos with sentimental but not monetary value. In my will I gave all my personal possessions to Stanford University. I never attended there but I'm a fan of the rail baron who founded it and I admire some of the tech innovations that came out of there. Just having three undergrads in anthropology digging through my junk while saying "holy fuck, this guy was a fucking weirdo! Why are we wasting our time digging through some schizo's shed in the asshole of California?" would be a final shitpost to be lol'd at.


I have had the same realization myself recently, my mother has been cleaning her house out, and I looked around mine and thought i should do the same. It’s amazing the stuff we have accumulated over the decade we’ve lived here and even more amazing how little of it we actually need or use.

We’ve hauled probably at least 4-5 loads of trash to the dump and put countless trash bags of crap out with the trash 2x a week. Now I’m at the point of going through the larger things, furniture and miscellaneous items and selling them on marketplace. It’s nice to bring in a few extra dollars for junk I don’t need or use any longer.

The funniest part of it all is that we live on a major road so anything I put by the road is taken by someone. Literally every single thing, no matter how gross or crappy, someone snags it. An old broken futon, two old mattresses, a rusty rabbit hutch, a broken treadmill, someone even took a shattered storage container and a broken mop handle from the trash, another person went IN my trash cans and took all the trash out of them, AND took the 4-5 bags sitting next to them too.

It’s very easy to accumulate things, just living life. But I decided to be proactive and get rid of things and NOT re clutter so now I go through the areas I already cleaned and make sure things are put away where they belong and if a drawer gets looking crowded, I stop and empty it of what it doesn’t need. My quality of life is much improved because I know what I have, can easily access it, and use it. I’m not a collector of things, I just have things I actually use (or thought I’d use them), but it’s still a lot of stuff. I can’t imagine collecting a ton of crap and having to deal with it.
 
All of the beautiful fields that dotted my summer drives are being ripped up for ugly storage units and bughive apartments nobody can afford. I cannot understand why anybody would want to pay money to not have something in the house. Donate it or dump it.
Nigga, I spent 120$ on that shitty plastic christmas tree and fuck if I am not going to pull that shit out every fucking year.
 
All of the beautiful fields that dotted my summer drives are being ripped up for ugly storage units and bughive apartments nobody can afford. I cannot understand why anybody would want to pay money to not have something in the house. Donate it or dump it.

There are limited circumstances where they make sense: you had to move out of Address A but the house you just bought at Address B needs a couple of months of contracting work before it's move-in ready, or your closing date got delayed, so now you're staying in an airbnb or Residence Inn while you count down the days. Alternately, your work had you go do a one-year assignment in another country and it didn't make sense to keep renting your apartment while you were away. Or if you're serving a prison stint. But if that's all that people used these for, they wouldn't need to build nearly this many.
 
It's the ultimate fate of the consoomer. For non-disposable media, every book, game or film has a memory within it of what you did during that time or how you felt experiencing it.

Consoomers don't have that, most of what they buy will never get a glance, and they will mainly play new media to get on track to buying and playing the next thing, without thought of why they are even doing it.

Eventually they will look at shelves upon shelves of Mario games, Deadpool comics and Capeshit and realize that they just burned their money for shit that they don't even remember if they read.
I recently sold all my old video game stuff. Stuff I've had since I first started forming memories. I could have held the same controller I did when I was 4, played the same game on the same cartridge that I first inserted into the same console back when I was in preschool.

I could have done these things. But I never did. Instead, I let them sit on a shelf, rarely looked at and never played. Then one day I decided to grab one of those controllers and hold it in my hands for the first time since middle school. I pressed some of the buttons, and I realized it felt like a foreign object. It had been so long since I'd used it that it didn't feel remotely familiar anymore. And I realized what a shame that was, and I got rid of all of it.

I still play video games. It's still my primary hobby. In fact, I still routinely play the same games I sold, albeit on different media. But letting my childhood relics decay in a basement somewhere was doing neither of us any favors.

The real treasures you amass from a lifetime of gaming are the memories and the experiences, not the plastic and silicon. I can still bring myself right back to the early 90s by playing those games. The objects that contained those games really don't matter at all. At least not to me.
 
Nigga, I spent 120$ on that shitty plastic christmas tree and fuck if I am not going to pull that shit out every fucking year.

This is hilarious but you know something? I watch a LOT of Hoarders and it seems like so many of them hoard Christmas trees/stuff. I wonder why that is?

I know a irl hoarder and she’s got like 4 storage units and her house is also hoarded out bad. She managed to get down from I think SEVEN units. Idk what the average cost is monthly for storage units but I bet if someone spent $120 for a tree then threw it away and bought a new one every Christmas instead of paying for storage unit fees, they’d save money.

I realize I’m totally taking your amusing joke post seriously but it got me thinking…
 
As men we are born into this world naked, and we leave it empty handed. All that we can truly own is the love we make.

"But all the men of the south love their women. It is for them that they face the sea in winter, the storms and the freezing fogs. It is said that as a man pushes his boat out over the shingle, the sound the bottom makes grating on the stones is my wife, my children, my children, my wife."
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