So recently, I’ve been talking to a friend and we were mid-conversation, when he said this:
It’s rather that I’m lost in the grand scheme of things. If there are a thousand steps to Heaven, then what is the end goal? Will we ever see it?
Quote by RayHammer
And later added:
I’ll rephrase. Is becoming a hermit in the woods really a way to the enlightenment? Or can a person still be a messiah inside the concrete hell?
Quote by RayHammer
This made me think alot about the issues connected with our lives in what I find is a corporate mess enslaving our thoughts and actions.
If there are a thousand steps to Heaven, then what is the end goal? Will we ever see it?
Quote by RayHammer
The End goal of life essentially is living in my eyes, not wasting too much time on mind-numbing platforms like Steam, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pornhub or alike. They all basically have one thing in common, which is addicting you to spend as much time on there as possible, being non-productive or lying to you that it is more productive to become an influencer on their site because they earn from you.
It also depends on what you yourself really see as achieving in life. To me, it’s God’s plan creating us the way we did, each of us has their own talent, some more talented than others. But in the end, our universal goal is to help each others communities and live together. Some people also tend to forget that us humans are created as social beings. If you start to think “I hate humans.” then maybe you should rethink that view and ask yourself why? Humans are so diverse in thinking and act differently upon certain situations, but there’s still a general sense of morality in their environment which they follow. One example is how in my eyes, germans act very polite to strangers but are quite competetive in their minds. They don’t like it if they see someone who does things better than them, because it makes them think that they’re going to replace them. Even with colleagues from their same workspace, which I find quite odd, since you could just ask them to teach you how they work more efficiently, if you really cared. But no, often they instead bully them out of the group. Atleast, that’s how my experience was quite often with some certain environments.
Also what I mean by the diversity which god, or if you have other beliefs, which your parents have given to you, your personal talents, goods and bads, makes us us. We are human. We are the ones ruling the world because it has been given to us by god or according to science by a mere random chance. We can decide how we want to live our lives, oftentimes it feels harder to accomplish depending on our certain environments, but in a general sense if you want to live a more fulfilling life, it is going to be harder to accomplish than a kind of slave-to-impulses life. It’s socially accepted that everyone has WhatsApp or Instagram or watches porn, but if you’re the kind of person to deliberately choose against it, you stand out from the crowd. Be proud of being more unique than others.
Now of course it is for us as a community to decide what is right and wrong, but since we’ve been the ones who have bitten into the forbidden fruit, we are aware or should be aware of truths and evil. We can see how for one example capitalist monopolies rule over our social lifes by making us dull, emotionless and quite controllable with our impulses to watch the latest video on YouTube or TikTok, and yet still decide not to act upon it, even if it quite clearly hurts our mind. Can we really say that a phone is healthy for us? Constantly looking into a small screen to see if our favorite Tubers or Influencers have uploaded a new video? If we are aware of what we think is good, we should spend more time on that instead of wasting our time unnecessarily browsing our social media feeds.
Now I am not saying that watching every video on YouTube is absolutely bad, I just don’t think that watching e-girls doing the same video 10 times over is. If you learn a new hobby or project or maybe just a different worldview than yours, that’s definetly going to be more helpful for you than these mind-numbing short-videos like Satisfying knife cut vids, since after the 5th vid you’ll probably just get bored of it. It’s the same content over and over and over again, yet we seem to enjoy that more than actually being productive or trying out new things.
Think about it, if you’ve been watching a YouTuber for a long time just for your entertainment or maybe for your education, think if the time you’ve spent consooming his content was worth a dollar or a penny. Count the seconds, minutes, hours or days you’ve probably watched the same type of content and think “How has this been helping me?”.
If you find an answer which indeed helps you, then Congratulations. You’ve probably also been realizing like me and many others that social media is abusing you more than helping you. Then I’d say you’re on the righter path of realizing you should use the Internet for what it’s been made of, a tool. Not what corporations like Facebook/Meta believe in. The Internet used to not have Instagram, YouTube or any social-media site back then. Infact, they only had things like web-rings or personal websites of random people like me just posting their personal lifes on their websites and not on corporate controlled media sites.
Back then users had more control of their data.
Nowadays, data is money. Big money.
Now why do I say this? Well, for one I believe if you free yourself of your desires bit by bit, may it be social media sites, gaming, alcohol, drugs, etc., you start to view the world differently. As sober as it is. And isn’t that really what we all want? If you disagree, think about it: Is it really you saying that or is it your mind being fooled by desires? Are you really in control of your thoughts?
Now, the actual end “goal” of our lifes will be death, the exact opposite of life (surprise surprise). If you’re a slave to impulses like consooming, cooming, drugs, etc., are you really going to live the life you want? Or could it be one manufactured by companies?
Information is one thing which controls the way we think, while chemicals are another. Heroin clearly influences how you feel, you feel euphoric when taking it, you’ll want another one to have that euphoria again and you hope for an even higher feeling. Yet once you’d quit you’d realize that it hurts you, you’ll feel like you need another needle and you start to forget that it is bad for you. Heroin is an extreme example, because everyone knows the heavy addiction tied to it, but we start to forget that maybe other addictive substances are just as hurtful, like nicotine or alcohol. And for another example, has social-media really been beneficial for everyone mentally?
I’ll rephrase. Is becoming a hermit in the woods really a way to the enlightenment? Or can a person still be a messiah inside the concrete hell?
Quote by RayHammer
Now why do I state all of the above before going into my “answer” of this: It’s because the road to enlightenment is an individual one. So in short, I don’t know the answer for you. Whatever you believe in, there’s only one you on earth who exactly thinks the way you do. You may agree with people on topic xyz, but after getting to know them for a while you notice differences in them to you. Some are christian, some are not. Some love animals, some don’t. Some want to have a family, some want to live alone. It’s these differences what makes us human. But our individuality and creativity is getting destroyed by corporate shills who spoon-feed you with sponsored videos about what you should buy, how you should think and what they decide is best for you. Realizing this issue is already a path to enlightenment. Some had in in the wild, alone and tired of modernity, while others got it while living in the city. Some will realize it sooner, some later. But it’s essentially this realization what makes us aware of our surroundings, what hurts us and what takes away our faith.
Personal Note:
I’ve been on this path for quite a while now and to me it’s not an easy one with all the devilish easy to get stuff you can have where I live.
“Alcohol? No problem, only restriction is you must be 18, then ur fine. Oh also, if you do anything bad while under the influence, we may legally fine you since it’s your fault. HAVE A NICE DAY WITH THE CHEAP WINE YOU GOT!”
If something is easy to get and in bulks, should you really blindly buy or consoom it?
“Get the newest XYZ now for only XYZ,99€!!! Limited Time only! Not really! But Really! BUY IT NOW! BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT!”
What if you then realize you don’t like it? Will you be able to get your money back? Or maybe, will you get your data deleted?
“Data Privacy? PSSHHHH, Yeah we of course wouldn’t sell your data. We have it stored though… and lots of it aswell.. I mean LOTS of it. Like, we know where you’ve been on August 25th 2012 at 1:52pm, what you’ve searched up on the web and what you’ve been watching for essentially your whole life growing up. Yeah but we won’t sell it, we’d never… only if the government wants it tho… or maybe to some certain companies… i mean you do like vacuum cleaners since we’ve seen you recently bought one from XYZ-Company so we thought maybe XYZ-Company is good for you? Not that we’re sellouts or anything.”
Even if you decide to live more privately for example or have more control of it, yet you still want to use tech, how much choice do you have with phones?
“Want to load different apps onto our iOS? Nah, this will be insecure. You may not have things if we don’t allow you to. If you’re unhappy, go and get a different phone” The different phones in question: Stock Android with locked down Source-Code, cannot use your phone without having to login to Google first, they collect even more data than Apple devices do Bonus Phones with sadly still issues: de-googled Pixel Phone (essentially giving money to Google), unusable PinePhone, limited hardware capabilities due to monopolies controlling who they want to sell to, decent cameras only on big-companies’ phones, etc etc etc
So yeah, maybe the actual “enlightening” path is rejecting modernity and going back to pidgeon-mail. It would sure be nice and you’d most likely find better friends than you do now, since there wouldn’t be many to begin with. Yet it’s still a question if all of this is merely just a phase and the pain we’re suffering is just a temporal one, where in the end we won’t live in pods and eat bugs. Who am I fooling, we’re already on the ship towards it. Less dependancy on tech means more control of your life. The less you pay for services like Spotify, the more money you have in the end. The less you think about politics, the more relaxed you’ll become. Identifying yourself with your impulse is one sin we all have to overcome, some will sooner than others, but we should all try to get there by having more accessible knowledge to the dangers.
Also, just for the end of the blog, here’s a cool and probable etymology on the word Web Ring.
“Web ring” can also be read as “we bring”, as in we bring additional content to watch or visit.
