Rebirth 2, Poker, Philosophy

Transcript:

Follow-up, or rather part two, to the whole “rebirth at midlife” thing. I totally forgot to mention the reason I brought up living in an RV with minimum expenses.

It occurred to me at one point that one of the main problems — the reason I have to work and earn a salary of a certain amount — is to pay off living expenses. I felt that work was pulling energy and other things away from stuff I actually wanted to do. Especially getting past the age of 40 and going on to 50, you start wanting to use your time a little more wisely and more directed toward your own preferences.

So there were two options. Either I earn a ridiculous amount of money so I can stay afloat without worrying for a while, or I reduce my expenses to where the money I have becomes a ludicrous amount of money. That’s what bore the idea of buying an RV and living in it to have minimal expenses.

The other option would have been to work myself really, really hard — and who knows where that money would come from. Or I can do the RV option, which is cheaper. Not easier to get to, but then I can get on my own track faster.

Having said all that, it is possible to simply live an apartment life. It’s a little more expensive, but the job that would cover those expenses wouldn’t have to be that demanding. If I select properly — and it helps that I’m older with plenty of experience — certain jobs wouldn’t want me because of my age, but other jobs would want me for my experience, my patience, and so on. That’s what prompted me to start going down that path of consideration, and that’s where I ended up here.

Since I didn’t cover that in my previous log, I wanted to cover it here. Again, this goes back to the idea of living more freely.

I honestly have a conspiracy theory — which may or may not be founded — but notice that there’s a lot of advertisement for people to go to college, get a degree, get a house, have a family, get a car, and get a retirement fund going. There’s a lot of money required for all of that, which means you naturally need work to generate that money, unless you’re dishonest about it or get lucky.

Now, you could say companies are just doing that for their bottom line. But there is a possibility that people are doing it to control the populace, because as long as people are working and coming home tired, they don’t have enough energy or resources to do things those in power don’t want them to do. This sounds like a conspiracy theory — and sure, it could be. I may be completely wrong. But it’s a possibility, and I’m good at rational delusions, so I have plenty of those in my head.

But getting back to the point: if someone wanted to control people and hatched this kind of plan, encouraging companies to push consumerism — or at least looking away while they do it — would serve that purpose just fine. A consumer populace spends money, which means they need to work, and so on.

My preference, though, is to live more freely. As I said, either I get really rich or I reduce my expenses by an equal amount. That’s the direction I’m going with my life at the moment. I’d rather do what I want to do than work myself to the bone doing something I don’t want to do, wasting time and energy — especially at this point in my life.

Even if I cashed out my retirement account, it wouldn’t be a whole lot of money. But I’m not going to do that. So that’s kind of where this whole thing started, about eight years ago — I finally came to the conclusion that if I lived more cheaply… but then I had an irrational moment where I wanted a house. At the time I was working a very well-paying job, so why not? But yeah, I definitely made a mistake, and I’ve already made peace with that. I like my house; it’s just expensive. The purchase price was $300,000. I shouldn’t have done it. But that’s another conversation.

I have my aim and my direction — and I may have already discussed direction elsewhere. Suffice to say, it’s going to be a life of making things, playing around with stuff, and posting my results. Maybe other people will see it and say, “Hey, I want him to do this for me” — and it’ll be something I like doing. It becomes a mutual thing: this looks fun, I get a little money for it, and that could lead to other things. Or — this is what you call a pie-in-the-sky thing — everybody looks at me and goes, “Wow, this guy is smart.” Not smarter than anyone else, just smart. Why not? Everybody can be smart in their own ways.

Then I get to contribute to humanity — sure, why not? I’m unfortunately a very cynical person, so doing things purely for the good of humanity is a non-starter for me. I just don’t feel that duty. But I do get a kick out of making things that solve problems, and I do get a kick out of someone saying “thank you.” That’s enough reason for me to contribute.

The plan right now is that if I happen to invent something new, I’m going to do a defensive publication rather than a patent, because patents are so expensive. It’s almost like the system is rigged against individual inventors — whether that rigging is intentional or the system just took advantage of the framework, one of those possibilities applies. Anyway.

I know I go off on tangents, but this is how I think. That said, the general direction is: I’m going to continue to tinker, continue to make things, continue to share the results — like these audio logs. And I’d be happy if this inspired other people to do their own thing.

I’ve had countless inspiration points in my life. One of the most recent was listening to John Cleese talk about creativity — back around 1991, I think, for a management seminar, which is funny. He took a humorous angle on it, but made a very good point: creativity happens when people get to play around with ideas. Someone picks up a guitar, starts messing around, does their own thing, and comes up with something new. Same with ideas, mechanics, math, science, art, speech — pretty much anything. If someone gets to play around with it, creativity goes up and something new gets made.

Oddly enough, I’ve drawn a parallel to poker, which is something I’ve been trying to do — and failing at, or at least hitting a bad streak. But if you’re playing poker with a bankroll you’re not worried about — in other words, you can play as freely as you want — then you can literally play with it. What if I do this? What if I try to poke him this way? When you play freely, creativity increases. And in a game like poker, a creative play is harder to react to because it’s unexpected, and people don’t know how to respond.

Taking that one step further: psychologically, that means they have to fall back on uncertain tendencies at their core. This borrows a bit from the Akagi anime. If someone is completely confused, they revert back to their core tendencies. The anime mentioned three possible moves: advance forward, retreat backward, or stand perfectly still. There may be more, but the point is — advancing into poker theory here — if you make a move that confuses them, they snap back to something familiar. So you can actually make a creative play just to see how they react and get information out of it. I’d love to experiment with that, but I don’t have the funds. Which means, to do that, I’d have to go get some funds — i.e., go back to work. That’s in the near future for me.

I’ve been floating around for about a year. I thought I could make money at poker, but I’ve had quite a slide: started at $4,600, went to Vegas with $3,100, and I’m currently at $700. That’s a hell of a slide. Fortunately, I pulled $2,000 out before it got taken away, so that was good. Either I had a lucky streak early, I’m in the middle of a bad streak now, or I stopped playing well — something like that.

Poker’s on my mind right now, so that’s where this conversation went. It started as a follow-up to my midlife rebirth log, wandered into my theory about people being goaded into earning money just to keep them working and manageable, and then into poker philosophy. It also touches on the idea that when people do whatever they want and are labeled “bad” for it — well, there’s something to that, but it’s an individual judgment. If you can tolerate a certain amount of chaos, or even enjoy it, it’s not bad at all. It’s exactly your thing.

And that leads to one last point — I swear this is the last one. It’s interesting when people say “pursue your dreams” or “do what motivates you most.” That’s an open statement. The results could be anything, including things that are harmful to others. Strictly speaking, from a cold-logic standpoint, morals don’t exist. But from a warmer logic standpoint, morals are actually part of the system — you could define “warm logic” as a system of logic with morals attached. And that’s where society comes in deciding what’s acceptable. I’ll stop there; that’s a topic I could go into very richly another time.

The last point I wanted to make was: when you say “do whatever makes you happy,” be aware that the things that make someone happy might make someone else very unhappy.

I think that’s enough wandering. This will be a fun log to post. I may have to separate it into sections for the transcript, but I’ll polish it minimally — I hate to polish. I love to create, I love to plan, I love to make something, but once it’s done it’s done. I’m out. It’s no longer interesting.

Anyway, sorry for the rambling and the random tangents. This is how I think and how I enjoy life. Hopefully this has been fun. I’ll try to remember to do a post on logic — cold logic versus warm logic — later. Thank you.