Theo du Plessis is a minimalist.
We are surrounded by the stuff that we think is so valuable and important, but take it all away and what is left? The real you is left. Or at least the journey to the real you without all the stuff that you think defines you. In this video, Theo Du Plessis of South Africa, had a “Damascus moment” that opened him up to the only question he asks himself now before acquiring possessions or pursuing experiences: is it REAL? If it is real then it is worth having in his life. Theo’s life is one of connection with himself and nature, and a force he calls Goodness which gives him hope and community in the spirit of Ubuntu – I am me because of others.
I found another video on something called karma tube. That’s where I got the blurb written above. They posted another video that might be worth looking at.
I don’t mean to overwhelm this with outside information but I want to put one more video in here about growing your own food and self-sufficiency. This is a fellow from Israel who seems about as pragmatic as pragmatic could be. And he is not working on quite the philosophical plane that our no money friend finds so comfortable. I myself find it hard to let go of money. Actually, I can go weeks or really even a month or more without spending money because I don’t live in town. If I don’t buy anything, I don’t spend any money. But these things are very good to think about.
***
It’s about living a lifestyle that you can be happy in. This is a bit of a complex thought but at its root, a person needs to feel as though they are a part of things. Vested interest is one way to say it. Family. Community. Honesty at least.
In the early part of the century, several European countries began rethinking their laws about narcotics. They found they were working with a system that seemed more interested in punishing than facilitating people. This was a time of weakness in the oil business circles. They hadn’t quite made the Russian deal yet so the world still had a prayer. In any case, there was a mild move towards intelligence which got quite a bit of blowback from the conservatives. The point was that if one had a shitty environment, one would want to escape from it as much as possible. The idea that people become addicted to drugs is not so much that the drug itself is so much more powerful than we are, it’s just that life itself outside of the use of the drug isn’t even worth living.
But here is the whole Pandora’s box. This is the essence of my argument. This is everything. In order to fix the problem, we have to fix a society that truly sucks. And I say the world we live in right now absolutely sucks.
Lately I’ve been killing time watching shorts on the internet. I’m already sick of it but for a while it is quite the thing for keeping your attention when you have nothing else to do. The films are usually less than 1 minute. Some of it is humorous, some of it is about money. I’ve run into some interesting TikTok people. But at the end, the strangest thing was that I kept getting shown restaurant stuff for hamburgers and barbecue and fried chicken.
So I have two thoughts about this. The first is how compelling it is to watch a guy sit in his car with a more than reasonable microphone and camera setup and he’s doing mukbang crunching and chewing sounds while giving this ridiculous review. Literally, this fellow is going for the job of picking out national chains and hoping one or two of them want to do some advertising with him. Sponsor a video. This video was sponsored by public health. I’ve been a vegan for a long time but I understand how compelling my old drugs were. I did food growing up. When I wanted to get high or get stupid or forget things, I ate. I ate when I was upset and I ate when I was bored. Thank God I lived in America where everywhere you looked there was a restaurant ready to give you something greasy and salty and fatty as quick as you want it. Sweet too if you have a tooth for it. Fat, cheap carbs, salt and sugar.
Most of these videos have people eating these mega meals. I followed fine dining for a while where they talked about $500 to $5,000 dinners. Extremely pre-digested food artistically served with tweezers. I’m sure it’s delicious and it’s own unique way. This one guy only does barbecue reviews. He goes or lives in Texas and swallows what amounts to maybe a quarter of one of the waitresses in smoked meat.
And then it started moving all by itself and I started getting these discussions about media and the algorithm. It turns out that they give you the thing that makes you angry. That’s the whole point of the entire commercial arrangement. We don’t want calm people. We want angry people. We want upset people. We want people that will make violence snap judgments and then have the rhetoric inside their heads to follow through all the way to the inevitable bloody ending. We don’t want anyone enjoying life. We make a lot more money when people are a mess and everyone is trying to concoct the greatest drugs they can so that they can earn a living too.
It doesn’t work. I am not speaking to you as an act. No one is hiring me to write these words. I’m not even particularly trying to entertain anybody. Just some text you can read and some things to think about if you feel like it. But I’ve never been the sort of drug addict that people know to be this terrible money sucking leech that destroys families and relationships. I’ve never been that guy. I’ve never been into heroin or cocaine or methamphetamine. I never spent all my money to get high. I never even spent any money experimenting. I never even really drank very much. I was even a vegetarian through most of it. But if I did go degenerate mode, it was for food. And just how they talk about everything being super sized these days back in the West, so it is for drunk party food as well. People want to put their face in the trough. They want to eat giant food senselessly that will do a good job of shutting down their brains and making their bodies work over time trying to digest it. That’s the peace. That’s the drugs.
What do you get the when you understand that you can’t get there? Oh sure, there are moments. I have memories of mega meals. They’re just not really happy memories. I guess I have a couple of community memories from going to restaurants but there are not that many great memories. Even if I remember being in New York, the streets wet and the sun still an hour before sunrise, I’m in a booth eating toast and hash brown potatoes with several cups of coffee and reading the Daily News. Was I happy during that time? Authentic American escape. I had a place to go where I could sit, eat and amuse myself intellectually and it didn’t cost so much money and nobody really cared.
I also have come to the understanding that money in motion is the most insane thing in the world. I am a baseball fanatic and I keep thinking of the intricacies of that game. One guy throws the ball and if another guy can hit it with a stick, it creates this chaotic moment where the players need to restore orders quickly as possible. Very interesting game playing with randomness or even infinity. But this is our economic system. The moment you realize you are responsible for paying your own bills, you realize what a hostile environment is. The moment you understand that you are married to money, you don’t have anything else on your mind ever.
I’m one of these homestead people. Even when I lived in town, I was a real bastard. When I left the house, I told myself that I was not going on a shopping trip. Usually I would leave because I wanted some exercise and I would jump on my bike and do some kilometers and then go home for some food or whatever I wanted. I did not go out just so I could end up at a cafe or a restaurant. And I did not go out with my eyes open to see if there was anything to spend money on. Sometimes, I wouldn’t even carry money with me. I would take my cards and my cash and put it away and leave the house with only my identification. I couldn’t buy anything even if I wanted to.
And what was the result? I got to think about something other than money. It was a present. It was pleasurable.
I grew up in America. I understand how crazy I am. I understand who I was and what I wanted and how I lived my life. I understand all of the justifications I give for my actions and I’m one of these guys who will happily say that he will take responsibility for all of them. If I did it, I did it and my name has always been my name from the beginning. But it was all about spending money. It was all about spending money. We used to say that either you’re making money or you’re spending it. The meaning being how much everyone hates spending money. Making money is interesting. That’s a plus. Spending money? When it’s gone, it’s gone and then you stuck trying to get more.
So it is all drugs. It’s all about addiction. It’s about self-loathing for lack of agency. Are we good looking enough? Do we wear the right clothes to create the right moods for our superiors? Do we agree to accept that there are experts above our pay grade who know all the real answers while we are stuck playing with our specialties and are not allowed any voice outside of our specialty. Well, you can be a crank. You can be a political crank. You could be one of these activist fools. Don’t worry. We have plenty of adversaries for people who like to act up against the social order. Hey, the rich folks are doing something. Just stand back and enjoy the ride and if you’ve got 15 bucks, they can cut up one and a half potatoes and just slather it with fat and saucy toppings until you have the most luxurious thing you’ve ever had in your life. That’s what it cost to get a sandwich these days. I’ve been away for a long time. You’re throwing 20s around like we used to pitch quarters.
And how many people are happy? Check the bank account. If you have enough money, you’re happy. If you are employed and you have a regular check, you have the ability to take care of yourself. You make that little extra money that allows for some decent drugs or even friends who have money for drugs and you are living the life. Get yourself a partner, cohabitate and you have the American dream. But how many people are happy?
I’m not talking about what people will say to you. I’m not talking about saying what you feel you’re supposed to say and trying to be normal. In fact, I can see being shouted down for even asking the question or for being seen as a kook myself. In fact I can see anything other than having this conversation for reals. How many days of your life have you genuinely been happy? How many days of your life existed where we were not absolutely ripped apart with worry about something? How many days of your life have you spent trying to escape anxiety? Even if you feel as connected as connected can be, believe me, the mafia works this connection even harder.
I say it’s Christianity. I say it’s modern corrupt Christianity. Christianity is a big money religion. They like showing off how big the churches are and how many churches there are. And of course there are plenty of preachers out there to bring you back to the fold. All you have to do is believe and all your problems are solved.
But not really. I’m not into assessing blame. I’m assessing doing the right thing. I am not into talking forever and ever believe it or not. I don’t like getting with people who just like playing with words. I’m tired of all these clever people playing catch me if you can. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of hanging around with leeches and parasites and want to be criminals and other weaklings. I’m tired of being around smart people. There’s a lot of interesting things to apply ones mine to but I am so tired of people who believe that they are higher because they don’t work with their hands or their bodies. I’m tired of people who believe somehow that they are better than others because of how much money they have or that to get to wear nice clothing to work.
I just don’t see the world as being worth living in. I can see that the world shows you all of this wonderful stuff that you can have if you have the money. There are no videos out there saying where to get this money. There are plenty of suggestions and all kinds of influencers who want you to listen to them tell their story again and again. But there is no understandable road to wealth unless you were born into it or you get really really lucky after working ridiculously hard for a long time. Sure, one out of a billion goes through the roof because they wrote a song or something like that. But I promise you, you will never get there until you can’t enjoy it anymore. I promise you, if you ever get there, it will be at the expense of the metabolism that had the original dream.
I believe in what these guys are saying. There are a ton of homestead videos or gardening videos out there. DIY stuff is everywhere. People find it interesting sometimes to watch other people work. You can find anything you want on the internet and the algorithm will give you everything it thinks you need even if that only means keeping you aggravated. But what I say is absolutely necessary is for everyone to stop escaping our shitty world and to start doing things to ease the shittiness. That means changing. That means understanding that you are living one lifestyle and that it is possible to lead another lifestyle that might be more genuinely fulfilling and have more genuine happiness in it. That purposefulness that everyone looks for. That sense of community that everyone dreams about and kills themselves trying to get moments from. All the things that have been taken away from us by the governments so that they can stay in power and continue to collect taxes from us need to be replaced. I say we replace it with the real stuff.
I did have one more thought about compensation. It seems there are countries who wish to pay money to black people as an apology for slavery. I’ve heard pluses and minuses about this. Such a thought is obviously born in the racism that says black people don’t get a full chance. Actually nobody gets a full chance. There are the privileged few who will automatically get to the end because the road is very clear for them and then there’s all the rest of us killing each other for scraps and peanuts that fell off the table. As a Jew, where’s my compensation? Where’s my compensation for 2,000 years of anti-Semitism? Genocide. Or just what it’s like to live in a world with a bunch of idiots who have been told that you are a vacation arrival spot for them. You are a real treat for them and people are just going to enjoy you whether you like it or not and you don’t really even get to say no. Just smile and be pleasant.
Inevitably, if we are talking about some form of social welfare, I think it’s a fine idea except I’m not really fond of sponsorships. I’m not really fond of people who automatically get some money because it’s not fair to those who don’t. There is a class of people that automatically get money. And then there’s everyone else who has to work for it or learn to live without it.
My best proposal to stop pollution and climate change and social problems is simply to create a government-funded daily payout job working for your community or doing some sort of land rehabilitation or clean up. I’m talking about having a job available for half a day that pays illegitimate wage, enough for people to live off of, and we allow this to be an alternative to the meat market to service the corporations and the governments which is what we have now. And I don’t care if y’all allow entrepreneurs, we are talking about a two-party system. We are talking about a system of checks and balances. We need an available service that says people do not automatically become slaves to the economic system. If they just want to work and live a quiet life of community and service, why not? Why do we automatically pay people who are willing to kill others but we are unable and unwilling to pay people who simply want to be good community members?
And if I think of this logically, if the job is not a joke, if you do not get laughed at and become some social pariah for taking part in it, it’s a good deal. If you lose your job, you’ve got somewhere to go automatically. All you have to do is be unreasonable shape and agree to take the job seriously. I think it’s a wonderful idea and what I really think will happen is the market will adjust substantially because of how satisfying it is to live without them. More people simply growing food and helping sustain life and less people playing power games with others.
I just didn’t really like it. I didn’t really like the people I would meet. They never did anything. You never had their own voice or made their own decisions. It was all just laughing at each other and using each other. It was all just giving people extra room because they were getting drunk because they made some money. I just don’t think this is a healthy world to live in and I don’t think the way we do what we do is the correct model for human beings. In fact, I think because of religion and Christianity and the power struggle that goes to keep the slave structure in place and profitable, the world is completely unlivable now. There is no place that hasn’t been destroyed by this commerce that everybody thinks is so great. I don’t know. What’s so great about something that poisons your land and ruins your home? What’s so wonderful about something that turns something beautiful into something ugly?
I suggest getting off the merry-go-round. Food. That’s the real topic to think about. How much you pay for it and how much you support the oil business by eating something that comes from a million miles away in the completely wrong season. It’s not about commodities. It’s about sustaining life and hopefully, trying to find some happiness along the way for adults. Not better drugs or crazier parties, the ability for an adult to feel content that they are in the pocket of something good instead of living a life of perpetual anxiety and knowing like knowledge that you’re no good all the way through. Except of course if you were born rich. And you’re just darn good looking.
