Category: Stoic

Dune, Moods, Wrestling, and a Way of Life

“Look at the symptoms:  temperamental behavior, mood swings, facial hair.  Uh oh, Dad, I think you have menopause.” – That 70’s Show

cover

There ended up being roughly 732 books in the Dune series.  I stopped after book four, which was one book too many.

In our basement we have a wrestling mat.  It would be unusual if we had a wrestling mat and dismembered mannequin parts strewn around the room and baby doll heads covered with blood red paint, but we don’t.  The Mrs. and I decided we need to leave some projects for after the kids go to college.  So we use the wrestling mat for the more conventional purpose of practicing wrestling.  Both Pugsley and The Boy enjoy it, and so do I.  Pugsley has expressed an interest in winning a lot of wrestling matches, so he fairly enthusiastically led us to doing independent wrestling practice at home so he could improve.

One night it was time to practice.  The Boy was ready.  I was ready.  But Pugsley said, “I’m not in the mood.”

The Boy turned pale.  He knew what was coming next – the kraken was about to be unleashed.  I did a quick Internet search.  I then looked up from my laptop screen and quoted the following:

“Mood?  What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood!  Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset [JW: a musical instrument].  It’s not for fighting.” – Frank Herbert, Dune

gurneymood

If you’re not in the mood, make it so.

The lecture he got that followed that quote exceeded the amount of time that we would have practiced.  It’s the same lecture The Boy had gotten several years earlier, and he joined in to poke his brother with verbal barbs as well.  You may call it bullying, we call it raising children with values.  Maybe we should have stopped before we gave him a swirly?

The context of the quote is from the novel Dune which has spawned one bad movie (the early 1980’s version) and one underfunded movie (the early 2000’s version).  In the novel, young Paul Atreides is the son of a space Duke somewhere in the far future after humanity has spread through the stars.  Paul has the benefit of being royal, so he has a rather rigorous curriculum of everything from math, physics, and gender studies to small arms combat.  Just kidding.  Study math and physics.  Ha!  Studying math and physics is a sucker game:  study those things and you’ll have to pay taxes.

dunecat

This would have been a better plot than the early 80’s film.

Like all boys, Paul was looking for a day off.  His combat arms teacher, Gurney Halleck, rightly told him the truth:  when trouble is brewing or there is work to be done, the Universe does not care about your mood.

Like all boys, Pugsley was looking to push and see just how far he could get away with slacking.  The answer was simple:  he couldn’t.  He had made a commitment to his brother, to me, but most importantly to himself.  But sometimes, like all boys, he needed a reminder from his father that duty comes before mood.  So, he got the big speech.  I quote books, I quoted Patton, I quoted my father, I quoted Mr. Rogers®, and I noted that I hadn’t taken an unplanned sick day since before he was born.  Call in to the boss on a Tuesday morning with a sore throat?  No.

wrestlingmood

If you’re not familiar with wrestling, the guy in purple is like France at the start of World War II.

As an adult you have to do a lot of things that you don’t enjoy.  You have to go to work when you know it’s going to suck.  You have to take your punishment when you know you’ve done wrong.  You have to pay your bills.  You have to work out.  You have to meet the commitments you made, no matter how painful.

Keeping your word to other people is how the world sees that you have good character.  Keeping your word to yourself is the sign of real integrity.  Some days you don’t want to hit the weights.  You don’t want to go to work.  You don’t want to go to school.  You don’t want to go to practice.  You don’t want to meet that pesky General Grant at Wilmer’s place in Appomattox.

Boo hoo.

leemood

I heard you don’t have to lose the war if you’re not in the mood to lose the war.  Also, is it just me or does it look like they’re playing Battleship® on paper?

When you start failing to keep the commitments that you made to yourself, you’ll stop keeping your commitment to others.  What matters is turning on the alarm clock, and getting out of bed when it rings or beeps or whatever it does.  Every day.

You don’t need seminars.  Or pep talks.  Or motivational posters.  Or Tony Robbins and his weirdly white teeth (I swear that man has the grin of someone who likes to eat things that are small and squirming because they’re still living) and a $2000 seminar.

You need discipline.  Discipline is better than motivation any day.

Why do you need discipline?

discipline

Kevin Bacon understands.

Because motivated is a mood.

But disciplined is a way of life.

Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue

“Kim Kardashian is so sexy, her butt is like a big mountain of pudding.” – South Park

kardwolf

I hear the only way they can be avoided is if you don’t have any money.

This is the last of the series of three posts about virtue, at least for now.  The other two are linked near the bottom.

If you look at rich people, you can see fairly rapidly that being wealthy isn’t a sign of a virtuous life.  There are no shortages of bimbos in Hollywood® who get famous by “leaking” a sex tape to get famous, in fact it’s odd now to have a famous person who doesn’t have a series of sex tapes, although if you take my advice you’ll skip the Ruth Bader Ginsburg tape.

This unearned fame is perplexing to me.  It seems to be that to progress as a celebrity you should have done as little as possible to help mankind.  The entire idea that people willingly give money to the Kardashian family makes me vaguely ill, or maybe that’s just thinking of the Kardashians in general.  The Kardashians look like a species that’s closely related to humanity, but just far enough apart from us that mating with them would be illegal in almost every state, except maybe California.

Come to think of it, they do live in California.  Hmmm.

naturalkardashian

A Kardashian in its natural state.  I believe they have insurance against Velcro.

As I’ve mentioned before, Epictetus (a dead Stoic Greek philosopher dude) felt that wealth was neither virtue nor vice in and of itself.  The Stoics certainly thought that preferring wealth was okay, but getting all bent out of shape about it (or about anything) wasn’t.  But, Kardashians aside, are there virtues that are associated with getting wealthy?

I looked and found (LINK) a study of traits were found to be present more in high earners than “average” earners.  They were:

  • High earning people don’t hate or worship money – they don’t avoid wealth nor place too much importance on money. Of course, when you’re pulling down $400,000 a year, a few extra bucks for a giant-sized plutonium-plated Elvis™ PEZ® dispenser doesn’t even get your attention.  However, if you’re making $14,000 a year, counting the grains of rice in a box of Rice-a-Roni® (The San Francisco Treat™!) makes sense to make sure that the Dollar Store© isn’t cheating you again.

elpezvis

All hail Elpezvis!  And thanks to Karl for this wonderful photo!

  • Not fans of luck. The psychological name for this was “internal locus of control.”  Yeah, sounds like part of the navigation system on the U.S.S. Enterprise.  In human-speak, it means whether or not they felt they were lucky (or unlucky) or their situation in life was due to their hard work and effort.  My bet is if you ask any really successful person this question that they’ll give that answer – but I’m also aware that MANY people work even harder than the average CEO, putting in more hours doing harder, messier, more thankless work.
  • Rich people wanted to be wealthy and put more value on it than average income people. Part of this might have been related to average income people rationalizing – I know that I put less importance on hair now that it’s left my scalp like Guatemalans leaving Guatemala because it’s Guatemala.  I wonder what my hair had against my scalp?  Could I build a wall to keep it from migrating down my back?
  • Had more “financial knowledge” – this was self-reported – they didn’t give them a test.
  • Workaholics had more wealth, which doesn’t surprise me, and high-earners were “enablers” – loaning money to deadbeat relatives. I’m guessing this is a function of “not trying to borrow money from people who don’t have it.”

The only virtuous bit I could find in all of that (and I had to stretch to do it) was that the rich seem to develop an indifference to money when they have some.  It’s like an indifference to pizza after you’ve had enough lasagna to stuff Sardinia, however.  Sure, it’s virtuous, but only just barely.

What I didn’t see on the list was conscientiousness, or faithfulness, or discipline or even self-control.  True virtues seemed to be missing.  I guess I have to deal with facts:  jerks get rich.  Unscrupulous people get rich, nepotists get rich (a lot!).  CEOs trade in wives like used Yugos®, and CEOs move from company to company the way I move from room to room in my house.

yugocap

Ahhh, all the luxury of communist Eastern Europe combined with the reliability of an Italian car.  How could it lose?

Do I hate wealth?  I absolutely do not.  Do I hate the wealthy?  Not a chance, some of them are awesome.  Do I think that churches preaching “prosperity gospel” are helping Christianity?  Probably not.  I’m pretty sure that God wants your faith more than he wants you to have a Mercedes-Benz®, even if all your friends do drive Porsches©.

But wealth is fleeting.  Companies fail over time.  Sears™ used to dominate multiple fields – appliances, tools, insurance, even their own credit card.  Now they’re tottering on the edge of bankruptcy.  And that serves a purpose, just like the death of an individual.  The economy must be cleansed over time, or else it becomes, well, sick.

Stealing from Eaton Rapids Joe (LINK) where he compares the economy to a salmon stream:

At one time it was commonly believed that dams would benefit salmon spawning.  It was believed that regulating the flow so that it was constant would be most beneficial.

The unintended consequence was that the constant stream cut a deep and narrow channel, just like a band saw.

The narrow channels intercepted very little sunlight…the driver of nearly all life on the planet.  The channel was devoid of pools and riffles, gravel beds of various coarseness, rocks to break the current and beds of seaweed.  They were a desert for salmon fry.

His blog is excellent, and you should visit it daily (LINK).

But like that salmon stream, when we seek to get wealth without virtue, have a country without virtue (Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python) or even attempt to become immortal (Books, Stoics, Immortality (Now Available on Stick)) we condemn ourselves to a world where hairy near-human Kardashians are free to wander without fear of a razor.

And that is a world no man wants to live in.

bradgelina

It’s . . . spreading!

Books, Stoics, Immortality (Now Available on Stick)

“I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod.  I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel.  And I am immortal.” – Highlander

coffee

Or maybe it was the scotch that made him immortal?  When I drink scotch I’m bulletproof.

I once had a Grandboss (my boss’s boss) that once said, “Reading is the only way that you can know great minds across centuries.”  He was deeply philosophical and attempted to use that philosophy to improve business results, and also to use history as analogy for business conditions.  Prior to the movie 300 coming out, he was discussing the battle of Thermopylae and the courage of the Spartans to fight to the last man as a business analogy.  Needless to say, when you’re using a battle where every single solder dies as an analogy, business isn’t going all that well.

Grandboss also assigned On War (a treatise on war and strategy during the Napoleonic era) by Von Clausewitz for us to read.  I’m probably the only guy who actually did read it, and still have my copy.  Needless to say, I loved my Grandboss, and still send him cards on Grandboss day.  When I quit that job to take a new one, I told him first, and as a goodbye present?  I gave him a book.

My Grandboss was right, though – reading allows us to know great minds across centuries.  The nice thing is we can read the thoughts of dead Greeks like Epictetus.  Epictetus spent his entire life studying and living stoic philosophy, which was a pretty hard thing to do when you were a slave with a gimpy leg.  Epictetus eventually became free – we don’t know how, but I imagine he won the annual caddy’s golf tournament and got a scholarship from Judge Smails.

nothing

I bet Epictetus just wishes he wrote, “You’ll get nothing and like it.”

One thing we do know is that Epictetus did was spend a lot of time thinking about virtue and vice.  We’ll spend more time on virtue on Monday’s post, but Epictetus came to the conclusion that the following things were neither vice nor virtue:

  • Wealth
  • Health
  • Life
  • Death
  • Pleasure
  • Pain

As wealth and health are at least two nominal themes of this blog (this is Friday, so I’m stretching it and saying this is a health post) it might seem a bit hypocritical that I spend time talking about health and wealth and then quote a dead lame Greek that says that neither of those are virtuous.  But I would argue that my message on wealth is that true wealth is in having few needs (Seneca, Stoics, Money and You), and although I prefer pleasure to pain, I recognize that a pleasure repeated too often is a punishment (Pleasure, Stoicism, Blade Runner, VALIS and Philip K. Dick).  And we also know that health is more controllable by our choices today than Epictetus did.

qwho

Immortal and omnipotent.  And good on the mariachi trumpet.

Heck, I even got challenged by an Orthodox priest friend on whether or not learning for learning’s sake was, in a religious context, a vice.  If so, there goes most of my Monday posts.  The priest and I (as I recall, over a BBQ lunch) came to the conclusion that learning for learning’s sake was maybe a vice.  Since he was also a fan of learning for learning’s sake, if it was a vice we were both guilty.

Going back to Epictetus’ list, Life and Death are on it as being neither virtues nor vices.  I’m not sure about you, but I really prefer Wealth to Poverty, Health to Illness, and Life to Death.  Epictetus felt the same way – it was okay to have preferences with the understanding that neither condition is, in itself, virtuous.  I finally came to understand that while not virtuous, death is required for life.  Oddly, I thank Bill Clinton for this realization.

It was during the Clinton presidency that I first looked around at the national leaders for both parties and thought, “Jeez, what a bunch of bozos.”  Both sides were stupid or corrupt.  Some were stupid and corrupt at the same time (looking at you, ghost of Ted Kennedy, I’ve imagined you’ve been plenty warm this winter).  Back then I was a capital-L libertarian, and could see that both sides had as primary goals the restriction of freedom on their agenda in addition to being incompetent.

Beyond that, they were . . . awful.  Spineless.  They were tools of groups with different names but the same objectives – objectives that mostly didn’t favor you or me.  Throw into this mix that one day at lunch I was thinking about immortality and the implications of living forever, which was spurred on by eating a tuna fish sandwich which might have been as old as Epictetus, who died in 135 A.D.

bubbaho

Elvis will never die.  Mobility?  That might be an issue.

If people were generally immortal?  Our birthrate would plummet – 200 year old women have very few kids.  As for me, I’d have plenty of time so rather than putting things off until next week, I’d put stuff off until next century.  But the worst consequence?

Bill Clinton would forever be an elder statesman, always trying to increase his (and Hillary’s) power for all of eternity.  Our current batch of elected officials would be about the best we’d get, or maybe the only ones we’d get.  Senators and congresscritters already stay in office until the only way to keep them alive is though that experimental technique that turns them into zombie-like creatures that feast on living human flesh like Nancy Pelosi, or immortal robots like the Ruth Bader-Ginsbot™ 3000.

Thankfully, we live in a world where things die and the world moves on – just like a cell in a human body ceases to exist so new cells can take over.  We have a name for immortal cells – cancer.  Just like cells pass away, so do we to leave this world to the youth.  I didn’t say death is “good” – just that it serves a purpose.

laz

Okay, this is one boy who loved his mother.

Part of that purpose is focusing us on the here and now:  in this way we don’t lose sight that life is precious and fleeting, like sedation dentistry.  Perhaps the most precious thing we have is the shared time with those who have meaning to us (like your friendly blogger).  But for those who have left us, honor them with the virtue that they helped you obtain.  Be glad you had a part of their life, and had a chance to witness their virtue and learn from their vices.  Look at how they have changed you, made you better so that they live on through their influence on you.

Lastly, for heaven’s sake, write something down.  It’s the only way that someone can know your mind when you’re gone, unless they check your browser history.

“That which you desire, controls you.”

“Egon, somehow this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Do you remember that?” – Ghostbusters

precious

See, a bottle of wine costs $15.  Plus the crap I buy on Amazon.

That which you desire, controls you.

Let’s look at common examples:

  • Money
  • Power
  • Respect
  • Sex
  • Great Parking Spaces at Denny’s
  • Friendship
  • Water in the Sahara Desert
  • “Buy One Get One Free” Coupons for Chocolate Dipped Ice Cream Cones at Dairy Queen®
  • Booze
  • Glittery Sunglasses in the Shape of Stars

glitterglass

Can’t you feel their magnetic pull?

When we see these desires, we see those who are driven by them and are instinctively repulsed.  An example:  when The Mrs. and I were newly married, we had an idea for a book – a humorous parody of the Clinton administration.  Its title?  An Intern’s Guide to the White House.  I thought it was funny, and maybe we even still have a copy sitting around somewhere.  If so, I’ll post it sometime – we got hooked up with a bad literary agent (we were young and stupid) and it never got published.  But like George Washington jokes, that material is just a little out of date.

pres

This is like a photo from the world’s most awkward prom.

But back when we were still optimistic the Intern’s Guide, The Mrs. and I were excited when the Starr Report (a report by the independent counsel looking into the Clintons) came out.  We felt that it would make a perfect sequel to our Intern’s Guide.  Heck, the working title for the sequel was The Starch Report.

Then I read the Starr Report.  Ugh.  What President Clinton did was . . . sad.  You can forgive lots of things, but getting past disgust over behavior that was, by any standards, weak and pathetic is a pretty high bar.   And it wasn’t the perjury that was the worst part – it was the complete lack of self-control.  Just because a complete lack of self-control is legal doesn’t make it moral or desirable.

As you can see from President Clinton’s example, this lust wasn’t just a weakness, it was personally destructive to him.  And some of our greatest fiction, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, explores this same theme.  I still recall when Macbeth, in the movie version, gets kicked off campus.  Then he and his wacky friends form a paranormal investigating service, and save New York from Macduff, who is portrayed as the Stay-Puft® Marshmallow Man.

stay2

Ahh, Shakespeare at his best.

But history has shown time and time again how lust for sex or lust for power has led to the downfall of the powerful – like the time Weinstein put the moves on Napoleon and Napoleon outed him on Twitter® with the #NapoleonToo campaign.  But in all seriousness – if Napoleon had been content with France?  If Weinstein could be  . . . not Weinstein?  Napoleon could have gone down in history as an amazing leader and statesman.  And Weinstein could have maintained his revered status in Hollywood.

In the end, greed makes you poor.  Need makes you needy.  And desire makes you a slave.

But you’re saying, “John Wilder, all of that seems kind of negative.  What’s the solution, I mean besides joining your cult of the Nudist Beatnik Threesome?”

chelsea

Outcome independence.  The idea of outcome independence is that who you are doesn’t change based on the results, and, win or lose you realize that’s an okay outcome.  Like Kipling wrote in his poem, If (LINK):

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same . . .

You are independent of the outcomes around you – your job, the last raise you got, all of it.  That’s not outcome indifference.  Not at all.  Throw yourself into getting to an outcome that you’re passionate about.  Outcome independence isn’t being without passion, because nothing worthwhile ever gets done without passion.  Let me explain with an example:

I was nearly a freshman in high school, and was mildly infatuated with a girl in class.  Back then, people had phone books, and had their names in the book.

I called her house.  Her dad (a doctor) answered.

“Is Michelle in?”

“Michelle, it’s for you.”

Michelle:  “Hello?”

John Wilder:  “Hi Michelle, it’s John Wilder.  Interested in going to go see a movie?”

Michelle:  “I’m sorry – I’m busy that night.”

Seriously, I didn’t leave anything out of the conversation.  I asked her to a movie, and she said she was busy.  But I had never said when I wanted to take her to a movie or even what movie.  Even freshman me understood that meant that there was no night, ever, when she’d say yes.

kbusy

Even then I was amused.  I really wanted to go out with her – I was not indifferent – she was pretty cute.  But when the outcome was negative, I didn’t have the slightest bit of loss of self-worth.  There were lots of girls out there.

But failure is a result, too.  I prefer to win.  Strongly.  But winning doesn’t make me a better person, and it doesn’t make me more moral – look at all of the really horrible people that have been successful.  I could name them, but they have lawyers.  I learned my lesson with Gandhi.

Losses can be better than a win . . . sometimes:

  • What did you learn?
  • Are you stronger?
  • Would success have been bad for you?
  • Is this just a temporary loss that brings about a greater victory?
  • Can you lose gracefully?
  • Is the loss pointing you to a mistake you’re making that you need to correct?

The best victories are internal.  I know when I hit “publish” on a post whether or not I liked the post, whether or not I hit a home run.  I really want you to like it, too, but internally, I know when I enjoyed writing it, and am pleased with the results.  I’m passionate about it, and when I know I’ve done a good job, it makes it hard to go to sleep.  I’m excited.

And I get enjoyment out of failing, too.  If you never failed, victory wouldn’t feel so good.  But I’d still like some glittery star glasses.

Why Are You Mad At Your Computer? It Doesn’t Care. Plus: A Deeply Meaningful Poem

“They would’ve learned to wear skins, adopted stoic mannerisms, learned the bow and the lance.” – Star Trek

hardwood

Okay, it was really only one color.  But it was a LOT of ink.  Staining and painting.  Stainting?

I rarely saw Pop Wilder mad at any living human being, at least I rarely saw him mad after I reached the age of ten.  And I assure you that I deserved it every single time he was mad at me – drawing on the hardwood floor in ink under my bed wasn’t a particularly popular move – especially since Ma and Pop only discovered it the night before we were supposed to be out of the house so that the new owners could move in.

Oops.

Perhaps his even temper with people was learned.  After being in banking for decades (and having me around for years), I imagine he’d seen everything, including frogs swimming in the World War I helmet his father wore.  It might be that he believed the worst of people, and that way when they weren’t horrible, they pleasantly surprised him, and when he found ink on his hardwood floor and the family photo album soaking in the bathroom sink (I promise I had a good reason)?  Or spray painted the fender of his brand-new car?  Well, that was to be expected.

So, Pop Wilder was a mild and even tempered man and perhaps even a saint for not killing me.  The one exception to him getting angry was that he would get mad at . . . things.  Chainsaws.  Cars.  Snow machines.  The blinking light on his VCR.  In fact, the only time I ever heard him drop the f-bomb was when he was referring to his computer.  He said it not long after I’d introduced him to the future The Mrs., and in her presence.  “It’s . . . it’s all f****d up.”  Honoring Pop Wilder’s tone and frustration make it a form of punctuation in our house when things have just gone completely wrong but in a comical and hopeless manner.

But what I do know is this:  the computer didn’t care.

fbomb

Ahh, the United States Swear Force in action.

Dead Roman Marcus Aurelius nailed it when he wrote, “Pray to change yourself, not your circumstances.”  Marcus wasn’t referring to what was in his control.  Being an Emperor of Rome, Marcus could control a lot of things, but that’s not what frustrated him.  No, Marcus was referring to those things he couldn’t control.  Marcus was going to grow old and die, and he couldn’t change that.  Marcus would be resurrected as shoe salesman in Savannah, and he couldn’t change that, either.  Marcus wanted to change himself so he took those things that he couldn’t control and not react to them.  Why complain about gravity?

stonehead

Marcus Aurelius, with a hipster beard before it was cool.

The computer doesn’t care that you’re mad at it.  The computer won’t change if you speak harshly to it, though I hear Bezos is working on a computer that will buy random things from Amazon® that it knows you won’t like, just to spite you if you’re mean to it.  Honestly, most people don’t care if you’re mad at them, either.  The real secret is, however, that most things simply do not matter on any sort of cosmic scale.  I even wrote you, dear Internet, a poem about that:

The Unblinking Stars

The stars looked down.
When Julius Caesar was born, they looked down.
When Caesar defeated the Gaul, they looked down.
When Caesar died, they looked down.

For every man, for every empire.
The stars looked down.
Unblinking.

When continents split, and then recombined.
The stars looked down.
Nearly eternal.

At every time, at ever place,
Every ambition, every love.
Every betrayal.  Every loyalty.
The stars looked down.

Looking up at them, seeing into eternity.
I gasp.  I wonder.  I check the router.
Oh, good.  The Internet’s back up.
I wonder what just happened on Twitter?

spacekeys

I think that what sets us up to become angry about a situation is contained entirely within ourselves – there’s a way that we think the world should be, and when the world refuses to be that way, we get angry.  And the world doesn’t completely conform to anyone’s hopes and dreams.  From time to time, even I end up comparing my life to someone else’s life.  But I do this particularly awful thing:  I compare what they’re best at, to my accomplishments in the same arena.  Let’s take the business guy I knew.  He had tens of millions of dollars, a house in the mountains, and even a vintage fighter airplane.  I don’t have tens of millions of dollars, a house in the mountains, or any airplane that’s not a model kit that I made when I was a kid.

There’s a lot to envy, isn’t there?  I even think he had a pretty good marriage and smart kids.

Oh, and he’s dead.  And he died in a really dramatic fashion that probably left his widow with nearly no money after the lawsuit and attorney’s fees.  So if I’m going to be envious, I have to be envious of the whole person, not some small aspect of their lives.  It’s a big world and someone, somewhere has it all better than you.  They’re smarter than you, slimmer than you, with a really close, cool family.

And I’m okay with that, too.

One thing that helped me through my own personal envy was . . . cars.  When I lived in Houston, there were really nice cars everywhere.  And by nice, I mean cars that are worth more than my house.  I felt envy.  Then I thought about the car payment that they had to make (I read somewhere that most Mercedes® on the road are not paid for – they’re for show).  That made my four-year-old dad-four door car that I’d bought used seem a LOT better than the Mercedes® driven by the 27 year-old at the stop light next to me.

bitcoin

If you’re a billionaire crime-fighting superhero that found an amulet that gives you super powers but also covers your body in reptilian scales while flying screaming skulls follow you around?  I suppose it’s okay if you buy yourself something nice every once in a while.

To recap:

  • The situation doesn’t care. Don’t get mad at it, especially if it’s beyond your control.
  • Most things really don’t matter – don’t get hung up on the trivia of now.
  • If you won’t remember it next year? It’s probably meaningless.  Don’t sweat it.
  • Don’t compare yourself to others, unless they’re clearly awful in everything compared to you. Then gloat.
  • Expect that your children will destroy thousands and thousands of dollars of your property and at least a dozen priceless, irreplaceable heirlooms. And burn the counter with hot macaroni.  And write on the bathroom walls.  And . . . oh, wait, those were my kids . . .

Wait, what?  I’m Pop Wilder now.  When did that happen?

The Funniest and Most Meaningful Black Friday Post . . . Ever.  Now 50% off, Today Only.

“It’s Black Friday, the day when ordinary house moms turn into vicious bargain hunting animals, blinded by low prices, and eager to get the Christmas shopping done early.  If this was a zoo I’d say run for you lives, but this is Buy More!” – Chuck

fiztoot

Mabel’s family was upset with her on the drive home.  They used Apple® products and didn’t have Windows™.  (I’m sorry for that joke, but by way of explanation I’m a father.)

Like many people, I try to avoid the stores on Black Friday.  If I were a mullet wearing geezer with my toga full of elf chum (please don’t ask me to draw a picture of that, I’m not even sure what elf chum is, and now that I’ve written it I feel vaguely dirty), I’d say Black Friday is maybe the one real American holiday that most people agree on.  Christmas is great, but when was the last time a group of people attempted to choke each other to death to get a gift-wrapped package of underwear on Christmas?  Never.  But put a 50%-off tag on socks with a pattern of Iron Man® smoking a bong with Donald Duck™ on them?  Heck, I’d drop kick a calico kitten through a box fan for a bargain like that!  Sure, we have great holidays like Fourth of July, but nobody ever died in a riot for 2 for 1 fireworks.

Bargains!  Free stuff!  Perhaps that’s the new slogan of the United States – Free Stuff!  And don’t forget that buying stuff is easier than actual salvation or real effort to be a better person.  And even if you don’t like toast – that toaster is only $5.  You can learn to love toast.

Perhaps Black Friday not only our true holiday, it is perhaps our true religious holiday.

zombie

You can tell that these zombies aren’t leftists – they don’t appear to be lecturing anyone.

I’m not going to make fun of people who are short of cash and frugal and truly need the items that they buy, but that only accounts for a small percentage of purchasers on Black Friday.  As Americans, we have been conditioned to shop.  Until we drop.  And don’t let Debt stand in your way.  And I use the word “we” for a reason – I’ve done it, too.  No, I would sooner investigate my hotel room with a black light and then still stay there than go in a store the day after Thanksgiving.  But I do have the Internet.  And I’ve bought stupid stuff:

  • Dog Waxer – rechargeable! Never let your unwaxed dog embarrass you again.
  • Solar Powered Night Light – Works best on a sunny day.
  • Internet-Connected Underwear – With your app, you can check the temperature and humidity.
  • Night Vision Scope for Caulk Gun – Now you can apply your caulk, even in the dark.
  • Crossword Puzzle Book for Dogs – Just as it says.

So, yes, I’ve bought my share of stupid crap, which made me ask the question:  why do we buy useless crap at all?

  • Impulse: I see shiny things.  I must have them.  The depths of the brain, that part that grunts instead of talking and that never uses underarm deodorant that drives this fascination.  Just give it meat, scotch, and women and the impulses will go away.
  • Herd Mentality: I will fight you to the death for the toaster that puts the fuzzy face of Bob Ross on toast!  They actually make a toaster that does this and I am hoping that the Discovery Channel® has a series coming where people fight to the death for consumer items.  Makes me feel so, well, Roman.  Humans want to have the things that other humans have, which is why so many ex-wives exist.  I’ll just stop right there.

bob ross

What a happy little toaster!

  • Makes You Feel Better: Shopping really works to make you feel better – it gives you a sense of accomplishment.  No matter how hard your day was, and what tasks you face, there is a 100% chance that you can buy something and it will make you feel a little bit better.  It gives you that sense of control, no matter how poor your decisions were today, you can find a breakfast cereal or, say, 436 pairs of shoes.  You can make a choice and follow through.  People even have a name for this type of shopping – “Retail Therapy.”

therapist

The nice thing about Retail Therapy?  It costs about the same as real therapy, and you can still hate your mother when you’re done shopping for those 436 pairs of shoes.  So you have hatred and shoes left.  I call that a win-win.

Why not shop until you drop?  You can.  If it’s not a problem:

  • Well, if you’re going into debt for power tools just to chase the kids around with (a circular saw works well as long as you have enough extension cord) or sacrificing your ability to retire just so you can have a “Hello Kitty®” ashtray, it’s a problem.
  • If you have boxes of stuff you’ve never opened inside of other boxes of stuff you’ve never opened, it’s either a problem or a movie premise for Leonardo DiCaprio© for a movie called Inshopsion. There is a rule, however, that DVDs starring Burt Reynolds™ do NOT count in this category, so don’t even ask.

If you really need something to complete you, shopping isn’t it.  It’s short term, and only lasts until you’ve bought the next thing.  And the more crap you buy, the more confusion you bring into your life – sooner or later you have to spend more time managing the crap than it is worth.  Again, I know this from experience – my own.  And I still can’t find that spare kidney I bought on Kidney-Bay® on Black Friday back in 2012.  Maybe it moved back to the original owner.

How do you cut back?  Thankfully, the solutions are simple:

  • Replace shopping with something that’s a real achievement. Blogging for thousands of wonderful readers who have wonderful hygiene, immaculate mullets, and stunning good looks counts.  You know, as an example.
  • Look for real competition in the world. I mean, soccer was invented by European beatnik nudist jugglers to provide something to do while their berets dried and they drank cappuccino.  But, yes, even soccer will do.  Find something.
  • Bored? Learn to not be bored.  Take up chainsaw juggling.  European beatniks do it all the time between cigarettes and poetry readings.
  • One of the things we don’t thing about too much when we think about shopping is time. And time, my friends, is all we have, each day that ticks away is lost forever.  Plan your time to be and do something real.

We have to shop.  We have to buy things.  But as the Roman philosopher Seneca said, any over used virtue becomes a vice.  Or was that Captain Kirk?  I’ll go check my 12 disc collection of Star Trek:  The Original Series Commemorative 32nd Anniversary Edition Complete with Pink Tribble Box Set.  I got it on Black Friday in 2009 on sale for $24.99.  It might be here over behind the Original Smokey and the Bandit 2 jacket.  Who knew that Burt Reynolds was exactly my height, but only weighed 155 pounds?  Thing doesn’t even fit around the shoulders.

smokeybanditjacket

Eastbound and Down.

Bonus:  Deliverance interview between Burt and Johnny.

Okay – I love comments, and would love to have more, so don’t be shy.  Or I will dropkick another kitten through a box fan.  And don’t forget – you can just subscribe to this in the box above, and I’ll show up at least three times a week in your inbox.  Which won’t break it.  And I won’t send or sell your address, ever.

The 13 Keys to College Success. Beer Bongs Suspiciously Absent.

“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.  Mr. Hoover, president of Delta house?  1.6; four C’s and an F.  A fine example you set!  Daniel Simpson Day . . . has no grade point average.  All courses incomplete. Mr. Blutarsky.  Zero.  Point.  Zero.” – Animal House

college2

Meet my freshman adviser, Mr. Morpheus.

Here is my advice to a new college student, or even one currently in college if they’re slow.  Hey, roomies, if they’re currently passed out on the floor of their bedroom after one too many $1 Zombies® at Applebees™, you can write the following post on their face in Sharpie® for them.  Don’t worry, they’ll thank you later.

Sage Wilder Advice Number One:  College is an investment.

And not like a lame “investment as a metaphor” – college is an actual, real investment of your time and somebody’s money.

College costs a lot, tens of thousands of dollars a year, plus the cost is going up every year.  The primary reason costs go up is that colleges are a great machine that turns the maximum amount that you can borrow for college into debt, a hangover, and twenty extra pounds of weight where you used to have a waist, all while giving you fancy coffee and climbing walls.  Why those things?  It’s well known that Socrates did no teaching until after he’d had his caffeine and a good climb.

The other cost of college is your time.  During the four or five years you spend chasing sorority girls studying hard for a degree, you could be out working, making money.  The time spent at college has this second cost – the income you give up – embedded in it.

So how do you make money?

Well, depends on your degree.  If you’re getting a degree that’s not directly tied to a career, often you emerge from college well suited to be a retail clerk.  Oops!  You were qualified for that before you went to school.  Hmm.

Degrees matter.  Science.  Engineering.  Accounting.  Finance.  Economics.  Computers.  Construction Management.

Those are good.  They pay well, and there are often more jobs than graduates.

Sociology.  Anything with “Studies” in the target.  Exercise Science.  Music.  Art History.  Anthropology (over 12,000 grads, 700 jobs).  Art.

These are a waste of your time and effort, if you expect to work in those fields and/or be able to afford to eat anything more than ramen.

Average return also depends on what school you go to.  Not as much, but there really is a difference in the job offer you’ll get if you go to Northern Southwestern State Community College versus, say, Harvard.  Ahhh, good old NSWSCC, no one can hold a candle to you!  The school does matter, both to employers and to the quality of connections you make, but more on that below.  If you’re more likely to impress an employer with your school?  Yeah, you’re more likely to get a job offer.

What’s the net cost?  This varies greatly by school.  Every school has a list price – what they’re saying they’re going to charge you.  But after scholarships and other discounts, what will you really pay?  This hits to the cost side of the equation.  Combined with the lower income during the college years, this is the cost your degree must pay back.

And it has to pay this back not with your total income, but the difference in what you would have made if you never graduated college.  And we all know that no one could ever make fortunes like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg if you don’t finish college.  What?  Gates and Zuckerberg were dropouts? Hmm.  Well, could it be that college graduates would be more successful . . . even if they didn’t graduate?

That’s the difficulty – you can’t live your life 15 times and measure which way you would be more successful.  But college has free beer and climbing walls, so, it’s got that going for it.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Two:  GPA is probably important.

When I was doing college recruiting, we specifically recruited for graduates from a window – too high a GPA?  We were pretty concerned that they might be, umm, not real humans, but that was a very long time ago.  Grade inflation has taken the average grade at Harvard to an “A”.  Yes.  The average grade is an “A”.  So if you don’t have a great GPA?  You’re below average.

But the second part is we can use GPA as a real estimate of what you’ve learned.  So, study!  Spend the hours, learn the material.  Get together with friends to study.  Have smart friends.  Get examples of old tests, and study those.  By my junior year at school, I was studying an average of eighty hours for a test in my harder subjects.  For one, I spent over 120 hours studying for the final.  I was thrilled when I got a ‘B’.  There were about two A’s given for about 150 students.  So, I was thrilled with my ‘B.’  Especially since I dropped that class the first time I took it.

Yes.  Drop classes if your grade is like one of those “fail” videos on YouTube.  Oh, wait.  Those fail videos took the name from the grade.  Yes.  Drop the class.  Go again next time.  Avoid YouTube.  Seriously.

college

And the best way to a good GPA?  Go to class.  I had one class that was just . . . so very early.  On the occasions I went, I actually learned lots of stuff that was helpful and showed up on the test.  But going to class was . . . so early.  So I didn’t.

I passed.  Barely.  And I was thrilled about it.  Easier method?  Actually go to class.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Three:  It really is who you know.

Successful people hang out with successful people.  Make connections at college.  When you graduate, you should know 100% of the top 10% smartest people in your major.  Also?  Know the rich people.  They might not be the best students, but I have never gotten a job from a poor person.  Meet them.  Don’t be fake or lie, but don’t miss the chance to hang with the son or daughter of a billionaire.  One major mechanism of moving social classes is, well, being useful to a billionaire’s kid.  His dad will set you up.  Or, better yet?  Marry one.

I had one friend who went to college and married an heiress who was worth over a billion dollars.  Nah, just kidding.  It didn’t work out, so he dumped her.  And, yes, that’s a true story.

But almost every job I ever got was from someone I knew who liked me.  So know those people.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Four:  Avoid debt.  Avoid debt.  Avoid debt.

Debt is horrible.  Student loan debt is the worst.  With a car loan, a home loan?  Declare bankruptcy and you can walk away.  How do you get rid of student loan debt?  Die.  Bankruptcy won’t do it.  I wrote about it here (College Funding, Value and Grade Inflation: Should Your Kid Go? Should You Pay?).

Even with an awesome job, college debt is a killer, and you don’t even have a crappy used car to show for it.

The best strategy?  Have someone else pay.  Get a scholarship.  Have your parents pay or help.  The Reserve Officer Training Corps?  Yeah, you can get the Army, Navy, or Air Force to pay for your college.  And all you owe them is one weekend a month, and two weeks a year.  Not a bad deal for tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Five:  Nobody cares.

Instructors and professors don’t care about you.  The school doesn’t care about you.  Your friends?  They might care about you, but as soon as you’re off campus if you flunk out?  Yeah, that door is closed.

It’s not meant to be a demotivator.  You were raised and told you were a super special precious snowflake of a human.  But the reality is that if you’re “one in a million” that there are 7,200 people just like you on Earth.  And if you flunk out?  The college doesn’t care.  The world doesn’t care.  Your mom and dad will care.   But don’t get mad at the situation – the situation doesn’t care.

Your roommate might care.  But he or she might be happy you’ve headed to other locations.  Privacy so they can play their progressive jazz harmonica at 2:24am!

Sage Wilder Advice Number Six:  Activities are a yes.

Join clubs.  Join sororities.  Join professional organizations.  Do all of those things.

I was in a car reviewing résumés from my alma mater while on a recruiting trip.  The leader of the recruiting team, a graduate of the same school as me, asked about a particular candidate.

“What clubs was he in?”

I listed them.

“What offices did he hold?”

“Um, none.”

“So, a member, member, member.  Pass.  We’re looking for leaders.”

This was the guy who hired me.  So, if you’re in a club?  Do more than be a member.  Lead.  Bring cookies or beer.  Do something.

Heck, that might be great advice for life:  don’t be a non-player character.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Seven:  Manners.

You’ll be surprised how often you’ll be expected to have a tie.  So, have one.  Or whatever fancy things girls wear.  Dresses?  Pantsuits?  Whatever.  Have at least one of those with you on day one at school.

Also:  drink slowly.  You’re not used to alcohol.

Don’t eat like a pig.  Your mom taught you better than that.  Use your knife and fork properly and KEEP YOUR ELBOWS OFF THE TABLE.

And don’t try to eat a hot dog in one bite.  It might nearly cause you to choke to death.  Not that I’d know.

college3

Sage Wilder Advice Number Eight:  Relationships.

Get married later.  Like after you have a job and some money.  But have lots of relationships.  Go to parties.  After you’re done studying and your homework is done, unless you’re going with your billionaire girlfriend.  Also?  Don’t leave any evidence on YouTube.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Nine:  Have a “Plan B.”

Your high school boy/girlfriend will dump you.  Your plans for Friday will change.  Life in college is the most tumultuous period of your life.  Ride the wave.  You will not have the same major on day one as on day 300.  Your ideas will evolve.  Wonderful!

Sage Wilder Advice Number Ten:  Discipline.

Be disciplined in sleep, study, exercise.  College will try to pull all of your routines away.  Maintain them even though you’ll see a lot more nudity than ever before in your life.  Odd nudity.  Weird nudity.  Party nudity.  Covered in 7-11 nacho cheese nudity.  But keep your discipline.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Eleven:  Go all in.

When Cortez or Obama or whoever it was that conquered the Aztecs landed on the beach, he burned the boats.  That way his sailors had no way out.  They had to be committed to the conquest.  Thus, they peacefully slaughtered thousands of Aztecs until they converted them all to Scientology.  I think.

But the point remains:  If you’re in college, you’re in.  All in.  Go for it.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Twelve:  Is it for you?

The narrative is simple:  do well in high school, go to college, get a good job, work 40 years, retire and die.

Okay, we’re all going to die.  But what if . . . you could get a good job after high school without college?

You can.

My neighbor is a lineman.  That means he knowingly works with high voltage lines to fix them when they’re broken.  This is a big deal after hurricanes – these are the guys that bring Netflix® back.  And they make good cash.

So do plumbers.  And guys that fix air conditioning.  And guys that suck septic systems.  All of those people make pretty decent money, at least around here.  And they don’t have to worry about office politics, or showering.

I had one youth I worked with in Scouting.  He wanted one of the careers above.  My basic reaction was to tell him – “Go to college.”  I would have been wrong.  He has three job offers.  He’ll be making $80k a year before an engineer his age will.

Good for him.

Sage Wilder Advice Number Thirteen:  Enjoy.

Life is like a bodybuilding elf.  It’s short and hard.  So?  Enjoy yourself.  But understand that your choices at 18 might impact your ability to be a billionaire when you’re 30.  Or 50.

Unless you married the billionaire heiress.  You did do that, didn’t you?

Bigfoot, Aliens, Farrah Fawcett, and the Guide to Real Inner Peace

“I have droppings of someone who saw bigfoot.” – Futurama

ufo1

I think this happened to me in the summer of 1982, but I don’t remember when, or where I was.  Pictured (green abductor):  Brett Kavanaugh. 

I was staring straight up at the ceiling in my bedroom, under the seven* heavy quilts that made the -40°F nights comfortable in my unheated** bedroom, every muscle tense.  This was what terror felt like.

I had seen him, or at least his glowing red eyes, on the small hill that was visible 1,175 feet from my bedroom window.  And I knew that he was headed toward me.  I knew that he had seen me.

I couldn’t see him headed toward me since I was too scared to look out the window, but I knew his inhuman, ground-devouring strides would be taking him to my window soon enough.  And then?  What would he do?

I gradually fell asleep, as the adrenaline drained from my nine-year-old bloodstream.  I remember wondering as I dozed off how exactly I knew that the hill was exactly 1,175 feet from my back window, and then I remembered.  Google® Maps™.

Okay, I didn’t know that it was 1,175 feet from my window until just now when I measured it on Google® Maps©.  But it was uncomfortably close.

What, though, was it?

It was bigfoot.  I had been reading a UFO magazine that day.  The UFO magazine had several helpful facts for me:

  1. Bigfoot was, in fact, not a creature from Earth at all.   Bigfoot was an alien.
  2. Bigfoot was a psychic alien.
  3. Bigfoot, the psychic alien, had glowing red eyes.
  4. Bigfoot was known to inhabit the hills near where I lived. Since I lived in the hills – the exact hills the little gray and white map in the pulp UFO magazine had shaded as “high bigfeet activity areas associated with alien psychic bigfeet that will probably kill, dismember, and eat wee John Wilder in his sleep, and if he’s lucky, in that order.”
  5. Okay, the graph didn’t say they would kill, dismember and eat people, but it did talk about increasing incidents of violence against people.

So, I was a little tired when I went off to school the next day.  Thankfully, I also concluded that the glowing red eyes might have been something else, like a reflection in the window.  Or maybe that was a memory that psychic bigfoot put into my nine-year-old brain?

Really, it had been quite a long time since I was allowed to be scared, specifically since the night when I knocked on my parents’ bedroom door at 2AM and Pop Wilder made it clear that my presence was no longer requested at 2AM waking him up because I was scared.  At that point, I became more afraid of what Pop Wilder would do to me versus anything a psychic bigfoot could do.  Besides, I was sure Pop Wilder was real.

Alien psychic bigfeet?  Not so sure that they existed.

UFOFarrah

Farrah kept me safe from the bigfeet.  And made me feel real funny when I was 13.

Honestly, after this one night of terror I didn’t give bigfoot a whole lot of thought.  My focus shifted to girls, where huge feet and lots of hair wasn’t exactly a selling point for me.

sexybigfoot

Words only a teenage male bigfoot would type into Google®.

So, I grew up.  Then one day, I heard the words again . . . Alien Psychic Bigfoot.

The Mrs. and I were travelling across country, and listening to a radio program as we drove through a cool high desert night.  A guest was on talk radio, patiently explaining that he was a bigfoot researcher, but more specifically, a bigfoot researcher that had the theory that bigfoot wasn’t a critter, it was, instead, a some sort of alien creation, just like in the UFO magazine from my youth.

But it gets better.

You’d think that the biggest enemy of bigfoot researchers would be skeptics?  No.

The biggest enemy of bigfoot researchers is . . . bigfoot researchers that have a different theory than them.

So, if you’re in the “bigfoot is just an animal that we haven’t found conclusive evidence for yet” camp then your biggest enemy is the “bigfoot is a psychic alien” guy.

And vice versa.

This makes me laugh, inside.  But it’s a truism of life.  When people believe in something, their biggest enemy isn’t someone who doesn’t believe, it’s someone who believes, but just a little bit differently than them, most often over something that doesn’t have any real bearings on the truth of their belief.

I was talking about a particular Christian denomination with a friend.

He asked, “Are they dunkers or splashers?”  Dunkers are those that baptize by immersing the baptized into water, while splashers use a Papal-Approved® Super-Soaker™ to baptize.

I replied, “I have no idea.”

“It’s important, you know.”

And that’s always amused me – the biggest fights are about the smallest things, often with the people that are closest to you in belief.

So I guess that’s the thing that I learned when alien psychic bigfoot held me in its hairy loving arms:  love one another – it’s the only way to get to a true inner and outer peace.  Except for the “bigfoot is just a critter we don’t have proof of” people – don’t love them.  They’re awful.***

To be clear, I do not claim to have seen a real bigfoot.  I also do not claim to have seen a UFO, except the band, UFO, and them only on YouTube®.

*Yes.  Seven is an excessive number of quilts.  It was also quite warm.

**The bedroom was unheated because I turned off the electric baseboard heaters, and, in an escalating war with Ma Wilder, I eventually flipped the breakers off.  Eventually she got the message.  I like/liked it cold.  I even had the windows cracked sometimes when it was below zero.  I was an awful child.

***Just kidding.  I don’t really care.  My current bet is they’re both wrong.

What is Wealth? Is it More Than Money?

“Aristotle was not Belgian, the principle of Buddhism is not “every man for himself”, and the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.” – A Fish Called Wanda

hallinoates

This may be the most important philosophical question of our lifetime, especially if you’re haulin’ oats.

The other day I was listening to the radio and the hosts (Walton and Johnson) were discussing wealth.  Since actual radio around Casa Wilder consists of a single AM station broadcasting crop reports and lean cattle futures and an FM station that is “All Hall and Mostly Oates, All the Time!”  Therefore?  We listen to radio stations on the Internet.  Walton and Johnson are out of Houston, but we also lived in Alaska, so we also often listen to a station we like out of Fairbanks.  Obviously, when the radio in the bedroom says it’s -40°F and the kitchen radio says it’s 85°F, there’s likely to be wind and a rainstorm down the hallway.

anteater

Maybe I misheard that lyric?

Anyhow, Walton and Johnson were discussing wealth.  They mentioned that a recent study showed that, in Houston, a survey said that to be considered “wealthy” you had to have $2.5 million dollars in net worth.  To be considered “well off” you only needed to have $1.4 million dollars – which is quite a bargain – many people work a whole year and don’t make that much money!

After a bit of research, I found the source of the story:  Charles Schwab®, the investment firm.  You can read the study here (LINK).  In San Francisco (according to Schwab©), it’s even more money than Houston to be considered wealthy:  $4.1 million.

Looking at the best numbers I could find, the median household net worth is about $100,000.  To be in the paltry $2.5 million Houston-wealthy club (versus the expensive San Francisco $4.1 million club), means that your household is in better financial shape than 96% of American households.

But that’s the problem with this survey – since, at most, 4% of the people taking the survey would be considered “wealthy,” most of the people taking it have about as much idea about how much money it requires to be wealthy as a monkey trying to understand Nietzsche.  I mean, apes read philosophy, but they just don’t understand it, Otto.  And I imagine people who aren’t wealthy don’t understand that, either.  The answer is just a bit more complicated . . . .

I’ve done about 70 posts on wealth, but I need to step back and ask that question:  what is wealth?  To say it’s purely a number is to show that you don’t understand wealth.  Money represents not a fixed number, but a possibility.

kissonlist

If you measure wealth in love . . .   

What is wealth?

Wealth is time.  In fact, if you go to the basic equation – your life is made entirely out of time – nothing else.  Your life literally is the sum of the things that you do with your time.  So wealth is doing what you want to do with your time, which means doing what you want to do with your life.  It’s entirely probable that a Wall Street investment banker with $10,000,000 in the bank from a job he hates and shrill wife with more implanted silicon than actual original equipment is less wealthy than a hunting guide who lives in a log cabin in Alaska who has less than $5000 in the bank.

In my case, I’ve traded a LOT of time for money in the past.  My theory was to work hard while I was young so that I could build my career so I could save enough money so that my family would be secure in the future.  You would say that working all the time is not a very wealthy (or in some cases healthy) thing to do, except . . . I loved the job I was doing!  In many cases it was stressful.  Difficult.  Uncertain.  Long hours.  And when I did an awesome job?  Yeah, it was like winning the World Junior Baking Championship.  Not that I can bake, or even that there is a World Junior Baking Championship, but I think you know exactly what I mean.

I watched the documentary Lynyrd Skynyrd:  If I Leave Here Tomorrow this weekend, and those guys simply loved playing music.  They’d do it all day long, even when they weren’t getting paid.  Being a rock star was awesome, sure, but it wasn’t the point.  They were wealthy as soon as they could get paid for playing small clubs.  Arenas were just the gravy.

And, yes, I’ve said in the past (and still maintain) that to support yourself, support your family you might really have to suck it up, buttercup, and work jobs you don’t like because an Alaskan hunting guide has really crappy health insurance and his spouse has neurohemoblastaphobia which can only be cured by a mouse egg (before the baby mice hatch) extract that’s been strained through bigfoot hair and breathed on by an honest politician.  Yes, it’s as expensive as it sounds.  Then you have to work the job you have rather than a job where you play guitar all day.

Wealth is freedom.  Could you quit your job tomorrow without having a new one and still meet all of your obligations?  For most people, the answer is no, either because the obligations are too high or the amount of cash they have is too low – 60% of people in the country live paycheck to paycheck.  However, sometimes it’s self-inflicted.

Some people trade their freedom for a car payment.  I’ve seen people who purchase a $60,000 pickup, and then have to pay $1,200 a month in car payments.  I don’t know about you, but my 4,000 square foot house has a payment of less than $1,000, so it’s not making me freer to be tied to a depreciating asset that I have to pay $14,400 a year for.  Plus insurance.  Plus whatever taxes the state would extract for a $60,000 vehicle.

I have a pickup.  It cost $6,000.  I paid with cash.  It didn’t cost very much because the car dealership was having a hard time selling a stick shift.  The truck runs fine.  Engine is a bit small, but 95% of the time it’s just being driven by a teenager to school and back.

But if your idea of wealth is a $60,000 pickup, I’ll never be wealthy in your eyes.

But I can be free without a $60,000 pickup.

And, no, I’m not a radical get rid of stuff and never buy anything sort of person – I’ve probably got more books on some topics than any library in my state.  And, I’ve bought more than my share of crap in my life, but very little of it has made me happy, and very little of it has made me a better person.  Except for the PEZ®, of course.  And I’ve been on some incredible vacations.

Wealth is time.  Wealth is freedom.  And your wealth is determined by things you “need.”

The less you need?  The wealthier you are, and the more choices you have.

oatsplan

Retirement Spreadsheets, The Apocalypse, and You

“Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” – Forrest Gump

little end

I have no idea where this came from.  But it’s exactly like the one they read to me when I was a wee Wilder.

I have an enormous spreadsheet.  Okay, it’s not really enormous – I’ve made and used much bigger ones at work to calculate the number of licks to get to the center of at Tootsie Roll® Tootsie Pop™.  The number of licks is 573,212 – and not one lick more or less.

This particular spreadsheet:

  • Has yearly calculations from the year 2014 (when I started it) until I turn 103 years old.
  • Divides my spending into 16 categories.
  • Has separate rates of inflation for each category (average inflation rate is 3.6%).
  • Has spots for assumed investment income as well as variable future income from work.
  • Has projected balances on 11 accounts, plus assumed rates of growth.
  • Graphically projects income and net worth . . . until I reach an age where 99.9% of people are dead.

I did use this spreadsheet for one pretty important decision – whether to change jobs back in 2014.  My option back then was to chuck my current job and take a job where I would have a risky proposition at making a big payout in three years or so.  The big payout would have been enough to retire on when combined with my net worth back then, for sure.  Attractive, right?

But it was risky.  How risky?  My first guess was that there was a pretty low probability that it would pay out.  How low?  Maybe 20% chance?

I ranked that against staying in my current job.  I did the math, and it looked like if I could keep my current job for three more years that I could take a differing job, say a high school teacher or flaming poodle-juggler (juggling flaming poodles, not juggling poodles while on fire – that would be stupid), and still keep my standard of living.  Three years of high stress for (relative) economic freedom, or at least more choices.

Hmmm.

I ended up not taking the job, and the risky part won – the job would have been worth much less than the job I would have left, plus the boss I would have worked for?  Yeah, he died three months later.  And my math was right – I’m about where I expected to be as far as net worth.

But I know my prediction is wrong:

  • It assumes that inflation is rather low for a long-ish period – something that I’m not sure is realistic in an economy where the government is attempting to print money as fast as Elon Musk says stupid things on Twitter®. Seriously, Elon, filter, dude, filter.
  • My investments earn about 2.5% every year, after inflation.
  • There’s nothing in there about a civil war or societal collapse.

Huh?  What investments make 2.5% every year after inflation?

No, I kid.

But there’s an entire subgroup of people of people who are preparing for societal collapse – preppers.  They even make television shows about them so that people who are stockpiling food for when the apocalypse comes advertise where they keep all that food.  Thankfully none of their neighbors will remember that after the apocalypse.

I guess (in a small way) that I’m a prepper, too.  The spreadsheet was my prepping – preparing for my career future – and my saving for eventual retirement is prepping, too.

Prepping is preparing, and when done right, it should prepare you for a range of options.  I could liquidate my retirement fortune and buy lots of oatmeal, bendie-straws and PEZ®, but in the sad event that Mad Max® is not the template for the future world, well, what do I do with all those bendie-straws now that California has made them illegal since they enacted common-sense straw registration.

In Houston, we rode out Hurricane Ike back in 2008.  Here is part of what I wrote then – you can find the full thing here (LINK) if you scroll down a bit:

Wow. Didn’t see that coming.

Oh, wait, we did. On radar, on the radio, on the Intertubes. As I said, it was unlikely that we’d stop until the power stopped or the beer ran out.

I still have beer.

At 6:20PM, the lights went out. They flickered on, off, on, off, on, then finally, utterly, off.

(Skipping long description of storm – and moving to the next day.)

We listened to the radio, which mainly told us that the power company wasn’t going to do anything that day (though, that afternoon, The Mrs. indicated that the power had flickered while The Boys and I went out to reconnoiter. Sorry that we missed it, but we did find that there was power on either side of us, not three miles away. No stores were open, and we had no phones. Thankfully, one of the previous announcements for hurricane preparedness had told us to have “food, water, and ammunition” (I am not making this up). We had food for a month, water for a similar time, plus more ammunition than the Pakistani army. We were set.

Eventually, washing came up. I avoided the subject. The Mrs. doused The Boy and Pugsley with coldish water (they howled) and then we ate cold Spaghetti-O’s® and sat around in the dim candlelight. Living in the 18th Century was rapidly losing its charm.

The radio had limited information. The hosts kept telling us to check their website for more information, even though 98% of their listeners were without power. Perhaps the average person has a hand-crank satellite Internet connection?

Then FEMA came on and indicated that you could contact them by calling (no phone!) or by Internet. The Mayor of Houston indicated that within 24 hours they would have 24 trucks of ice in, but he didn’t say where they’d be. He didn’t know.

A representative from our power provider indicated that we might be out of power forever, really, since they had no idea where that mythical lightning in the wire came from. It was really a mystery to them. They even indicated that changing a light bulb might require Federal authority. They began blaming FEMA for the problem. (In actuality, they said that it might be four weeks until the power was back on, in which case I would be looking for a suit of armor, a mighty steed, and a really cool battle-axe.)

On night one, The Mrs. and I had grilled hot dogs over candles. It worked okay, but our hot dogs tasted a bit like apple potpourri.  We started cooking over propane the next day.

The next morning I made coffee for The Mrs. and I. It improved our disposition greatly. Then I cooked ribeye steaks that I’d gotten on sale and frozen. That helped our disposition more. Ribeye for breakfast? Mmmmm.

I took The Boy and Pugsley to see if we could get a generator. This act in Houston (currently) would be like searching for Paris Hilton’s virginity – just not there anymore. Lowe’s® was open, and had a generator. Nah, just kidding. They had bottled water and some Chiclets©.

It appears that hurricanes smell like sex to fire ants (jerkusantus invictus). I got bit five times pulling branches out of my formerly fire-ant free backyard. I then unleashed a genocide of Biblical proportions on them, making the chemical warfare of WWI look like a Disney production of The Little Mermaid® in Candyland™.

I went back inside, and the power-gods deigned to tease us again. The lights flickered during dinner (T-bones and bratwurst saved from spoiling through immolation).

The utter lack of information was maddening. Anecdotal reports of FEMA commandeering truckloads of generators. Reports that Responders (I am ever so tired of that word) being stuck without food – you’da thunk they would have thought far enough ahead to stock up their patrol cars with Snickers®, pantyhose and Pez™ before heading to Houston. No. A Congresscritter was on the air complaining that the responders didn’t food, and wanted THE PEOPLE WHO HAD NO POWER TO COME TO THE NICE AIR CONDITIONED AND POWERED PLACE AND BRING THEM FOOD.

If you’re a responder without chow, you’re part of the problem, not the solution, bubba. I was not feeling sympathetic as I threw out $200 in spoiled food.

Power? That was a myth at this point, the electric company representative, and never really existed. Those things that you call “outlets”? Used for hanging meat to feed short animals. The representative suggested burning furniture to boil water to create steam to power a crude generator. I would have built one, but I had no power for my welder.

We went to bed early. Nice.  The next day I went to work, to an office with power. And ice. And TV. I charged the laptops so the kids could watch Garfield© DVD’s. I had hot coffee. A functioning microwave to dry my socks. I’m not sure why I came home. Oh, yeah, the fam.

I headed home. I saw . . . our porch lights on.

The mythical lightning had returned.

We were actually really prepared for Hurricane Ike.  And we were only out of power for a few days but in reality we could have handled several weeks.

And preppers are really prepared for emergencies.  Some of them have complete surgery kits, antibiotics, and armored vehicles on remote homesteads powered by solar power.  Plus they have gear to survive chemical warfare similar to what an army battalion could attack with after a late-night visit to Taco Bell®.

But the future is funny, because it’s squirmy.  It won’t be as you expect or predict:

  • You might have higher inflation.
  • A totalitarian government might arise when Chelsea Clinton is named Pope®.
  • You might rip the crotch of your jeans during a softball game.
  • The Swiss might finally snap and launch a surprise nuclear attack at the rest of the world.

Each situation that you might run into requires a different response, but in the meantime you have to plan to live a life, but have plans to respond to most reasonable situations.

Should you plan for the stores to be out of food for a week?  Sure.  Should you plan for no power for a week?  Absolutely – a big ice storm can take out the power for months in some locations.

But if the stores were closed for months?  Yeah, that’s a response that’s categorically different, and depends a LOT on where you live.  I live where most of the food comes from – there are grain elevators and cows all around.  In New York City?  Not so much.  But like a wedding between Vladimir Putin and California Governor Jerry Brown, though possible, it’s just not very likely.

Are there general rules to a major disaster?  Maybe.  Here’s a first pass at some based on my experiences where I was in situations that approximated a disaster:

  1. Be flexible. You don’t know the future, but if you’re alert, and think, you can guess at some probably things that might
  2. Be the first out of the door. When it’s obvious that your situation has gone to hell, get out.    Get in line for the re-routed plane.  Get a rental car.  Being late makes everyone in front of you your competition.  Don’t put yourself in that position.
  3. Understand that gone is gone. The universe doesn’t care if it’s not right.  The universe doesn’t care if it’s not fair.  And during an emergency, neither should you.  Your plans are changed.  Your house is on fire.  Your PEZ® has been stolen by the ghost of Tom Petty in a kimono.  Deal with the situation, not your feelings.
  4. Understand that the old rules may not apply. Again, deal with the situation, not your feelings.
  5. Regions matter. Your behavior should tie to the location you’re in.  I’d rather be in central Iowa a year after an apocalypse than Chicago on a Tuesday.
  6. Values and prices change rapidly. $10 for a bag of ice is a bargain if it saves $200 in food.
  7. Laying food and supplies in before an event makes you smart, and removes you from being part of the problem. Doing it after the disaster makes you a hoarder and part of the problem.  Looters and hoarders get shot.
  8. Preppers look like hoarders to hungry people. Don’t talk about your stuff, or sit on the back deck having a ribeye when your neighbor is boiled grain from the silo near the railroad tracks.
  9. Make sure you account for taxation when looking at your investment gains in your retirement portfolio.