I came to a very sudden realization about what my life is actually going to be about. I think what I have always felt is that the underlying reason that I need to have a job and a career is because that is how we survive in the world. Early man needed to hunt and gather food to survive. I need a job and a career to survive.
My mind has been changed. It became especially obvious once I saw that my current job helps the world's survival in no way. However my job is perfectly explained by memetic theory.
What I do at work doesn't help people survive. It helps ideas and tons of abstract things continue to thrive.
And this led to an important realization about money. Money is not very useful in helping people survive. Money is the ultimate abstraction of value. Money completely replaces real value with virtual value. The effect of the creation of money was enormous in memetic terms. Since money can effectively come out of nowhere, it can act as a nearly unlimited resource for the creation of memes. Generally replicators will always run into trouble with limited resources. But money allowed for the proliferation of the useless. It allowed things that are in no way related to survival to thrive since value was so thoroughly abstracted.
Money also created very weird situations to develop. A lottery is an especially weird situation as it represents a time when value magically appears out of nowhere and can drive the proliferation of particularly odd and useless memes.
What this means to me now is that money is not tied to my survival. It is tied to how I will affect the memetic movement of the world.
Money is not evil. But it is controlling us and we have forgotten that there are ways of surviving with out it.
Kyler
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