Your guide to quitting perverse incentives in your life.
As technology makes us more powerful, it also makes that power available for perversion. We must cultivate our characters and our discipline to avoid such perversions. Delegating power to another to save us, is in of itself a perversion.
None of us should be surprised when we give our attention to attention hoarding individuals, and power to power hoarding individuals, and money to money hoarding individuals, then we find ourselves disempowered with only the scraps for us from our week's decisions of how we spent our attention, money, and power.
We must foster (fund through our wallets, our votes, and our attention) what we want, and stop giving it to those who fleece us.
Please create issues and pull requests to improve the guide. If you have something negative to say, try and think of an educational way of putting it, rather than an ego stroking "I'm right, you're wrong way" that just causes unnecessary defenses. Thanks!
Feel free to also grab a time on my calendar and we can work on intergrating your feedback into the document, as by all means, it could do with revision.
You don't need a subscription. You don't need an app. You don't need a service. You don't need an upgrade. You don't need a smartphone.
What all these faux-needs have is they relinquish your agency into something external, rather than in yourself. They put your ability on pause, while you wait.
You can't expect the fruits of your labour, without the countless days of toiling the soil FIRST.
Ever been subscribed to a personality, that over time you grew out of, or even perhaps wondered why you still watch it when they clearly aren't making content targetted towards you as their target market anymore.
They are not your friends, they have no relationship with you.
Junk-food is faux-sustenance. Entertainment is faux-learning. Porn is faux-reproduction. Parasocial is faux-friendships.
Things in life feel good when they increase our evoutionary fitness (survival and reproduction). However, this positive reinforcement towards increased fitness can be exploited by immitations.
Junk food exploits what our body seeks in sustenance, but without the fitness benefits of nutrition.
Entertainment exploits what our mind seeks in situational learning, but without the fitness benfits of embodiment.
Porn exploits what our gonads seeks in reproduction, but without the fitness benefit of a nurturing relationship and genetic children.
Parasocial relationships expoits what our soul seeks in relationships, but without the fitness benefit of a mutual shared connection.
Reach out to the person in the video, the image, the stream. Can you touch and feel them?
Move the monitor to different angles, do they still look at you?
Notice where your hand is, is it on the person and gender you are attracted to?
Who and what are you neglecting with this distraction?
Whose life benefits from your addiction? Is it the lives of those you care about or will care about?
You need support to sustain and grow real intimate relationships, you need friends, and you need honesty and integrity.
Faux-relationships are not real, they do not care for you, they are fleecing you of the time and money of this one mortal life that you have. You need all the time and money you can get, before they expire, to develop your character into someone worthy of being in a relationship and sustaining a family with.
Instead of posting photos on parasocial media to be exploited by faux-connection and manipulated by attention hoarders, instead call or meet your friends and screenshare or show them the photos get their reactions in shared social situation, instead of compressed into one-way platitudes and gesticulations. This not only develops your friendships with real interactions, it limits the exploitation of your digital data and personal life, by companies and strangers who don't actually care for you as much as you'd hope.
Instead of posting the fluctuations of your thoughts immediately onto the internet or in an instant message, instead note those fluctuations in a private journal, and think of friends who you could discuss it with over a real conversation, developing what needs to happen for these inklings of notes to grow enough to be worthwhile of consuming that friend's dedicated and focused time with you to discuss them. They are your friend after all, and friends respect friends time, they don't waste it with nonsense, they grow each other, they cultivate each other, they improve each other.
When you feel a desire for intimacy, realise this is not an impulse to be satiated immediately, but a desire for something that should increase your evolutionary fitness. Become someone of high character so you attract someone worth increasing your fitness with. If you are female, recognise that you have limited time before your eggs deteriorate and the opportunity to find and attract a mate (not just a relationship) will be gone forever if you don't develop your character as soon as possible. If you are male, recognise that you can't pop babies out with whoever you please, that you must act as soon as possible to compound the interest of your time and the fruits of your labour, so that you can compete with other potential mates to get a quality outcome. If you fail to do this, life's limited opportunities in the mating department will pass you by, and that is a bad place to be, as it is filled with faux-entitlement, a guise for the resentment to those who did spend their time wisely. If you are an undesirable woman, you will be surrounded by hoards of undesirable men, with no protector. One must also realise sexual access is not mateship access, and that sleeping with someone is not an exclusive access to them; fidelity is more than access, it is a conviction of character. If you wish for a happy family, one without jealously, infidility, and divorce, then as a man you must avoid whores as they will fleece you as a honeytrap for their own gain, and as a woman, each new sexual encounter reduces your mateship pontential as it ruins your trust in guaranteeing that any father of your child is who you say he is. Also, STDs are a thing, you can be asymptomatic and pass it on, some can make women infertile. So avoid dating apps that optimise for fleecing each other, and focus on developing real friendships, which when the right person comes, your friends can vouch and support you through your courting and family, and protect you and them if anyone's motivations are insincere.
- External resources about the vital importance of reclaiming your attention
- Click farms are only incentivised under perverse markets, markets which benefit from monopolised control, attention hoarding, and data mining; we must remove ourselves from these markets
- There is world outside attention that has been bought and paid for, it's just waiting for you to put your attention into it
- Get support for sutaining an growing real intimate relationships, and not escaping into the fantasy of faux-ones
Each day we make dozens of choices that affect the lives of other humans, animals, as well as plants and the earth. Those choices can be towards people and institutions that coordinate with evil, or those who stand by principles to avoid harm.
For instance, in China, any business with 50 or more employees is now owned by government. This is a government that oppresses its people, harvests organs nonconsenually to the highest bidder, and sends religious groups into concentration camps. When we participate in trade with China incurs no other option but to finance this regime. Companies don't care, they just want their dollar, because their consumers don't care, because you haven't cared. Once you care, you the consumer cares, and the consumer determines the practices of the companies they support, by voting with their dollars dozens of times a day.
Furthermore, the finance insitutions haven't cared, they have cared more about fleecing the population for their own pocket. However, some finance instituions do care. These are companies, which rather than making decisions on what we care for and wish to bring about in the world, we delegate that power to financial instituions that line their pockets with 10x returns while we the capital suppliers to them get 1% interest a year in an inflationairy currency (inflation is where the government dilutes the exchange rate of the currency, by printing more of it into their pockets while increasing its relative sacrcity in ours).
If you were to walk around a block in a middle-class neighbourhood, there would be millions of dollars sitting in retirement and saving funds, being utilised by financial instituions to fund wars, fund oppression, and fleece populations. However, while in many jurisidictions you cannot withdraw these mandatory funds - mandatory retirement funds are a tool of governments to constraint the flow of money to their lobbyers - you can fight back by selecting which funds you use.
There are many funds, many companies, and many currencies, that are better than the ones fleecing you.
- Learn the life saving importance of where your funds go
- Acces non-inflationary currencies
- Retirement funds for Australians where they can select the ethicacy of the investments
- Electricity companies in Australia that focus on renewable national energy
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