Clippings from "Zero World Problems"

 Greetings Cappy Readers!

With the advent of streaming it is obvious many of your favorite bloggers no longer write, and instead have been sucked into the realm of podcasting/streaming.  I am one of those victims.

However, I am writing my latest book "Zero World Problems," some pieces of which were removed/editing from the book.  These "clippings," though well-written, end up on the editing floor as they don't really fit in the book.  

I present one here just to keep the ole blog alive and give our old school readers a little something to read:

Post-material economies require non-material standards of living. Which means the first thing you need to do is reject your conventional middle school values and all the materialism that comes with it. This is easier said that done in that humans are biologically addicted to consumption and socially programmed to hold it as the most important thing in their lives. But it doesn't change the fact that if you don't ditch materialism as the most important thing in life, you are more or less guaranteed to waste yours, suffering the miserable "punting lives" described above.

How one does this is up to the individual. They can read Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, putting it into practice in their own lives. They can study minimalism and make it their personal financial strategy. Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism, Ikigai, Confucianism, and Taoism are great resources for understanding the philosophical benefits and reasons for a non-material life. And a simple and dirty trick is to just use Facebook to look up all the materialist assholes you had to deal with in your past and see just how miserable, fat, and debt-ridden they are. Regardless of how you get to this epiphany, it is your responsibility to do so. But if there's a trick, if there's a short cut to giving you the needed motivation to abandon your middle school values, it's realizing one thing;

Just how much cheaper it is to abandon your material goals.

For all practical points and purposes, you will never achieve the level of wealth you want. It just isn't going to happen as you'll always want more. But in that vain pursuit, it will cost you everything in life. You money, your time, your happiness, your youth, and your health. But imagine for a second you didn't care what other people thought about you. Imagine if you didn't need to buy a fancy car, fancy clothes, attend an overpriced school, or live in some uppity neighborhood. What if your car payment, your mortgage/rent, and your credit card bills were all 1/3rd they are today? What if you only bought what you needed, and not what society demanded? What could you do?

Could you sleep in and enjoy a coffee before you had to drive to work?

Could you walk to work as you could afford a smallish apartment near your job?

Could you work 30 hours a week instead of 60 since your car was paid off?

What if you had no student loan debt? Would that improve your standard of living?

What if you were never divorced? Would that improve your life?

And what price would you place on never having to worry about money ever again?

The truth is the average American has no idea how close they are to financial freedom. How much easier it would be if they would just give up all the Edina Castle Rock Scottsdale Cavaricci bullshit. How much richer they'd be owning less, allowing them to do more. And while this book has made some philosophical arguments for replacing material standards of living with non-material ones, that is not the main intention of this book. Those arguments have been much better presented in the works of Stoic and Eastern philosophers (of which you should absolutely read). The purpose of this book is a more economically practical one with a "do now, understand later" approach. It is to identify new specific standards we should be pursuing in this post-material world. It is to identify new life goals and objectives that will lead to a better, more fulfilled life. It is to give you a list of specific new economic goals to achieve so you know what to pursue in life after you've achieved enough materially. It is to make you want these goals more than you want a Ferrari or side by side.

These new economic standards of living will fall the following categories:

Freedom

Simplicity

Peace of Mind

Your Home, and

Your Health

It will be through these things humanity can continue to advance and the individual can continue to pursue happiness.