We all want something better, but what’s nature’s point of view?
Without the ups and downs, it’s just a flatline. We can have both pleasure and pain, or neither.
As mobile organisms, with a sequential thought process to navigate and then narrating our journeys and building civilizations out of the collected knowledge, with the stories with the most impact being the most repeated, we think reality is this narrative arc, with some pot of gold at the end.
Yet time isn’t really even the point of the present moving past to future, as it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
The potential is nearly infinite, while the actual is a small fraction of that and the residual, of memory and history, only a tiny bit of that. Future, present, past.
We are motivated by the desires of the heart, yet judged by the considerations of the head. Energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Like galaxies, or societies. Liberal versus conservative.
Consciousness is like energy, always and only present, while emotions and thoughts are the forms generated, rising and falling like waves.
The process churns along, past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Lives go birth to death, while life shuffles onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Thought simply being the fully formed emotions, of the cresting waves, then receding. We feel life coming, we only see it receding.
We seek some immortality as a continuation of our narrative, but time is only an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We are little bubbles of being in space and the only immortality is seeing ourselves in others, as our networks grow. So we need them to be healthy networks, like trees. Not little atomized shells, where a parasitic, metastatic financial system mediates most relationships.
Money is a contract, with one side an asset and the other a debt, but we experience it as quantified hope and try to save and store it, like a commodity.
To save the asset, similar amounts of debt are necessary. Which creates a centripetal effect, as positive feedback draws the asset to the center of society, while negative feedback pushes the debt to the edges.
Though as the value circulation mechanism of the community, similar to blood and arteries in the body, this is like the heart telling the hands and feet they don’t need so much blood and should work harder for what they do get.
The second effect is that the government has become the debtor of last resort. Where would those trillions go otherwise? Bid the markets up a little more?
Public debt backs private wealth. So, among other things, we are blowing up other countries to sustain the illusion of surplus notational value.
Money is a medium. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the fluids passing through our bodies. Hypothetically, what if the government was to tax out what it currently borrows?
After the freaking out, people would start storing value in other ways.
We mostly save for the same reasons; raising children, housing, healthcare, retirement, etc. If these could be invested in as community assets, rather than everyone trying to save for them individually, we would have stronger communities and healthier environments.
The irony of our individualistic culture is that it creates atomized societies, that are more easily controlled by institutional authority and mediated by parasitic financial systems. The networks are as essential as the nodes.
Does nature care, as it fluctuates between the absolute and the infinite?
Don’t push it too far.
Karma is a bitch. The feedback.
Thermodynamics all the way down.
