[bounce]

I would disagree with you lizard. There is nothing that screams insecurity of oneself, fear of others, and hatred of life than accumulating things that we don't need (or even want) just to keep up with the asshole Jones's.

And I'm willing to bet that guy gets as much pussy as he cares to have. It would be super easy for him to go to a yoga class and pull bitches back to his hole. Plus, he looks surprisingly youthful for a 56 year old living in a hole.

[RenewalMan]

This is what apparently $3000 can get you. I'd be happy living here.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...3-000.html

[j r]

I'm down with a minimalist lifestyle, but I would like to be able to stand up in my own home.

[Blaster]

(11-06-2013 06:12 PM)thedude3737 Wrote:  

Beautiful. That's true freedom right there.

I'd say the majority of Americans are programmed and function to constantly add more to their physical surroundings. Bigger couch, bigger TV, bigger everything. I admit at one point I started on this path, before the red pill kicked in.

I haven't owned a TV in 13 years or so but I've started to reconsider everything else. I never ride my bike. I've got hundreds of books I never pick up that I read years ago. I could definitely downsize my personal belongings.

Imagine coming home to something like this:


To me, it seems instantly calming.

The difficulty I've had is that in spite of taking a fairly minimalist approach (except for clothes) is that to have the few things I really do want is still very expensive.

I pay a lot for the dirt I live on (walking distance of work, nightlife, etc.)
I pay a lot to live high in a clean, secure building with no mice or cockroach problems.
I pay a lot to live in a place where I don't need to hoard quarters just to do laundry (and I don't want to spend my life hand-washing clothes).
I pay a lot to live in such a place by myself, without having to share a bathroom or kitchen.

I've had to work hard to get just to achieve what, to me, seem like fairly baseline living standards for a 1st world country.

[The Lizard of Oz]

thedude3737 brought up Thoreau and "Walden" in a previous post, and indeed this is something worth talking about in this context.

The literature of nature worship that is exemplified in the writing of Thoreau and other writers like Emerson and Rousseau is, in my opinion, one of the most overrated and pernicious strains of the literary.

It is a literature of bookish men who grossly sentimentalize their experiences of "nature" because for all their brilliance, they can't get a good handle on the world around them. The real world of men and, importantly, women.

They find "nature" pleasant because it offers them a blank canvas on which to project their petulant and thwarted sensibility -- thwarted particularly by unfulfilled eros and the inability to control the female as they think they deserve; and they surround this experience with empty rhetoric born entirely of their book learning, the one thing that they really have. "Nature" is never worshiped by those who inhabit it natively; it is worshiped by the brilliant, solipsistic and wounded outsiders.

To be clear, I'm not saying that these men were necessarily "losers" in a conventional or even erotic sense. But I am saying that they were sensitive, bookish and intelligent men who could not truly get a handle on the world, which is what they thought was owed them by dint of their cleverness and assumed superiority. The literary are immodest, self-absorbed and impatient; when they saw that they had no control over the world and particularly over the thing that meant most to them -- women -- they skulked away to "nature" in which they chose to see their genius reflected back at them.

All very understandable, but the literature that it produces is grievously overrated. Yet many have been suckered by its rhetoric.

It is worth hearing what a truly great writer and thinker, Dr. Samuel Johnson, had to say about these subjects:

http://www.samueljohnson.com/cities.html#263

Quote:

"No wise man will go to live in the country, unless he has something to do which can be better done in the country. For instance, if he is to shut himself up for a year to study science, it is better to look out to the fields, than to an opposite wall. Then, if a man walks out in the country, there is nobody to keep him from walking in again: but if a man walks out in London, he is not sure when he will walk in again. A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life."

http://www.samueljohnson.com/london.html#30

Quote:

"Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists."

http://www.samueljohnson.com/london.html#77

Quote:

Johnson: "The happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say, there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit, than in all the rest of the world." Boswell: "The only disadvantage is the great distance at which people live from one another." Johnson: "Yes, Sir, but that is occasioned by the largeness of it, which is the cause of all the other advantages." Boswell: "Sometimes I have been in the humour of wishing to retire to a desart." Johnson: "Sir, you have desart enough in Scotland."

http://www.samueljohnson.com/london.html#238

Quote:

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

Lastly, one must note that conditions have changed to an almost magical extent; there is vastly more learning, interest and experience immediately accessible to anyone with an internet connection than there was in all of Johnson's London. We all live in "London" now. But this does not change the truth of his thinking. When a man is tired of "London" -- meaning, of the true and complex life of the world of thinking and action that surrounds us -- he is tired of life.