Soul-sucking capitalism and hypocritical heroes. There’s a lot to unpack there.
I remember the first time I discovered one of my heroes was a hypocrite. He was the guy who organized thousand mile bike trip vacations for his family and a couple of us young bucks who were his acolytes. He drove an old VW Beetle, the ultimate righteous vehicle, and I would feel such pride when I saw him driving around town in the winter wearing an Air Force survival parka and using a cigarette lighter to defrost the windshield. He lived in a house he built debt free with the help of friends, and it looked like a solar heated woolly dog in a sea of cracker boxes. He had a Salvador Dali mustache and was a photographer who, when a beautiful rodeo queen didn’t pay for the life sized print of herself in full rodeo queen regalia she ordered from him, glued it to the wall of his outhouse in a fit of spite. He was a fine craftsman who built beautiful furniture and at the time in his life when most men drive big Buicks and wear wingtip shoes, he packed up and moved to Texas to do an MFA in sculpture. And he always grew a huge beautiful garden, which is where I discovered his Achilles heel of hypocrisy. He used a gas-powered weed eater. When I saw that weed eater, my heart sank. Here was a man, my mentor, my hero, who after doing everything else right, used a gas-powered weed eater. It took me years to digest the fact that even heroes sometimes walk on feet of clay.
And yet, for all that flaw of his, he helped me learn to think my way through the maze of soul-sucking capitalism. I hated the fact that everything new, expensive, and shiny rather quickly became obsolete, last year’s unthinkably primitive model, and depreciated into worthless, all so we would turn right around and in-debt ourselves again by buying another newest and shiniest. The answer? Just don’t need stuff, and the stuff you do need, buy it when it is obsolete, unthinkably primitive, and costs 3 cents on the dollar of the price a new one. I went through the righteous car phase and froze my ass off for a few years even while wearing an Air Force survival parka and defrosting my VW Beetle windshield with a battle-worn Zippo lighter. Eventually I had an epiphany moment: buy the slightly less righteous stuff with actual heaters that worked, an idea I built upon in other endeavors. It’s more important to be righteous than to own righteous. It became my Quest, my One Big Thing. Like my friend, I built and paid for my own house. I was free to roam the world, but always had a refuge to return to, my place on Earth. I could pick and choose how to give away my life, so instead of climbing some corporate ladder, indebting myself to a ball and chain of depreciating stuff, and yearning for the sweet taste of freedom, I took a different path and it worked for me. Sometimes charting a new path toward one’s dreams can be a frightening venture, but it is worth the effort, and O! what stories a red-pilled mind can tell.
I’m not sure depending on the expensive and ever “improving” products of soul-sucking capitalism is the way to a free soul and clear conscious, and I’m absolutely certain that my answer is not the correct answer for someone else, but an answer is out there. It can become the Quest and save one from a brittle, sucked dry soul. Toss aside the conventional, search for the truly needful and find a way to achieve it with minimal hypocrisy, maybe limited to a metaphorical weed eater or two. Your answer is out there somewhere.
And that right there is my version of the Jordan Peterson Speech that Every Young Man Needs to Hear.
This comment is an article in itself. As usual, it’s filled with sardonic wit but sincere. I hope to see this character return in one of your own posts!
Thanks, Nolan. You and a few others on Substack always get me thinking and I often turn my comments into full posts. It’s the Substack Dialectic.
I’m kind of curious about something: has anyone ever made a crack to you about the 3:10 to Yuma? If not, may I be the first? Otherwise, it falls into the category of Of All My Regrets In Life, Why Didn’t I ________ . For instance, why didn’t I name my daughter Alexa? Why O! Why?
Unfortunately, whether they realize it or not, Substack's founders are ensuring their success remains limited in Europe because they won't enforce their own community guidelines in a way that keeps them out of the crosshairs of the EU's Digital Services Act.
Ach , no one is perfect. Yuval Noah Harari is a human so he must be hypocrite too. It 's human behavior. Hypocrisy often is just being not consequent. People that a
Thanks for the shout out and always advocating to have more non-English voices here on Substack. I am happy to say I have found one in @Talìa Cu, a journalist whose mission is to talk about fashion in Latin America in Spanish with her newsletter @Latin Zine. She has been making me read in Spanish which I haven't done for years, despite loving the language. What I appreciate about her newsletter is that it focuses a lot on the fact that in Latin America the fashion industry is intrisincally tied to the socio-political climate. Something that is glossed over in Occident.
Always a pleasure to read your thought and discover authors I didn't know about!
I am on the look out for more "foreign" Substack but written in English, though I speak several languages, my first language is English, and I think we should not discount the voices of people all over the world that is not America that is writing in English.
Soul-sucking capitalism and hypocritical heroes. There’s a lot to unpack there.
I remember the first time I discovered one of my heroes was a hypocrite. He was the guy who organized thousand mile bike trip vacations for his family and a couple of us young bucks who were his acolytes. He drove an old VW Beetle, the ultimate righteous vehicle, and I would feel such pride when I saw him driving around town in the winter wearing an Air Force survival parka and using a cigarette lighter to defrost the windshield. He lived in a house he built debt free with the help of friends, and it looked like a solar heated woolly dog in a sea of cracker boxes. He had a Salvador Dali mustache and was a photographer who, when a beautiful rodeo queen didn’t pay for the life sized print of herself in full rodeo queen regalia she ordered from him, glued it to the wall of his outhouse in a fit of spite. He was a fine craftsman who built beautiful furniture and at the time in his life when most men drive big Buicks and wear wingtip shoes, he packed up and moved to Texas to do an MFA in sculpture. And he always grew a huge beautiful garden, which is where I discovered his Achilles heel of hypocrisy. He used a gas-powered weed eater. When I saw that weed eater, my heart sank. Here was a man, my mentor, my hero, who after doing everything else right, used a gas-powered weed eater. It took me years to digest the fact that even heroes sometimes walk on feet of clay.
And yet, for all that flaw of his, he helped me learn to think my way through the maze of soul-sucking capitalism. I hated the fact that everything new, expensive, and shiny rather quickly became obsolete, last year’s unthinkably primitive model, and depreciated into worthless, all so we would turn right around and in-debt ourselves again by buying another newest and shiniest. The answer? Just don’t need stuff, and the stuff you do need, buy it when it is obsolete, unthinkably primitive, and costs 3 cents on the dollar of the price a new one. I went through the righteous car phase and froze my ass off for a few years even while wearing an Air Force survival parka and defrosting my VW Beetle windshield with a battle-worn Zippo lighter. Eventually I had an epiphany moment: buy the slightly less righteous stuff with actual heaters that worked, an idea I built upon in other endeavors. It’s more important to be righteous than to own righteous. It became my Quest, my One Big Thing. Like my friend, I built and paid for my own house. I was free to roam the world, but always had a refuge to return to, my place on Earth. I could pick and choose how to give away my life, so instead of climbing some corporate ladder, indebting myself to a ball and chain of depreciating stuff, and yearning for the sweet taste of freedom, I took a different path and it worked for me. Sometimes charting a new path toward one’s dreams can be a frightening venture, but it is worth the effort, and O! what stories a red-pilled mind can tell.
I’m not sure depending on the expensive and ever “improving” products of soul-sucking capitalism is the way to a free soul and clear conscious, and I’m absolutely certain that my answer is not the correct answer for someone else, but an answer is out there. It can become the Quest and save one from a brittle, sucked dry soul. Toss aside the conventional, search for the truly needful and find a way to achieve it with minimal hypocrisy, maybe limited to a metaphorical weed eater or two. Your answer is out there somewhere.
And that right there is my version of the Jordan Peterson Speech that Every Young Man Needs to Hear.
This comment is an article in itself. As usual, it’s filled with sardonic wit but sincere. I hope to see this character return in one of your own posts!
Thanks, Nolan. You and a few others on Substack always get me thinking and I often turn my comments into full posts. It’s the Substack Dialectic.
I’m kind of curious about something: has anyone ever made a crack to you about the 3:10 to Yuma? If not, may I be the first? Otherwise, it falls into the category of Of All My Regrets In Life, Why Didn’t I ________ . For instance, why didn’t I name my daughter Alexa? Why O! Why?
Haha, yup, 3:10 is usually the first and only thing that comes to mind when people hear my name.
I love this. Thanks for the shout out!
Unfortunately, whether they realize it or not, Substack's founders are ensuring their success remains limited in Europe because they won't enforce their own community guidelines in a way that keeps them out of the crosshairs of the EU's Digital Services Act.
That hasn’t crossed my mind. Thank you for bringing that up. That would be a really interesting article.
are 100 % consequent are generally terrible people or at least Insufferable.
“People who 100 % consequent are generally terrible people or at least Insufferable.” That’s a too remember. I love it, Frank.
Ach , no one is perfect. Yuval Noah Harari is a human so he must be hypocrite too. It 's human behavior. Hypocrisy often is just being not consequent. People that a
"...you’re not mind fucked into doing so."
Exactly. And pretty much everything else you say about social media.
Thanks for the shout out and always advocating to have more non-English voices here on Substack. I am happy to say I have found one in @Talìa Cu, a journalist whose mission is to talk about fashion in Latin America in Spanish with her newsletter @Latin Zine. She has been making me read in Spanish which I haven't done for years, despite loving the language. What I appreciate about her newsletter is that it focuses a lot on the fact that in Latin America the fashion industry is intrisincally tied to the socio-political climate. Something that is glossed over in Occident.
Always a pleasure to read your thought and discover authors I didn't know about!
Thank you, Emmanuelle! I’ve been looking for more Spanish newsletters. I just subscribed to Latin Zine.
Very happy to know you subscribed! I hope you will enjoy her work!
I am on the look out for more "foreign" Substack but written in English, though I speak several languages, my first language is English, and I think we should not discount the voices of people all over the world that is not America that is writing in English.
For sure!
Thank you, Nolan🙏❤️
A|wo|men.
Thank you, Tonya!