With age and experience (can) come wisdom, so they say….
Plenty of red pillers will tell you to dump emotional and mental baggage, but something else is coming to pass in my life, I’m getting back to that stage where I am feeling the need to dump physical baggage.
Now, my trade was originally engineer, so I am not talking about throwing out my last 1/2″ AF spanner, but I am talking about a bunch of the other shit, some really cool, shit, but really cool shit that in reality I almost never use, really cool stuff that in reality, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, I only got into in the first place as a sort of comforter, because I knew the train I was on was destined for a slow motion wreck somewhere up ahead on a curve.
I use this same analogy when it comes to people and their data, if you have data stashed away on disks or backups that you haven’t even accessed in 12 months or more, chances are you are never going to actually NEED it, but unlike data, physical shit is a whole other ball game.
Let’s take my lathe, for some years now I have been going to convert this to CNC, as I did with the mill, and basically back along the way I bought it to do a specific job, and figured that even if I only broke even on the job, I got a free lathe, so the job paid for the tool, a thing I did many times back when I was engineering.
I have now had that lathe 6+ years, and apart from that initial job, I think I may have used it all of six times, all for pissy little do nothing jobs that I did in a lathe because it was there, but which I would have done by a different method if I did not have that lathe.
I have put that lathe into storage once, when my psycho skank ho ex first kicked off, and paid for storage for 2+ years, and I have moved it twice.
In addition, because I have a lathe (and other machine tools) I can’t just rent a small pad, instead I basically go looking for a small workshop with attached accommodations, and so in the end live in places I would not normally live in, and pass up living in places that I would otherwise be quite happy to live in.
Sure, you can say the lathe is an asset, but it is an asset that has cost me real money to keep over the years, and which has materially affected my lifestyle and accommodations over the years, and which basically has not earned me any fucking money on anything even remotely approaching break even for those expenses over the years.
Of course the old adage that if you want to buy X it will cost you a thousand bucks, but if you own X and want to sell it you’ll be lucky to see two hundred holds true.
Fact is, it has cost me more to KEEP this lathe than I paid for it, or than I would get selling it… and that is not a cost that is going to go away.
Frankly speaking I haven’t had any jobs that ___I___ wanted to do, that these tools allowed me to do, that otherwise I would not have been able to, what HAS happened is I have used them to do cheap ass jobs for friends and relatives, who would never pay full price for those jobs anyway.
So, in a real sense, the lathe is a Totem, it is a symbol of what I was trying to hold on to, back before it all went to shit… and like all symbols, they have a real and significant cost of upkeep.
In English culture there is a thing where someone with money builds a pointless and useless structure on their land, these were called follies, and it’s where the word comes from, it is a folly for a red pill man to hold on to and maintain totems, shrines to a former life.
The red pill is in reality much deeper than many people assume at first, you can’t take the red pill, look at all the shit you have, and NOT see that everything that you own can be taken away from you on a whim, with the stroke of a pen, by the same sorts of assholes that populated the secret family courts.
Nice lathe you have there man, say the bailiffs looking to collect cunt tax the courts ordered you to pay your psycho skank ho ex, and sure, you can go down the whole shit route of having that lathe owned by a company that is owned by a company that is owned by a company you own, and you just rent the fucker from the last company in the chain, but you’re just feeding the machine that fucked you over in the first place.
The red pill in reality is you just can’t own that much shit, the only thing the system doesn’t bother fucking with too much is the proverbial man of straw, and we already found out the so called protections from iniquity you were expecting to benefit from as an upstanding citizen were largely illusory anyway.
If it does not ALL fit into one load on a rented Ford Transit van, then brother, you have too much shit…
If not being surrounded with your shit leaves you with vague feelings of unease, insecurity and discomfort, then brother you haven’t fully absorbed the red pill into your system and psyche.
“Owning shit” and being a man of substance with a nice house full of nice shit was all part of the big con game anyway, just ask the people of Cyprus today, or anyone else in Europe later this year, whether by inflation or taxation or government decree or court order, it is all stripping you of your assets, and you get 5 cents on the dollar credit for it.
I guess that’s why I took so long to actually sit down and look at all my shit and do some sums about what I paid and what it cost me to keep and what it earns me and what I could sell it for, it took so long because I knew I wouldn’t like the answers.
Not because the answers were that I have already lost money on all that shit and it is never coming back, but because the answers were that it was all just a set of Totems, and if I actually intend to move along and continue to survive in this life, I have to quit worshipping the totems, and cut em down and roast some marshmallows.
It’s time to keep moving, stop being a slow / stationary target.
