A Miser’s Death

A miser had accumulated five hundred thousand dinars and looked forward to a year of pleasant living before he made up his mind how best to invest his money, when suddenly the Angel of Death appeared before him to take his life away.

The man begged and pleaded and used a thousand arguments to be allowed to live a little longer, but the angel was obdurate. “Give me three days of life and I shall give you half my fortune,” the man pleaded. The angel wouldn’t hear of it and began to tug at him.

“Give me just one day, I beg of you, and you can have everything I accumlated through so much sweat and toil.”

The angel was adamant still.

He was able to wring just one little concession from the angel-a few moments in which to write down this note:

“Oh you, whoever you are that happen to find this note, if you have enough to live on, don’t waste your life accumulating fortunes. Live!

My five hundred thousand dinars could not buy me a single hour of life!”

— From ‘Heart of the Enlightened’ By Anthony de Mello

The Rule of Lao Tzu

Lao Tzu became very famous, a wise man, and he was without doubt one of the wisest men ever. The emperor of China asked him very humbly to become his chief of the supreme court, because nobody could guide the country’s laws better than he could. He tried to persuade the emperor, “I am not the right man,” but the emperor was insistent.

Lao Tzu said, “If you don’t listen to me… just one day in the court and you will be convinced that I am not the right man, because the system is wrong. Out of humbleness I was not saying the truth to you. Either I can exist or your law and order and your society can exist. So… let us try it.”

The first day a thief who had stolen almost half the treasures of the richest man in the capital was brought into the court. Lao Tzu listened to the case and then he said that the thief and the richest man should both go to jail for six months.

The rich man said, “What are you saying? I have been stolen from, I have been robbed—what kind of justice is this, that you are sending me to jail for the same amount of time as the thief?”

Lao Tzu said, “I am certainly being unfair to the thief. Your need to be in jail is greater, because you have collected so much money to yourself, deprived so many people of money… thousands of people are downtrodden and you are collecting and collecting money. For what? Your very greed is creating these thieves. You are responsible.

The first crime is yours.

— From Freedom: The Courage to Be Yourself By Osho

Juggling blood and fire

CHRIS: I’m thinking about going to Alaska.
WAYNE: Alaska, Alaska? Or city Alaska? The city Alaska does have markets.
CHRIS: No, Alaska, Alaska. I want to be all the way out there. On my own. No map. No watch. No axe. Just out there. Big mountains, rivers, sky. Game. Just be out there in it. In the wild.
WAYNE: In the wild.
CHRIS: Yeah. Maybe write a book about my travels. About getting out of this sick society.
WAYNE: Society, right.
CHRIS: Because you know what I don’t understand? I don’t understand why, why people are so bad to each other, so often. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Judgement. Control. All that.
WAYNE: Who “people” we talking about?
CHRIS: You know, parents and hypocrites. Politicians and pricks.
WAYNE: This is a mistake. It’s a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff. Alex, you’re a helluva young guy, but I promise you this: You’re a young guy. Blood and fire! You’re juggling blood and fire!

— Into the Wild

Ultimate Freedom

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes, Ultimate Freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return `cause the “west is the best”. And now after two rambling years, comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking, bringing him to the great white north. No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

— ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP MAY 1992 (in Into the Wild)

Living dangerously

Maybe it is time to consider living dangerously. Maybe it’s time to reject the commands of power, the dictates of society and public opinion, and to stop worrying about what other people think about what you do. You have the power and ability to create your own reality — to change what isn’t working and to manifest what you desire.

— Dick Sutphen

Meaningful, significant work

Given the amount of time we spend working, failure to find meaningful, significant work is not just a minor misstep in living out God’s plan; it is a deeper kind of failure that can make each day feel like living death.

— Dan Miller

Raise a child

It takes a whole village to raise a child.

— African proverb

Pale Blue Dot

O fim último da vida

Não tenho filhos e tremo só de pensar. Os exemplos que vejo em volta não aconselham temeridades. Hordas de amigos constituem as respectivas proles e, apesar da benesse, não levam vidas descansadas. Pelo contrário: estão invariavelmente mergulhados numa angústia e numa ansiedade de contornos particularmente patológicos. Percebo porquê. Há cem ou duzentos anos, a vida dependia do berço, da posição social e da fortuna familiar. Hoje, não. A criança nasce, não numa família mas numa pista de atletismo, com as barreiras da praxe: jardim-escola aos três, natação aos quatro, lições de piano aos cinco, escola aos seis, e um exército de professores, explicadores, educadores e psicólogos, como se a criança fosse um potro de competição.

Eis a ideologia criminosa que se instalou definitivamente nas sociedades modernas: a vida não é para ser vivida – mas construída com sucessos pessoais e profissionais, uns atrás dos outros, em progressão geométrica para o infinito. É preciso o emprego de sonho, a casa de sonho, o maridinho de sonho, os amigos de sonho, as férias de sonho, os restaurantes de sonho.

Não admira que, até 2020, um terço da população mundial esteja a mamar forte no Prozac. É a velha história da cenoura e do burro: quanto mais temos, mais queremos. Quanto mais queremos, mais desesperamos. A meritocracia gera uma insatisfação insaciável que acabará por arrasar o mais leve traço de humanidade. O que não deixa de ser uma lástima.

Se as pessoas voltassem a ler os clássicos, sobretudo Montaigne, saberiam que o fim último da vida não é a excelência, mas sim a felicidade!

— João Pereira Coutinho (jornalista)

Scarcity vs. Post Scarcity

Scarcity

Scarcity (also called paucity) is the problem of infinite human needs and wants, in a world of finite resources. In other words, society does not have sufficient productive resources to fulfill those wants and needs. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society’s goals can be pursued at the same time; trade-offs are made of one good against others. In an influential 1932 essay, Lionel Robbins defined economics as “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”

Post Scarcity

Post scarcity or post-scarcity describes a hypothetical form of economy or society, often explored in science fiction, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would be due to an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods, allowing manufacturing to be as easy as duplicating software.

Even without postulating new technologies, it is conceivable that already there exists enough energy, raw materials and biological resources to provide a comfortable lifestyle for every person on Earth. However even a hypothetical political or economic system able to achieve this lifestyle for everyone would generally not be termed a “post-scarcity society” unless the production of goods was sufficiently automated that virtually no labor was required by anyone. (It is usually assumed there would still be plenty of voluntary creative labor, such as a writer creating a novel or a software engineer working on open-source software.)

— Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia