RE: if I lost this account, would you care?
There's this aboriginal tribe in Australia... I forget their name, maybe Nathan knows, but they are nomads, travel on foot, measure distance by songs and none of them, not even the oldest and wisest of them can count. They don't know numbers. In a BBC documentary someone asked one of the old men about his sons, he asked "how many sons do you have?" The old mans answer: "Many." The translator repeated the question for the BBC: "Yes, but how many sons do you have?" and the old man repeated the answer from before, "many".
This tribe has a word for "one", which is the same word as for "all", and a word for "many". So after a couple of tries from the BBC and the translator the old man got fed up and, while making a stripe in the sand with his finger for every name he spoke, he said "Peter, Jared, Hanso, Jacob... Many!" (the names aren't accurate, of course) That's how we know he has 4 sons, but the old man himself couldn't care less.
If you fail to see the wisdom contained in this tribe without numbers, if you fail to see how incredibly free these people are, you are a modern man indeed.
I keep laughing and crying at all these posts about a fair world, which the universe doesn't care for in the slightest as Nathan said, that keep using the words "gain" "lose" "risk"... You know them by heart, we all use them every day... @omitaylor uses a very good example by trying to discern when "taking" is "stealing" and when not; the insuline one is so good... But they only all apply in a world, a population with a mindset that thinks there's not enough. No one cares if you take insuline when it's everywhere and free. When "it'just there", like grass or sand, nobody thinks about taking nor stealing, just about being and needing.
The tragedy, the reason why I laugh and cry at the same time with these discussions sometimes is that we all seem to forget, willingly almost, that there is no scarcity of anything. Only the time we have with each other is scarce, and we fuck that up by making everything else scarce. We should all go visit Nathan in Australia and find this tribe. Live with them for a stretch. Unlearn from them.
@zyx066 of course, time is our most precious resource. Although I am sure, there is an AI or blockchain idea somewhere that even now is working on how to stretch time so there is more of it - or an illusion of more. We can idealise tribes in the desert, as we idealise times past, a concept explored in Woody Allen's film, Midnight in Paris, but we can never really know if that was how it was, or, more likely, how we imagined it to be. Currently, I'm living in a remote Aboriginal community in the desert in Australia. I can tell you right now that it's nothing like you suggest that Nathan imagines it to be, LOL! And I doubt it ever was.
You're absolutely right: this 5 or 10 minute talk on a years old documentary is the only thing I know / remeber about this tribe. And it is all I'm repeating here. I would likely not even survive a week there :-)
It's just their mindset, how I imagine that to be based on ten minutes of listening, what I try to communicate here and that I compare to the rat-race we have turned our lives into, again as I see it, and grossly generalizing to make a point. We equate "more" and "faster" with "better" and "higher" and all the while we measure our position on a made-up social ladder by counting what we have. If that's not a prison, I don't know what is.
Meno of course gives a beginning of an answer; if you leave out the measuring, the things he says that sound so obvious, but apparently aren't, suddenly become obvious. At least, in my mind's eye. ;-)
@zyx066 I feel that we have it within our grasp to create a heaven here on earth, but we choose not to do so. If every person took it upon themselves to create a heaven surrounding themselves - as in, inner peace etc. - then we create it collectively. One could imagine that this is the Buddhist philosophy. I personally enjoy a strong sense of inner peace AND happiness. I try to project this in my day-to-day dealings. Sometimes I run out of energy because of the small stuff. We all have a drive to achieve - whatever our nominated goal is - and after that, in life, we are free to enjoy the spoils of that effort. If we didn't strive towards anything, what would our life consist of? What would it be about? Make achievable goals. Get there. Congratulate yourself, move on to the next goal. We can also help others to achieve their goal. Life is a journey. We are writing the story of us...