To Every Human Being

Table of Contents:

Hello!

You don't know me and I don't know you, but if you are reading this, it's safe to assume we are both humans.

This means that we have a lot in common. We live on the same planet (at least for now), in the same solar system, in the same galaxy, and in the same universe. There may be more beyond the ever-expanding horizon that we currently cannot see past, but none of us really know as of right now.

More importantly, we belong to the same species that we call homo sapiens, or simply humans. You and I carry with us DNA that is 99.9% identical, according to the 2003 Human Genome Project. And deep down you and I both want the same things.

One way to put this into words is to say we both want to Survive, Thrive, and Reproduce. Another one is to simply say we both want to Love and Be Loved. A third one is to say we both want to Be Happy, but we might not have the same interpretation of what that means.

Now, I really want to tell you something. Which is:

I truly love you and I wish you nothing but the best.

I’m sorry if that feels like too much too soon, but I feel like I can really relate to you and understand you. We are largely the same after all.

We have of course spent our time in different environments, all the way from when we started developing in our mothers’ bellies, throughout our childhoods, and possibly into some number of adult years (I don’t know how old you are, but I am an adult). And we have both been influenced by and learned from our environments in an attempt to better fulfill our own needs. But deep down we remain the same and we want the same things, even if these things take different shapes in our everyday lives.

Because of this, I understand that in every moment you are doing what you judge to be best for you, and in some moments you may be doing what you judge to be best for both you and others. I love that about you, and I am the exact same!! We have sooo much in common! We should totally be friends!!!

Now that we’re friends (I hope you said yes 🤞), I’d really like to talk to you about a few serious things, that I believe are extremely important not just to you and I, but to all humans, and arguably to a lot more than just humanity. I hope that’s alright with you. If not, feel free to stop listening to me now.

Before I dive into these topics though, because I care about your well-being, there are two things that I urge you to keep in mind as I talk to you:

1) A thing is a thing, not what is said of that thing. I am about to share with you my views on a number of topics. No matter what I say, my words don't have to change your view on the world. We are all free to create our own world views, and you are you and I am I.

Your views on these topics undoubtedly differ from mine. You are welcome to agree with me on some points and adjust your own views, but I hope you'll feel just as free to completely disagree with me on others and stick to your own views.

I love you regardless of your views, and I encourage you to make up your own mind. I do not know everything, and friends like you with thoughts and feelings different from my own (especially if you are able to articulate them) help me to learn and grow! So thank you for being you!


2) It's very likely that some of the things I'll talk about will be triggering/upsetting to you. I wish there was a way to avoid this, but unfortunately there isn't.

Some of the things I will say to you may give you an existential crisis. Other things may bring up something unbearably painful that happened in your past. Others may challenge some of your beliefs that you are not ready to let go off. You may end up wanting to fight me to defend and protect yourself. If that happens, that's okay. Of course I'll still love you.


One thing you can choose to do is to find a close friend (or a few) that you trust to listen to me with together, so you can support each other if anything I say ends up upsetting any one of you.

Alrighty then! I think we're ready now. Let's begin.

Part 1: The Way the Universe Works

Chapter 1: The History of the Universe

My story starts with the Big Bang, just like your story and my story also started with a big bang. Ain’t that a funny coincidence?

Anyhow, the big bang happened 13.8B(illion) years ago and created the universe as we know it. Our solar system came into existence 4.568B years ago, and our planet Earth was formed a very brief 28M(illion) years after that.


The first 500M (4.54B – 4B years ago) years of our planet’s existence were a mess. We’ve dubbed this period the Hadean Eon named after Hades, god of the underworld. Probably because Earth was a hellhole back then. Temperatures were too hot for any life to exist, and most of Earth was plagued by constant volcanic eruptions.

Things eventually cooled down a bit and the following 1.5B years (4B – 2.5B years ago) were arguably the most peaceful years in our planet’s existence. During this period called the Archean Eon, most of Earth consisted of a gigantic ocean deeper than any of today’s oceans. This may not be the most suitable environment for humans, but early life did manage to develop. At the moment we only have hypotheses for how life began, but the field of abiogenesis is hard at work trying to figure it out. Either way, Earth was a warm and moist place, and things tend to grow well in warm and moist places.

Next came the Proterozoic Eon, which lasted 2B years (2.5B – 538.8M years ago). This period started with the Great Oxidation Event, during which bacteria flooded the earth’s atmosphere with oxygen over the span of 400M years. This caused most life on Earth to go extinct, because it was not used to and unable to adapt to living in an oxygen rich atmosphere. But soon after, new life began to flourish in the form of Fungi, Sponges, Algae, and other types of Eukaryotes (you and I are also Eukaryotes fyi).

I’m sure the Proterozoic Eon was a lovely time to be alive, but it did not last forever. The next Eon, called the Phanerozoic Eon, should ring a bell. Wait… you’ve never heard of it? Well, unless you are reading this hundreds of millions of years after I am writing this, we are both living in the Phanerozoic Eon. It started 538.8M years ago and it is still the Eon we live in today in the year 2025.

Now we’re moving from Eons into Eras. Which makes me wonder whether Taylor Swift will ever do an Eons Tour, but I digress.


The Phanerozoic Eon started with the Paleozoic Era (538.8M – 251.9M years ago). Which began with the Cambrian Explosion, an event during which a large amount of new complex life formed during a very short 13-25M year period, similar to how the Earth formed in “only” 28M years. Undoubtedly this time during the Cambrian Explosion must’ve been a very exciting time to be alive.

But the fun didn’t end there. The rest of the Paleozoic Era was filled with exciting events as well, such as:
  • The evolution of corals and jawless fish
  • Continents playing bumper cars
  • Terrestrial life establishing itself on land
  • The Age of the Fish
  • 70% of all species going extinct in the Late Devonian Extinction events
  • 90% of all Earth’s coal beds being deposited during just 2% of Earth’s geologic history
  • The evolution of the first reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and synapsids (ancestors of mammals)
  • The Great Dying. An extinction event during which 57% of all biological families* went extinct
*(1 family can consist of many separate species, so a much higher % of species went extinct. e.g. 81% of marine species were wiped out during the great dying.)

Hmm… maybe it wasn’t all fun and games back then after all.

 Say hello to grandpa! You and I evolved from a cousin of this synapsid.


The next Era during the Phanerozoic Eon is the Era before the one we currently live in. It is called the Mesozoic Era and lasted from 252M to 66M years ago. This is the Era during which Dinosaurs ruled Earth.

I feel quite bad for the Dinosaurs, because they not only had to evolve in the wake of the largest extinction event in Earth’s history (the great dying), and they not only had to live through another one of Earth’s five largest extinction events in the Triassic-Jurassic Extinction Event, their era essentially came to an end with the Cretaceous-Paleogene Extinction Event, yet another top 5 extinction event in Earth’s history… poor dinosaurs :( The Mesozoic Era sure was a rough time to be alive.

Anyway, if you want to learn more about Dinosaurs, I recommend Discovery Channel. I’m going to move onto the Cenozoic Era, the Era you and I still live in today.


Eras are divided up into Periods, and the Cenozoic Era began with the Paleogene Period, which lasted from 66M to 23.03M years ago. But let’s just say it ended 23M years ago, because what are 30,000 years in the grand scheme of things.

During the Paleogene Period, there was a 200,000 year period where global temperatures were elevated by 5–8 °C. This is called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. At some point, it got so warm that even the poles were covered in jungles.

Mammals did very well during this period. They diversified from a few small and generalized forms into large forms that dominated the land, and some of them even adapted to living in the sea and air. The ones that adapted to oceans became modern Cetaceans (whales, dolphins, etc.), while the ones that adapted to trees became Primates.

Towards the end of the Paleogene Period, the first elephants, cats, and dogs evolved, thanks to a cooling climate and the evolution and expansion of grasses.

The following Neogene Period lasted from 23.03M to 2.58M years ago. During this time, the continents as we know them today formed. North and South America connected via the formation of the Isthmus of Panama, the Indian subcontinent collided with Asia and formed the Himalayas, and land bridges were created between Africa and Eurasia as a result of falling sea levels.

In terms of flora and fauna, grasslands continued to expand at the expense of forests. Mammals and birds continued to dominate the land and skies, while large carnivores such as the now extinct Megalodon super shark dominated the seas.

But far and away the most important development during the Neogene Period (at least in my story) is the appearance of the first hominins somewhere between 7M and 5M years ago. Hominins are what we call all human ancestors that lived after the split with Chimpanzees and Bonobos.

More simply put, this means that around 6M years ago, two primates/monkeys had a family. One of their children ended up having children and grandchildren of its own that became Chimpanzees and Bonobos, and another child had children and grandchildren that eventually became humans.

Chapter 2: Human History

If you’re getting tired and you feel like you’re back in history class, don’t worry. I’ll get to my first point at the end of this chapter.



The first noteworthy event in Hominin history is the earliest bipedalism ~7M years ago. Bipedalism is a form of transportation on land whereby a tetrapod (4-limbed animal like Grandpa from last chapter) moves around by exclusively using its lower limbs. In other words, it’s how an animal with legs and arms moves around using only its legs, more commonly known as “walking”.

From ~4M to ~2M years ago, the Australopithecus genus* existed in Africa. This is the genus from which the human genus Homo evolved around 2.8M years ago.

*Humans, elephants, cats, etc. are species. A genus is kind of like a family of species. See picture below for more clarity.

The human species belong to the domain of eukaryotes, kingdom of animals, class of mammals, order of primates, family of hominidae, and genus of homo


This is what we suspect Australopithecus looked like:


Basically, a mix between a monkey, a grandpa, and a bodybuilder.

The first species belonging to the Homo genus evolved around ~2.8M years ago. We suspect that Australopithecus may have began using stone tools, but we more-or-less know for sure that the early Homo species used stone tools. Homo habilis, which is arguably the first Homo species to have existed, used stone tools for butchering.

Far and away the most dominant (measured in length of survival) Homo species is Homo erectus:


H. erectus lived from 2M years ago to around 100,000 years ago, which is basically yesterday from an evolutionary viewpoint. It also coexisted with modern humans for quite some time.

H. erectus benefited from a process of rapid encephalization, an increase in brain size relative to body size, that occurred in the 1M years before its arrival. This means that the brains of H. erectus people were about double the size of their H. habilis predecessors. This likely contributed to them being the first to use fire and complex tools. H. erectus is also believed to have been the first Hominin to leave Africa, spreading throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe between 1.8M and 1.3M years ago.

H. erectus was an Apex predator, meaning it sat on top of the food chain during its time and had no natural predators. It may have been the first human ancestor capable of hunting and gathering in coordinated groups, because H. erectus people are known to have consumed creatures as large as elephants. They also may have been the first to care for injured and sick group members, and perhaps even built boats to traverse bodies of water.

All in all, H. erectus was an impressive species, but even though its members lived alongside humans for a while, humans are not directly descendant from H. erectus. That honor belongs to Homo heidelbergensis, which existed from 700,000 to 200,000 years ago.


H. heidelbergensis also benefited from an increase in brain size. H. heidelbergensis people had a brain size comparable to modern humans of about 1,200 cubic centimeters. Their height was likely also similar, with found specimens ranging from a 157.7cm female to a 181.2cm male.

They’re thought to have made weapons like spears to use for hunting. Meat was an essential component of their diets. They ate not only elephants, but also rhinos, horses, and even baboons.

From H. heidelbergensis evolved three major species. Two of those are Homo neanderthalensis and Homo denisova, which lived from around 400,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago and 285,000 years ago to 25,000 years ago respectively. These species lived alongside humans and even interbred with humans. As a result, you and I are both likely to carry some small (<5) % of DNA that comes from them.

 Reconstruction of a Neanderthal man


The third major species that evolved from H. heidelbergensis is Homo sapiens, more commonly referred to as humans.

Humans evolved from H. heidelbergensis around 300,000 years ago in Africa. At the time, humans were nomads who did not stay in one place. As hunter-gatherers (HG henceforth) they hunted various wild animals and fish, and gathered all sorts of naturally occurring edibles and other objects such as plants, insects, fungi, honey, eggs, etc. But, if for whatever reason their habitat was no longer one in which they could survive, thrive, and reproduce, they sought a different place to move to.

This nomad lifestyle led humans to disperse from Africa, where they originate, in two waves. The first one happened around 130,000 to 100,000 years ago, and the second around 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. From there, humans proceeded to colonize all of Earth, arriving in Eurasia around 125,000 years ago, Australia around 65,000 years ago, and the Americas around 15,000 years ago.

If you’re wondering how humans managed to get from Africa to America with nothing but their feet, they did so by walking from Siberia to Alaska via the Beringia land bridge, which formed due to the lowering of the sea level during the Last Glacial Maximum 26,000 to 19,000 years ago.

Humans invented several new things. They’re believed to have been the first to have systematically buried their dead. They started creating music and art, started to wear clothes, and of course continued to use increasingly sophisticated tools. They also created settlements, usually nearby sources of water, because water is awesome.

And that’s pretty much where the human story ends.

Did you like it?

...

What? It’s incomplete you say?

But I put in so much work and covered 97% of human history!

Not to mention 99.9% of Homo history, 99.98% of Primate history, 99.995% of Mammal history, 99.998% of Animal history, 99.9995% of Eukaryota history, 99.9998% of Earth’s history, and 99.9999% of the Universe’s history!!!

What more do you want?

I promised you a point at the end of the history lesson?

Oh yes, you’re right. Thank you for reminding me, dear friend!

...

My point is that for 97% of human history, from 300,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, we lived like this:




And now, a measly 10,000 years later, which is but a second from an evolutionary standpoint, we live like this:



Now, you’re probably thinking that I’m trying to illustrate to you something about technology, rapid advancements, exponential progress, or something along those lines. And while yes, rapid advancements in technology have led to exponential “progress”, that is not quite the point I’m trying to make.

The point I want to make is:

Human society has gotten ahead of itself and progressed much faster than evolution has been able to keep up with.

How do you feel about this statement? What are your thoughts on it? I imagine it’s not quite the point you were expecting and that you might need me to explain what I mean by this in a bit more detail. So allow me to back up a little and explain to you exactly what I mean by this.

First, let’s start by simply considering everything I’ve just shared with you about evolution up to this point. I’ve shared with you the entire history of the universe. All 13.8B years of it in a summarized format.

13.8B years is a LOT of time. It’s a million times the amount of time it took humanity to go from HG society to today’s society. In other words, for every minute that it took for humans to go from being hunter-gatherers to “modern” humans, it took more than two years to go from Earth being a fiery hellhole to the planet pre-dating “modern” society with life on it that included HG humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc. A lot changed and evolved during those 13.8B years, but it did not happen very quickly.

If you look at a shorter time period, such as the last 2M years since Homo erectus appeared, you’ll notice that a lot less evolution has taken place. Yes, Homo erectus had a somewhat smaller brain size and EQ (a slightly more complex version of brain size to body mass ratio) than humans. So if a Homo erectus person was raised by humans in HG society, it would likely be slow to learn, be more emotional, and have more animalistic behaviours, but it would likely integrate reasonably well if the humans chose to accept it.

That same scenario in modern society might prove more challenging, but a lot of humans struggle to adapt to and thrive in modern society as well. And for very good reasons might I add, but more on those later.

I don’t mean to say that we haven’t evolved at all from our HG days 10,000 years ago, because we have. The Black Plague for example might have killed as much as 60% of the European population, in addition to ~33% of the population of the Middle East. Any minor genetic advantage that helps a person survive such an event will be much stronger represented in the next generation. And in fact, a gene that helped boost immunity during The Black Plague has become more dominant in humans since, which is contributing to certain auto-immune diseases today.

There are many other human genes that have evolved since our HG days. Lactose (in)tolerance for example is caused by a mutation in the MCM6 gene, which evolved sometime during the last 10,000 years. Humans used to become lactose intolerant after weaning off of breast milk by default. But then humans realised that using agriculture to live in long-term settlements requires a lot less energy, and at some point there must have been situations where humans were able to survive because of the ability to digest milk from farm animals as an adult, so in some populations this has caused the MCM6 genetic mutation, which allows them to digest lactose even as adults.

So evolution is still taking place. Humans are highly adaptable and we have continued to adapt to our changing environment over the past 10,000 years since HG society ended. However, there is one very specific change that’s completely taken over human society and that has FAR outpaced evolution’s ability to keep up with.

Do you want to take a guess at what this is? If you're reading this together with friends, do you want to place (friendly) bets among each other? Now would be the time, because we’re going to dive into it in this next chapter.

Chapter 3: Villages Theory

Imagine yourself a human living in a HG village. You’re just doing your thing, you’re hunting, you’re gathering, and that’s most of your life. You are the most respected and trusted person in your village, and you’ve been bestowed the title of Chieftain. You’re doing a great job and there are enough resources to go around. All in all, life is pretty good in your village. You and your clansmen are generally happy folk and you’re making babies and expanding your family.

Things are going so well for your village that you have more than enough resources to take care of your own for the foreseeable future, and so you decide to explore beyond the lands you are familiar with to see what’s out there. You never know what lies beyond your horizon. There could be great things out there, and it’s in your nature to be curious and to expand. As your village’s chieftain, you take it upon you to go scout.

After traveling for two days, you stumble across another human village. You cautiously approach and notice the village looks quite similar to your own. People there seem to be thriving and look happy. You decide to make contact with the village and see what happens.

When you walk up to the village, the people notice you and immediately welcome you with open arms. You’re invited to share a meal with them, and you joyfully accept. During the feast, you teach your new friends about your own village and they teach you about theirs. You teach them a lot of new useful skills and knowledge that they had never thought of, and in return they teach you a lot of their skills and knowledge. After the feast, you invite the other village’s chieftain over to your village. Their chieftain has an equally good time at your village, and so a relationship between the villages is established.

After this, life goes on for a while. Both villages continue to thrive, and so you expand your boundaries even further and connect to three more villages. You now have a network of five individual villages learning from one another and helping one another thrive and expand.

However. After a while, one of the other four villages starts to struggle, because of a severe drought in its area. This village has helped your village and the others tremendously, and because the four of you continue to do well and have resources to spare, you decide to help out the struggling village by sending supplies to aid it.

This works out well for a little while, but eventually the drought spreads to a second village and this village too is now running short on resources. Your village and the other two that are still unaffected are no longer doing as fabulous as before, but the three of you feel secure enough and have enough supplies that you’re willing to help out the two struggling villages... for now.

Eventually the resources of your village and the other two villages who are in good shape start to dwindle, and so decisions have to be made. The second village impacted by the drought isn’t in too bad of a shape. The people are still well-nourished, in decent spirits, and are able to hunt & gather the resources in their area, even though they aren’t quite enough to sustain the village, and so it's not entirely independent.

However, the first village impacted by the drought is in far worse shape. Although supplies are continuously being sent, it takes days to travel between villages, and it’s not a “hey, come on over for some breakfast, and here is a lunch-box you can bring home with you” type of thing.

The drought has completely driven away all wildlife in the area and there is essentially no water and food left nearby. The villagers are depressed, stressed, and fighting among one another. Ordinarily a village in such bad shape would’ve moved on to greener pastures a long time ago, but the villagers have become too lazy and dependent on supplies from the other villages.

You, as your village’s chieftain, meet with the chieftains of the other two healthy villages to decide what to do. One of them wants to cut off both struggling villages, whereas the other makes the argument that as long as the three of you work together, the semi-stable village can be supported without further depleting the supplies of your three villages. But neither of them wants to continue to support the village in worst shape, even though they know everybody in the village will die, because they both believe that if you continue to support it, the healthy villages are at risk of being dragged down along with it. The other two chieftains now ask you to share your opinion. What do you tell them?

Regardless of your choice, I guarantee you that actual HG humans would’ve chosen to ditch the dying village, perhaps much earlier than this scenario describes. And I am incredibly grateful for that, because we wouldn’t be here today if they hadn’t. By choosing to abandon the dying village, the chieftains not only protected their own villages, but also helped the other two or three villages.

The beauty of having individual disconnected villages and societies is that it’s totally fine if a lot of them perish, because there will still be many more that survive and live on. Furthermore, if you as a HG village chieftain go out to scout and expand, and you come across two villages, one with rude hangry HG people and another with smiling welcoming HG people, you’re going to stay the hell away from that first village and establish relations with the second village, because what the second village is doing is clearly working, whereas the first village is probably not a village you want to emulate. If you’re part of a network of 10 villages that are all thriving and doing fabulous, you may be more willing to (cautiously) establish a connection with a rude and hangry HG village, but not if you’re a chieftain leading just one individual village.

This is the essence of “village theory”. Villages can be dumb and screw up, be stagnant and go nowhere, or simply get unlucky, but the worst that will happen is the village dies and their mistakes/bad luck is contained and dies with them. Villages that do well will expand and connect with other villages that do well, and even if something happens to a village in a network, the space between villages means that others are well insulated and each individual village has no realistic other choice than to prioritize itself during tough times. This is evolution in progress. This is survival of the fittest.

The root issue with modern human society is that there aren’t any real villages left (except for maybe 1 type of village that unfortunately is not allowed to die out, but I'll talk about that in chapters 26 & 28). This is why I argue that humanity is progressing too fast and that evolution can no longer keep up. Sure, there are nations and communities present within human society, but for the most part we have progressed to where we are one large village. If one human gets unlucky, we are all affected. If one human does dumb stuff, we are all negatively impacted. Humanity's biggest existential threat is overconnection.

I imagine that “if one human gets unlucky” and “if one human does dumb stuff” may seem a bit far-fetched to you, but the vibrations of bad events go far beyond the ones getting unlucky and doing stupid things. A simple example is a teenager getting hit by a car and passing away. It’s not just the teenager who is affected, but also his/her parents, family, extended family, friends, communities, etc.

One of the best examples is the ‘08 financial crisis. The dumb and greedy idea to put profits over common sense and to over-leverage on real estate might have started with one or a few individuals during dinner, it then spread throughout Wall Street and eventually affected most of humanity. It’s fortunate that human society is as resilient as it is and we haven’t died out yet, but it’s really not a good thing that these bad vibrations never die out either and in a sense echo in eternity.

 Unfortunately this holds true not just for good things we do, but also for bad things we do and bad things that happen to us


If the ‘08 financial crisis had been contained to Wall Street and Wall Street had died because it did something dumb, or better yet, if it had been contained to the bank or group of traders that started it, that’d have been the end of that. But I believe not only that recent events like the ‘08 financial crisis and COVID are still negatively affecting humans and our society today, but that many more big historic events such as the atomic bombing of Japan, the holocaust, and perhaps even the black plague are still affecting society today, because none of these bad vibes were contained to one village, and so they never died out with a village. What I’m describing here is essentially “generational trauma”, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. I'll cover generational trauma in chapter 18.

Hopefully at this point you understand this major change that’s taken place over the past 10,000 years. HG society ended with the dawn of agriculture and settlements. We’ve gone from living in countless individual villages that were free to do as they saw fit, because unsuccessful villages dying and successful villages thriving and reproducing was evolution working as intended, to now essentially living in one big human village, especially with the advent and growth of the internet. All of humanity is now at least somewhat connected, and so if things go wrong somewhere in our big village, it affects the entire village.

But it’s not just human society and human evolution that work like this. Regardless of whether you zoom in or zoom out, the entire universe is essentially just villages and space for insulation. Let’s zoom out first.

Beyond villages, there are geographical regions and continents on Earth. Continents have water between them as insulation. Beyond Earth, there are planets with empty space between them. Beyond our Solar System, there are other Solar Systems, and beyond those there are Galaxies, Galaxy Clusters, Superclusters, and perhaps other universes, more popularly referred to as The Multiverse, all with space between them.

Zooming in, humans are made up of Cells, which are made up of Molecules, which are made up of Atoms, which are made up of Quarks. Each of these bond together with others of their kind via connections/relationships, but there is also space between these for insulation. Which is a very good thing, because ~100B cells die in your body each and every day. Thankfully, cells that die don’t drag down every other cell with it, but instead are replaced with newly created ones.

So, if HG chieftains prioritized their own villages over other villages, and if it seems like a pretty easy and obvious choice to make, why don’t you? Why don’t we?

I will talk more about this, and I'll talk about how we can reintroduce villages in modern human society in Chapter 5. But first, I’m going to talk to you about how humans work and the differences between men and women.

Chapter 4: The Way Humans Work

I’ll preface this chapter by saying that, although we all have both a male and female side, similar to the ancient Chinese Yin & Yang symbol, and although I believe I’ve gotten some pretty deep insights into the female side of things, I am ultimately a male, and so my perspective is always going to be incomplete to some extent.

I'll also paraphrase this chapter by saying that it is rather abstract, so if you don't get it, think it's weird, or wonder what the hell I'm talking about at certain points, that is completely okay. Feel free to jump forward to Chapter 5 if at any point you don't know what I'm talking about anymore.


With that out of the way, let’s go back to HG society.

Let’s start this chapter off with the following statement:

Fundamentally, humans only have two goals. To survive and to reproduce

What do you think of this? Agree? Disagree? Think I should’ve thrown in a poll first so you could’ve seen what others think? That’s a great idea! I wish I would’ve thought of that. Maybe you should be a co-author. Oh well… there’s always a next time.

To help guide us in our quest for survival and reproduction, humans experience two fundamental emotions to point us in the right direction. If our survival is at risk, we feel fear that tells us to wake up and protect ourselves. And in order to stimulate us to reproduce, we experience joy.

Now you might be thinking, “hey, wait a minute. orgasms are great, but there’s a whole lot more joy out there”, which is a very valid thought. Thank you for sharing it with me! I agree with you that saying humans only care about survival and reproduction is perhaps a bit of an oversimplification, because we care not only about ourselves surviving and passing on our genes, we also care about our future generations surviving and passing on their genes. In short, we care most about our own survival and prosperity, but also our family, our country, the human race as a whole, and to a lesser extent other species.


Because of genetic differences, it’s only logical that in HG society each gender spent more time focusing on the one task it was better at. At a minimum, men are more physically capable, and as such were better suited to ensuring their family’s survival via hunting dangerous animals, defending against predators, and taking on the stress of ensuring there were enough supplies to go around. On the other side, only women can birth offspring, and so only they can actually produce future generations to pass on genes to.

These are two very clear undeniable differences between the male and female genders that undoubtedly drove life in HG society, but I believe there are more. I believe men have better focus, because they’ve been under more stress and have been more frequently exposed to fear. It’s only natural that men have developed stronger focus in order to be able to put aside fear and perform in stressful situations. In HG society this was necessary to successfully hunt when your life was in danger, and to be able to go out to gather resources when they were low and things were looking bleak. A HG man had to be able to put his emotions aside and focus on how to get out of tight situations. It’s likely that men either evolved to or always have been better at this skill out of necessity. This makes men on average better at executing, and making something happen after a decision has been made.

On the other hand, I believe women have stronger awareness. In order to care for offspring and assess their needs, you need to be able to tune into their feelings and understand what they’re feeling. Furthermore, during good times stressed out men needed to be soothed and helped to realise the tight situations were behind them and it was okay to relax. So the ability to read the emotions of others as well as the ability to share one’s own vibes with others who needed them must’ve been an important skill in HG times.

But I believe that perhaps the most important reason for women to develop strong awareness and a strong ability to sense and share emotions was during desperate times. The worse things get, the more men tend to focus. So the more desperate a HG village was for resources, the more focused men were on gathering those. I believe that in times like these, it was likely the women who remained aware enough to realise that when things got too bleak, more drastic changes had to be made. I believe it was most likely the women who at some point just got up and left to look for a different area to move to, when survival in their current environment felt impossible. Or at a minimum, I suspect women pressured men or were the indicator men relied on to decide it was time to look for greener pastures.

I imagine HG waifus may have communicated their feelings like this:

“Hey bro, man, HG hubby, protector lord, listen up! I know you’re hyper focused on our survival right now, but you’re unaware that it’s impossible in our current environment. Either you take me somewhere else, or you go ahead and die here without me. I’m out. Peace.”

All of this makes women on average better at decision making, or at least at deciding which general direction to proceed in and which decisions are important and which are unimportant.

One way to sum things up would be to say:
  • Women seek safety
  • Men provide safety
  • Men seek joy
  • Women provide joy
I must stress that these are far from absolute statements, because men need safety just as much as women and of course women could hunt & gather for resources too, especially during desperate times. But, it’s inarguable that on average a man would have performed better at ensuring survival. Similarly, it’s inarguable that men cannot birth offspring, and so at a minimum women provide offspring / reproduction, and therefore joy if you follow the logic that the fundamental emotion of joy points humans in the direction of reproduction and their offspring thriving. So, via evolutionary forces, over time men will have become better at providing safety and women better at providing joy, and so over time they must have looked more towards the other sex to provide the one they are less competent at providing for themselves.

Why is any of this important to my story you ask? Well, the important thing to remember is that regardless of our gender, we all have two halves inside of us. Starting with, but not limited to, two separate brain halves, one male and one female. It’s just that in men the male side is more dominant, and in women the female side is more dominant. This is important to know because it’s not just humans and animals where this concept comes into play. Countries and their governments, companies, organizations, religion, science, and many more things have both male and female properties, but usually lean towards one side, and often quite heavily so.

Do you want to take a guess whether the country you live in has more male or female properties? Listen to what your gut tells you. Here is a hint:

Men naturally provide safety, and the easiest way to stay safe is to restrict freedom as much as possible, because if you stay within a space that you know for a fact is safe, nothing bad will happen. Then again, nothing great will happen either and/or eventually you’ll run out of resources. Therefore, women, who are more focused on providing joy, naturally maximize freedom, because the bigger the space is that you are free to explore, the more good and joyful things there will be in it, even though this may come at the cost of also letting in a lot of bad things.

And this is the synergy between men and women. We need men to keep us within a space that’s manageably safe, and to stop us from expanding this safe space too fast and letting us get overwhelmed with fear and bad things. At the same time, we need women to push us forward and push us to explore, because if women did not exist (and men did not have a female side), men would naturally never venture out and just stay within their safe boundaries forever, until resources run out.

Another way to phrase this is that men naturally take small steps forward (or no steps at all if it were completely up to them), but are better off if they try to take slightly bigger steps than they are comfortable with, or more medium-sized steps if you will. Whereas women naturally take huge steps forward, but are better off if they take slightly smaller steps than they ideally want to, or better yet medium-sized steps.

Men are naturally self-centered. You can’t protect someone that isn’t a part of you, because when you extend your boundaries around others, they become a part of you. As a result, men tend to get isolated. They protect themselves from overwhelming emotions in order to be able to focus and survive during tough times, but this means they are at risk of overprotecting themselves, putting up boundaries that are too strong and too tight, and even imploding if they end up completely cut-off from the outside world. Therefore, when in doubt it’s better to err on the side of being physically close to a man and showering him in love (although ideally not too much), because he is selfish in nature and will protect himself from you if feelings get too overwhelming. The most important skill for a man is the ability to ask for help, for someone to just be there for him, because connection is the antidote to isolation.

Women on the other hand naturally prioritize others. You can’t provide joy to yourself, because you can’t share something with yourself that you already have. That’s like telling yourself something you already know. As a result, women tend to overexpose themselves to others and others to themselves. They connect to others who are feeling down by sharing good vibes during good times, but if they over help they hurt others, may become bipolar, and in a worst case scenario they are at risk of not keeping any love to themselves and exploding. Therefore, when in doubt it’s better to err on the side of giving a woman more physical space and setting stricter emotional boundaries with her (although ideally not too tight), because she will break through your emotional boundaries if you’ve made them too tight. The most important skill for a woman is the ability to listen to and be aware of others’ boundaries, because protection is the antidote to overexposure.

That was a lot! A very short way to sum up these last two paragraphs is as follows:

Men protect others via the nurturement of self-love, and women love others via the nurturement of self-protection. The better we are at nurturing the latter, the more effective our natural ability (the former) becomes.

Alright. Are you still with me? I understand that some of this may be a lot to take in and may seem a little (or very) far-fetched to you. If so, that’s okay, and of course I still love you. Even if you disagree with me on some of the things in this chapter, I hope you’ll still listen with an open-mind to the rest of my story, because agreeing to disagree on some things, doesn’t mean we can’t agree to agree on other things.

I promise we'll quickly return back to earth over the next 1-2 chapters, but if at any point you feel like you're losing interest, feel free to skip forward to Part 2 and Chapter 7, in which I talk about industries that profit off of people's unhappiness.

Chapter 5: Self-Love

In this chapter I’m going to talk about the antidote to the fundamental problem present in today’s society that I laid out in chapter 3 with the help of villages theory. In this chapter I will use the term self-love to refer to both the self-love men need to learn in order to effectively protect others, as well as the self-protection women need to learn in order to effectively love others.


Do you like to travel? Do you like flying? Even if you don’t, please take this advice from the airline companies, because you cannot effectively help others if you don’t take care of yourself first.

First off, I have to say that I don't like the terms "selfish" and "selfless", because being self-ish just doesn't cut it. We all need to be self-centered in a way in order to effectively reintroduce villages into society.

And selfless is also a bad term to use, because we all have a self / village within us, and so being completely selfless is a bad idea. The more one tries to be selfless, the more self-centered one becomes. Give in to being self-centered. It’s better for everyone.

This is really very logical. No one knows us better than we do ourselves, and so the one best capable of taking care of us is ourself and the one with the most complete information and most direct link to us is ourself. With enough practice, we can take care of ourselves very well, but we will never be able to take care of others quite as well, because we can never know others as wholly as we can know ourselves. Likewise, no one can take care of us as well as we can ourselves, because it’s impossible for any one to know us as well as we do ourselves.

If a man doesn’t practice self-love, he will seek it elsewhere by squeezing it out of others. He will put overly strict physical boundaries on others in an attempt to absorb more of their love. But putting overly strict physical boundaries on someone hurts that person and so he will not receive positive love in return. If anything, he will receive hatred, be even more devoid of love, and attempt to squeeze the person even further, starting a spiral.

If a woman doesn’t practice self-protection, she will seek it elsewhere by forcing it out of others. She will force her emotions upon others in an attempt to garner their protection. But forcing emotions upon someone hurts that person and so she will not receive the so desired protection, but rather the opposite, harm. People will fight her to keep her away, causing her to seek protection even more by forcing even more love upon others, starting a spiral.

In an ideal world, all men would channel all the positive vibes they receive to themselves, and allow their self (their subconscious) to decide how best to love/protect others. Likewise, all women would channel all the protection/resources they receive to themselves, and allow their self (their subconsciouss) to decide how best to love/care for others.

Hopefully the notion that we all know ourselves best and that (at least in theory) no one can take better care of us than we can ourselves is not a far-fetched one. A simple thought experiment then proves that self-centeredness is better than selflessness, not just for ourselves, but also for the ones around us. For this thought experiment, we’ll once again use HG villages.

Let’s imagine two HG villages that are very near to each other, so that we can take transportation costs out of the equation. Now, which of these two scenarios do you think would lead to these two villages thriving the most?

1) The villages each take care of their own needs via hunting, gathering, building tools & weapons, taking care of the young, taking care of the sick, etc.

2) The villages taking care of each other’s needs via hunting, gathering, building tools & weapons, taking care of the young, taking care of the sick, etc.

It’s obvious, right? Even if some information about the other village is easily obtainable, such as food & water supplies, available tools & weapons, disease of a sick person, etc. Each village still knows itself best, and things like food preferences, tendencies and emotional needs of children, being used to certain types of tools/weapons (e.g. spears rather than maces), etc. are harder to assess and keep track off.

Humans in modern society are the exact same. We’ve all lived each and every moment of our own lives, and even the people closest to us will never know us quite as well as we do, and therefore will also never be able to take care of us quite as well as we can ourselves.

The biggest issue with two HG villages taking care of each other’s needs rather than their own, or two humans prioritizing each other’s needs rather than their own, isn’t even inefficiency in the form of providing something the other party already has aplenty or not providing something the other party is lacking as a result of imperfect information. This can be remedied via improved communication. The biggest issue also isn’t not knowing how to provide something for another party, although this is a big issue, because this (in theory) can be learned. No, far and away the biggest issue is the spiraling of unmet needs.

Using the HG villages example, imagine that village A’s two best hunters fall sick, severely crippling its hunting capabilities. It’ll be up to village B to take care of these hunters and heal them to the best of its capabilities, but in the meantime village B is also going to struggle because village A’s hunters won’t provide it as much food. As a result, village B’s doctors may take a little longer to heal the village A’s hunters. And it’s not just village B’s doctors that are affected. Village B’s hunters will also have less energy to hunt which in turn also affects the food supplies of village A. So even after village A’s two best hunters heal up, they’re going to be lower on energy, negatively affecting their hunting, which means that village B’s food supplies will continue to be negatively affected, and so a spiral is started.

If these two villages had simply taken care of their own needs, worst case one village would’ve died, but most likely one village would’ve struggled for a while and then recovered, rather than a spiral of two villages affecting one another causing all sorts of complications. In essence, these two villages are co-dependent on one another, and if one goes down, the other goes down with it.

In modern human society, the not knowing how to fulfill certain (especially emotional) needs often goes hand in hand with the spiraling of unmet needs. This is why divorce rates are so high, and, briefly revisiting the concept of generational trauma, this is why incapable parents are such dangers to the future of humanity. But much more on that topic later.

For now, let’s go back to something more positive. Do you remember this chapter’s goal of providing an antidote to the problem I laid out in Chapter 3: Villages Theory? Well, let’s get to it.

I’ve essentially already illustrated it and it’s very straightforward, but the way to reintroduce villages into modern society is by being more self-centered and seeing one’s self as one’s own village. However, this is far easier said than done, and humanity will need to make some major changes in order to accomplish this effectively. Much of the rest of what I’ll share with you starting in part 2/chapter 7 is about some of the necessary changes needed at a societal level in order for each of us to be able to accomplish this within ourselves.

All of this is of utmost importance because unmet needs of people who aren’t self-centered enough and unmet needs of people who are unable to take care of their own needs don’t just disappear. These unmet needs continue to exist and these people usually attempt to have these needs met through others, thereby causing hurt.

For example. Many men who feel unsuccessful and have low self-confidence due to how they’ve been treated in the past, instead of working on self-love and how they feel about themselves, often attempt to get rich just for the sake of being seen as more worthy by those around them. Even though many people who flock to these men (if successful in obtaining wealth) only do so in the hopes of getting a piece of their wealth. On the surface these men may feel better, but deep down nothing much changes, because they aren’t actually receiving more love, and so many of them continue to chase more and more wealth for the rest of their lives in an attempt to fulfill their unmet emotional needs. And by the end of their lives, these men still haven’t had this fundamental need met, and they often weren’t able to do much for others either, because they were too busy accumulating more wealth in order to try and feel better about themselves.

Compare this to men who feel unsuccessful and have low self-confidence who are able to heal and process the reasons why they feel that way, and eventually learn how to love themselves and give themselves confidence boosts when they need them. These men will be able to take care of their own needs (or at least this particular need), they won’t be obsessed with accumulating wealth (or other behaviours that appear to fulfill their need on the surface), and they then as a result will also be able to do more for others if they so choose. Just like a thriving HG village that has ample resources to take care of itself might venture out and look to establish mutually beneficial relationships with other HG villages.

If you’re still with me, thank you for listening to me ramble about Hunter Gatherer society for I don’t even know how long. I kinda lost track of time. How long did it take you to read all this? I’ve been writing for nine months now, although I took a loooong (six months) break at some point.

There is one final topic I want to talk about, which will involve more HG thought examples. After this following chapter about boundaries and consent, Part 1 will come to a close, and I'll start talking about non-HG topics.

Chapter 6: Boundaries & Consent

Let's start this chapter with a self-quote:

Rules protect the rulemaker, not the ones the rules are imposed upon

In my eyes this is very obvious, but looking at the outside world, it doesn't seem like anyone understands this. Do you? Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Can you back up your stance with reasoning and logic? If you're reading this with a friend or a few friends, perhaps you can discuss amongst each other?

A real-life example that really drives home this point is Singapore's death penalty for drug traffickers. Regardless of what you think of this law, who do you think this protects? Singapore or drug traffickers? Singapore, right? This is why rules protect the rulemaker (in this example Singapore), and not the ones the rules are imposed upon (in this excample drug traffickers).

Other great real-life examples are rules set by parents. Most parents haven dozens, if not hundreds, of rules for their children, many of which appear to protect the children, but all of which protect the parents and the parents alone.

A relatively obvious example is that of bedtime. Demanding a child is in bed by a certain time is often thought of as a way for the child to learn to go to bed on time and sleep sufficiently, but really it serves to give parents some structure as well as much needed quiet and privacy after their children have gone to bed.

If you just tell a child to go to bed by a certain time and use rewards and punishments to accomplish this, the only thing the child will learn is to avoid punishments and seek out rewards. It'll never learn its own needs when it comes to sleep, and it'll never learn how to tend to those needs on its own. And as per the previous chapter on self-love, it's a bad idea for anyone else, including parents to take care of someone else's needs, especially long-term. Eventually children grow up and move out, and if all they've learned is to go bed at a time their parents would like them to, they're going to be awfully unequipped to take care of themselves.

But more on parenting in part 6. I hope that for now I've been able to illustrate that setting a certain bedtime for a child is a rule that benefits parents, not children.

Next up, let's talk about legal and illegal boundaries. Unfortunately a lot of boundaries parents set on their children should be illegal and are only legal because children are more-or-less the legal property of their parents.

So what are legal boundaries and illegal boundaries? In short, legal boundaries are placed by someone or something upon him/herself or itself, whereas illegal boundaries are placed by someone or something upon another person or thing.

Allow me to indulge myself and illustrate legal and illegal boundaries with a few more HG examples before I completely move on from them at the end of this chapter, other than a few shout-outs here and there for nostalgy's sake.

Let's start very small in an imaginary HG world with only one human in it. Putting the morality of hurting animals and nature aside, this single human should be free to do whatever he wants to with no restrictions, because there are no other humans to consider.

Next, let's add one more human to the mix and now imagine a HG world with two humans in it, one male and one female. This complicates things slightly, because even though they are technically still free to do whatever they want to, there are some boundaries that should now be illegal. For example, it should be illegal in this world for the man to build a house around the woman with a door to which only he holds the key, essentially locking her up in a tiny room. Although the woman does not hold the same power physically, it should similarly be illegal for her to do the same on an emotional level.

Are boundaries placed on Balrogs to stay away from fellowships trying to save the world legal?

Sticking to the one man, one woman imaginary HG world for a bit, imagine the two of them fall in love and decide to build a home together and move in. Now, let's assume they see each other as equals and share the home 50/50, apart from a yoga room for the woman and a gaming room for the man. I'm sure they did primitive forms of yoga back in HG society, and I'm sure men back then played games with rocks and dirt or something.

Anyway, other than those two rooms, everything should be decided together and so any and all boundaries placed (no axes on the floor), should be decided together. Disagreements may occur every now and then, but that's what relationships are like.

More interesting are their own rooms (the yoga and gaming rooms), over which they each have total say. The woman might say, you are allowed to enter my yoga room and even do yoga with me, but you have to knock first and only if I say yes can you enter. Furthermore, you can only participate in yoga with me if I consent, for which you'll once again have to ask permission, and if I say no, no means no.

The man on the other hand might crave more personal space and put tighter boundaries in place, such as. You are never allowed to play games with me, nor are you ever allowed to enter my personal gaming room. Only if there is an emergency, you can yell my name and state the emergency, and if I deem it important enough, such as we have <24 hours of food remaining, will I answer and come out of my gaming room to talk to you.

Woman's boundaries:
  • Knock before entering.
  • Only enter if I give consent.
  • Ask permission before doing yoga with me.
Man's boundaries:
  • Never play games with me.
  • Never enter my game room.
  • If it's urgent, you can yell my name + reason for yelling, and I'll come out to talk if I deem it important enough.
The woman's boundaries here are very reasonable, and if the man broke any of them, that'd mean he has violated her boundaries. The man's boundaries are also reasonable, even the 3rd one, but the woman may or may not be able to stay in a relationship and live with a HG man like that, because he appears to prioritize rock and dirt games over providing sufficient food for his household.

These boundaries are reasonable and should be legal because they are placed only on the room that each of them owns. The woman placing a boundary on the man's gaming room of "you can only have three rocks in there at most" or a boundary on the man himself of "you can only spend up to one hour a day in the gaming room" should be illegal. Similarly, it should also be illegal for the man to place similar boundaries upon the woman or her yoga room.

Okay, let's move on to something a lot more complicated. Let's talk about a HG world with a medium sized village of 25 homes and 100 people. Clearly a situation like this requires some form of cooperation and governance.

It should still be illegal to place boundaries on others and the property of others, such as other villagers and the homes of other villagers. For example, if this village had an ethnic group that was in the minority (5 homes, 20 people), it should be illegal for this minority to be targeted. It should not be legal to put curfews on only them or to demand herbs from their personal herb gardens, because those would be boundaries put by the village discriminately on some other people and the property of some others.

However, it's a different matter if the village decides that there should be curfews placed on everyone, because the village feels like it needs quiet after 8PM so that everyone can wake up fresh for hunting at 5AM. Even if the ethnic group in the minority needs less sleep, at this point all they can do is accept the curfew (placed on all villagers) or decide to leave the village and start their own village elsewhere.

Similar rules may have to be created by the village for its own protection. For example, locking up a villager in a hut looked at in isolation appears to be an illegally placed boundary, but if this villager has chosen to be part of the village, accepted its rules, and one of the rules is that for the protection of the village's peace any villager that punches another villager is placed in a hut for a few days to cool down, then it's a legally placed boundary on the puncher to put him in the hut, because he chose to be part of a village and accept this law/rule and consequences as part of that.

One can further extrapolate this to multiple villages and even draw comparisons to municipalities, countries, etc. But I think this drives home my points already, the main ones of which are:
  • Rules protect the rulemaker
  • Boundaries placed upon someone else or something one does not own should be illegal
  • Villages/societies/groups are a bit of an exception, but people first need to be made aware of the rules and they need to first consent to being part of that village/society/group before it becomes legal to impose those rules upon others.
And this is a major problem present in human society today, because we are all born into a host of groups ranging from a family, society, country, to even a species, and we never consent to being part of any of these, yet we have to accept all the rules imposed upon us, often times without even fully knowing all the rules.

Sure, most humans generally know that certain crimes will land you in prison, but do we really know the laws of our families, groups, societies, and countries by heart? I think not. I'm going to move on now, but do not underestimate the humongousness of this societal issue.

So with that, let's move on from all these HG analogies (I hope you liked them :) ), and let's start talking about modern human society and a few of the things wrong with it.

Part 2: Society

This part will start off relatively chill, but quickly head into more controversial topics and opinions. In essence, Part 2 is a discussion of a couple of issues I see present in today's society, starting with the most obvious and least controversial, and ending with the least obvious and most controversial.

Let's get started.

Chapter 7: Profiting off of Unhappiness

We'll be talking a lot about incentives in Part 2, because incentives present in society dictate a lot of what happens in society. An easy way to illustrate this is: if I told you I'm going to give you an amazing hug if you say "I am awesome" out loud, but I'm going to slap you in the face if you say "I suck" out loud. I think most of you will do the former and choose to say "I am awesome".

Similarly, there are incentives present in today's society, and a lot of these have to do with capitalism and money. There's no way around the fact that every single company on Planet Earth is incentivized to make money, because of the way capitalism is structured. It goes something like this:
  • None of us need money to survive, but we all think we do and we kind of do because the things we need to survive are most easily obtained via money.
  • Every country but Bhutan has decided to measure progress in terms of GDP (growth), and make that their main focus.
  • I'm pretty sure every single, or just about every single, human being would prefer to have more money/resources than less money/resources.
  • Companies are ultimately owned and controlled by shareholders, all of which are human beings who prefer to have more money rather than less money.
  • As a result, the only real motivation of companies is to maximize profits.
The picture isn't quite as black-and-white as I paint it here, because good humans who sometimes prioritize things other than money exist, as well as wealthy individuals who don't value additional money very highly. There also exist companies (especially Elon Musk's companies) that to some extent are able to prioritize a mission other than maximizing profits. However, by far and large companies and industries are incentivized to maximize profits, and they go to great lengths to achieve this.

In many cases this isn't that big of a deal. Take the airline industry for example. Sure, I think an airline focused on maximizing customer happiness/satisfaction would be awesome and may even make more money long-term than all the airlines focused on maximizing (shorter-term) profits, the airline industry is extremely safe and does a decent job of flying humans from point A to point B.

However, there are a number of industries in which capitalistic incentives do pose significant problems for human society. Two prime examples are the beauty industry and the fitness industry, because the more insecure people are about the way they look, the more money these two industries make.

The beauty industry is an especially toxic cancer present in society, because the more insecure we feel about the way we look, the more money the beauty industry makes. As a result, the beauty industry as a whole is incentivized to do whatever it can to make people (especially women) feel more insecure about themselves, because if we (and women especially) felt great about our looks, our bodies, etc. the beauty industry would pretty much go out of business.

And thus, the beauty industry is fighting not only to keep us insecure, it's actively doing its best to make us more insecure in whatever way it can, because the beauty industry (and the people making a living off of it) can only exist while we feel insecure. And by that logic, anyone working in the beauty industry is making a living off of people's insecurities one way or another. I'm sorry if you are working in the beauty industry and this is hard to hear. It's a harsh truth, but it's the truth. You may think you're in the business of helping people feel better about themselves, but that business only exists if people feel bad about themselves first.

The fitness industry is very similar. It may not be quite as bad as the beauty industry and it's a little more focused towards men, whose looks are simply not seen as important as women's looks by society. Don't ask me why, it just is. We care slightly more about how women look than how men look.

Men are visual creatures, and women are good with their hands

(the latter is a reference to women having stronger awareness)

Anyway, the beauty and fitness industries are essentially living things that will fight not only to survive, but also fight to grow and carve out bigger portions within society. And the way they do this is by targeting and maximizing people's insecurities.

One more example I want to touch upon, is perhaps the worst offender of profiting off of people's insecurities. Can you guess? Of course it's (social) media.

To be fair, insecurities are only part of what social media companies profit off of, because at its core these companies really profit off of the loneliness of people.

There is a lot of talk about a loneliness epidemic and how people are worried about the effects of social media on society and children in particular, but if we use a little bit of common sense, it's not too hard to see that it's actually social media that's behind this epidemic and profiting off of it.

Just ask yourself, why do people go on social media? To connect with others and to socialize, right? What type of person will go on social media and seek connections and social interactions the most? It's really pretty simple... a lonely person. And as such, the more lonely people there are, the more social media profits.

I hate to point the finger at certain companies and individuals, but Meta & Mark Zuckerburg make more money the lonelier people are, and as such they are incentivized and do everything in their power to make people feel lonelier and lonelier, because that's simply how the incentives are set up.

According to the movie Oldboy, people start seeing ants when they feel lonely

There are many more industries like these, another one I want to mention is the gun industry, especially in the USA. What do you think makes people buy guns? Even if they're solely used for self-protection, people buy guns when they are frightened, feel in danger, and feel the need to protect themselves. So as a result, the gun industry is literally incentivized to create a more dangerous and unstable society in which people are frightened of each other, because that's how it makes the most profits.

I could honestly go on and on and list a lot of industries, but I'll stick to just one more, against which one could make an argument that it is the worst offender of all. Any guesses? Drumroll... it's the advertising industry. 

Advertising embodies everything that’s wrong with capitalism. Fundamentally, what makes advertising make money? If people are easily influenced, easily emotionally manipulated, and in essence weak of mind. The more easily human beings are influenced, but really manipulated, to buy products, the less costly advertisements are to make and the more value the advertising industry creates for other industries.

The advertising industry forces products onto people by targeting, and even creating and amplifying, emotional weaknesses and establishing links between emotional needs and products that shouldn't be there. As a result, swarms of people feel like they need products they don't actually need, because their favorite celebrity told them they do and they trust that person, or because some catchy tune made them feel something during a commercial. I personally hate the advertising industry with a passion.
Capitalism as a system benefits from people thinking material goods solve their problems.
Before I wrap up this chapter, I have a question for you. On a fundamental level, what do you think notifications are for? What does it mean when you get a notification?

I'm curious to hear your answer. My own answer is that getting a notification means that something needs you, be it an app, your phone, a social media account, or whatever. If you like to feel needed all the time, then notifications are great, but I'd encourage you to keep them to a minimum unless you think the needs of others are more important than your own.

Chapter 8: Tech & AI

I've already shared with you my opinion that human society is progressing too fast for its own good and has gotten ahead of itself. Unfortunately this trend only seems to be accelerating as humanity through capitalism appears to be set in its tracks on improving the human condition via technological advancements alone. Artifical Intelligence, albeit amazingly useful in certain situations, is only exacerbating this issue.

I'll put up front that it's undeniable that technology has improved our lives in a lot of aspects and that there is tremendous potential for AI in certain specific areas. Clean energy, primarily in the form of solar, is truly a game-changer for life on Earth, and so are highly automated factories that can produce new technologies (such as solar panels) at a large scale.

The internet is also an amazing thing. Even though I cannot understate the importance of Villages Theory, the ability to connect with any other human being and share positive helpful information is wondrous and extremely helpful in many situations. There are negatives to the internet, but there are also tremendous positives.

As for AI, I'll explain my qualms with it in a bit, but in spite of those there are specific use cases that'll benefit humanity greatly:
  • Self-driving cars. Autonomous transportation at a global scale is <5 years away and empowered by AI.
  • Humanoid robots. Robots that do your household chores, work in factories, cook your food in restaurants, and much more are a little further away than 5 years, but AI will help make these a reality.
  • I have not used AI to write code, but use cases like this where AI makes the work of humans easier / go faster certainly exist.
  • Improved web search. Not for every search I do, but for about half of them I find that AI does a good job in summarizing the results and saving me time.
Widespread Self-driving vehicles are <5 years away

Widespread humanoid robots are >5 years away, but nonetheless on the way

With that being said, I also think there are tremendous downsides and pitfals when it comes to AI:
  • AI is not going to be smarter / better than human consciousness. AI is literally electricity running algorithms and learning how to do things from humans. I personally do not see how an algorithm can be smarter of perform better at something humanity teaches it than humanity could do itself. It's like we're raising robotic, emotionless children to do things for us. But these robotic, emotionless children will never surpass us as a species.
  • AI isn't going to be able to answer questions about the nature of the universe. These are questions we can only find answers to within ourselves, and each human should be free to come up with a different answer as to what's out there and what the meaning of life is. AI isn't going to be able to tell us how to live our lives.
  • There are tremendous dangers such as humanity believing that an AI knows everything, and trusting AI more than we do ourselves.
  • AI essentially learns from, and thus in a way copies human beings. Humans are flawed and make mistakes. Flaws and mistakes copied on a scale as large as AI can lead to terrible results. In the case of self-driving cars it's easy to see when it makes mistakes, but in the case of a chatbot or oracle-type of AI, it's easy to think this AI knows a lot when in fact it might be extremely dumb just like humanity still is.
Lastly, and most importantly, I want to talk about whether it makes sense for humanity to pour so much of our energy and effort into tech and AI. Is this really what's going to make humanity happier and better off in the long run? I understand it will increase GDPs worldwide, especially those of developed nations, but will it make us happier?

Sure, tremendous positives have come out of Tech & AI and will continue to come out of Tech & AI, but even putting aside the downsides, does it really make sense for so much of humanity's focus to be directed towards these types of advancements?

It's hard to argue that wide-spread solar energy will be fantastic, but would it be better for humanity for every human to have access to clean drinking water and sufficient food or for us to have self-driving cars? This one may be close because self-driving cars can help with the former, but water & food or improved search? Water & food or AI that helps us program code faster?

Furthermore, even ignoring, putting side, and forgetting about the worst suffering humans that lack clean water and food, although self-driving cars would be nice and awesome, is that really the thing that will give humans in developed countries the biggest boost to their happiness?

Personally, I don't think so. I'll share more on the things that I do think would make the biggest difference in later parts, but for now I'd be curious to know what things you think would make you the happiest if you could wish for anything. I'm afraid I can't hear your answers :( But perhaps you can talk to yourself or a friend you're reading this with, or leave a comment?

Chapter 9: Free Speech

What do you think the perception of free speech is in modern human society? Or in other words, if we asked all 8+ billion human beings their opinion on free speech, and aggregated their responses, what do you think the results would be?

I think these would be some of the key-words that would come up if we polled humanity on free speech:
  • Universally positive
  • Basic human right
  • Anyone who is against it is a power-hungry dictator
  • You can't have democracy without free speech
Personally, I beg to differ, especially on the last point.

First off, there exists a clear counter-example in Singapore, which contrary to some beliefs is very much a democracy, it's just that the most popular party has never not won an election. But unless you believe that Singapore's elections are all fake, one party winning every election does not mean it's not a democracy. It most likely means that that party is doing a pretty amazing job running the country.

However, even though Singapore is a democracy, and as a person living in Singapore I can tell you that I feel free to speak my mind, there are restrictions compared to certain western countries, especially when it comes to the media, which is mostly state-owned.

Does this mean Singapore is not a democracy? Some of the world looks at Singapore and says yes, because the same party has been in charge for over 60 years, and because there are some limitations on freedom of speech and freedom of press the citizens must feel opressed and unable to have their voices heard, right? Not exactly. Democracy refers only to whether the people in power have been voted in power by the larger populace, which is true for Singapore, unless you believe the Singapore elections to be fake.

To me it seems like the logic is that if citizens of a country are unable to talk shit about their governments, that means nay-sayers cannot spread their ideas and thus opponents of the ones in charge cannot overthrow the ones in charge. But if anything, the logic here is that haters are unable to influence others to vote their way, and thus election interference is less likely. Either way, I do not see the logic that freedom of speech is a necessity for people to be able to freely cast their votes in a fair election.

Now don't get me wrong though. I'm not saying free speech is a terrible thing either, and of course if every citizen was forced to live in an information isolation chamber and a handful of people in power controlled exactly who had access to what information, obviously this would undermine democracy, because the people in power could control exactly how every person voted. However, I think North-Korea might be the only country where one could make an argument that information is that limited. Furthermore, I hope you're beginning to see that freedom of information (flow) is more important to democracy than freedom of speech. And although there are overlaps, they are not the same.

As for freedom of speech, I think the sort of freedom of speech absolutism going on in the USA for example is destroying that country. Words can not only be incredibly painful but also used to manipulate. And so when freedom of speech (and press) is taken to the extreme and one can say just about anything about anyone, chaos will ensue. And if anything, freedom of speech taken to the extreme will mean that the ones in power stay in power.

Even in the USA, there are some limitations and one cannot defame someone or incite violence. However, hate speech, racism, and offensive beliefs can for the most part freely and legally be shared, which will subtly over time create tensions and conflicts within a society. So in essence, adult bullying is legal in the USA (and various other parts of the world that take free speech too far).

Depending a little bit on whether one sustains long-term physical injuries, I think many people would prefer to get punched rather than their buttons pressed and deepest insecurities messed with via words. In my opinion, words and psychological violence have the ability to hurt far more than physical violence. And so herein lies the danger of taking free speech too far.

It's not an easy issue to solve, because different words will hurt different people, but to me it's clear that one cannot be allowed to say anything to anyone. That is just asking for trouble and civil unrest. And so some limitations on freedom of speech and even freedom of press would be good, because a lot of journalism around the world has ulterior motives, and is often paid for to accomplish some goal or push some agenda.

Lastly, I think an extremely important concept is "Freedom to Believe". Not just freedom of religion, but freedom to believe whatever people want to believe. This is why I was adament in the introduction that you, my dear friend, should be free to stick to your own beliefs and should be free to disagree with me on any topic you want to disagree with me on, including this one.

Pushing one's beliefs onto another person is incredibly toxic and oppressing. It's okay to share of course, but if freedom of speech is taken to the extreme, one is legally allowed to attack and bully other people's beliefs out of them, which is a horrible crime in my eyes.

Alright, this is a rough part to write, because it's not fun bringing up all these things wrong in society that are at the root of so much hurt in humanity, but there are two more to go.

Chapter 10: Science vs Religion

Okay, I think I'm about to alienate 99% of my listeners with this chapter, but I'm going to write it nonetheless.

Let's start by talking about religion, because that one will be easier to cover, as science appears to be winning these days, because it's mandatory in school. And although religions are widely accepted, in a way they're also kind of frowned upon by a lot of society these days is the impression I'm getting.

Religions are getting a bit of a bad rep, and for understandable reasons. Religions have been the cause of many a war, and even now create a lot of tension and unrest across the world. This doesn't mean all religions are bad, and every large religion has bad "sects" and bad people in them, but instead of talking about those, let's talk about some of the fundamental issues with more-or-less every religion.

Before I begin, can I just say that it's kind of weird that all gods are male? In my personal opinion, I think it's much more likely that there is one goddess out there than that there is one god out there, but okay.

Anyway, the biggest flaw with religions is that they are obsessed with the truth and being right, even though religions are literally belief systems that usually culminate in believing in a god. The noun belief and the verb believe innately state that these things are assumed to be true, but not proven to be true.

It is therefore the biggest shame that religions are so scared of dissenting beliefs that challenge their own. The worlds of many religious people revolve around their religion, and so if their core belief of "god exists" is challenged, to them it feels like their entire world is challenged and their entire world starts to fall apart.

This is understandably incredibly frightening, but how many religious people and religions protect themselves from falling apart is by attempting to silence all nay-sayers and all dissenting beliefs and opinions. This is why more extreme religions turn into cults, in which people are forced to follow all the beliefs coming from the leaders without question, and from which escape is difficult, because the cult members will feel insecure if someone decides to leave the cult. Because why would one leave the cult if all the beliefs in it are the truth?

Religions almost seem like a global game similar to social media. Amass as many followers as you can, but you're only allowed to follow one account, and maybe a sub-account within that account.

Props if you know what movie this is from!

Either way, a core issue with religions funnily (and sadly) enough is that most don't believe in every human's basic right to be free to believe what one wants to believe. Good religions have some amount of leeway and allow for discussion on how to interpret their religious writing, but if your belief is too far off and makes others uncomfortable, you'll no longer be accepted (in good religions), or it'll be bullied out of you (in bad religions).

Religion is a form of indirect group therapy.

In essence, religions are belief systems that people adopt that end up at the core of their being. A lot of people live and die by these belief systems, which is largely fine, but it's unfortunate that for many religious people these are so crucial to their worlds, because I think religious people and therefore religions would be better off if they could accept more uncertainty, and more dissenting beliefs and worldviews.

This would also help religions to learn and get better over time, because none of them really do. Religions are so obsessed with being the truth, that they are frightened to admit that they are wrong about anything, which halts progress. If you're not willing to change your views over time, you never progress. This last one, is something religions could learn from science.

But let's move on to science now, because there are major issues with science as well. And in fact, I think I actually have a bigger bone to pick with science than I do with religions!

Science is dumb. Let me just start with that. Sure, it's also amazing and it's allowed humanity to progress greatly (perhaps a little too much, but nonetheless). We wouldn't have clean energy, or transportation, or telephones, and I wouldn't be able to talk to you like this without science making computers (I woke up at 5AM and started writing on my PC at home, it's 6:30AM now) or without it inventing the internet (I don't know what time it is for you or where you are, but I assume you are using the internet to read this).

So why do I say science is dumb? Well for one, if we were walking outside in a forest and there was a lake in the forest, I know I'd be seeing the lake as blue and the leaves as green. When I talk to you about this, I know you also describe to me the lake as blue and the leaves as green. But how do I know that looking through your eyes you see the exact same thing? How do I know that you don't see the colors of the lake and the leaves swapped? How do I know you don't see the lake as my green and the leaves as my blue? Short answer is... I don't.

It's literally impossible to know how anyone else experiences the world. We all assume that we experience the world the exact same, or at least more-or-less the same, but all we can do is communicate, trust, and go from there, but we don't really know anything about anyone else's world.

Thereby, we (and science) cannot really prove anything, which to its credit science actually sort of admits, all we can do is agree to agree on things. That's what science really is. Science is agreeing to agree on things, until someone disagrees.

But far and away the biggest issue I have with science is the fact that it essentially disregards feelings. It's all about progress for progress' sake, which as we've discussed is why humanity has gotten ahead of itself, and perhaps the root cause for everything that's wrong with modern human society.

Feelings are real and feelings exist, that should be obvious. But science can't really explain why we feel the way we do.


I mean... just read this. To be fair this comes from AI, but does this sound like scientists know anything about feelings? Feelings underlie and are involved in just about everything, if not everything, we do, except for perhaps science.

I'll give some props to quantum physics though, because that shit's just cool. Here, take Quantum Entanglement for example:


Quantum entanglement almost appears to describe "love" and even uses the word "fate". Two particles (or humans?) can form a connection and share the same fate, no matter how far apart they are? How romantic! 😍

Anyway, I think I've made my point when it comes to science. Science (apart from quantum physics perhaps) is too obsessed with progress and does not factor in feelings enough, or at all. And thereby is kind of set in its ways and perhaps not quite open enough to things that cannot be proven to exist, such as love.

Chapter 11: Mogonamy & Marriage

Talking about love, this brings me to the final topic I want to cover in this 2nd part about things wrong with modern human society, and it's a big one. The biggest one in fact.

I'll state up front that I have nothing against monogamy in and of itself, people who freely choose to be monogamous, or people who are happy being monogamous. It's just that I think a lot of people are forced into monogamy due to societal forces, and that comes along with a lot of bad things such as hurt, resentment, and hatred.

The first issue I have with forced monogamy is that it essentially results in forced (emotional) co-dependency.

Every couple sets different boundaries. Some couples draw the line at having friends of the opposite sex, some at having dinner with friends of the opposite sex, some at holding hands or making out with someone from any sex, and some couples even allow a "hall pass", as in a celebrity crush with whom you could theoretically hook up if the opportunity presented itself. Every relationship is different.

But regardless of where the line is drawn, a line is drawn, and emotional cheating is a thing in just about every relationship. In monogamous relationships, emotional connections other than the one you have with your one life partner are, albeit hopefully not completely forbidden, severely limited, resulting in monogamous couples being co-dependent on each other at least to some extent. This is because there are limits on your outside emotional connections, and therefore your deepest feelings you are only allowed to share with your significant other, forcing you to be dependent on your SO to at least some extent.

Often times when two people enter a (romantic) relationship, they talk to each other about boundaries, they listen to what the other person's boundaries are, and thereby allow the other person to set boundaries on them. But as we discussed in Chapter 6, boundaries set by someone on another person or something you don't own are (or should be) illegal. Do you own your significant other in a romantic relationship? Most (especially monogamous) people seem to indicate they do, at least to some extent.

This all stems from people's insecurities and the fear of losing someone. In order to protect themselves from losing their loved ones, the response most people come up with is trapping that person in a monogamous relationship with tight boundaries set on the other as to what's allowed. But as I covered in chapter 4, putting tight boundaries on someone in an attempt to squeeze love out of someone will only result in receiving hatred (or at least less than ideal love) in return. Besides, is it really love if your partner is only with you because you're not allowing him/her to leave?

Furthermore, if something makes your partner happy, and you truly love your partner, why would you deny them that? Now, I understand that it's hard to take this to the extreme, and many people are just not comfortable letting their partner sleep around for a number of reasons, and therefore are not comfortable with the alternative to monogamy, polyamory, but why not allow your partner to have other deep emotional connections if those make them a happier person? As long as you're still prioritized and feel valued, a happier partner will make you happier too.

But the most important issue with how people do (romantic) relationships in general (not just monogamous ones) in my opinion is the initial boundary setting. Instead of allowing your partner to set boundaries on you, why not set boundaries on yourself. If you meet someone and you no longer feel like having sex with and/or going on dates with other people, then don't and set that boundary on yourself, and allow your partner to set his or her own boundaries as well. The only boundaries that should be decided together are the ones on the relationship itself (e.g. finances, children, etc.). Just like I discussed in the HG example in chapter 6 with the yoga room and game room.

Next up is marriage, which to me is one of the absolute worst things in society today. It's sold as the end all be all of life, get married, have children, etc. But in reality it's a horrid institution causing tremendous suffering.

Why? Every human being is unique. That makes every deep relationship, which most romantic relationships are, between two human beings uniqueness^2. So unique that only the two people involved really have any idea how awesome and beautiful it is (in most cases 😅 bad romantic relationships in which both parties are unhappy also exist).

I already have big issues with putting a unique human individual (out of 8B+) into a box against his or her will (much more on this in part 4), but to put a relationship between two unique human individuals into a box, call it marriage, and apply the same laws to each and every one... that's just incredibly evil to me.

If you're married, do you know what's in the marriage contract you signed when you got married? If you are not married (yet), do you plan to get married? If yes, do you know what you're signing up for? As in, do you know what's written in the marriage contract in your country?

It's absolutely insane that every unique relationship between two unique indivual human beings ends up being more-or-less forced to sign the same marriage contract, as if every romantic relationship is, or has to be, the same. This makes absolutely zero sense. And the fact that so many people buy into it, go along with it, and let their uniqueness^2 relationships be willingly boxed in, instead of letting them develop and blossom freely, is mind-blowing to me.

Part 3: Governance

Chapter 12: How not to Govern a Country

I'd ask you how you feel about governments, but most people do not have very positive feelings about governments, especially not their own, so let's not get into that. But feel free to have a brief discussion with anyone who's listening to me with you, if you so please.

Instead, let's talk about what governments are. A government is a small group of people put in charge of running a large group of people because the large group of people is too lazy and/or too busy to run itself. And depending on the size of the large group of people, it may simply be more efficient to have a small group put in charge of governing it.

The example I used  to talk about boundaries in chapter 6 of a HG village with 100 villagers is a size that could arguably still fully govern itself. For any and all decisions these 100 villagers need to make together as a group, they could simply assemble in the middle of their village, perhaps call it their townsquare, discuss amongst themselves when there are arguments, and then hold votes to decide outcomes.

As long as one has a suitable townsquare large enough to accommodate the number of villagers, this can be upscaled infinitely. The limiting factor is not the number of people that have to be able to participate in the meetings, the limiting factor is the number of issues that decisions have to be made on.

In modern society, it's easy to create a virtual townsquare accommodating millions, or even billions. Social media platforms such as X and Reddit are already virtual townsquares of sorts, albeit more casual ones not quite suitable for running countries. But with some adjustments made, they in theory could serve as modern day townsquares capable of facilitating the running of countries with each and every citizen involved.

The limiting factor is the complexity of countries and the number of issues going on at any one time. Countries are almost like companies with as many customers as they have citizens, hence the complexity of running one. It's simply not feasible to have every citizen directly involved in every decision that has to be made, nor do I think every citizen wants to be directly involved in every decision made in a country.

Does a person living in London really care about which major road in Birmingham gets an extra lane added to it first? These sorts of decisions might be left up to municipalities, but the point still stands. Not every person living in the UK cares enough about every decision made in the UK to want to be directly involved in it.

And this is where indirect governance comes in. We elect a small group of people we trust, and we put them in charge of the larger group, so that the larger group doesn't have to be directly involved in every single decision. Efficiency. And this makes quite a bit of sense.

What does not make sense, however, is that even our supposed best examples of governance that are "first world democratic nations" have gone so far towards indirect governance, that citizens barely have any control over their country at all.

Let's take the USA for example (sorry for picking on the USA so much, but it's kind of chosen to be the shining leading example of the west), which isn't the best example, but let's look at it first.

How much influence do US citizens have over their country? How much direct say do they really have in how their country is run? How many decisions do they get to be directly involved in? The answer unfortunately is, one bi-lateral decision, with effectively only 2 choices, every four years. That's it.

And to top it all off, the US is so influenced by money, that even that decision is heavily influenced by who has the most financial backing, and so it's really more of a plutocracy than a democracy.

Let's look at another example in Denmark, which is often regarded as the world's most democratic country. I had to do some research, because I'm not familiar with it. I will say that it sounds like a great system compared to many other countries, so props to Denmark for that, but I will simplify it somewhat here:

Disregarding the EU election and local elections to municipal councils, even Danish people only get to make a direct decision pertaining to how their country is run once every 3-4 years. This decision isn't bi-lateral. Voters not only have many parties to choose from:

(only parties with >2% of votes get seats)

Danish voters also get to vote on representatives directly. And through these votes on parties and representatives, Danish people get to influence how their country is run, but it's still only a few votes once every 3-4 years that only indirectly influence actual decisions that impact the lives of Danish citizens.

Some of you may already know where I'm going with this, and many of you probably don't fully understand why I'm not a fan of the Danish system either, but let's just move on and look at how to actually govern a country.

Chapter 13: How to Govern a Country

I think we should be able to do better than this given we live in the year 2025, no? Isn't it pathetic that even in the countries with supposedly the best governance, citizens only get to make a few decisions once every 3-4 years? Worst of all, the only decisions they are allowed to be a part of is who is put in charge, and then you just have to hope for the best.

But there is a better way! And it's called direct democracy, or less indirect democracy depending on your viewpoint. As I stated in the last chapter, there are simply too many decisions that have to be made in today's society (which is perhaps an issue in and of itself, but I digress), and so I don't think many citizens want to be directly involved in every single decision made. And it's not feasible either. And so some elected leaders are helpful, but let's talk more about that in a bit, and first focus on the direct democracy aspect.

So what would I suggest? I suggest that once every so often, let's say once every quarter, the most important decisions that have to be made are put to a vote. For example, say a country has to make three important decisions in a certain quarter regarding immigration (relax, stay put, or tighten), where to cut expenditures, and what to do about one of the big cities in the country that's really struggling.

This could happen via technology and via an official government mobile app. Perhaps there could be an option to vote in person for people without a mobile phone, but ~70% all people and ~98-99% of people in developed countries have cellphones these days. I also reckon blockchain can be used for this purpose (and elections and democracy in general), even though I'm not an expert on that topic by any means.

The first topic (immigration - relax, stay put, or tighten) is a fairly simple vote with three options, and should be straightforward. All decisions made through direct democracy can be this straightforward. People should be informed first, and so the mobile app (and/or media outlets) should probably have some information to help people make informed decisions. Informed citizens then vote, and the result gets implemented by the government.

However, I've intentionally chosen more complex decisions for the 2nd and 3rd example just to illustrate what could be possible, if the citizens of a country are comfortable enough with more direct democracy.

The second issue (where to cut expenditures) could simply involve a poll directly on which areas citizens are most okay with cutting costs, and then the actual elected government could use this information to set up an actual plan that'll be put into action. Or, similar to how social media works, financially savy citizens with enough interest in the topic and time on their hands could propose actual plans on how to fix the budget, which could compete with an official government proposal, and then the best plan that's put into action is the one that garners the most votes.

The third one is even more open-ended (what to do about a big city that's struggling). Or actually let me choose a better scenario. Imagine we're back in the midst of the '08 financial crisis and the #1 issue is what to do about the Wall Street crisis. This is obviously not something the general public can solve directly through a vote with a few options, but it does bring the opportunity to do a mini-election and elect an individual from the general public who is put in charge of solving the crisis and reports directly to the president/prime minister.

Imagine it something like this. In the 3rd quarter of '08 it became clear that something had to be done about the crisis on Wall Street, and it was the #1 issue going on in the USA at that time. The USA could've held a super accelerated mini-election to elect someone to be put in charge of solving this crisis. Someone the people trusted to deal with this and someone the people directly voted to be in charge of this, rather than the government scrambling to deal with it itself. As soon as this was announced, people could've uploaded recordings of themselves, then just like social media the most popular ones get upvoted, a few days later or a week later you have a nationally televised debate between the top 3-5 picks, and 1-2 days later people vote on who's put in charge of dealing with the '08 financial crisis, someone who reports to the president directly. I imagine someone trustworthy who understood the inner workings of Wall Street and the crisis would've won. Perhaps a short-seller who had seen it coming for over a year.

Something like this is likely too much right off the bat, and a country/populace that's actually brave enough to implement direct democracy will likely start off simple by polling the citizens on a few relatively simple topics once every quarter. Then once everything's proven to work, they might actually start polling citizens on some of the most pressing matters every quarter. And then over time perhaps more advanced systems like the budget one or the '08 financial crisis example, that could be refered to as direct indirect democracy, could be implemented.

This way citizens actually have more involvement in the decisions being made that impact them. As mentioned, there are simply too many decisions that need to be made for citizens to be involved in every single one, but citizens should really have more input into how their countries are run, because we're really deluding ourselves if we refer to any country as a democracy.

Honestly, from my perspective every single country is sort of a dictatorship, because every government has total power over a country. It's just not as bad as dictators of old because it's usually not a single dictator (power is shared amongst the government), dictators are only allowed to be in charge for usually 4 years, and in "democracies" they don't take control themselves, but even if a dictators didn't obtain control by force, they can still be referred to as a dictators.

typically, but not always.

Obviously people hate the word dictator, and many of you probably got offended by the last paragraph, I'm sorry about that. But even though we've made some progress in terms of governance as time has passed, we're not as far removed from authoritarian regimes as most people would like to think.


It depends on how you define "small group", but the first half of this paragraph describes today's governments awfully well, because there is essentially no (direct) participation from citizens in decision-making. There are fortunately more democratic institutions these days, but I think just about every politician shittalks its opposition, and every government attempts to maintain social order and control.

Anyway, before I get too off-track shittalking modern human society and get carried away talking about how flawed human society still is, there is one more important thing I want to talk about in this chapter, which is the arbitrary four year terms that seem to be a global standard for elected politicians. Some leaders shouldn't lead anywhere close to four years, and others should lead much much longer. So how do we solve this?

It's pretty simple. Technology does come in handy here and there, and this is an example of where it can come in handy. Blockchain could be used for this as well. Imagine every citizen can either on their mobile app or at a physical place update their stance on the elected government/leader/leaders to either supportive or unsupportive at any one time. You then aggregate to find a leader's true approval rating, which, if using blockchain, is accessible to everyone at every point in time.

Then the only thing needed is to implement a system whereby if the leader's approval rating drops below a certain number for a certain amount of time, new elections start automatically. For example:

If approval rating drops <20% for more than a week, you're out.
If approval rating drops <30% for more than a month, you're out.
If approval rating drops <40% for more than a quarter, you're out.
If approval rating drops <45% for more than 6 months, you're out.
If approval rating drops <50% for more than 1 year, you're out.
If approval rating drops <55% for more than 2 years, you're out.
If approval rating drops <60% for more than 4 years, you're out.
If approval rating drops <70% for more than 6 years, you're out.
If approval rating drops <80% for more than 10 years, you're out.

If you're wondering what about countries where a leader can't be found who can stay around or get >50% approval rating? Probably you'd want to split that country up, because having >50% of the population unhappy with a leader for over a year is a recipe for social unhappiness and social unrest.

Lastly, I'll finish this chapter with the following thoughts. The private sector (e.g. for-profit companies) is constantly being disrupted, rethought, innovated, improved, etc. When is the last time governments had a good overhaul and were rethought from the ground up? I don't know the answer, but it's got to have been more than a hundred years ago.

Similar to how I've stated that I think modern human society has far outpaced evolution, I also think modern human society has far outpaced governance. Regardless of what you think of the ideas I've presented in this chapter (many more to come in the next two chapters, and parts 4, 5, and 6), I hope you can agree that our societies are built upon outdated foundations in today's governments.

Chapter 14: What's Wrong with Capitalism?

This chapter doesn't have anything to do with governance, but this is a topic I have to talk about before moving on to chapter 15, in which I will talk about how I would run a government. And so, I'm just slotting this in here. And it does contain one thing I would implement if I were to run a government, having to do with taxes.

Let's start by talking about what an economy is. What do you think an economy is? Difficult question? So difficult you can't even answer and would rather just hear my answer? I imagine that's the case for most people. The economy is sort of like our society. It's become one big village / economy now that everything is so globally connected. As a result, the economy is so complex that it's hard to bring it down to its basic fundamentals, but allow me do it for you.

The economy is essentially one giant capitalistic system, which is essentially a giant voting mechanism on what humanity wants economic resources distributed towards.

Let me simplify that a little further with one of those HG analogies that I'm starting to miss.

Let's very simply identify a HG village with 100 people in it. For simplicity's sake let's assume all 100 are equally capable of providing resources for the village (e.g. no young children). Now, let's say that all this village needs is water, wood, and three types of food: fish, meat, and berries.

As a way to organize their hunting and gathering efforts, the village decides that during morning assembly every villager gets to vote on two things he/she wants that day, and this is kept track of with markings on a rock wall next to the village, similar to how cave drawings work.

I guess this village had a lot of meat-eaters

These markings on the rock wall then guide the villagers to what they should hunt and gather for the day, and so tasks (go bring 2 buckets of water, catch 2 fish, find 2 handfuls of berries, etc.) can be divided so that everyone gets what they want at the end of each day.

Today's modern economy works very similar to this, and in essence is just this with a lot more bells and whistles. We obviously use money for exchange, which allows people to work a lot some periods (18-65) and less other periods (retirement, holidays, etc.), among various other benefits.

So what is the economy? In essence it's a voting mechanism on what we, as a species, want economic resources to be allocated towards. Everyone who spends money tells the economy that they want something, and then economic resources are allocated to produce it. For the most part this doesn't happen in real-time, and actors within the economy have to predict what people will spend money on, because otherwise someone else who's faster will provide it for them. And although this is tedious and complex for the economy, it's great for consumers, because it means that in most cases we don't have to wait for something to be manufactured and shipped to us. We can just walk into a store, or order it online and have it delivered to us from a warehouse.

So far, all is well-ish, but now let's talk about the major issues and flaws in this system. Primarily, the fact that not everyone has an equal say in where economic resources are allocated. Rich people have far and away the most voting power on what gets produced, whereas poor people don't get much of a say, and sometimes no say at all.

The idea behind this is that people who have made more money have created more value and are therefore entitled to reap rewards of their labor, and there is some truth to that. However, does an 18-year-old student who's never worked in his/her life not deserve at least some say? Does a human being in a war-torn country with no opportunity to contribute much of anything deserve at least some say?

You may have noticed that two paragraphs up I said that rich people have far and away the most voting power. But do they? Can you spot my intentional mistake here? I'll get to it in a bit.

But there is something really weird going on in the world, because if we look at the way we tax people, it appears as if big earners are the worst people in existence, because we tax people who (supposedly) contribute the most to the economy. Why would we do that?

And here it comes... the biggest problem with capitalism is that the ones who spend the most are the ones who have the most voting power, which isn't always the richest people, even though there is a lot of overlap.

So, as a result, you have people spending money on (and thereby telling the economy that humanity needs) mega-yachts, multi-million dollar sports cars, jewelry, etc. etc. at the same time that some people with no voting power are starving.

Furthermore, ask yourself what would happen if these economic resources (let's say human labor) gets diverted from making a mega-yacht to providing food for people who are dying from hunger. Who would benefit from this and who would stand to lose?

Clearly, very few people stand to lose, only the ones buying mega-yachts and perhaps some of their friends and family will be upset. However, in return not only do the countless people getting food become happier (a mega-yacht worth of economic resources can feed a lot of bellies), I'd argue that the people who are now saving lives instead of building mega-yachts also become more fulfilled.

Alright, I'm jumping back and forth between a lot of angles here, but let's return to the tax issue, because that is perhaps the most important solution I want to provide here, because deleting capitalism from society is not something we can do overnight, and perhaps not something we'll ever want to do. Certainly not for the foreseeable future.

So, why do we tax income so much, and why are we trying to tax rich people with a lot of assets? Is it bad to provide a lot of value to the world (earning money doesn't always mean value is provided, but that's an entirely separate issue of capitalism)? Is it bad to have provided a lot of value to the world? No. So why do we tax them so heavily? We're going at this problem the wrong way.

What makes much more sense is to directly tax the biggest problem in the economy, which is extravagent spending. So, instead of an income tax, why don't we impose a consumption tax? The way I would do it is as follows.

Instead of people reporting their income, people report their expenditures. Especially most first world countries go entirely by credit/debit cards these days, so I'd move towards those further so that all expenditures are easily kept track off, and in the meantime any cash expenditure must be tracked by the retailer. Setting up this system requires some work, but it shouldn't be too much more complex for people to report their consumption than it is to report their income. A side benefit is that people may also become more financially savy and responsible.

You then create brackets, just like we do for income tax. For example for developed countries:
  • <$2k/month = 0%
  • $2k - $5k/month = 10%
  • $5k - $10k/month = 20%
  • $10k - $20k/month = 35%
  • $20k - $40k/month = 50%
  • $40k - $70k/month = 75%
  • $70k - $100k/month = 100%
  • $100k - $200k/month = 200%
  • $200k - $500k/month = 300%
  • $500k - $1M/month = 400%
  • $1M+/month = 500%
These brackets are just an example of what it could look like. And yes, I would advocate to tax well over 100% on people consuming millions of dollars worth of economic resources every year.

I would also tax indiscriminately regardless of type of consumption, because even though in my opinion mega-yachts are a waste of economic resources, who am I to say so? It's simpler to just tax consumption regardless of what is consumed. If some people prefer to drive a sportscar over eating healthy food and don't mind paying 20% taxes, that should be their choice. No one knows what makes others happy, and taxing some goods more than others is a form of manipulation.

But regardless, a single person consuming millions of dollars worth of economic resources in a single year, that's what needs to be taxed heavily in order for capitalism to work properly. 

If I were to run a government, this is one of the main things I would implement, but I would do so much more.

Chapter 15: How I Would Run a Government

The first thing I would do is to stop being so obsessed with GDP growth, because it's just a freaking number. Seriously. Sure, GDP growth is an indicator of certain things, but if we could split a currency like a stock, and we did a 10:1 currency split, meaning for every one dollar/currency unit we now have 10. That'd mean 900% GDP growth overnight, but all it'd accomplish is confusion.

GDP growth in and of itself is meaningless, and a much better target would be a high approval rating, but even that is just a binary yes/no, and citizens could just be saying they think you're better than anyone else (or less bad than anyone else) at running the country, so that's also not exactly it.

Instead of any of this, I'd simply use some common sense to guide me to what I should prioritize to make my citizens happy/happier.

I'd start by asking myself:

"What is most important to my citizens?"

"Hmm... well... oxygen I guess. If they don't have oxygen, that's among the worst things I could imagine."

"Do I need to worry about any of my citizens running out of oxygen?"

"Hmm, probably not. It's freely and readily available. So let's move on."

"What is the 2nd most important to my citizens(' happiness) after oxygen?"

"I can only assume that's water. Does every one of my citizens have access to clean drinkable water at all times?"

(Let's assume this is Singapore, where I live, but it'll be similar for most developed nations)

"Yes, pretty much."

"Oh, that's great! Running a government is pretty easy actually!"

"But wait! They have to pay for clean drinking water?!?!? What is this nonsense! Who the hell thought it was a good idea to turn water into a business? When is oxygen and clean breathing air going to be sold to my citizens? 😠"

Alright, so to be fair there are economic resources going into ensuring that people in developed nations have top-notch clean water that doesn't make you sick. Water out in nature that animals (and humans used to) drink was never fully clean, but the water in cities where most people live hasn't exactly become cleaner over time.

So yes, it takes some resources to provide clean drinking water, but other than oxygen, isn't this the most important thing a government could provide for its people? Guaranteed access to clean drinking water? And so, my first real order of business would be to make all water free, and to make it illegal to charge a citizen of my country for water, because why turn water into a business? Why turn water into a commodity? If anyone dies in my (developed) country from a lack of clean drinking water, I'll certainly have failed as a leader.

"What's next? No citizen of mine will ever lack oxygen or water. What else is important?"

"I know! Food!"

Food is a little bit different from water, and you can't just make it illegal to charge for food, and at this point I should probably talk a little bit about the overarching picture and goal before talking more about food.

I'm making assumptions here, but I believe every human is simply trying to be happy, so making my citizens long-term happier would be my top priority. Not short-term happy btw, because then I'd just give away money or free drugs until the government runs out of money.

So how do I make my citizens happier in the long run? Well, safety first, so I'd start out by creating a safety net so that no citizen of mine will die prematurely (unless they really want to). Some countries already have safety nets of sorts via social security, and there's been talk of UBI. But those assume that money is safety, and although it sort of works that way in modern society due to the capitalistic system, and although I understand that different people prioritize different things, and who am I to force upon my citizens that oxygen, water, and food are most important to them... I mean c'mon... I think it's pretty obvious that these are among a human being's most important needs, and so to have a real safety net that works even if the capitalistic system were to collapse... you, as a government, need to figure out how to provide these for free regardless of what happens. If a HG village could have eternal free-flowing water for all its inhabitants, it would jump at the opportunity.

Towards the end of this chapter there'll be even more clarity on what I'm advocating for and what I'd try to build. But for now, let's continue with food.

Alright, so it's not feasible to make it illegal to charge for food. Three Michelin star restaurants would be overrun. But one could set up infrastructure to provide super shitty (but free) meals to every single citizen. In Singapore there's already cheap Hawker Food that starts around $5 per meal, so 2-3 meals per day would be $10-15. So I'd have to make it a lot shittier and more efficient at scale. I reckon you could feed a citizen for perhaps as little as $2 per day, consisting of just plain rice with some eggs/chicken, and maybe a few vegetables.

Perhaps over time you could expand this and up the budget to $5, or eventually even $10 a day and actually make it quite healthy, and include fruits and the like. But it's better to start small, because you wouldn't want to be on the hook for feeding your entire country on day 1, which is a risk if you make good healthy meals available for free. It'd also upset the economy too much, and too many restaurant owners would go out of business too fast.

So to start, it'd be shitty meals that will keep you alive, but not much more than that, and over time it could potentially be expanded to proper healthy nutrition readily available and free for everyone.

Okay, let's hold off for a little longer on talking about what sort of societal changes this would bring forth, because I have two more things I'd do that I want to cover in this chapter.

"So, now my citizens will never run out of oxygen, water, or food! Fantastic! They're probably / hopefully pretty happy with how I'm doing as their leader. I hope my approval rating is doing well."

"Regardless, there is so much more to life than these three things. I wonder what else would make my citizens happy. Oh! I know! Everyone needs a home! Free housing is next!"

This would work very similar to food. I'd want to give my citizens the option to have free housing, but I'd like most of them, at least initially, to not really want to live in my free housing, so as to not create too much disruption on day 1, and so it would have to be quite shitty.

I'm thinking a tiny <10sqm box with no windows, a bed, a light, a desk, a mini-fridge, and rock-solid sound insulation. I'd want to give my citizens a space of their own where they can lock themselves up for extended periods, just be alone, be themselves, and do whatever the fuck they want, because it's their home and theirs alone. And it's so sound-proof that they can scream and play music as loud as they want and no one will hear them.

Honestly, 10sqm may be too large. It'd be sort of like a capsule hotel, but with a bit more space to stand next to one's bed, and with a private room with rock-solid sound insulation. Bathrooms would be communal.

Think something like this, but with better sound insulation, and probably even smaller

Does anyone's dream home look like this? Probably not. Does anyone want to live their entire life in a tiny (perhaps as small as ~5sqm) little box? I doubt it. But it should be an option that's there for any one of my citizens, so that everyone can have at least a home.

And now I really want to talk about what kind of society this would create, but before I do so, I'll quickly mention the last thing I'd do, which is provide free healthcare for all. Numerous countries already have this, so that shouldn't be too difficult.

Now, there are actually three more things I'd do, but Parts 4, 5, and 6 are dedicated to those. So before moving on to those, let's first talk about what society would start to morph into if I were to run a government and were to have the support of my citizens to make these changes. First of all, let me ask you. How do you think society would change? Would you want to live in a country like this?

I hope so. I would want to, because I think people would be much happier if they had the option not to work and not to be part of the capitalistic system. Not to say that it's bad and should disappear, but I think it's pretty obvious that most people are trapped in a system that they can't get out of. Most of us need money to live, and in order to get money we need to be part of this system that's turned into a monstrosity that's completely out of control. And as I discussed in Chapter 7, is incentivized to hurt others. So most of us have no choice but to hurt others through this capitalistic system that dominates human society. It's either hurt others, or have no money and die.

Worst of all, most human beings never get a chance to explore themselves, or to find out who they really are. They're born, raised, educated, and then once they finally are old enough to go out on their own, they have to be part of this system in order to survive.

And not just that, but most humans have a scarcity mindset and feel like they need to outperform other humans in order to survive, and in order to do so they feel like they need to capture a larger pie of the economic/capitalistic system. I think this is moreso what drives humans than greed or wanting a better lifestyle. It's moreso a fear of ending up at the bottom and no longer having access to the things we need. That plus wanting to have not just enough resources to live today, but wanting enough resources to live tomorrow, next week, next month, and ideally for the rest of our lives. But then there are all these forces, such as advertising, imprinting into us the need for more things than we actually need in order to make us consume more in order to increase GDP...

Truly... the world... and especially capitalism... it's such a mess.
Companies are making humanity feel like it needs certain things that they can profit off of, rather than providing the things humanity actually needs. Especially because the people most in need have the least voting power on how economic resources are allocated, there is a disconnect between the capitalistic system and humanity's needs.
The economy is turning wants into needs and creating needs in people who don't really need anything rather than addressing the actual needs of humanity.

I think that if we put in place efficient systems that ensure that people have their basic needs met not only today or tomorrow, but for the rest of their lives, that people would finally be able to chill and figure out what it is they really want to do. That's what I'd try to do if I ran a government.

Second to last, here's food for thought. I get the impression that if a "third-world" war-torn country suddenly had free water, food, and housing, everyone would be jubilent and applaud. But if a "first-world" developed nation suddenly had free water, food, and housing, people would be like... that's dumb. That's socialism. Get the hell out of here.

Am I right about this? Why is this? Would it hurt the pride of people in developed nations to be taken care of by their governments? Are we supposed to be able to provide these things ourselves? I don't know where this comes from, but it's super weird, backwards, and really fucking dumb if true.

Anyway, last thing for this chapter (and part) is a look ahead at the next three parts, because there are three more things I would do if I were to run a government, and they're arguably the three most impactful things, which is why each gets an entire part dedicated to it.

They're close to my heart and areas I'm extremely passionate about, because they are things that have had a severely negative impact on my life, which, if you're curious, you can read more about in my autobiography. These areas are:
  • Mental Healthcare
  • Education
  • Parenting
Let's start with mental healthcare.

Part 4: Mental Healthcare

Chapter 16: Psychiatry

Before researching, my assumption was that psychiatry started on good intentions as a way to help people with mental health problems in an environment they feel safe in. We're all familiar with going to a doctor, and perhaps even a hospital, being diagnosed with some sort of physical ailment, and then being described medication or a procedure. I assumed that psychiatry was started somewhere in the last 50-200 years and simply copied the physical healthcare system, because it makes sense (for physical ailments) and it's what people are familiar with and feel safe with. However, after doing a bit of research and digging on Wikipedia, it turns out that psychiatry has much more sinister origins and is a lot older than I thought.

It turns out that societies as far back as 2,000-2,500 years ago in places like ancient India and ancient Greece already used the term "mental illness", theorized about the possible causes, and invented treatment methods. This all makes sense and isn't too surprising. There are loads of ancient rituals involving herbal medications, exorcisms, and the like. And things like TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) also appear to treat the body indirectly through the mind. Spiritual practices and healing methods have been around for a long time.

It's just that over time science has progressed, learned more about the human anatomy and how the humany body works, and we've come up with proven ways to treat many a physical illness. However, even though we know how the physical part of our brain works all the way down to neurons, synapses, etc., there is a big difference between the physical human brain, and the human mind. We still have absolutely no clue how feelings truly work, how the mind works, or how human consciousness works. We have theories, but that's it. And it seems like everybody has their own interpretation of how these things work, and this is where religions, spirituality, souls, etc. come in for many people to explain the either not-yet-explained, or the simply-unexplainable.

However, as physical healthcare separated itself and established itself into a proper science, mental healthcare continued to exist and people continued to think that people acting weird were "mentally ill". These were (and are) in many cases simply people who act a little (or a lot) out of the ordinary and don't quite fit within society. In 5th century BCE ancient Greece the origins of these (presumably more extreme) behaviours were thought to be supernatural in origin.

As time went on, starting in 9th century medieval Islamic regions and later in 13th century Europe, hospitals were built to treat the "mentally ill". However, there were also people simply held captive in cages in order to "entertain the masses". In the late 17th century these sorts of "mental health hospitals" or "asylums" started to proliferate and more and more started popping up. One important characteristic of these places was that people for the most part were locked up there against their will.

And this is essentially psychiatry's origin story. Locking people up against their will who are deemed to need "treatment", just because they act a little different than the average person. I'll talk more about how this works in today's modern society in the next two chapters, because unfortunately things have not changed much from medieval times. But I want to use the rest of this chapter to talk concretely about the most important things that psychiatry gets wrong, and why it is such an evil and why it is causing so much suffering within humanity, probably more than anything I've discussed thus far.

You may have noticed my "" (quotation marks) around the terms mental illness and mentally ill. This is because of the following:

The way psychiatry views mental health is binary. People are either mentally ill or mentally healthy, and psychiatry is seen as the world's foremost authority on who is and who isn't mentally healthy (or in other words, whose behaviour is and whose behaviour isn't deemed socially acceptable, but more on that later...).

Now let me ask you, which of those two camps do you think you fall into? Especially for people who think they fall into the mentally healthy camp, do you think that means you're completely mentally healthy and have zero mental health issues? Personally, I don't think a person like that exists, especially in this day and age. As I've discussed, it's incredibly difficult to adapt to modern human society, and as a result I don't think any individual can be classified as 100% mentally healthy. In my eyes, if you want to call any one person "mentally ill", you have to call every single human being "mentally ill", but I prefer to not use that term, because that'd indicate there is something mentally wrong with human beings.

I am, and therefore I am perfect

Now, even if you go along with this line of thought and are of the opinion that everybody has mental health issues (and this was me until recently), you'd in my opinion still be wrong, because you'd see mental health as a spectrum:

Very mentally unhealthy - Mentally unhealthy - Somewhat mentally unhealthy - Somewhat mentally healthy - Mentally healthy - Very mentally healthy

However, human minds aren't that one-dimensional.

I am of the opinion that every human being is unique. Every human life, and therefore every human's life experiences are unique. And therefore every human mind is unique as well.

Psychiatry (and fans of personality tests such as Myer-Briggs) are of the opinion that you can categorize a human mind into x number of boxes. Just sixteen boxes in the case of Myer-Briggs, and a few hundred boxes in the case of psychiatry. Thereby label a human being's mind, understand it, and treat/medicate it. But we do not even understand how the human mind works in general, let alone a unique individual's unique mind, so how could that approach possibly work?

Instead of labeling humans with psychiatric disorders, why don't we label humans with names? A name is all a human needs. Everyone is unique.

After "diagnosing" a unique individual's mind to be wrong in some way, psychiatry decides to medicate it and alter the person's brain's chemistry, because it believes that we feel the way we do because of certain chemicals. But is it really proven to work like that, or is there a chance that we create these chemicals in a response to our feelings?

Does it sound more logical that our bodies produce certain chemicals when we meet certain people, and then we start to like them, or does it sound more logical that we meet someone we like and then as a response our bodies start to produce certain chemicals. I think the latter sounds way more logical. If it were to be the former, we'd have no influence on who we like and who we fall in love with, and we'd arguably have no free will.

Psychiatry believes it can drug people who feel bad and make them feel better. Do you know who else feels that way? Drug addicts. They know they can drug themselves and feel better... for a while.

In essence, psychiatry is attempting to drug away people's real-life problems, but you cannot take drugs and heal from real-life issues. There are things, such as one's spouse passing away or one's child being raped, that are so mentally and emotionally destructive that even just thinking drugs could make someone get over that is extremely delusional.

You cannot drug away real-life problems. Psychiatrists think, believe, or wish this to be possible.

Most of psychiatry's labels for "mental illnesses" and "mental disorders" are really just symptoms of real-world and real-life problems. Let's run through a few:

Anxiety

Common sense says that anxiety is an emotion or state of being. Let's see what Google says:


Oh, so Google agrees that it is an emotion, but then why does it say disorder at the top? Is it a disorder to experience emotions? Is it okay to be anxious, but when a psychiatrist says it's too much and crosses a boundary, now it suddenly becomes a disorder? Is it illegal to experience intense emotions?

All anxiety is is a fear of the future. It's a symptom of real-life problems and can be a state of being in certain situations.

Depression

To be fair, Google is very insistent that Depression is a disorder, somehow suggesting that it's not okay to be depressed... so I went with Wikipedia, which suggests depression is a mental state.

Personally, I think it's indeed a state of being / mental state that's usually a symptom of underlying (real-world) issues. To say that there is something wrong with being depressed is invalidating someone's feelings, incredibly toxic, and incredibly hurtful, not helpful. Yet, psychiatry tells depressed people there's something wrong with them and that they shouldn't feel this way.

Panic

I don't even have to go to Google or Wikipedia for this one. The fact that panic can be a disorder is absolute lunacy to me. Panic is clearly an intense emotion or mental state. To say there's something wrong with someone who's experiencing panic is to say there's something wrong with a person's feelings, which is never true.

Invalidating someone's feelings or life experiences is one of the worst and most hateful things you can do to someone.

There is always a good reason for why people feel the way they do, it's just that it's not always obvious what this reason is.

Phobias

Fear is a disorder now? Or only once it gets intense and irrational? Do psychiatrists know that feelings are by definition irrational?


Okay, I should try to calm down a little bit, because as you may be able to tell, I have a serious bone to pick with psychiatry. So instead of running through the entire list of disorders that psychiatry has come up with, let me just state my overall stance:

Most, if not all, "mental illnesses" and "mental disorders" are symptoms or bags of symptoms of a normally functioning human mind, albeit usually under severe stress or as a result of horrible life circumstances.

Psychiatry puts people into one of these boxes of theirs, and then treats these symptoms, but never the underlying cause(s). Drugs can suppress symptoms, but they cannot heal the mind.

This is a good time to add in something important, hopefully before I've completely alienated what's left of you friends who are still listening to me. (I hope we're still friends :/)

In that it treats and can reduce symptoms, psychiatry isn't completely useless. There are people who are suffering so much that they simply want some relief. Or how about a man (or woman) who has lost their entire family in a plane crash. That is not just a life-altering, but a life-destroying event, and if this person is able to recover from this at all, it's going to take a monumental effort. It may help this person to take something to help reduce the intensity of his/her symptoms during the initial months, so that this person can rebuild his/her life, before waning off the drugs and really dealing with the underlying issues, which obviously is the loss of all the closest people in his/her life.

Before talking more about certain incentives and why this waning off doesn't happen as much as it should in the next chapter, there is one last thing about psychiatry that I want to cover in this chapter, which unfortunately comes from my personal experience:

Psychiatrists put their own pride over their "patients'" well-being, Psychiatrists rather feel like they've helped people than actually having helped people. It's understandable that they want to feel like they've helped people, but the only way through which they know how to is to drug people.

This may not hold true for every single psychiatrist, but it unfortunately holds true for most. Psychiatrists may think they're well intentioned, but whether they're aware of it or not, deep down most of them unfortunately aren't. But hey... that can also be said about advertisers...

Chapter 17: Big Pharma & Mental Health Laws

Alright, so hopefully I was able to make some of these things clear in the last chapter:

  • We sort of know how the physical human brain works
  • We can only theorize as to how the human mind works
  • Psychiatry thinks it can use what knowledge we have about the human brain to treat the human mind
  • What psychiatry is really doing is determining whose behaviour is socially acceptable and whose isn't
  • Psychiatry is incredibly evil and spreads immense suffering

In this chapter, I'll expand the scope of my war on psychiatry to also include Big Pharma. Allow me to do this by quoting myself:

The fact that society frowns upon drinking away one's own problems, but accepts drugging away other people's problems through psychiatry, should tell everyone that there is something seriously wrong with psychiatry.

Many industries that produce products that are known to be harmful to humans have tried to convince the general public that their products aren't harmful. Big Tobacco is the most obvious one that most of us are familiar with, but Big Alcohol is sort of doing the same. We all know that alcohol, especially in larger quantities, is harmful to us, but there is research being done to highlight some of the health benefits of drinking alcohol (anti-oxidants and such). Who's behind that research? Who stands to benefit? Obviously Big Alcohol. I even once read that Big Sugar used to publish similar research back in the '60s, and Grok confirms this is true:


What about Big Pharma? Big Pharma is cheating, because it's formed an alliance with Psychiatry, which is posing as a science but really is more of a religion, in order to push some of its drugs onto people.

Psychiatry as we've just established, is not a science. The only scientific thing about it is that it has done some research as to what drugs suppress what symptoms, which as we've established can occasionally be helpful if someone is suffering from very severe symptoms after a very severely negative life event.

However, a real doctor in a real hospital wouldn't look at a person with an infected appendix that's going to burst and say, oh this person's symptom is pain, let's treat this person with painkillers and send him home once the pain is gone, without addressing the underlying issue. It's just that, using the example from the last chapter where someone lost their entire family in a plane crash, you can't just make that kind of life event go away. It's something only the person him/herself can deal with, hopefully with support from people remaining in his/her life. You can't prescribe medication or a procedure and fix something like that.

But back to Big Pharma. It's using psychiatry as its vessel to drug the world. South American druglords use boats and distributors to get their drugs to US citizens, Big Pharma uses psychiatry and what are dubbed mental health laws. But Big Pharma is a lot more evil than South American drug lords, because at least US citizens have a choice in whether they use South American drugs. Victims of psychiatry and mental health laws usually do not.

Mental health laws around the world use something called the "Obligatory Dangerousness Criterion" (that I have no idea why it is obligatory) in order to involuntarily commit people to places referred to as "mental health hospitals", but are really more aptly referred to as "churches of psychiatry", "rape houses", or really anything without mental health in the name, because referring to those places as "mental health hospitals" is an insult to both real hospitals and real mental health professionals worldwide. This is still the same shit that started in 13th century Europe, and inside these places emotional torture and emotional rape are legal.

The mental health laws used for this purpose are simply a modern legalization of psychiatry's origin that we discussed in the last chapter, which is discriminately locking up people that psychiatry deems exhibit socially unacceptable behaviour. The "Obligatory Dangerousness Criterion" will tell you that only people who are a danger to themself or to others as a result of a "mental health disease" will get involuntarily committed to a "mental health hospital", but reality is far different than this and far different from how these places are depicted in movies.

I've unfortunately had the displeasure of being inside one three times, and I can tell you they're more like light prisons. Furthermore, I can also tell you that in there I did not come across a single person who had attempted suicide or was even suicidal. So that must mean that everyone there was a danger to others? No, far from it. I think the most dangerous person I came across in there was someone who had kicked a police car... once.

No, what these laws are really being used for is for psychiatry and big pharma to tag team new victims. Psychiatry gets to decide what's socially acceptable and socially unacceptable and gets to torture its victims who are deemed to have exhibited socially unacceptable behaviour until they are confident they'll no longer continue such behaviour. And big pharma gets to drug all the people involuntarily confined against their will, and usually gets long-term customers out of this deal. For big pharma, it's literally free customer acquisition. And the more people get locked up using these laws and labeled as "mentally ill" and forced to take drugs, the more money big pharma makes.

And because psychiatry is so passionate about drugging away the world's problems, psychiatry and big pharma are a match made in hell. What adds further fuel to the fire is the fact that psychiatrists believe they know people better than those people know themselves, which is delusional. Psychiatrists like to call other people's beliefs delusional, but thinking you know a person better than they do, especially after a few brief conversations (or even a few long conversations), and at that point know better what's best for them than they do, is beyond delusional.

And this is why I say that psychiatry is a religion posing as a science. The posing as a science (but really being a pseudoscience at best) part we've covered, but why is it a religion? Because it doesn't accept people with beliefs other than its own, and it attacks people's beliefs as delusional and as forms of paranoia. Regular religions aren't as horrible about it these days, but many also used to attack people with beliefs other than their own, and religions are also very unaccepting of dissenting beliefs, as I discussed in Chapter 10.

One last qualm I have with the "Obligatory Dangerousness Criterion" that helps lock people up involuntarily is that it, as is, allows professionals to break confidentiality. The fact that talking to a mental health professional about suicidality or about hurting others comes along with it a risk that that professional will break confidentiality and inform authorities makes people less comfortable talking about these topics that are very important to talk about, especially for people struggling with them.

Take for example a suicidal person. The best thing for that suicidal person is to be able to talk about his suicidal ideation and talk through his feelings in a safe and private setting, so that he can hopefully work through it all. However, if doing so to your therapist / counselor / psychologist comes along with a risk that this person is going to break confidentiality and get you locked up and drugged against your will in a "mental health hospital", you might take your chances and just face death rather than face a fate worse than death in a place where you'll be tortured while prohibited from killing yourself.

This is a complex topic for which I do have a solution, which I'll discuss in a few chapters (chapter 21).

Chapter 18: Generational Trauma

Finally we circle back to generational trauma, which I've mentioned before when I talked about things like the '08 financial crisis, World War II, and even the Black Plague still affecting society today in various ways.

I'll let you in on another secret as to how most people get involuntarily committed in "mental health hospitals" using mental health laws and the "Obligatory Dangerousness Criterion". A lot of people's behaviour is deemed socially unacceptable by the ones around them and get ganged up on by the ones who supposedly love them the most. Sometimes it's family members of a wealthy person trying to get access to that wealth. Sometimes it's simply failed parents who can't accept that their child is misbehaving because of their failures. Sometimes it's a group of friends doing some sort of intervention on a person they feel like needs to kick an addiction or some other habit.

Aside from the fact that this happens without a proper legal process, and is thus incredibly prone to abuse and lies, what I want to focus on is the failed parents and generational trauma part of this. There's a lot to unpack here.

Let's start by really simply trying to describe what generational trauma is. I'll go at it from a couple of different angels.

First off, let's (not) appreciate the fact that humans often, naturally, go for things that make them feel better as soon as possible, because we want to feel better now, not later.

If your goal is to have a clear mind, you will dissociate. But if your goal is not to dissociate, you will end up with a clear mind.

And so, any of us who want to feel good and have a clear trouble-free mind, will naturally do so by putting aside all our problems and ignoring them. Because the easiest way to feel good is to focus on something positive and ignore all the negatives.

However, what happens over time is that all these problems will just bubble and baloon and continue to grow until at some point they can no longer be ignored. Physical examples of this are an appendicitis that'll eventually burst, or a minor discomfort in your lower abdomen that eventually grows into stage 4 cancer. Emotional examples of this are a displeasure with your chosen major in uni because it was really more your parents' choice than yours, over time growing into a hatred for not just your parents, but also yourself and your entire life after you've wasted 40 year working in a field you hate, or a small thing your boyfriend/girlfriend did wrong early in the relationship that you chose to ignore, spiraling over time into intense underlying distrust and the end of the relationship.

Spiraling of unaddressed emotions and the natural desire of humans to not address (unpleasant) emotions are a dangerous combination, especially because over time these unaddressed emotions only become more and more uncomfortable to address.

Furthermore, there's this phenomena called having children that's really popular, and in many cases, rather than addressing their own issues, humans decide to just pass them onto the next generation to deal with, which turns into generational trauma.

My favorite example to use is that of a male basketball player who tried his hardest to make the NBA but didn't. There are many of these men, and many of them then have children and pass on their dreams and desires onto their children and push them to make the NBA and succeed where they failed, because they are under the delusion that this will make their children happy, but really it'll (in a way) make them happy.

If the things being passed on were just dreams and desires that would be bad enough, because no one knows what makes another person happy better than they do, so projecting and pushing one's dreams and desires onto someone else is a surefire way to make them unhappy, but unfortunately what's being projected and pushed onto the children in this example is something else, the father's trauma.

No one needs to make the NBA. Most likely, the father grew up really poor and on some level felt that, if only I got out of this situation and made a lot of money, I would be happy. Basketball turned out to be his path to achieve this, and so this man did his best to achieve this goal of his. And this isn't completely unreasonable. However, I'd argue that although the instability and poverty were definitely real-life issues, the left-over trauma(tic memories) and unaddressed emotional needs of this person were even bigger issues.

Ideally, this man would've worked on himself, healed from what happened to him during his childhood, found stability emotionally and financially, and then perhaps still chosen to pursue basketball simply because he enjoyed it.

However, that did not happen. He saw Basketball and making the NBA as the thing that'd solve all his problems, he failed at it, and then he passed on this entire life philosphy, including his emotional problems onto his children. He imprinted upon his children perhaps not his exact upbringing and circumstances, but he certainly taught them that if you don't make the NBA, then x, y, and z emotional pain, because that's what I've learned throughout my life. And as such, this man's trauma is passed onto the next generation.

Families are essentially villages, and because it's piss easy to be a parent and everyone is allowed to be a parent (more on that in part 6), every family gets to pass on its issues and trauma to the next generation, and future generations become more and more traumatized because more and more shit happens. And because villages have all but disappeared from modern day human society, all the shit that keeps happening keeps spreading and keeps affecting everyone, and it all keeps being passed on down to next generations to deal with, because it's much easier for all of us to pass all our problems down to our children than to deal with them ourselves.

Okay. So how does this tie in with psychiatry and such? Well, psychiatrists are very similar to parents in that they think they know what people need better than they do, just like parents think they know what their children need better than their children do. As in the basketball player's example, even though it's the father who feels and thinks he needs to make the NBA to be happy, he then projects that onto his children and instills into his children that they need to make the NBA in order to be happy. And as a result, even though the father needs the children to make the NBA for him to be happy, at least on the surface he's thinking and acting as though his children need to make the NBA for them to be happy.

Talking about basketball, this guy's my GOAT!

This is incredibly evil, and psychiatrists are the exact same and work with parents hand in hand. It's really psychiatrists who need their patients to take drugs for them to be happy and to feel like they've helped their patients (and in some cases to get bonuses from big pharma), but they act as though their patients need to take drugs in order for their patients to be happy. And they act as though they know their patients better than their patients know themselves after a few brief conversations. (Honestly, psychiatrists' patients should be referred to as victims)

Parents and psychiatrists work hand in hand, because some parents absolutely fail at raising their children, and so when children don't quite fit in or reflect badly upon their parents, some parents can't cope with that and instead of taking on that blame they look for anything else other than themselves to blame, and psychiatry is there to help. There are numerous psychiatric disorders for parents to choose from to, hand-in-hand with psychiatrists, use to label their children as "mentally disordered". Rather than own up and say, "hey, we failed as parents, and fucked up this human being, we're sorry", many parents say, "hey, my child has autism" or "hey, my child has ADHD", and "none of this is my fault, it's just a disorder".

Lastly, I'll explain generational trauma from one more angle.

For some reason, in modern day society the way love seems to work is as follows:

  1. You make sure you're okay, because it's bad to be needy. This involves prioritizing your family and friends and making sure they're okay too, and making sure you have strong bonds with them.
  2. Only once your family (especially parents. parents are very important!) is taken care of, and you have no immediate needs and you feel like you want to start dating, is it okay to start dating. It's bad to need a boyfriend/girlfriend, it's only romance if you really want someone.
  3. Then you date for a while, over time you introduce your partner to more and more important people in your life, starting with your friends and eventually your family.
  4. Then with everyone's blessing you get married, and forever happily ever after and such.
All of this is bullshit. Although people are/should be well within their right to be in charge of their own relationships, and as such it's perfectly reasonable to prioritize your O.G. family over everyone else, for most humans the most important relationship in their life will be the one with their significant other, life partner, husband/wife, or whatever label you put on it.

If this is the most important relationship most of us will form in our lives, why are we only allowed to (at least initially) want this type of relationship and want this person in our lives? And why is it socially frowned upon to feel like you need a life partner or need someone pretty quickly after meeting them in a romantic setting? Especially if you believe in soulmates, wouldn't it be weird not to need your soulmate and say "meh, I'm good... maybe after we've been in a relationship for 9 months I'll need you"? I think that just about anyone who tells you they don't need love is lying to you and possibly lying to themself as well. Life alone without ever experiencing love or romance fucking sucks.

The way this relates to generational trauma is that, if we're all initially only allowed to "want" a boyfriend/girlfriend and we all are supposed to take care of our family, friends, elders, and in some cultures even companies, first, how the hell are we ever supposed to get around to dating in modern day society? All these people are never going to be fully taken care off, and if it's the burden of new generations to prioritize and take care of old generations first, well... because of generational trauma and the stacking up of everything bad that's ever happened, no wonder new generations don't get around to having children and birth rates are plummetting.

Today's generations are so burdened with taking care of our elders, families, friends, companies, that we barely have time to take care of ourself, let alone produce new offspring, let alone find someone to produce new offspring with, let alone do it the right way and be happy with ourselves and our relationships first, so that when we have children we don't continue the cycle of generational trauma.

Perhaps this is why so many artists (especially Taylor Swift. Go Taylor!) talk of love as a "game". I mean, it obviously isn't, but it can be thought of as such if we and our lovers somehow need to bypass all the bullshit we're being burdened with in order to be together.

Psychiatry is trying to monopolize love, trying to be in charge of human connections, and trying to propogate generational trauma.

Chapter 19: Mind-Viruses

There has been lots of talk about mind-viruses recently, especially about something called the "woke mind-virus". In this chapter, I will explain to you exactly how they work and present a few examples.

Unfortunately, mind-viruses work quite a lot like generational trauma. It's like if you put generational trauma in a blender with advertising and religion, you end up with mind-viruses.

My definition of a trauma is an unprocessed emotion, and of trauma in general is unprocessed emotions.

On the deepest level, a mind-virus is a bottled up emotion / trauma, but on the surface it's a belief or belief system set in place to deal with this trauma. For example, going back to the basketball player, many unprocessed emotions from his childhood make up his trauma, and his belief system on how to deal with it is: "if I make the NBA and become rich, I'll be happy".

Everyone has many mind-viruses like these within them, and viruses can be contageous, but not all are bad. Take one of mine for example. I think Penguins are cute, magical and awesome. I don't know exactly why I think so, but I do, and I've certainly infected some people around me with this Penguin-Love Mind-Virus, which I think is fairly harmless.

Dumb =/= Cute, but it may be true for Penguins

There are also very harmful mind-viruses though, the most popular one these days appears to be the woke-mind virus, which I would refer to as a selflessness mind-virus or perhaps the forced-empathy mind-virus.

To me what seems to be going on is that there is (or was, it's kind of grown and transformed over time) a group of people who can't stand to watch others suffer and believe it's their duty to help others. So much so that they feel that they have to help others and they don't think they're good people if they don't. They then also project this onto others and bully people into helping others honing in on every human's desire to be a good person, or to at least be seen as and perceived as a good person.

What you get as a result is a large mass of people, commonly refered to as "the woke movement", bullying others into being what they perceive to be good people and turning into the good people police.

Generalizing this movement and saying it's in essence a group of people who can't stand to watch others suffer might be too optimstic, because it's hard to generalize something that's become so large, and certainly at this point there are simply people who want to be accepted and be part of "the cool / nice / good group" as they perceive "the woke movement", and they'll go to any means, including bad means, in order to be part of it.

It's sort of like high school all over again. There's a cool group of kids and everyone wants to be part of it, but the cool group is in charge of deciding who gets to be part of it, and at least the outward appearance is made to be "you have to be good and empathetic to be part of this", but in reality this movement thinks it knows what's best for others and society, which is not a way to do good at all, but rather a way to control masses, to police what behaviours and actions are socially accepted and what aren't, and to spread suffering just like psychiatry is doing.

One other mind-virus that never gets talked about that I want to address is something I refer to as the Discipline Mind-Virus.


I'll talk in more detail about punishments in Part 6, but for now I hope you can agree that it's a messed up thing to discipline someone. As discussed in Chapter 6, the only way it's okay to punish someone is if that person has agreed to certain rules/laws and its punishments for breaking them, in which case it cannot be referred to as discipline.

Discipline is punishing someone in order to get them to obey to something, but the only way it's okay to punish someone is if they've already agreed to the punishment as a consequence for breaking a set rule, in which case they chose to break the rule anyway and probably had a good reason for breaking it.

Sometimes it makes sense to break rules. Punishments shouldn't be there to ensure rules never get broken. Punishments should be there so that the incentives align and so that rule breakers pay adequately for the rule they broke.

Alright, so discipline is bad, even in the self-discipline sense, because it's doing the same thing to yourself, which I suppose is less bad than doing it to others, but it's still bad. It's better to be kind to yourself.

But why do I talk about a discipline mind-virus? Well, it's because male parents in particular, but also female parents, use discipline on their children to get them to obey to rules. It's because schools use discipline to get students to obey to rules. And it's because we as society use discipline, because it's a widespread mind-virus that nobody's even really aware of.

When is the last time you've disciplined yourself or another person? For me it's been over a year since I've realised the existence of this virus and stopped disciplining or punishing myself, but I bet that most of you listening to me have disciplined yourself, and perhaps even others, much more recently than that. Please stop and be kinder to yourself and thereby others.

Love yourself and be self-centered, because loving yourself and staying true to yourself is what's best for everyone.

Chapter 20: How to do Mental Healthcare

Alright, let's get back to running my government. Where I left off was free healthcare, but what I was talking about a number of chapters ago was free physical/regular healthcare. I haven't spoken about mental healthcare yet, which is also extremely important. So let's talk about how to provide good mental healthcare on a country-level in this chapter and the next, before I move on to Part 5.

Let's begin by talking about what good mental healthcare is, before talking about how to implement it.

It's hard to even answer what mental healthcare is or should be, let alone what good mental healthcare is. That is because there are so many different philosophies and different forms of therapy out there, including psychiatry, which unfortunately is trying to be the only one and the definitive and only way to deal with mental health.

This is why I hate psychiatry so much, because mental healthcare should be and ultimately is completely voluntary. You cannot get someone to change themself unless they want to, and the more you try to get someone to change something about themself, the more resistant they'll become to changing it. Which is why there is no point pushing people to work on themself. Everyone knows what's best for themself.

So, let's put up front that mental healthcare should be voluntary and that there should be many different options to choose from, so that everyone can choose what suits them best. Just to give you a brief overview of the types of therapy that already exist:

  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
  • Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy
  • Interpersonal Therapy
  • Art Therapy
  • Music Therapy
  • Somatic Therapy
  • Couples Therapy
  • Group Therapy
  • Animal-assisted Therapy
  • Family Therapy
  • Play Therapy
  • Mindfulness-based Therapy
  • And many more
And of course, psychiatry should also be readily available, albeit severely regulated, because all psychiatry does is alleviate symptoms. It does not address underlying issues. As discussed, currently psychiatry goes so far as to suppress symptoms to a point where underlying issues appear gone, even though they are not, which gives people the illusion that they're better, even though deep down they are no better off.

Other than variety, and freedom of choice as to whether an individual does therapy, and if so what kind of therapy he/she chooses, there are a few more cornerstones of what I'd do in terms mental healthcare if I were to run a country:
  • Free/subsidized. I'd want my citizens to have access to at least ~10 free sessions per year, and more subsidized sessions beyond that. Perhaps eventually it can be completely free just like regular healthcare, but it's best to go bit-by-bit and not introduce major changes all at once.
  • Accessible and readily available. Many countries have long waitlists before someone can see a good therapist, but ideally everyone should have access to a good therapist within two weeks at most.
  • Education about therapy. There should be more education about therapy itself. Not only what different types of therapy exist and how to choose what's best for you, but also about red flags to look out for in therapists, therapeutic boundaries, how to get the most out of therapy, etc.
Alright, so how to achieve this? I've already essentially done some history classes, so let's do some light mathematics next.

Assuming therapists can see clients 25 hrs/week, because it's an emotionally challenging profession, and that there are 47 work-weeks per year, that amounts to 1,175 working hrs per therapist per week. Further assuming that a quarter of my citizens use their 10 free therapy sessions each week and that 1-in-10 people choose to do bi-weekly therapy, that'd mean the average person does ~4 therapy sessions per year. Considering the ~1,200 sessions per therapist per year, this means my population would need about 1 therapist per 300 citizens.

(This math is full of assumptions btw, and if free and heavily subsidized, 1 therapist per 300 citizens might very well be too low.)


According to Google, the USA has about 1 therapist per ~2,000 people as of right now, and the above list is the list Grok came up with for developed nations. Argentina stands out as an outlier, but apparently there are cultural reasons for that.

In order to get to 1 high quality therapist per 300 citizens, one would need to put a lot more emphasis on incentives and/or on culture. If the USA and its government put as much effort into respecting its therapists as it did its soldiers, the country would 100% be a much better place. But more incentives, such as higher salaries and better benefits wouldn't hurt either.

Of course a system would need to be put in place to ensure they're all high quality therapists as well, starting with a better education system for therapists-to-be. For one, it could be a lot simpler. My best friend studied psychology wanting to be a therapist, and the impression I got is that half of her courses didn't even have anything to do with psychology, and I remember her talking to me about a class in nutrition... if time like that instead was spent on face-to-face time with clients, or being mentored by a real therapist in real therapeutic settings, that'd be much more beneficial. But more on education systems soon.

I think one more very important ingredient is a good feedback system for therapists. It's going to be impossible to have nothing but outstanding therapists, and so there has to be a system to find out who the terrible ones are in order to weed them out. It's not easy to report a therapist for ethical violations, and even when a therapist hasn't committed any ethical violations but is simply a terrible therapist and/or human being, there'd have to be a country-wide system in place for feedback, which clients can use to rate their therapists, similar to how you might rate your yoga class/yoga teacher after class.

All of this may not seem like that much or that revolutionary, but simply giving people the means and the freedom to determine what's best for them and their mental health would change the world for the better.

Furthermore, there is one more thing I'd do, which is legalize MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy as soon as possible. You might be wondering why, because I've made my stance against psychiatric drugs very clear.

First off, I highly recommend watching the Netflix documentary "How to Change Your Mind". It's a great documentary, and the 3rd episode is on MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy. When I first saw this, I was still in the middle of my own healing journey and therefore quite curious, and after digging into the research further, it seemed very clear to be a game-changer when it comes to helping people who have been through shit, so to say. I've never tried it, but if I had to re-do my own healing journey, I would definitely try it.

There are a number of major differences between MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy and psychiatric drugs:

  1. MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy is always voluntary
  2. MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy is a form of therapy focused on addressing underlying causes of suffering. The MDMA is only there to assist in this difficult work, it's not thought to be the cure like psychiatric drugs.
  3. MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy uses MDMA very infrequently. There is tons of time for processing and integration without MDMA (often as much as 1-2 months) in between therapy sessions that use MDMA.
  4. MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy is a temporary thing. The goal is to use some MDMA to help clients heal from and process difficult experiences, the MDMA is not supposed to be a life-long crutch for the clients.
  5. MDMA is not actually that addicting, especially not the way it's used in MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy. Psychiatric drugs are far more addicting.

When I first saw the Netflix documentary I was very skeptical, because I thought MDMA (Ecstasy) was a really bad drug, but as it turns out it's about half as addicting and half as harmful as alcohol, at least according to this chart. Take the exact numbers with a grain of salt, but MDMA is actually far less bad than we've been led to believe.

MDMA-assisted Psychotherapy is still new, but research is overwhelmingly positive and it's been recognized as a breakthrough therapy by the FDA. Currently the only country where it's fully legalized is Australia, but the USA is working to legalize it, and there are a handful of countries where it's legal in early access programs and certain extreme cases.

If I ran a country, it'd one of my top priorities to legalize this as a form of widely accessible therapy.

Chapter 21: The World's First Mental Health Hospital

People go to hospitals to get treated voluntarily, except for mental health hospitals in which they have to get locked up and subjected to treatment. There is something incredibly wrong with that.

How this is a thing and how it's considered a normal and good thing to lock people up and force treatment upon them against their will is beyond me. The contrast to real hospitals is so large. Do you think this is okay or a smart thing to do that will help people other than people working in the psychiatric and pharmaceutic industries?

I am of the opinion that mental health hospitals haven't been invented yet. Putting aside the fact that people can be put there involuntarily and "treated" against their will, the second biggest issue with today's "mental health hospitals" is that there is no privacy. How anyone thinks it's possible to heal and work on one's self while locked up with dozens of others is also beyond me. These places, as are, just flat out don't work, and are more like light-prisons where people can be locked up for a while with barely any proof just for doing something others don't like.

Before I invent the world's first mental health hospital and describe to you what that would look like if I ran a country, I'll briefly discuss prisons.

If instead of prison sentences, we gave out hugs, the world would be a better place.

This quote isn't entirely true or accurate, nor do I suggest actually doing this, but I sometimes like to say it and there is a point behind it. Because even though, as I've discussed, some rules and boundaries (mutually or commonly agreed upon) make sense, and there have to be consequences for breaking those boundaries and punishments have to be followed through on for the rules to be respected, once a crime has been committed, no one actually benefits from the punishment being carried out.

It's a long-held belief of mine that every human being is good deep down at their core. This belief has been challenged and at times I've thought I no longer believed it, but I think I still do... probably.

Something that reinforced this belief a couple of years ago is the Netflix documentary I Am A Killer. In this show, every episode covers the story of a criminal on death row. Every episode starts and ends with an interview with the killer, but throughout the episodes other people are interviewed, such as family members of both the killer and the killed, investigation officers, lawyers, childhood friends, etc. Do you want to know which person I usually least want to trade lives with? It has to be the one who was killed and murdered, right? No, just about every episode the person I least want to trade lives with is the killer, because the one that got murdered usually had an average life until he/she unfortunately was murdered. However, the killer in almost every episode had the worst life full of the most awful things, such as childhood neglect, sexual abuse, bullying, no family, etc. And if I had lived in their shoes, I honestly can't say I wouldn't have done the same thing in many of the stories.

I remember the first episode very well. It was about a person with a horrible upbringing who stole from a store around the age of 18 and got sentenced to time in prison. While in prison, he understandably misbehaved, and his sentence kept getting increased. Then some geniuses thought it'd be a good idea for him to spend 10 years straight (iirc) in solitary confinement... at some point he (unsurprisingly) couldn't take it anymore, wanted to die, and decided the best way for him to do so would be to murder a child-rapist during shower-time in order to get sent to death row...

Not every single episode is that clear cut, but a lot of them are. Either way, the point I want to make is that people who do terrible things, often times, have suffered terribly themselves. That doesn't mean every person is as good as the other and bad people don't exist, but in my opinion a lot of the bad things happening in the world are caused by (generational) trauma and messed up societal incentives rather than bad people/actors.

And so, although I don't advocate to not follow through on punishments that exist for breaking laws, this is just something I wanted to share somewhere, and I do think it'd be a good idea to give a lot of criminals an alternative to prison. Perhaps today's "mental health hospitals" could be places where criminals with horrible backgrounds could choose to spend a lot of their sentences.

Alright, with that out of the way, let's invent the world's first mental health hospital. Are you excited? Let's go!

Before I give you my version, let me ask you what you think a mental health hospital should look like! Oh... I can't hear you :( Maybe you can post your answer in the comments and I can read it?

Anyway, first off, I think most people should be in mental health hospitals voluntarily, just like real hospitals. The only exceptions may be people for whom there is real evidence they are a danger to themself and are either seriously planning to commit suicide or have attempted suicide and failed. Even then, it may be best in most cases to let these people come voluntarily, but for now let's say that in some cases like this, they can be brought there against their will.

Now, every single patient needs to be given privacy in the form of a private room, because no privacy is the #2 issue with today's "mental health hospitals". What is the #1 issue you may ask? It's the fact that people are prevented from killing themselves.

Wait, are you for real? Shouldn't the purpose of mental health hospitals be to help people and even save their lives?

Well... sort of, but there are reasons as to why some people want to die, usually when the process of dying, which is scary to every single human being, and death become less scary/painful than living, proving that there are things worse than dying/death. The issue with prohibiting people from killing themselves is that you take away their agency and might inadvertently do things to them far worse than dying/death.

And so, especially to suicidal patients who have been brought there against their will, you're doing something not very nice to them by taking away their agency and free will and going against it, so the least you can do is work with them and show them you're hearing them by... giving them a plastic knife in their private sleeping quarters on the first night.

Caregivers should then every day talk to patients and ask them "What can we do for you?" and "How can we help?", and by doing their best to tend to their needs by listening and giving them what they communicate to us they need, we can attempt to help and hopefully alleviate their suicidality and desire to die.

However, if over the course of the first week the caregivers are unable to help and the patient still wants to die, we should upgrade their plastic knife to a real knife. No one really wants to kill themself with a knife, because it's a horrible way to go, but it's not impossible in case someone is suffering terribly.

If you're wondering where I'm going with this, please read on for a bit more, it'll all make sense.

Then as the days and weeks go by, if the caregiving team is unable to do anything for a patient, their suicide weapon should continue to be upgraded to more pleasant ways to go. Perhaps after week 2 they can be given a high floor, after week 3 a box of drugs they could overdose on, perhaps after week 4 a gun, and perhaps after 5 weeks if they still desperately want to die and the attempts of caregivers to help a patient haven't done anything, perhaps then it's best to just let them go and allow them to design their own death. Allow them to design the most perfect day or two, and then at the end of it they have the option to die in whatever way they please.

And once 90%+ of (hopefully mostly discharged) patients at the end of their stay are satisfied, you can call it a real Mental Health Hospital and say you've invented the world's first Mental Health Hospital.


Part 5: Education

And with that, we're already at part 5! How are you feeling? Are you excited that we've covered so much and are getting towards the later stages of this... let's call it a white paper? Or are you sad that we're getting closer to the end?

Do you still want to listen to me speak? I'll remind you that you are free to stop listening to me at any time, but I'll also tell you that these last two parts are the ones I'm personally most excited to talk about. I've actually been thinking about how to create better schools for decades, because I've been so disappointed in the education I received. How do you feel about the education you received? I'd love to hear your answer!

Anyway, let's start off part 5 simple with a bit of history.

Chapter 22: The History of our Education System

Many thousands of years ago, different countries, regions, and cultures used to be disconnected and used to be individual villages, and as such various independent education systems developed in ancient times. I won't cover every single one nor every single detail, but I'll do my best to give you a broad overview in this chapter.

Ancient Education Systems (~2,000BCE - 500AD)

Most education systems started with an emphasis on reading and writing. From this, one can infer that the invention of writing was a major one, because in many, if not all, regions it's what education systems started with. Writing in essence is a way to record and pass on things like ideas, thoughts, knowledge, and even feelings. Education systems aren't too dissimilar.

The earliest known education system was developed in Egypt's Middle Kingdom, which was a part of the Middle-East. This region of the world put a big emphasis on writing, which initially only the highest classes were allowed to learn. At some point the Egyptian hieroglyph system was even made more difficult than it already was in order to preserve the status of "scribes". Or in other words, literary people were trying to stay in charge of scripts and didn't allow the general population to be a part of it.

These look pretty complex

Ancient India was very different from the Ancient Middle-East. India's main aim was to develop character, social awareness, self-control, and to teach how to preserve and take forward culture. "Vedic" schools did this through teaching subjects such as:
  • Knowledge
  • Metrics
  • Exegetics (interpretation, usually of (religious) texts)
  • Grammar
  • Phonetics
  • Astronomy
  • And more
A good mix of subjects.

Around 700BCE, Indian schools studied texts known as "Upanishads" that were considered "wisdom teachings". These could explore subjects such as the deeper and true meaning of sacrifice. These texts encouraged an exploratory learning process whereby teachers and students became co-travelers in a search for truth. The teaching methods used reasoning and questioning. Nothing was labeled as the final answer.

Another important concept in ancient India was the order in which things were learned by students. It started with hearing from teachers, then the second step was (self-)reflection upon the things heard, and the final step was implementing these learnings into one's daily life. A very good education philisophy, and I'm honestly quite impressed with the ancient Indian education system.

Ancient China had a clear separation in its education system between the social elites and the common folk. Aristocrats studied in urban schools and learned about things such as literature, politics, music, and arts, whereas "normal people" studied in rural areas about farmwork and handwork. And this makes sense for an ancient society.

Confucius entered the picture around 500BCE and is said to have had a great impact on the Chinese education system for the following 2,000 years. I assume most of you have heard the name Confucius. He was a Chinese philosopher who founded "Confucianism", which I think is better thought of as a way of life than a religion. Here are a few Confucius quotes:
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.  
Respect yourself and others will respect you.
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

A few hundred years after Confucius, during the Qin dynasty, an education system was designed not to instill specific skills into people, but to produce morally enlightened generalists.

Ancient Greece did things very differently from other ancient civilizations. Other than the city of Sparta which went to extremes to produce warrior soldiers, other ancient greek civilizations had no government involvement in the education system whatsoever, and anyone had the freedom to open their own school and design their own curriculum.

As a result, parents could choose which school to send their kids to, and just about every child received at least some amount of education. After school, most kids went into apprenticeship either with their own father or sometimes another person. A few (the richest) went on to study further with sophists (essentially famous and distinguished people).

Ancient Rome also had education systems, in which the Greek language was used for a lot of fields of study, especially science. The Roman education system is what predominates most of the modern world's education systems, I assume due to how large the Roman empire was and the influence it has had on the world at large.

Rome's education system, just like many of today's education systems, had a tier-system whereby the brightest students went to the highest tier of schools and the least bright students went to the lowest tier of schools. Furthermore, ancient Roman students, just like today's students, progressed through schools. It may not have been exactly like elementary school => middle school => high school => university, but it was something like that. However, the big difference was that progression was dependent moreso on scholary ability (and the ability to pay for higher forms of education) than on age as is the case in modern society. 

The Middle Ages (500AD - 1500AD)

In Europe, the Roman Catholic Church became the center of education and literacy. In this way the church was able to preserve its own selection of learnings from the Latin language. Starting in the 6th century, the church started building many christian monastic schools and cathedral schools in which classes were taught by monks.

These religious schools are the forerunners of European universities, and in the 11th and 12th century schools started to become centers for the study of arts, law, medicine, and theology. Unlike today, it wasn't most important which school you had attended, but rather whom you had studied under. People would call themselves after their teachers.

As early as the year 797, a king obsessed with education by the name of Charlemagne attempted to establish free elementary schools by getting parish priests to accept any and all young children who wanted to learn from them.

In the Islamic world teaching began in mosques in the year 622 in Medina, but eventually moved to schools next to mosques in the year 1,066 in Baghdad. Tuition started at age 6 and was completely free.

From the 9th to 13th centuries, something existed in Baghdad called the House of Wisdom. This was a library, translation center, and educational center all wrapped into one, translating texts about astrology, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, and philosphy from the likes of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Euclid, and many more.

It was an unrivaled centre for study at the time in humanitarian and scientific subjects, such as mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, and even zoology. During this period, Baghdad was the world's richest city and had the largest population of over a million.

An image of what the House of Wisdom may have, but honestly most likely did not, look like

Learning in China was a little different from other places, because the language is so difficult to learn with thousands of commonly used Chinese characters. Therefore, early learning in China happened through songs that helped remember these characters. Only after the characters were learned could one progress further. Most of what was taught in the Chinese education system during the middle ages was Confucianism.

In 605AD, during the Sui dynasty, for the first time an examination system was put in place. This was done in order to scout for talent that could rise to become high-rank government officials. In theory, any male adult could become one regardless of wealth or status, but in reality the process of studying was time consuming and costly, and so most high-ranking government officials came from the wealthy land-owning class. However, throughout Chinese history there are many examples of people rising up from the low ranks through success in this examination system.

Certain South American cultures, like the Aztecs, also used songs, sayings, and rhymes like the Chinese in order to pass down knowledge. The Aztecs were one of the first people in the world to have mandatory education for almost all children regardless of gender, rank, or station. Although girls were taught different subjects and focused on crafts and child-raisng, not reading and writing, and were taught to be involved in religion.

All in all, it's clear that religion was a big part of education during the middle ages. Even when the education itself was not religious in nature, often times the schools were churches, the teachers were monks/priests, or the system was designed and run by religious institutions.

Modern Systems (1500AD - Present)

In Europe, modern systems derive their origins from schools from the high middle ages that were founded upon religious principles. Especially universities evolved from earlier established religious institutions.

In 1561, Scotland put forth a program for spiritual reform whereby every church had to have a school teacher, so that education became accessible to the poor. Few countries in Europe went as far as Scotland, but education became more widespread between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Prussia (essentially old-Germany) developed an education system with mass compulsory schooling in order to produce more soldiers and more obedient citizens. In the 1760s, Russia (actual Russia) set out to educate young children in state boarding schools in order to create a "new race of men". "By regenerating our subjects by an education founded on these principles, we will create... new citizens.". Not exactly noble motives, but more on that soon.

In Europe, academic journals started to be published by universities in the 18th century. In the 19th and 20th century universities concentrated on doing science and educating the wealthy upper-class in topics like: science, mathematics, theology, philosophy, and history.

In the late 19th century, most of Europe began to provide elementary education in the form of reading, writing, and arithmetic, because it was believed that this was needed for orderly political behaviour. Secondary education was only open to people who could afford it, but by World War I more focus started to shift towards secondary education.

Japan was isolated from the world in the year 1600. During the following 250 years learning became widespread. Elites focused on traditional samurai curricula that stressed morality and martial arts. They learned Confucian classics and arithmetic and calligraphy as well.

Commonners focused more on practicality. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were taught in temple schools, even though these were not religious institutions. By the 1860s 40-50% of Japanese boys and 15% of Japanese girls received some education outside of the home.

The Iwakura mission in the 1870s was a diplomatic mission by Japan to Europe and the western world. Part of its mission was to study western education systems. It brought back ideas of decentralization, local school boards, and teacher autonomy. Over the following 30 years, enrollment climbed from 40-50% to 90%.

India had widespread education for young elite men in the 18th century focusing on reading, writing, arithmetic, theology, law, astronomy, metaphysics, ethics, medical science, and religion. India's current system with western style and content was introduced by the British during the British reign in the mid 19th century.

Much of Africa was also educated by its rulers. The French empire for example copied the French system to its African colonies. Rather than aimed at helping locals, it was aimed at moderately training the lower bureaucracy in order to aid French colonial officials in their duties. This system was rejected by African nationalists who perceived it as an attempt to retard African development and maintain colonial superiority, and I think they maybe had a point.

In summary, during the last 500 years more and more education has moved from private home settings to public school settings. And the government is largely, if not entirely in control of the education system. But that's what the next chapter is all about.

Chapter 23: What's Wrong with our Education System

Short answer, everything. Just about everything. And I hope that by the end of this chapter you'll agree with me.

Judging by the history of education, education systems sprung forth out of a desire to pass down knowledge from one generation to the next, made easier by the invention of writing. Some cultures tried to keep literacy exclusive to the top 1-5%. Egypt is an example of this with its complicated hyropglyphs, but I suspect the Chinese writing system is complicated for similar reasons.

However, over time this probably noble intention of passing down knowledge morphed into religions taking control over education in the middle ages, and then something perhaps even more sinister in recent centuries.
Citizens should be in control of their governments, but governments are trying to control their citizens through education.

What do you think of this statement? Agree? Disagree? To what extent do you agree or disagree? I think it's pretty obviously true with multiple examples from recent history. Prussia is one. Russia is another. Colonial France is yet another.

As I've discussed, how governments should work is a small group being entrusted to make certain decisions on behalf of the large group, but what's happening is the small group is trying to control and enslave the large group, because it thinks it knows better than the large group what's good for the large group.

Governments do generally speaking know how to run a country better than their citizens, government officials are professional country runners after all, but that does not mean they know better than their citizens what's best for them. There's a big difference between the two. Furthermore, many individuals benefit from being in high-ranking government positions, and these individuals will often make choices that are in their own best interest instead of the citizens', which is staying in power.

With that established as a general overhead, let's dive into more details. I can sum up my overall issues with today's education systems as follows:
Today's education systems raise children to be successful rather than happy.

No, actually I wish that was true. It's actually a bit worse, but I'll rephrase this in a little while after talking about some of my concrete issues with today's education systems. Actually, let me just say education system in the singular going forward, because everything is pretty much one big village and the education system is no different. Sure, there are some cultural and societal differences, but by far and large the system of education and teaching and most subjects taught are the same worldwide.

Alright, here are my major concrete issues with it:

For starters, over 90% of what is taught in schools is not used by over 90% of people. Do most people really uses physics in their daily life? What about chemistry? What about geography? Advanced mathematics? Second language such as French? Is there anything you use that you learned in school? I'd say some subjects, such as English and basic mathematics are vital skills, but beyond that there's a very quick drop off from vital to never-use-again. This doesn't exactly help children be motivated for school either...

Meanwhile, the most vital knowledge and skills in life are completely overlooked by today's education system. What are the most useful things you've learned in life and where did you learn them? I bet it wasn't in school. Social skills can be practiced in school, but they're not taught. Relationships, motivation, financial literacy, mental health etc. none of these topics are covered.

Additionally, today's education system is outdated. As I covered in the last chapter, the modern education system is based on a system invented by the Roman empire thousands of years ago, and has not changed much in the past few hundred years. So in essence, today's education system is preparing children to live in the past, whereas it should be preparing children to live 20 years in the future in a rapidly evolving world. Even if the education system prepared children to live in present day society, even that simply just wouldn't cut it anymore.

Furthermore, today's education system raises children to be like and think far too much like the previous generation, instead of encouraging them to take a fresh look at society and find things that are wrong with it. It may have been a good starting point to want to pass on useful skills and knowledge to future generations, but it's gotten to a point where previous generations think they know better than the next generations what's best for them, which is delusional. And so children are no longer encouraged to think for themselves as much as they should be.

Lastly, although the modern education system is designed by governments, it caters far too much to capitalism. Governments have GDP Growth as their stated objective, and so it has essentially created a massive funnel into the capitalistic private sector. Universities offer degrees that land people good jobs and are working with the private sector to accomplish this. High schools just select which people can go to which type of tertiary education. Middle schools funnel people to high schools, and on and on and on. In Singapore, where I live, there's even competition to get your child into a good pre-school (pre-elementary school)...

If you're wondering whether I have any solutions or whether I'm just going to point out problems, I'll present solutions in the next chapter. First let's circle back to that statement I made a few paragraphs up and rephrase it:

Today's education systems are designed by governments to enhance GDP Growth, whereas the only two design goals of an education system should be:

1) Help children learn how to think independently, and how to properly assimilate information.

2) Help children acquire all the knowledge and skills required to survive and be happy in today's world.

Governments have success and happiness mixed up. Governments are trying to make children successful, but why don't we help our children to be happy? It doesn't makes sense to me... success does not equal happiness.

The first point is also of vital importance because of the following:

No matter what, we'll always be wrong about what we teach our children to some extent.

Past generations, and even the current generation think they know many things and think they can pass on knowledge to future generations as certainty. But we don't know what we're wrong about, because otherwise we wouldn't be wrong about it. So the first point and teaching children how to question everything and properly assimilate information is fundamental before you can even begin educating them.

If children can't think for themselves, any knowledge passed onto them is just brainwashing.

That was a lot of negativity. Now let's talk about how to make things better. 

Chapter 24: How I Would Design a School

This is probably going to be a very long chapter, because I have a mountain of ideas. This is a true passion of mine, because I've been disappointed in the education I received ever since I was still receiving my education, and I've been on-and-off thinking about starting my own school since I was still in school.

In essence, why we need an education system is because we need a tutorial to life. Human beings are born a blank slate, and we all need to learn how to be independent, and we need to be kept alive while we learn how to be independent.

Traditionally, parents take care of this, and still today parents do a lot of this work, but part 6 is all about parenting. This part is about education, because, at least in today's society, parents are too busy to do everything when it comes to teaching children to be independent and keeping them alive until they are. Part of this is because of reasons I've already talked about. Modern society is not an easy thing to live in, and the ability to do one thing (hunt) is no longer sufficient. We all need to learn countless things in order to even just survive in modern society.

My philosophy is that in order to make things as easy as possible for parents, we want the education system to take care of as much of all this as feasible. Partly to make it easier on parents, and partly to make sure that every human being has at least a partly good foundation, because there's inevitably variance in quality of parents, and so it's hard to ensure every human being has equally good parents, even with some of the things I'll talk about in Part 6. It's easier to ensure the quality of an education system across the board than it is to ensure every parent is equally good.

Let's start by talking about the role of teachers. Historically, there was no other way to educate children than to have individual teachers convey this information to them. Although, even 1,000 years ago in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad texts were used as aids to teach.

Today, this no longer makes sense. We've had large scale printing of textbooks that should be perfectly capable of doing the majority of teaching, and with the internet it is actual stupidity to have individual teachers convey information to children. No offense to individual teachers, many of whom are doing their utmost for their students, but none of them are the top experts in their field, or the best at conveying information. The amount of skills a teacher has to be at least passable in in order to educate children is absurd, and goes beyond subject matter knowledge and "conveying information" skills into even social and emotional skills.

What I would do if I were to design an education system from the ground up, is find the world's or at least the country's top experts in the subjects I want to teach, and have them teach it electronically with the help of the internet. So instead of having hundreds, or thousands, or tens-of-thousands (or more) individuals teaching mathematics, I would have perhaps 3-5, and only that many so that students have a bit of choice, because different children might prefer different teaching styles.

The role of the physical "teachers" present in schools would then also transform, because suddenly 90% of their workload has been outsourced to a few dozen, or few hundred individuals (3-5 per subject, but more in total). What do you think their roles should transform into?

In my opinion, they should become guidance / emotional counselors of sorts. I'm not suggesting that schools take over all emotional teaching, development, and nurturing of children, a lot of that will still be left up to parents. But I do think it'd be a good idea to have a bit more oversight and more check-ins on how children are developing emotionally.

Currently, schools ocassionally do step in and organizations like Child Protective Services also do step in, but this is only when things get severely and visibly out of control. What about children who are simply unhappy and/or depressed? If the time of teachers were to be freed up to the point they could become guidance / emotional counselors that speak to each student for half an hour or an hour each week about how they're doing and where they're headed, that would be an amazing addition to what the education system can do for children. And I bet children would grow up to be much happier.

Next, let's discuss what subjects would be taught in school. As of today, there's a very strict and rigid curriculum, at least 90% of which ends up completely useless to at least 90% of students, who by the way learn at least 90%, if not close to 100%, of their important life lessons outside of school. So what do we do about this?

Well, first off I think it's important to recognize how unique each individual student is. Every human being (and therefore child) is unique and every child should be able to explore their own uniqueness, instead of having to go through a cookie-cutter education system that treats everyone as the same. Every child's educational needs are different.

Nonetheless, there are things that every child needs to learn in order to have a chance to thrive in modern society. And so there should be, in my eyes, mandatory topics that every child learns about. Some of these are:

  • English Language
  • Literacy
  • Arithmetic, perhaps some basic mathematics like probability
  • Financial Literacy
  • Social & Relationship Skills
  • Physical Health
  • Mental Health
  • Life Skills (goal setting, future planning, how to survive / make money) etc.)
  • Some understanding of how the world and modern society works, and all the systems in place.
The depth to which each of these above topics should be studied varies. I think it's hard to argue against everyone needing a strong English language ability, essentially perfect literacy, strong arithmetic, and very strong social & relationship skills in order to do well in modern society. However, one doesn't need to know all the inns and outs of how to stay physically healthy to stay healthy, nor every intricate detail of how modern society works in order to live and have a chance at happiness in it.

Also, you may be wondering whether this means that I don't think there's room for other subjects such as science, history, and other languages? No, it doesn't. In addition to mandatory study of the above subjects, I'd make it mandatory to explore a wide range of additional subjects, albeit with a massive amount of freedom. Let me explain.

For a number of topics, such as science, chemistry, and history, I think it's hard to argue that at least a basic introduction into what they are, which could take as a little as 1-3 hours, would benefit everyone. However, to force children to study science for years and force them to put in hundreds of hours into a subject most have little interest in is completely pointless and a MAJOR waste of human resources.

So instead I would, once again with help of technology, encourage children to take introductory courses, perhaps only lasting a few hours or up to 10 hours each, in dozens of topics. This wouldn't be just science, chemistry, history, another language, etc. This would also include music, movies, video games, traveling, literature, handcrafts, futurology, programming, and also industries such as, entrepreneurship, finance, law, counseling, tech, diplomacy, hospitality, etc. Of course it'd take time to find teachers and create courses, but if there's enough interest from enough students in a certain topic, I'm sure it can be done.

However, unlike today's education system, I would not force children to explore any one of these topics in-depth. I think children should be allowed to discover who they are and what they're interested in naturally in a conducive environment. And so, whether children want to continue to explore infinitely or whether at some point something sparks an interest and they focus in on 1 or 2 subjects, or they become a generalist and spend ~30-40 hours on 20 different topics, that should all be up to them. Who are we to decide who future generations are and what's best for them.

As you can tell, freedom to explore oneself would be a cornerstone if I were to design a school. This goes back to the 2nd design point:
Help children acquire all the knowledge and skills required to survive and be happy in today's world.

No one knows what makes another person happy better than that person does, and so children need enough freedom in order to be able to find out what makes them happy, and what they want to do in life. Of course, they'll have to understand that in order to survive they'll have to find some way to make money, unless UBI becomes widespread or they have rich parents who will set them up, but how they live their lives is up to them.

Before we move on, let's revisit the 1st design point:

Help children learn how to think independently, and how to properly assimilate information.

This design point is so fundamental that it is of vital importance that an education system gets this right, because, as I mentioned, we are undoubtedly wrong about a number of things we pass onto our children, and so for progress to be made and for our children to be as happy as they can be, they need to be extremely good at figuring out what previous generations are wrong about. They need to be extremely good at questioning everything, which is unfortunately the opposite of what governments intent education systems to instill in children today.

Governments think it's best if education systems make people docile and obedient, but actually the world needs the education system to teach children to question and challenge everything, so that further progress can be made.

So how do we do that? Well, because it's the most important and most fundamental thing we can teach our children, it has to be interwoven into everything. At least an hour a week, if not 2-3 hours every single week, from the day children start their education till the day they finish their education, should be dedicated to this.

Now of course you don't want this to be the same from the first day to the last, because that'd not only bore children to death, it would also not be suitable. So, initially at very young ages this could come in the form of reading a story and asking children to reflect on it. To reflect on parts of the story that may not make sense, or that are perhaps not quite morally right. Anything that comes to mind.

Later on this could come in the form of learning about what we think we know about logic and reasoning. Even more advanced stages could ask children to reflect on a course they were recently taught and things that they didn't agree with or thought may be wrong. Eventually it could encompass sifting through news articles and having discussions with fellow students about whether there are factually incorrect statements in the article, or whether actions of certain individuals are morally right.

If I designed a school, this is the part I'd be most personally involved in, and I'd go into a lot more details and have it interwoven into the fabric of the school itself, because:

The #1 most important obligation humans have to future generations is to teach them to question everything about previous generations.

What do you think about this statement of mine? I'd love to hear your response now so I could incorporate it into this humongous project, but I may have to settle for a comment. Please leave a comment if this statement sparks anything within you at all!

Alright, I think I've covered most of the major things I'd incorporate if I were to design a school or education system, but there are numerous additional minor things, a few of which I will cover in the remainder of this chapter.

Let's start with the ages of children. The current education system is way too obsessed with age brackets. Every child is unique and every child develops differently. So one might make an argument for grouping children by ability or progression instead of age. However, even that I personally don't think is the way to go.

The traditional way of thinking is that it's more efficient to have children grouped by age (presumed ability) so that children can all be taught the same things at the same time. But I've already covered that I'd have most of the teaching done via the internet and most learning done freely by the students. There would still be some things that'd simply have to be done in a group setting and during which students would have to be grouped by ability. The Logic/Questioning classes would likely be one of those, because you can't have 5-year-olds reading the news and asked to question whether a public figure's actions are morally right.

But putting these aside, I think it'd be tremendously smart to group children somewhat randomly and arbitrarily. For one, you could give older/more advanced students who are interested the opportunity to mentor younger/less advanced students in their group, either in general or in specific topics.

Even without some sort of formal mentorship program, there are tremendous benefits from having children learn how to interact with different age groups in terms of social skills and learning how to empathize with humans who see the world differently. Both the younger and the older side can learn from such interactions. Even if grouping ages 4-17 is too much (at least initially), at least allowing groups such as 4-10, 8-14, and 12-17 within the same classroom would be very beneficial in my opinion.

Furthermore, I don't think education has to be from ages 4-17. There are children who around the age of 14-15 have already made up their mind to be a professional sports player and who want to do their best to give that a shot. By age 14-15 they should've already acquired most of the knowledge and skills required to survive in today's society, so if they want to leave school to focus on what they've decided is going to be their life for the foreseeable future, let them! A very young entrepreneur with an outstanding business idea is another example of someone who might possibly want to leave school before the age of 18.

Tagging onto that, there's no reason that children can't already start contributing to society at earlier ages. Perhaps there's a toy or video game company that wants to do market research of teenagers, its main clientele. There's no one who knows teenagers better than teenagers, so who better to do (or at least be involved in) such a project than a group of talented teenagers who just so happen to want to get into the marketing/sales industry or the toy / video game industry?

Other than a few very specific professions (law and medicine come to mind), the way we are educated to perform those professions makes very little sense. Did you know that in Japan once you get into university, university is essentially a multi-year vacation? Companies in Japan hire based on the name of the university you got into. They barely even look at the degree. And then once you're hired, the companies educate their employees themselves.

I lived in Japan for three years, and I heard a story of a US Computer Science graduate who was an experienced programmer and had done numerous internships. He got hired at a Japanese company as a coder, and alongside him in the same batch of hires were Japanese people with marketing degrees. All of them had to go through months of basic training in order to learn how to be coders.

This is an extreme example, but most jobs are learned on the job, and most degrees teach many things that end up useless. Hence, why I'd argue that most universities should go out of business. Universities are sold as the end all be all and everyone should go in order to get a good job. And yes, companies look at your university degree for some reason, but do universities really provide value to society? Some do, and as I stated, for some specific professions like law and medicine a degree is a necessity, because you need to learn a lot of specific information to perform well in those fields.

However, I'd argue that by the end of their childhood, most children should've been able to find something they're passionate about, should've been able to factor in the fact that they need to make money (in today's society it's hard for everyone to make a living with their passion), and therefore should be able to formulate a plan for their futures.

As such, if children are allowed to work on creating a resume in their final years of high-school and/or are allowed to freely acquire the necessary knowledge and skills needed for their chosen path, they shouldn't need to go to a university to get a degree. After all, would it be more useful for someone who wants to be a video game engineer to have gotten a degree in computer science, or for that person to have played a lot of video games, have taken multiple courses in programming, created 1 or 2 simple video games by him/herself, and taken an internship or two at game studios?

Similarly, for someone who wants to be a marketing person in the beauty industry, would it be more useful to have gotten a degree in marketing, or for that person to know everything about every YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok beauty influencer, have connections with a number of them, and have worked with one on growing her audience?

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that universities are rarely the best and most efficient way for children/students to achieve what they want out of life. Even if they've come to the realisation that they need a job in order to survive, there are much more efficient, enjoyable, and successful paths to get such a job than going through university. The only thing that makes this a little harder than it should be is because so much of the (idiotic) corporate world is tunnel-visioned on degrees and years of experience when hiring.

Finally, there's one more thing I'd like to talk about, which is how to address the fact that even though I believe this education system I've described here would be infinitely better than the one we have today, even the one I describe here undoubtedly has serious flaws that only students who have gone through it would be able to point out. As such, I'd like to give one more suggestion.

I think it'd be great if as a final graduation project, every student could change something about the school they went to or even about the education system as a whole. Perhaps groups of students could do projects to change something about the specific school they went to, and via technology every year all graduating students can come to a consensus about the top 3 or so things they'd like changed about the education system as a whole, and come up with ways to change it. Then perhaps a handful of students could spend a few years post-graduation getting paid to implement these changes. This could even be how the Ministry of Education finds its new future ministers/directors.

All of this is in a broad sense the type of school / education system I'd design if I were to design an education system, perhaps as part of running a government. What do you think? Would you go to a school designed by me? I hope so!


Part 6: Parenting

Imagine that you die tomorrow, and that you learn there is a life after this one.

In fact, you can choose from two possible worlds for your next life. However, these worlds are vastly different from the life on Earth you've gotten used to. Similar to how a monkey dressed in a suit would be unable to live and thrive in downtown Manhattan, you are currently not equipped to live in this new world. The two worlds have different systems to deal with newcomers.

In the first world, you'll be assigned to two random beings who are experienced living in it. It's their job to make sure you are taught what you need to know to be self sufficient, and to make sure you survive this initial period, which will last approximately two decades. Apart from that, you are basically their property for those first two decades, and they make most of your decisions for you. Your freedom is quite limited until you can stand on your own.

In the second world, you will also be assigned to two beings, who during the first two decades are responsible for your well-being and making sure you learn to be self sufficient. However, in this world, the beings are carefully selected to make sure they are qualified to fulfill this important role. Furthermore, although they are responsible for your well being, they do not get to make decisions for you. They're guides rather than your masters, and they are there to help you make your own decisions rather than to make your decisions for you.

Given these two options, which one would you choose?

Chapter 25: How we Raise our Children

Presented with the above choice, which one would you choose? I think the second world is obviously the better one, but unfortunately we live in the first world. In chapter 28 I'll talk about how to create a world like the second one, but first let's discuss how we raise our children in this chapter.

Parents tend to be very entitled and think it's all about them. Traditionally, many parents have brought children into this world because they needed extra labor around the house, extra income, a secured retirement, or more connections to other influential families (through marrying off children).

These reasons for having children are on the decline, but in many Asian cultures children are still thought of as extra income. In Chinese cultures children are essentially forced into giving parents an allowance after they start earning. In Western cultures children may not be seen as a source of money, they are seen as a source of happiness and are kind of supposed to look after their parents when they get older.

Before I point out the first major issue with the way we treat our children, I'll state that everything in this chapter is a generalization, and although some things are true for just about every parent in the world, I know that there are some very good parents out there, and so not every thing is true for every parent.

The first, and perhaps biggest issue, with how we treat children is that we treat them as objects rather than unique individual human beings. Some parents look at their children as an investment / second income, others as a source of happiness or an insurance policy against dying alone. Less terrible parents look at their children as literally their children, which sounds logical, but if you love your child because it's your child rather than because of who he/she is, he/she isn't actually going to feel loved.

This all comes down to the fact that, even though children are technically not supposed to be their parents' property from a legal standpoint, for all intents and purposes they effectively are. And as such, in a way children are slaves to their parents. Not all get treated poorly, but all essentially are. And even a lot of the ones that aren't treated that poorly are still treated as slaves, because the world is such that children are dependent on their parents financially (and thereby for their lives) until at least adulthood in most cases. Children have almost no power and more-or-less have to do what parents tell them.

Obviously most children are treated a lot better than most slaves were, but the system isn't all that different. Children have a lot more rights than slaves did, but most children have so few options that in practice they are essentially enslaved to and the property of their parents until they become adults.

Meanwhile, far too many parents think that it's all about them in the parent-child relationship, because after all they gave the gift of life to their children and they are spending blood, sweat, tears, and money to raise these children and sometimes even give their children the childhoods and lives they wish they had had, right? Wrong!

Bringing a child into this world is something you possibly do against the will of the child. We don't know whether anything comes before life. Most religions are very occupied with thinking about the after-life, but as far as I'm aware no religions think about the before-life. Do souls of children-to-be have some sort of subconscious choice on whether they want to be born? Or do they not? This is all very philosophical, but fact of the matter is that parents do not know whether their children wanted to be born (into this world), and as such possibly commit a great crime against their children before they are even born.

As such, everything in a parent-child relationship should be about the child. Parents possibly give other souls/human beings life that they didn't/don't want, which means they now have to go through the scary process of dying in order to undo what was done to them. Or in a little more simple words:
Parents choose to bring their children into this world. Therefore, in parent-child relationships the child should come first in 100% of situations.

Of course, if the parent is dying of cancer it doesn't mean the child has to prioritize itself and go on a vacation, but it can choose to. It's up to the child.

Next is something I've already covered somewhat in the chapter on generational trauma, but it's worth repeating.

The absolute worst and most dangerous people are the ones who think what they need is what others need. Sadly... most parents are like this.

I used the example of a basketball player who didn't make the NBA to illustrate this in chapter 18, but unfortunately just about every parent does this to some extent, and passes on its unfulfilled needs to the next generation.

I didn't get to go to university? My child will. My child needs to go to university. I didn't get to marry a rich husband? My child will. My child needs to marry into wealth, for her and for me. I didn't get to live out my dream of playing in the NBA? My child will. My child needs to make the NBA. These are just a few examples.

One technique parents use to get their children to be who the parents want them to be are punishments and rewards, which are essentially forms of emotional manipulation. Parents essentially use a carrot (rewards) and stick (punishments) to mold them into the human beings they want their children to be, completely disregarding that they are already unique human beings who should be allowed to discover who they are without such interference and emotional manipulation.

The issue with punishments is obvious. It's like the discipline virus I covered in chapter 19. Punishments essentially keep children away from some place the parent doesn't want the child to go and restricts their freedom to do / explore something. Rewards condition children to do certain things they may not actually want to do, like you might train a circus animal or pet to do certain tricks.

This doesn't mean there can be no punishments whatsoever. Obviously, if a child breaks a reasonable rule a parent set such as don't enter my bedroom, it's reasonable that a punishment goes along with breaking that rule. Similarly, there are natural rewards out there, such as if a child happens to do something that a parent truly appreciates such as babysitting a younger sibling, it's not prohibited to be grateful as a parent and do something in return. What causes issues is unnatural punishments and rewards in order to mold a child in a way a parent wants to.

Let's finish this chapter off with a pet peeve of mine. I am of the opinion that most of the time when parents say "I'm proud of you" to their child, it's actually really toxic, because:

Children should be helped to learn how to make their selves feel good about themselves. "I'm proud of you" makes them reliant upon their parents to feel good about themselves.

And unfortunately in some cases, "I am proud of you" translates to "I am not ashamed of you, and I like to show you around to others to make myself feel better about myself, because I'm reliant on others to feel good about myself". Let's file this under mind-viruses and call it the "I-use-my-child-to-feel-good-about-myself mind-virus".

Chapter 26: Families

In the last chapter, I talked about how, whether they're aware of it or not, most parents tend to use punishments and rewards to shape children into the kind of children they want. This is made possible due to the immense power imbalance between parents and children. Parents want and choose to have children, but children need parents (at least for a while) and presumably did not choose to be born.

Children end up part of not just their immediate families comprising of parents and siblings, they also end up part of larger extended families that they never chose to be a part of but instead are made to be a part of.

Going back to the choice between two worlds I presented you with, it's bad enough to end up in this world and (presumably) have no choice in who your randomly assigned parents (and siblings) are going to be, it's even worse that you are forced into a much larger family, usually with hundreds of years of history, and therefore also carrying centuries (or more) worth of generational trauma that you are now expected to carry into the future.

Just like each country has a distinct culture and distinct customs, so does each family. Some families are great, and individuals are lucky to be a part of them, but other families... not so much.

Some families are full of generational trauma. Some families never work on their mental health, and in some families mental health isn't even accepted as a talking point or even considered to be a thing. These families just keep piling up shit that happens to them over the centuries and never deal with it, other than finding new children to add to the family tree and pass their trauma onto.

Families in a way could be considered as the last real villages left within modern society, but none of them are dying out, which is a BIG issue. Although it's looking like perhaps soon more families are going to die out, as we'll talk about in the next chapter.

Alright, so it's terrible to be a part of some families that never deal with their trauma and pass it all down the family tree onto future generations of children. There is one very simple solution to this that'd not only make it much simpler for these "terrible villages" to die out, but also for these poor children to escape and start families of their own. There has to be a simple way out!

And this is the #1 issue with families. There is no simple way out of most families. I've already covered how children are dependent on their parents until they become independent. There is oversight into families in the form of Child Protective Services, but these are way too busy with serious cases of physical abuse and neglect to care much about cases of emotional abuse and neglect in which children are expected to carry far too much generational trauma and being molded by their parents/families using punishments and rewards making it even harder to escape.

Even if children manage to get through childhoods made difficult by the environment/family they grew up in, and manage to get to a point where they are financially and emotionally self-reliant enough to cut off their family, they are in many countries still forced to be a part of this family by association via last name.

Fortunately, there are countries where it's extremely easy to change one's last name via a simple Deed Poll such as the United Kingdom, Singapore, Canada, and most states in the US. However, countries such as Japan, Korea, Iceland, Sweden, and The Netherlands make it extremely difficult to change one's family name and "leave one's family".

Apparently these countries put a lot of cultural value on things like the "family registry", "clan lineage", and such. But what they're essentially doing is trapping people in families they do not want to be in by making it prohibitively difficult to change one's family name and leave one's family.

This is a MAJOR issue, because in essence this makes it possible for families/villages that should die out to continue birthing children, continue offloading their past trauma/mistakes onto new children/souls, assimilate those children into their families via punishments/rewards, and keep them trapped against their will forever, because escape is so enormously difficult.

Chapter 27: Declining Birthrates

How are you doing? Just two more chapters! Now that you've made it this far, please don't tune out, because I'm particularly excited for the last chapter! But before we get there, let's briefly talk about declining birthrates. Have you heard that birthrates are on the decline? I assume so. Here are some charts and statistics to illustrate:

Declining birthrates in the developed world vs the developing world

Declining birthrates in the developed world, separating East vs West

2025 data on the countries with top 10 lowest birthrates

2025 data on the countries with top 10 highest birthrates

2025 data on the developing countries with top 10 lowest birthrates

It's important to note that there are outliers in Africa. Countries such as Mauritius (1.40 TFR), Tunisia (1.95 TFR), South Africa (2.10 TFR), and Botswana (2.15 TFR) are developing countries in Africa, but have low birthrates.

Taking in all this data, other than cultural differences and the obvious differences between developed and developing countries I don't think there are any clear answers as to what's behind declining birthrates (yet). And even the developed vs developing is questionable, because there are outliers in Africa with very low birthrates.

2025 data on birthrates in countries with top 10 highest % aged 65+

2025 data on birthrates in countries with top 10 lowest % aged 65+

It looks like we're onto something now, doesn't it? There is a very clear correlation between the % of a country's population aged 65+ and the fertility rate. To me this just further supports some of my claims in earlier chapters, especially chapter 18 on generational trauma, that new generations are too burdened taking care of previous generations, not just emotionally but also physically as it turns out, to take care of themselves.

And as it turns out, new generations are not just too busy to take care of themselves, they are also too burdened by previous generations to find love, have babies, and start (new) families.
Birthrates are low because older generations are burdening new generations with too many of their emotional needs.

People like to say that now is the best time to be alive and that the world was never better, but is that really true? Low birthrates are an extremely bad sign of the state of the world and an extremely bad sign of the emotional health of new generations. It's a natural thing to have children and expand once one is in a safe and happy place of comfort. The fact that new generations are not having children is a sign that things are actually worse than ever, at least for these new generations. Perhaps older generations are very happy being taken care of by these newer generations and enjoying long lifespans through innovations in healthcare, but new generations are showing with their actions and decisions not to have children that things are really not going well for the world, at least emotionally.

So what do we do about this? That's what the final chapter is about.

Chapter 28: A Better Tutorial to Life

Human beings are born a blank slate. I've already said that, but it's worth repeating. And therefore, we all need a good tutorial to life. As of right now, it's pretty damn trash if you ask me. I've already covered the god-awful education system, and although ending up with well-intentioned parents isn't too unlikely, good intentions do not make good parents, and so ending up with decent parents is a lottery at this point.

Certain CEOs and most presidents of countries have such a wide impact and impact so many human lives that their roles are extremely important, but no role has as deep of an impact on other human beings as the one of a parent. Especially the first few days, months, and years of our lives, our parents and the way they relate to us set the foundation for the rest of our entire lives, that in most cases remains mostly unchanged till the day we die. We don’t let anyone be president or CEO because that would screw up the world. Yet, we let anyone be a parent and screw up the world? This has to change.

Many people appear to think that it's a fundamental human right to have children, but I could not disagree more. As I mentioned, children have no choice in whether they are born or what sort of situation they are born into. We, as the current generation, in my opinion owe it to future generations to give them as good of a future as we can, most important to which is giving them as good of a start as we can.

This obviously includes not allowing every human being to be a parent, because many adults aren't even capable of taking care of their own (emotional) needs, let alone those of another human being, let alone those of an innocent child. How no one has yet thought to put restrictions on who can and who cannot be a parent is beyond me.


How is the answer to this question yes?

I suppose that the world is so scared of population collapse and so obsessed with progress and continued growth (because (GDP) growth is the answer to everything, right?) that it does not want to put any limits on population growth?

Although I acknowledge the fact that further significant declines in birthrates pose some problems to mainly elder generations who need new generations to take care of them, I'd also argue that the world is in such a mess because of them, so part of me wants to say make them take care of themselves and let them pay for their own mistakes. However, there are solutions that should make everyone who cares about other human beings and who cares about doing the right thing happy, namely:

What if there was a way to find out who'd make the best parents? What if there was a way to find out who'd provide the best and most stable environment to children? What if there was a way to, to the best of our abilities, gauge which parents new generations would want to be raised by?

If there was such a way, we (or governments) could recognize these individuals as the world's (or country's) top parents and pay them to be full-time parents and raise perhaps ~10-12 children. Governments could plan exactly what birthrate would be best for their country, and then out of the part of the population that wants to be parents, select the best and pay them for their service of raising happy (and therefore likely productive) future members of society.

Why is it easier to be a (biological) parent than it is to be a barista, personal assistant, receptionist, or to adopt a freaking pet?!?! How is it possible that there are more restrictions around adopting an animal than becoming the parent to a (biological) child? There is 100% something wrong with this, because the responsibilities that come along with raising a human child are FAR larger than any of those other societal roles, and the positive or negative impact one has on the world through being a parent is far larger too.

So, how would one go about doing this? Well, first it has to have the support of enough people who understand that this is the right thing to do and who will support doing the right thing. Second, there'd have to be a selection process.

What I imagine this could look like is everyone between the age of 18 and 26, who has any interest in being a parent in the future, singing up to do 1-2 years of public service. During these 1-2 years they'll be evaluated on various criteria by numerous people, and the top performers get selected.

Then, once they know whether they want to be a single parent or apply with a significant other (or multiple significant others) and how many children they want to raise (might be a minimum of 4+ for single applicants and 8+ for couples), they can apply for the second and final round of selections.

During this round, candidates go through 6 months of parenting school with courses and exams, and then another year of real-life interaction with children, perhaps as foster parents and/or as volunteers at children's homes. At the end of it all, you should have a pretty good idea of who would make amazing parents, and as a government you can pay the top x% of performers to be professional parents and raise your future generations.

Now, one might be concerned about the bottom y%, which is going to be the majority of people, who are not going to be allowed to have (oops, I mean "raise". children aren't objects) children anymore. However, I think a lot of them will actually be happier now that they don't have to have children anymore. Many people are actually pressured into having children by past generations. Furthermore, once they're old and need to be taken care of, they'll now be taken care of by much happier newer generations who had better parents. Do 65+ year olds prefer to be taken care of by overtaxed unhappy people or by much emotionally stronger and overall happier people? I'd argue the latter would be able to take care of 65+ year olds much better than the former.

And perhaps the biggest benefit of all of such a system would be a further return to HG society in some ways, because now we've solved the problems presented in chapter 26 surrounding families. Families, that are sort of like villages in a way, now are no longer guaranteed to survive no matter how bad they are. Bad families that are not doing the right things will now once again die out, just like bad villages used to in HG times. It's survival of the fittest without any actual human beings dying, because it's survival of the fittest families.

And other than all of society having become one big village, that is the #1 issue with modern society. The only real remaining villages (families), are no longer dying. Every family is able to and allowed to reproduce, no matter how messed up and filled to the brim with generational trauma a family is, and no matter how badly the family will mess up the future by raising terribly unhappy children. This absolutely has to be fixed, and terrible families have to start dying out if we want to create a better, brighter future for all.

I could go into more detail on some of the topics above, especially how to select the best parents, just like I could've gone into a lot more detail on the education system, but before I finish this humongous project, I want to impart a little bit of wisdom on how to properly raise children.

Let's start this with two self-quotes, one of which is a repeat:
Rules protect the rulemaker.

And:

Do not put boundaries on the ones you love.

I already covered the example of an early bed time and how it's more for the parent than the child, let's use that one to think about what kind of effect this kind of rule has on the child.

When parents set a bed-time for a child, what do you think the child learns from this, if anything? Your guess is the child doesn't learn anything? Well, you're correct in that it doesn't learn anything useful, because what it learns is to go to bed at the time others want it to. This robs the child of the opportunity to learn when it makes sense for it to go to bed.

It's no secret that different people need/want different amounts of sleep. At a minimum, children should be provided with the opportunity to learn that when they lack sleep, they feel tired and exhausted, and most likely less happy as a result. If parents always dictate that a child goes to bed by 9PM and wakes up at 7AM for school, that's not an environment in which such valuable knowledge and life skills can be learned.

Sure, at some point once the child is old enough it'll probably pick up on the common wisdom that tiredness means lack of sleep and the logic behind that, but no one knows what amount of sleep makes anyone else the happiest, especially not in different circumstances (stress levels, life circumstances, spare time, etc.). The best (and in most cases the only) time for humans to learn these lessons, as well as countless other life lessons, is during childhood. But parents who set too many rules rob their children of these learning opportunities and instead teach them to just do what others want them to do.

Another good example is cursing. Among adults, especially those with children, their children and their behaviour often times is a big factor in their social standing. If a parent's children are well-behaved and behave as society wants them to, the parents are seen as good parents, but if a parent's children don't behave as society wants them to, the parents are seen as bad parents and looked down upon. As such, parents often times put pressure on their children to "behave" and "fit in", not for the child's sake but for the sake of the parents' social standing.

This is completely messed up, because children should be free to express themselves within reason, and honestly be granted more freedom, not less, because they are still learning about what words and behaviour others are and aren't comfortable with. Rather than restricting the words and behaviour of children more than that of adults, it makes more sense to restrict it less, but many parents are too concerned with what others will think of them if their children aren't perfect.

And with that final pet peeve of mine out of the way, I'd like to ask you what you think these changes would do to the world, or could do for the world. But because I can't hear you talking, please leave a comment instead!


Bye!

And that's the end of my story! I hope you're still with me, and I hope you liked it. No actually, I hope you loved it! If nothing I said sparked something within you, whether good or bad, and made you either go like:

I TOTALLY AGREE!!!

or

WHAT A FUCKING IDIOT!

I feel like I've done something wrong.

In my eyes, there are so many things wrong with the world today. Due to my (imo rather unique) life experiences I think I have a very unique perspective on some of the things wrong with the world, and I really hope I can spark a debate around some of these, because I frankly don't think humanity is headed in the right direction.

Humanity isn't necessarily headed in a bad direction either, and there are a lot of good things happening, but the things that are really plaguing us and the things that are really causing the most suffering in the world today all go unaddressed in my opinion. It seems as if either no one understands them, or no one wants to talk about them. If it's more of the former, I hope to have been able to inspire thought, if it's more of the latter, I hope I am somehow able to spark more of a debate.

Although I think I have an amazing perspective on some things, I also am undoubtedbly very dumb and completely wrong when it comes to some. If there's anything you think you have a better and/or unique view on, please share with me in the comments or talk to me on X:

https://x.com/FrankLeeSG

If you've made it to the end of this monstrosity of a blog post that ticks in at 115 pages, 45k words, and 250k characters before editing, thank you for listening to/reading all of it!

If you enjoyed reading this, please share it on X or elsewhere and/or talk to your friends and family about it!

I hope I didn't exhaust you too much. If we don't speak again, then I wish you nothing but the best. If we do, then until next time :)

Bye!

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Frank Lee Autobiography

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Childhood (1989 - 2007) University (2007 - 2011) London (2011 - 2013) Tokyo (2013 - 2016) Singapore (2016 - 2017) The Netherlands (2017 - 2018) Kuala Lumpur (2018 - 2020) Interlude Singapore (2021) Singapore (2022) Girls & Healing (Jan'23 - Apr'24) How to Save a Life (Apr'24 - Jul'24) IMR Confinement #1 (Jul'24 - Aug'24) Phyllis is Alive (Aug'24 - Sep'24) Forced Separation (Oct'24 - Nov'24) IMR Confinement #2 (Nov'24 - Dec'24) Healing myself yet again (Dec'24 - Mar'25) IMR Confinement #3 (Apr'25 - May'25) Outro Introduction If I went back in time to when I was in university, and asked my late teens/early twenties self how he'd describe his childhood, university-me would say that he had an overall good childhood, that he is very grateful for his high school friends, and that he thinks he'll always stay close to them. He would say that, although he was overweight for most of his childhood and was bullied for ...
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