While repetitively building things to sell lately I was supposed to
be thinking about what business project I want to tackle next -
more electronics gizmos, more planning towards my big website idea,
or stuff making money and get around to some of the side projects
which I've never started or are progressing at glacial pace on
occasional weekends?
The last one is by far the most attractive, but even last month I
couldn't actually do it. Business-wise I need to be working on
finding new products to replace things that have all mysteriously
stopped selling on Ebay. On the other hand if everything is selling
well I haven't got a chance to do anything but focus on ordering,
building, packaging, and communicating. I'm built into the same
corner as everone else: not finding time for my life's ambitions
until retirement. By which time, if I even make it, I'll quite
likely be too old to enjoy it anyway, and quite possibly to broken
to even attempt to.
So instead of reaching a conclusive plan, I've been enjoying
comparatively rosy contemplation of global thermonuclear war. If I
actually got around to building a nuclear bunker, excessively
eqipped with all the supplies, space, and luxuries I could want,
would I be happier in there sheltering from the appocalypse
unconcerned about obligations to pay people in the outside world.
What if I were to build a hidden bunker and just disappear in
there? Live for some years just off supplies, while outside it no
longer mattered about paying bills, travelling to buy and sell
things, prevailing politics, and legal changes. I'd just live away
separately from the world.
I've talked before about a certain appeal of riding out an
appocalypse (2023-04-10The_Observers_Utopia.txt), and also a
facination with people who live completely off grid in nature.
They're two sides of the same coin really. Socially I've already
well and truely dropped out. Not so much consciously as just by
lack of interest in much besides finding a girlfriend, and being
hopeless at the latter as well. Much of my engaged daily social
interaction (if any) is really via Usenet and that's really dead
now, and in a way I don't care - was it ever a net benefit
emotionally/intellectually or just an instinctual pull to talk?
Here I talk a lot more, but like when Aussies.space died for a few
months it'd be much the same whether I publish my writings or not.
Reading other phlogs can be done now, or similar content could be
scraped now and read back years later offline.
In economic aspects and my living environment I'm less of a
drop-out already. I rather consciously don't get much into
self-sufficiency projects like growing food because they require a
routine commitment which will either subtract from my business
time, or my recreation. I do repairs and things myself, but at some
point I can consider them done and move on. I like to travel and
experience nature. Camping out in the desert I might be able to
avoid commitments like council rates, but it would be a harder
environment to be self-sufficient by growing things, and without
paying for fuel and car license+registration I'd be stuck in that
one isolated place much like inside a bunker. For food I could get
enough preserved food supplies to last me some years by which time
I either manage to grow enough to sustain myself going on, or give
up and try to re-enter the wider economomy to make enough money to
try again. For travel I'd be stuck in the environment I picked, but
at least if nobody else wants to live there (hence cheap
property/rates, eg. in a desert ghost town) I could wander around
freely.
Ideally I'd drop half-way out, which I sort-of have already. But
any commitment to spending money means maintaining a way to make
it, and though being self employed gives me some leverage for doing
that within a less conventional lifestyle, it also means a large
degree of effort is demanded in order to keep any money coming in
at all. Half-way just doesn't work. You either drop out or you're
stuck in. Neither path looks like it leads to true happiness,
unless I make enough money with that big website idea to pay any
modest personal expense I can imagine for the rest of my life - the
intangible dream of early retirement.
Anyway writing that has dug half an hour into my work time so I'm a
naughty boy and better get onto profitable tasks or I'll give
myself the sack and have to move out to the desert/bunker.
