Real sources of stability

 Up at 3. Got things together to list last night then decided it was late/early enough and I should hit the sack. 

Good stuff on Reddit's r/collapse subreddit, mainly this: 

https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/k1laet/i_am_shaun_chamberlin_author_activist_and_dark/ 

the author seems really "akamai" as we say in Hawaii, one clever buggah!

I'm putting the link here to make sure I can find it again because there's a lot of study in there. But one thing I found was that the harder you try for "success" the more it will elude you. My studying high tech is a classic example. All the olders said to go into electronics because there was money in it, and there had been for them back in the 1940s-1960s. By the time I came along that was all gone. 

The author says instead to do exactly what you want and in that way you have the best chance of success coming along as a by-product. Although I was "intended" to become an artist, my interest was in music and I'd have gone for that. Thinking back, I didn't have the guts. I didn't need college for music necessarily, but just the guts to do as little work as possible and spend as much time as possible sneaking into the practice rooms at the University of Hawaii and sneaking in there and singing not just messing around with the pianos. 

I *was* really trying, it's just that the job I had was physically exhausting and I didn't have much energy left over for the piano lessons I signed up for that were held in a tiny hole-in-the-wall place just up the street from my job on Keeaumoku Avenue. I'd get home, get in the shower to get the dog and cat hair and piss smell etc off and then I honestly only had a couple of hours before I'd nod off. Now, those couple of hours could have been spent in practice rooms but no, I wasted all this time in things like night-time math classes. 

I was torn between what I was being told I should do, electronics, and what I'd been told I should do, art, and then what I wanted to do which was music; the only solace to the really poor. It's generally do-able to come up with a How once you have a Why, but that works when you're in one decided direction not three. 

The choice would have been much easier to make if I'd known how little high tech pays. I've come up with a theory that I, as an older, would tell the young ones which is, "Do what you like and assume you'll get paid shit, then if you get paid a bit more than shit, it's a nice surprise". I mean, I was the #1 hotshot tech at (large POS terminal company) and the guys in the warehouse all made more than me, and got to play soccer with a ball made of shrink wrap and goof off. The warehouse guys might not have been living their dream but they had solid jobs they didn't have to waste years and get 10 grand into debt to get, and paid more than I got by far. 

Hawaii, being an Asian place, has a strong culture of "keep quiet, keep your head down, work hard" etc. and making music would have been "making noise" so that was another reason for me to feel inhibited. It took a lot of guts for me to get out busking at first; it's that much harder for a Hawaii person than it is for a mainland person coming from the brash, loud, mainland culture. 

People in Hawaii who do go into music tend to come from musical families. Jake Shimabukuro's mom sang in the nightclubs and Iz came from a huge family tradition and grew up taking his ukulele everywhere with him and playing and singing, with a big clan urging him on.

I can't be too hard on myself that I didn't have this. My parents being mainland people, the culture is that everyone is an atomized individual and no one backs anyone up. Helping or encouraging anyone else, even a family member, is seen as weird. 

Getting back to the link above, the author also says that everyone's trying for safety and stability, and in modern culture it's taken as a given that the way to gain those things is by making money; the more the better. But money may be a very poor way to attain stability and he says, "just look at people in Venezuela" where I guess there's been hyperinflation. He instead cites his own ways of attaining safety and stability by living simply, growing a lot of his own food, and having a large social network. This is completely opposite to the modern convention that all you need to do is amass a large bundle of money, you don't need friends, you can just hug that big bundle of money. Oh, and if you can't make a big bundle of money, then you're a failure and it's your fault if you lose everything you own due to medical bills or something and can just go live under a bridge. 

So say I get competent on singing and the "uke", but money's largely gone. Well, I might well get by OK getting the things money buys like Oh, I need a new shirt, Here's one I never wear, Oh you're playing at our party Sure you're going to get to eat all you want and take some home... (that's standard in intact Pacific cultures).

I've been working on living on less, dropping expensive habits like taking cream in my coffee and eating restaurant food. A water filter turns out to be a lot cheaper than lugging bottles of water home. I've experimented with scrounging stuff like vegetables and that's worked out pretty well. I've learned some of the local "weeds" and the same ones are in Hawaii. I may not have the cooking facilities I have here, living in a rooming house back in Hawaii, but I can work things out. 

I have to be prepared to possibly be homeless in Hawaii because I have to prepare for being homeless wherever I end up. If something happens to Ken, things are going to fall apart fast. I've said this before, that in that case I'd probably have a few months here on the outside, and then I'll be physically outside. If I'm going to be homeless with no access to medical, dental, or eye care, iffy access to food etc., I'd rather be in that condition back home.