I come from growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness. (Atheist now). I’m intimately familiar with the blindness of belief systems and how futile they are to fight against. The best way to counter them is by example and drawing people into asking their own questions. Often we need to tell them the questions to ask in such a way that they feel as though they constructed the questions you lead them to ask. Any other form of opposition becomes a fruitless partisan opposition as a foreigner. I’m physically disabled now and my survival pivots on my understanding of this dynamic. This is not hyperbolic.

It is from this perspective that I say, you can’t fix stupid in anyone else. You can only fix yourself and show others what life is like when you do not conform. Like, I rode a bike everywhere until I lost 160 pounds. Several friends and family started riding bikes as a result. I can do anything on Linux and it has caused others to question and try it. I never watch ads for anything and have no subscriptions of any kind, and yet I watch interesting edutainment. Few people understand or are willing to setup a network like mine but still find it interesting that it is possible to live without corporate influences or intrusion, especially when I have no desire to make frivolous purchases like nearly anyone on corporate social media. I think for myself because I am disconnected and that seems to be rare in the present world. I tend to be both a realist and a hopeful futurist.

The way I see it, you don’t make change through authoritarianism or pocket isolationism. You’ll never win the world through a partisan operation or mindset. At best you might win half, but even then, the game is already rigged by the last person that played this hand generations ago. You make real change by living it, talking about it, and making it cool. You’ve got to post and talk about upcycling, about the benefits of riding a bike, about reusing electronics and hacking around, you talk about how you make food without commercial recipes, your fermentation experiments without buying anything, your balcony or window seal gardening with seeds from you food refuse. If you post and talk about these things, you motivate yourself and others to change. When everyone whines at work about their commute, you tell them how great your 6 mile route down the beach was this morning and how there wasn’t a person anywhere around, or you tell them about the mediative value of the hour and forty five minutes it took you to ride 33 miles like you’ve done for the last two years. You might be surprised at how often you find your coworkers joining you on those rides to work as you pass by their merging path from home, I certainly was for those two years before I got a better job closer to my home.

Fighting them only makes you the enemy or opposition, and oppose you they will. If you want to make change, you must show people what is possible, lead by example, travel the harder path but do it in style or just your style. This is my style. The only more direct and effective path is to get a law degree and get into political office… IMO

Ultimately, we are likely on the brink of major change in the next few decades. I think the big one will actually be from M-type asteroid mining. A single object is likely to hold more mineral wealth than everything humanity has accessed since the Holocene began. Dwarfing the wealth of the world will have massive consequences. Earth’s resource scarcities are due to gravitational differentiation (all heavy elements sunk in the center of Earth when it was fully molten). Accessing the core of a differentiated body in near Earth orbit will drive humanity into space in an unprecedented shift of exponential growth and geopolitical upheaval. Wealth disparity will be massive, but the focused pressure and exploration will shift away from the general population. We will just be stuck with the aftermath of the climate change caused by space men. It is likely to be about how the 1920’s were still an era of bicycles steam trains and horse carriages while the 1930’s was the sudden era of the automobile for only slightly above average people. The 2030’s will be the beginning of the space economy and mining colony. It is a much less hyped aspect of the current push into space, but it is the primary unspoken objective if you read between the lines, especially at what Japan has been doing to explore space mining and prospecting… but that is just my big picture hunch about where things are going and why billionaires are kinda acting like doomsday prepers in private and in business… It’s probably a good time to build agrarian skills too tho