Yup.

Yeah, that is the life. 10000 is a great number. I don’t think I have reached half of that number yet.

But yeah, all that I have done has been for free as a volunteer. And felt so much more rewarding than anything I’ve been paid for. My girlfriend has even paid to do volunteering in conservation. So that is going a step further. We now both have this little project where we use the syntropic method to bring life back to this slice of land we bought, where we’re also building our home.

Your life sounds wonderful. And I wish there was more of you out there. And I’m always grateful for knowing that there’s people like you out there. So, thank you.

That’s what I thought. The curse is in the fact that he can’t technically have the boulder remain balanced at the top. He would be free if he could get it to stay up there, but no matter how much and how hard he tries, the stone will always role down. It’s been a long time but that is what I remember from it.

Anyway, the sysyphus myth is supposed to illustrate what we today can also call Sysyphean tasks. Like brushing our teeth, getting a hair cut, cleaning the house, etc etc because no matter how many times we’ve done them, we’ll always will have to do them again and again until we die. The meditations of the philosphers always have to contend as to how Sysyphus or more accurately we accept that life sentence.

I’m not sure that is necessary to go that far, unless one wants to. Both Volla and Jolla phones and Fairphone 5 version with /e/os are all degoogled out of the factory. Sailfish and Ubuntu touch are great Smartphone OS options. If you haven’t tried it on someone else’s phone, you should, they’re both really great.

But I completely support people using dumbphones. Getting away from the hassle and hustle of an app centered world is quite refreshing.

I’ve degoogled my Samsung Android quite a while ago. And, no, I don’t have Google Play Services in the background either. Completely degoogled. If you don’t know how to jailbreak it to remove the apps entirely, you can just deactivate the apps and uninstall the updates from them. It will free a lot of space and memory and your battery will last longer. My phone is over 5 years old and the battery lasts over 4 days. Although I only have two non-system apps installed, voyager for Lemmy and Pixelfed. And when I travel and need directions I install Herewego or Mapy. I take turns between them. When I don’t need them, I uninstall them. And that’s it. No Meta shit (no, not WhatsApp either), no youtube, nothing. I do my banking in person. Malware is getting too good too fast with A.I. as a sidekick for hackers. This is a huge cybersecurity concern all over. One can risk it out of convenience, I won’t. If the bank gets fucked on their end, the money is ensured, if I get fucked on my end, it isn’t. It’s that simple.

Anyway, there are decent European alternatives for both Smartphones and Dumbphones. And yes, we should support them. Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are some of the worst companies out there.

Me too. And as I get older and older the more I like to see my leafy friends growing to the point I get to sit in the shade of one of them in a hot summer day as I listen to the birds chirping up there. There is no feeling like knowing I had some part in creating that moment. That makes me feel not that I created that moment, because I didn’t, that was was the sun and the rain, and all the worms and microbes and bacteria all the way. I just played a tiny part in it and that makes me feel one with everything in that moment.

Number 1: Keep planting trees. Trees should not be perceived as a carbon sequestration device, wood to build your table or fruit provider for your basket. The greatest function of trees is in the complexity it provides to any habitat. Shade to preserve humidity in the soil, leaves that fall and form mulch that also provides cover for preservation of humidity in the soil as well, but also nutrition to the microbial and bacterial life and other organisms that in return provide the decomposing nutrition to the root systems and so on. The microbial and bacterial life are the source to every other trophic level you stack on top of it. If trees are good for them, they’re good for everything.

Number 2: If the only concern everybody has these days is Carbon offsetting, then you should all collectively work to ban all forms of commercial fishing. Nothing offsets co2 like the oceans. Nothing. And not even close. Oh, and the oceans provide about 72% of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. But even oil spills are small potatoes when compared with the destruction the fishing industry causes to the oceans everyday. Which leads me to…

Number 3: Our food system is the most abhorrent display of inefficiency, cruelty and destruction. To start… so cities are built in a vertical axis for efficiency, to the point that they’re housing more than half of the world’s population and we still spread the consumption of that said population horizontally??? That is genius levels of stupid in space management. And I don’t care about the word Vegan or what anybody thinks of Vegans or what Vegans think… A fact is a fact. Anytime you raise your intake in source of energy to a higher trophic level, you’re augmenting the inefficiency of the energy intake. Which always means greater loss. I’ll risk being condescending, but explaining this more simply would be saying this… every time one consumes a plant, one requires all the destruction that plant required to grow enough to be consumed, when you raise your intake to an animal, you require that same destruction multiplied by the necessity of that animal to grow to produce offspring and ensure continuity of species, wich is of your interest but also an absurd amout of loss of energy when you take the animal has the energy source, given that your intake from the animal will be less than the one the animal required. The larger the animal, the larger the loss. If you raised to the trophic level to consume carnivorous animals then the loss would be even more ridiculous. Do we all get this? This never changes. We can decontextualize the conversation to a bunch of ridiculous scenarios, but the truth would persist even in the scavenger’s rule of the wild, which is one of opportunity. But that is not the case of humans, as our provision is one of design. This is our design. And it is a terrible one. And not in just space management and loss in energy intake. Monocultures are terrible for the soil, as they create nutrition deficiency and when you add plowing and harvesters to the mix, spray some pesticides on top of all of that, and we’re pretty much engineering extinction to the entire trophic level that provides all other trophic levels and their subsequent existences. So we’re just engineering extinction really. But don’t worry, remember that we’re not just doing this on land, we’re doing even greater levels of damage to the oceans at a rhythm that we can’t even fathom to on land. Especially with drag fishing. But hey, it’s only the largest source of oxygen and carbon sequestration as established. So no big deal there either, right?

Number 4: (It’s the final one, I promise) The solution to everything is every solution. And the concept of building hierarchies of priorities is the problem that keeps us all from that true solution. Which is us chasing every solution, and all of them all at once. Like transportation, Electric cars are not a solution on their own. But better public transportation systems are. I don’t think fossil fuels are a problem onto itself. Our magement of them is where the problem resides. Burning it to get stuck in traffic and wasting on trivial imports of dumb things that nobody should think they need or generating disposable plastics is. Which leads me to waste management. There’s no such thing as trash. If you think of trash, you are only noticing a flaw in a system. Nature doesn’t have trash. And we need to criminalise programmed obsolescence too. Yesterday. As to electricity, we need all sources. And we need geographical context. Sometimes a nuclear power plant will be the ideal for a region, but only nuclear everywhere is a ridiculous proposal. We need to find the geographical context and harness the energy accordingly. And sometimes that might be fossil fuels. Regional sovereignty is what we should chase in every way possible. Also, cities need to produce energy, and there’s many ways as to how. And food. Speaking of food… cities need vertical indoor structures to produce food like I previously mentioned. It’s great space management to match the vertical axis of how people live in them. But with the continuous uprising in drastic changes in weather patterns, having the food growing sheltered within skyscraper like buildings is a good idea. Not to mention that you can expand or artificially generate seasons to grow all year round. In less surface area. Also a good idea is to build regional food banks like underground vaults, that can store provisions and wither natural disasters and crop failures if necessary. This is what taxes should do. Insure resiliency of the populace. Agriculture needs revolution and to integrate permaculture philosophy and syntropic knowledge in whatever shape it takes. There’s also precision fermentation. Having bacterial and microbial life directly producing our food is the most integral part that is missing at large. This is a solution that comes from people who truly understand entropy and the trophic level exchange. I wish I had invested my time in learning more in that field. I think it will play an integral part of all of our futures. If we get there. But if someone works let’s say in construction, they need to think of how to build with efficiency as to last longer but to need less of everyting over time. Less electricity, less repairs, less resources overall, and fight to integrate universal design principles to every new project in the future. It should be coded into law that every new building or home has to be adequate for everyone, of any age, of any type, a home should be a home to anyone at any point. This will lead to less rushed renovations in case of accidents, illnesses, disabilities or just old age finally catching up. This means literally any service or field will have a function that can be improved in so many ways. And we are all the necessary contributors to any solution. And the solutions go on and on.

I just vented all of this to say…

If anyone plants trees, keep planting trees. That is one solution we all need. Unfortunately, it is not the only one we need. We need all of them. And I only covered a surface level of very few in this too long of a comment. That’s why we need each other. No single person or even A.I. will fix this alone. Not when we’ve already breached 6 of the 9 established planetary boundaries. We need all the help we can get now.

And trees are definitely part of that help.

The DSM contains a wide range of disorders and illnesses, and just because one can find a diagnosis cataloged in the DSM does not mean it is naturally inherited or genetically predisposed. Any diagnostic deriving from trauma such as PTSD as a quick example would not fit genetic predisposition. But Narcissism can indeed derive from genetic predisposition if found in correlation with another clinical profile such as psychopathy, for instance, which research really found genetic predisposition for. Psychopathy will always contain Narcissism as a “feature” (for a lack of a better word) of the profile. But Narcissism as an isolated “feature” can be learned behaviour or accidentally re-enforced environmentally. Examples would be parents who immensely spoil an only child or learned behaviour by imitation in a setting, such as growing up in Hollywood, just to name two basic and obvious examples. Not to mention that sociopathic beahaviour is encouraged by capitalism, which is also intertwined with perceived Narcissism. It’s a mess. Nature VS Nurture always is. This is all surface level of discussion, obviously. We could spend hours and hours on this. I hope I wasn’t an annoyance though. Just thought to chime in between the two sides to say that is more nuanced than it is either one or the other.

As to this person in question… it’s just another tech bro shitshow trainwreck of a human being. As to what is the Nature or the Nurture in this mess of an individual, I’m not so sure. These Silicon Valley like settings definitely attract these profiles, but it also definitely re-enforces this type of behaviour. Through mirroring or even peer pressure, emulation of behaviour can become inherent behaviour over time. So, who knows?