Will the coming crash force social correction?

I will be leaving my job in a couple of months, and am getting into retirement mode.  Because of some stunningly bad financial decisions I made in my younger years, my retirement income is very limited, and I am having to readjust my lifestyle to accommodate my more limited means.  It’s not so bad — I’m not starving or having to do without health insurance or housing.  What I’m noticing is that I mostly just don’t have money for impulse buys and things that would be “nice” to have or do.    We are not going out to eat so much, and when we do, it’s to cheaper places.  I don’t surf web pages and impulse buy.  When we spend money, we sit down and actually ask “Do we really need this?”

It’s no tragedy.  But it has made me realize a couple of things.  A lot of the stuff I’m cancelling are products  the woke industries are using to attempt to manipulate me.  I’m cancelling a *lot* a superfluous media.  I really hadn’t thought about how much I spent paying for entertainment options I didn’t really use all that much.    I had a subscription to one of those person-search services to look up old friends and people.  I spend about $100/mo on Kindle books at $4.99 apiece.  We used to rent streaming movies all the time — at four or five bucks a whack.  We used to go out to movie theaters all the time — back when that was allowed.  When all is said and done, I sped thousands per year on this kind of stuff.  When you are upper-middle-class, as I was, and your impulse buy limit is a few hundred dollars, you don’t even notice these costs.  But they add up.

Now it’s all, or at least mostly, gone.  The odd thing is that I don’t miss it at all (at least so far).  I still have internet access, though not at a zillion megabits per second.  I am not cloistered.  But I am not tied to media like I was just a few months ago.  Instead, I call friends.  I invite people over for dinner.  I spend more time doing things with my wife.  I am starting to do things that I kept telling myself I wanted to do but never had the time.  I read the Bible instead of the Huffington Post.  It turns out that I did have the time, but I wasted a lot of it consuming propagandized entertainment.

It’s a heck of a lesson to learn late in life, but I’m glad I’m learning it now, at least.  I didn’t used to be this way.  The slow insinuation of these media into my life was exactly that — slow.  I never noticed that it was consuming my life as much as it was, because at each step along the way, it didn’t seem like it was.  I turned on one of the cable channels a couple of days ago.  It was the first time I watched broadcast-type news and comment in months.  I was stunned at how little I connected with it.  It was all just jibber jabber.

The same thing, oddly, is true of my being cancelled by the National Association of Medical Examiners.  I was very active in the organization, and devoted inordinate time and energy towards it — writing position papers, defending the profession from detractors, doing committee work, doing research on salaries and working conditions, arguing for positions within the organization, attempting to help politically threatened colleagues.  I was surprised that it meant nothing to the current leadership when they kicked me off.  But I was even more surprised about how little it meant to me, after the initial disappointment.  I don’t even think about them any more, except when one of the colleagues that still talk to me sends me a note about some new boneheaded thing the new woke leadership is doing as the organization progressively (in all senses of the word) abandons the ideal of objective truth.

But then, that’s a common refrain among older folk, from Solomon in Ecclesiastes to Isaac Newton.  What’s important in youth is not so important in old age.  In youth, we are consumed with finding success.  As we get older, we become consumed with finding meaning.  And there is very little meaning in the cacophony we are buying, with our money and our more precious attention and time, today.

As the crash comes, more and more younger people will be like me, however. They will have to choose between more essential expenditures and spending on these media.  I suspect, and even hope, that society in general will begin to realize how nonessential all this is.  And as we are forced to focus on more essential things, we will more likely discover the great lie that we have been force fed.  The forces behind the “Great Reset” may well be planting the seeds of their own destruction by putting in place policies that will force people to turn away from the propaganda that keeps them mesmerized.  Once people begin to recognize again what is really important, it may form the basis for a new Awakening.  I pray to God this is the case.