I will be leaving my job in a couple of months, and am getting into retirement mode.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It’s not so bad — I’m not starving or having to do without health insurance or housing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0 We are not going out to eat so much, and when we do, it’s to cheaper places.\u00a0 I don’t surf web pages and impulse buy.\u00a0 When we spend money, we sit down and actually ask “Do we really need this?”<\/p>\n
It’s no tragedy.\u00a0 But it has made me realize a couple of things.\u00a0 A lot of the stuff I’m cancelling are products\u00a0 the woke industries are using to attempt to manipulate me.\u00a0 I’m cancelling a *lot* a superfluous media.\u00a0 I really hadn’t thought about how much I spent paying for entertainment options I didn’t really use all that much.\u00a0 \u00a0 I had a subscription to one of those person-search services to look up old friends and people.\u00a0 I spend about $100\/mo on Kindle books at $4.99 apiece.\u00a0 We used to rent streaming movies all the time — at four or five bucks a whack.\u00a0 We used to go out to movie theaters all the time — back when that was allowed.\u00a0 When all is said and done, I sped thousands per year on this kind of stuff.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But they add up.<\/p>\n
Now it’s all, or at least mostly, gone.\u00a0 The odd thing is that I don’t miss it at all (at least so far).\u00a0 I still have internet access, though not at a zillion megabits per second.\u00a0 I am not cloistered.\u00a0 But I am not tied to media like I was just a few months ago.\u00a0 Instead, I call friends.\u00a0 I invite people over for dinner.\u00a0 I spend more time doing things with my wife.\u00a0 I am starting to do things that I kept telling myself I wanted to do but never had the time.\u00a0 I read the Bible instead of the Huffington Post.\u00a0 It turns out that I did have the time, but I wasted a lot of it consuming propagandized entertainment.<\/p>\n
It’s a heck of a lesson to learn late in life, but I’m glad I’m learning it now, at least.\u00a0 I didn’t used to be this way.\u00a0 The slow insinuation of these media into my life was exactly that — slow.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I turned on one of the cable channels a couple of days ago.\u00a0 It was the first time I watched broadcast-type news and comment in months.\u00a0 I was stunned at how little I connected with it.\u00a0 It was all just jibber jabber.<\/p>\n
The same thing, oddly, is true of my being cancelled by the National Association of Medical Examiners.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I was surprised that it meant nothing to the current leadership when they kicked me off.\u00a0 But I was even more surprised about how little it meant to me, after the initial disappointment.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
But then, that’s a common refrain among older folk, from Solomon in Ecclesiastes to Isaac Newton.\u00a0 What’s important in youth is not so important in old age.\u00a0 In youth, we are consumed with finding success.\u00a0 As we get older, we become consumed with finding meaning.\u00a0 And there is very little meaning in the cacophony we are buying, with our money and our more precious attention and time, today.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I suspect, and even hope, that society in general will begin to realize how nonessential all this is.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Once people begin to recognize again what is really important, it may form the basis for a new Awakening.\u00a0 I pray to God this is the case.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I will be leaving my job in a couple of months, and am getting into retirement mode.\u00a0 Because of some…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[93,41,94],"class_list":["post-740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-media","tag-propaganda","tag-retirement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":741,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions\/741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.forensicpath.us\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}