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There is a secret that nobody wants to tell you. There is a secret that adults don’t tell kids for fear of how the kids will react. This secret slips out everyone know and then when an adult, usually a parent gets angry because you kids aren’t listening the way the adult thinks that you should. The secret generally slides by unnoticed and everything continues.
But there is a secret that you are not supposed to learn until you become an adult. There is a secret that you are not supposed to know until it is too late.
Adulthood is going to suck.
Imagine going to school for the rest of your life, only you don’t get summer vacation, or spring break or Christmas Vacation. Imagine that you keep getting report cards only instead of getting a grade, your report card always says “Couldn’t you do better, faster and for less pay?”. Imagine getting constant tests, but not being told if you passed. Imagine having to go to school for longer hours and probably still having homework, probably having to work weekends and potentially having your teacher call you to give you assignments. Imagine that you could get transferred to a new class or school at a moments notice and possibly having to move to another city as a result. Imagine being told that the class is too big and being kicked out of school and told to find a new school on your own.
Imagine having to do all that so that you can make enough money to pay for all the things that your parents used to pay for, but now imagine trying to do it with less money and more expensive stuff (pay checks have been losing ground to rising inflation which increases the cost of things for decades).
Imagine depending on a job you hate for the money you need to live. Imagine going to a place you hate for the rest of your life, so that you can maybe get two days off a week where you can’t even rest because there are chores to do and kids to take care of and groceries to buy.
Most adults get so depressed that 70% of them will be considered clinically depressed at one point (meaning they would be allowed to get medication to make them happier), and most of them rely on coffee and alcohol as coping mechanisms (and to a lesser extent marijuana and cigarettes and sleeping pills).
Have your parents ever told you things like: “Work isn’t supposed to be fun.”
“You’re not supposed to like it.”
“You won’t get to do what you like forever.”
or something similar?
And how about this:
“You don’t know what work is.”
“These are the best days of your life.”
“Enjoy this now.”
They aren’t lying to you. They once thought, maybe like you are now, that adults were either being overly dramatic or that they could beat the odds. They didn’t beat the odds though did they?
And that’s because the odds are stacked against you. Rules are set up and the game is started as soon as you’re born, but they don’t make you play with your own money in the beginning. From when you are born until you move out from your parents you are essentially playing for free. This is the time that determines if you beat the odds or if you get a life that you hate.
I am writing this as somebody who did no beat the odds as a kid and is still fighting against those odds as an adult. I did not beat the odds, and you only get one chance, but I have studied the odds and I think I know what you have to do.
I haven’t done this, remember that and don’t take my word for it. Test and consider and research and above all – think for yourself.
I write this as a record of what I’ve learned. And just maybe, the stuff here book will help you beat the odds.
But remember…
The odds are not in your favor.
The odds are not in your favor, and lets be clear, the odds are intentionally designed to not be in your favor.
Humans have been human for about two hundred thousand years. That is roughly six hundred thousand generations of people. And during that time, people learned how to be adults from about the age of six to the age of sixteen or so. About ten years was and is how long it take to learn what you need to know to be an adult.
During that childhood time, adults shelter and care for kids so that they can learn. And once they have learned, those kids are adults and perfectly capable of making their own way, surviving on their own and being awesome.
So what changed?
Well, about ten thousand years ago Kings started appearing. Kings had realized that if they bullied people by threatening to hurt them, the Kings could make people do all the work instead. And as a result the Kings would have a wonderful life, the soldiers and priests and other ‘important people’ would have a very good life, and everyone else would work and work and work and generally have a life that sucked. But what did the King care? He got to live a life of crazy luxury.
Over the ten thousand years that followed, Kings found better and easier ways to make people do the work for them. And one of the big ways they found was to prevent people from teaching their children how to be independent adults. Adults who knew how to live without anyone’s help had to be threatened and bullied into working for the king, and independent adults would fight back anyway.
But adults who didn’t know how to be independent and get along without any help had to find somebody who would give them the things that they needed, like food and a place to sleep in exchange for going work for that person. In other words, if the kings kept people from knowing how to live on their own the people would ask the kings to do work instead of the kings having to bully people into working.
The kings had found a way to trick people into choosing to be slaves.
What kings have done to us over those last ten thousand years means that we are all playing at a disadvantage. So we want to acknowledge that disadvantage. So the goal her is to figure out how to win a game that has been rigged against you from birth.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
If you follow this, you are going to have a much better chance at having a great adulthood. But to do so, you will have to work harder during childhood and probably seem pretty weird to the people, kids and adults, that you know.
Childhood is about twenty years give or take a few. Adulthood can be up to an extra eighty years. Me, I wish I knew this stuff twenty five years ago. But I didn’t and I can’t go back. So I’m writing this to give you guys a chance. But most people have no idea that a better way might even be possible, even when they watch people reach it. So people are going to think you are weird or crazy, especially in the beginning, if you try this.
Also, as I said, I didn’t know this when I was a kid. I may have no idea what I am talking about. I could be very very wrong. Certainly, a lot of people will tell you that if you let them know what you are planning.
I can’t make any promises for you, and you shouldn’t trust any promise like that anyway. You will need to decide for yourself what you think and if this makes sense. I make no promises. I am not recommending you try this. This is what I wish I had done and why. You have to decide for yourself what that means.
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You can call me Professor Harbinger, despite the fact that its not my name and I’m not a professor. So… What’s all this then?
Well I’ll tell you.
Nearly 20 years ago I stumbled across something, something spread across numerous disciplines- from the Post Colonial Literature I was studying, to the Taoist philosophy I was reading, to the Financial planning courses my mother was studying. I found a common thread. I found a common lie. We were being lied to.
Now, before you disregard this as conspiracy nonsense; I did in fact both read David Icke and listen to Alex Jones. That is not what I am discussing here.
But, there is something there, isn’t there? Why do fair right and fair left both see a conspiracy? Why do we keep making movies about …them? How can the Wachowski’s write ‘The Matrix’ as a metaphor for their struggle as transgendered women in the modern world, and see their message adopted by the Alt-Right? How can we all feel oppressed from the richest to the poorest? There is something there.
And what I discovered, to Quote Pogo, was this: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” In the Experimental Horror Film ‘The Cube’, a big reveal was that the conspiracy had no leader, but was instead a headless monster operating without conscious direction- a leaderless bureaucracy. Years later I would read ‘Infidel’ by Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her account of the women in her family coaching their daughters in their own oppression and I saw the connection.
“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Like an abused child growing up to be an abuser, we have passed a curse down from generation to generation and the toxic nature of the curse is beginning to poison everything we touch.
And I want out.
So here I am. I’m going to make an attempt, here and now, to do something about that creeping feeling that manifests in dystopian fiction and movies about robot overlords and virtual reality human zoos. I’m going to try and explain the understanding that I’ve gained from nearly two decades of research. I’m going to try and take action and build a life that doesn’t generate that feeling Thoreau described as “a life of quiet desperation.”
And you are encouraged to watch and point and jeer and maybe, just maybe join me for the ride.
So, Here we go.
“It’s only impossible if you stop to think about it!”
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!
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I don’t like me. Why should other people like me? I don’t like the person that I am. I don’t like my habits and I don’t like my results. I am tired and I am drained. I procrastinate and I avoid important work. I lack the skill set to overcome this, and I lack the support structure to properly build the skill set I need. I justify and defend rather than act. I research too much and do daily necessary tasks too little. I do not like me. I want to build myself into a person that I like.
And I try, I start things and I plan things. I know in theory how to learn and how to improve, but I am missing the back up that I need to get this started. I have read about the DeLancey Street Foundation. I know that those broken people are turned around by people a little further down the path to recovery.
I don’t have that. I tell myself that this is not an excuse, but that doesn’t make it easier and that doesn’t make me any more successful. I see a clock ticking, so many clocks ticking down. I am losing time, and the more time I remain in this holding pattern of ‘making do’ or ‘good enough’ the less of my life I will have to enjoy if I do ever reach ‘truly good’. And that scares me.
On a morbid note, I don’t know how much time society has. It may continue for more than a century, but I am disturbed by my understanding of the absolute limits of population, food supply, arable land, fossil fuels, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, climate change, species extinction, toxins in the environment, depletion of non-renewable resources, and growing crisis in the global financial system. It is hard to know when or if such a complicated system will snap under the strain of one or more crises.
It may be that we will create or discover some solution to offset these challenges, but I am deeply concerned by my inability to survive, let along survive, if the systems that have nurtured me begin to break down. Even something as mundane as a prolonged debt crisis, such as Greece, Iceland or the USA has undergone, could leave me and my loved ones in severe distress.
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We are going to change the world.
Humans have been on this planet for over two million years when Homo Habilis first arrived on the scene. And even if you limit the timeline to modern humans, Archaeologists tell us that we’ve been here for about 200,000 years. And for most of that time we did not destroy the ecosystems that we inhabited. It is only in the last 5% of the current lifespan of the modern human that we have become and ecological cancer.
And it’s really interesting that coincides with a system of control and hierarchy that encourages us to be slaves and servants and grown children- anything but adults, anything but warriors.
Once upon a time, becoming a warrior and becoming an adult were practically the same thing. Now the powers that be want workers, obedient and unquestioning.
And maybe I’m crazy, but I see a connection.
And I think that the secret to breaking the current suicidal tendencies of our culture is to give people back the secret to becoming adults by becoming warriors.
Religious and political organizations have youth outreach. Groups like the Scouts have been helping young people become better citizens for years. We need to create a support system to rival the Boy Scouts.
We are going to create a disseminate a guide and support system that people can use to transform themselves and their friends into the warriors that society needs and the adults that they deserve to be.
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 