Category: Old age of my youth – 2018

SUNDAY, 30 DECEMBER 2018

11:00

Read an article this morning that argues that God is imagination – not like imagination, but that God is in actual fact Imagination.

Any case, the part that I really liked was the author’s classification of religion with science fiction, ghost stories, and astrology: “I was expelled from the Paradise of innocence that long ago summer, but imagination never abandoned me. It sank underground throughout my teen years in a voracious appetite for reading, especially science fiction, and hooked itself tenaciously to anything in popular culture that left it room to breathe — religion, ghost stories, astrology, the New Age …”

It reminded me that people who are believers, even in the most traditional sense, have a desire for something more – something beyond this sometimes boring, sometimes monotonous, sometimes horrible, and sometimes sad life. I can even see how such a person could see someone who doesn’t believe in God as one without imagination, even narrow-minded.

This is a positive view of religion – that it is creative, characteristic of a person with a lively imagination.

My problem with religion as I know it, and as it was taught to me as a child, is the strong association with prescriptions and doctrines, which simply must be believed if you want to escape eternal damnation. This manifestation of religion is all but creative – after all, it shows a bold red, ominous “No!” to anything that crosses the line. It does require imagination. It asks you to open your head (or your “heart”) and be prepared to believe in something you can’t see. However, it requires of you to use your imagination just enough to accept what the so-called holy texts prescribe, or what the authorities in the faith community teach you to believe. If you give your imagination free rein, you’re looking for trouble. The “truth” has already been “revealed” – why wonder about things that can only cause problems?

16:11

It’s a cloudy day, with the temperature in the low twenties. I’m in Kaohsiung’s West Bay (Sizihwan) – about 25 minutes from our apartment by bicycle, at the National Sun Yat-sen Alumni House – on the quay overlooking the Taiwan Strait. Except for the sea, my view also includes the great rock with the lighthouse on the peak – in my opinion one of Kaohsiung’s best natural attractions, the mountain at the university, and a variety of people.

My snacks include small tomatoes, a banana, and a filo dough cookie with butter and sugar on the inside that a student gave me on Thursday night. I started my audio session with two Wealth & Mindset podcast episodes, and then moved on to Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town.

All in all, it’s been my best Sunday bicycle outing of the year.

* * *

The second podcast episode I listened to spoke of value that one should deliver if you wanted to make money.

As I was listening to the first two Springsteen tracks afterward, I remembered what I had read what reviewers wrote about him when his debut album appeared in the early seventies: that his lyrics reminded them of Bob Dylan, and his singing style to that of Van Morrison. In other words, there was no Springsteen yet as people know him today, just someone who wrote songs like one well-known singer, and who sang like another famous singer.

What did he do? He kept writing songs, and he kept singing, and eventually found his own place in the sun.

But what made him a legend, not to mention millions of dollars? He created value over and over for people who paid to see him perform. He told stories. He sang his heart out. Unlike some groups or singers, he didn’t only come out on stage and sang his fifteen or twenty songs before he disappeared again. He would keep going night after night for three or four hours. And night after night, concert-goers felt they were experiencing something special.

That’s what Springsteen gave people. And that made him not only a creative and commercial success, it made him a legend.

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WEDNESDAY, 5 DECEMBER 2018

Chris Rempel, a marketer whose newsletter I signed up for several years ago, says about time: “[In] business, focus as much on earning time as you do on earning money. And when the money does come in, use it to further guard your time by choosing investments that aren’t ‘jobs in disguise’.”

What that says to me is that you should, almost as a matter of routine, look at look how you spend the hours of each day, and have a conversation with yourself that looks like the following:

“Is there any way we can liberate that hour?”

“Which hour?”

“That one, between 18:00 and 19:00. Is there any way we can pay someone else to do what we do then? Or, isn’t there a better way to do what we do then? Or is there no other way we can get the same result (probably money) by doing something that takes up less of our time?”

SATURDAY, 8 DECEMBER 2018

What is my writing about?

I have a deep-seated need to understand myself, and also to understand the world in which I live out my daily existence, and to make as much of the one life I have as I possibly can.

Then, when I think I’ve sorted something out or received some decent insight, I have a strong need to share it with people. Writing has always registered in my head as a good way to do this.

WEDNESDAY, 12 DECEMBER 2018

Eventually, I would be able to say that the process of becoming financially independent has been enjoyable, stimulating, fulfilling, and extremely interesting, as virtually everything I have read and applied came down to improving myself.

THURSDAY, 13 DECEMBER 2018

First coherent thought after waking up this morning: “I have to change ‘just reasonable’ to ‘still reasonable’. (In reference to a title, “Did I swallow the red pill, or am I just reasonable?”)

Here I am now, a few hours later, and I still think it’s a good idea. But did I really get the idea the moment I woke up? I don’t think so. I think it was already in my mind yesterday, but too many other thoughts had blocked it. When I woke up this morning, there was no blockage – and the idea was exposed, in a manner of speaking.

Must be why so many people say good things about meditation.

SATURDAY, 15 DECEMBER 2018

I can summarise what I have learned about financial matters this year under three headings:

One: Financial intelligence: What is money? How do banks really do business? Where and how should you invest your money?

Two: Technical aspects of making receiving money: To open a business, follow these steps … or, to trade on the financial markets, start here …

Three: Wealth mindset – sorts under Positive Mindset/Positive Psychology

Useful to keep in mind when considering books about personal finances. Few books cover more than one of these areas.

TUESDAY, 18 DECEMBER 2018

My dad is ultimately my hero. In spite of setbacks that would have pushed many other men over the abyss, he simply picked himself up every time, and kept on walking. That is how I want to be. And not only did he keep walking, he did it with joy. And not with fake joy because he believes he should keep up appearances – I’m talking about a stubborn, resilient joy.

THURSDAY, 20 DECEMBER 2018

I’m reading [an Afrikaans book, the title of which translates as “Communion weekend over the years”] by Professor Bun Booyens. I once again realise: The religion of the Afrikaner involves a great deal of tradition – in fact, many folk traditions of the Afrikaner are religious in nature.

It therefore follows that when I abandoned the religious beliefs of my youth, I also renounced important traditions of the cultural group in which I was born and raised.

But what alternative did I have? Tradition is important – without it, it is more difficult to feel connected to your ancestors. But how could I continue to respect the religious traditions of my ancestors if its metaphysical foundation was no longer credible to me? I mean, is dishonesty a traditional value?

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FRIDAY, 7 DECEMBER 2018

I always feel like you have to know what’s going on in the world so you can be prepared for when something bad happens, or if someone who wants to do you harm crosses paths with you. If you’re only focusing on the positive, you are going to be as unprepared for the negative as Maya or Inca villagers were when European soldiers walked into their towns with their coughing and sneezing 500 years ago.

Fact is, however, that millions of bad things happen every day – literally, millions of bad things. Violence occur between people behind closed doors; robberies and murder are committed; attacks take place on unsuspecting people; one person or group bullies another person on the Internet, or at school, at work, or on the playground; people cheat other people out of their hard-earned savings. What you see on the one or two news channels you watch, or in the one or two newspapers or websites you visit, is a drop in the bucket. So, if you want to keep abreast of bad things happening, why settle for a drop in the bucket? How much do you think that drop will prepare you if you’re in a situation where you may become the victim of a malicious person?

The other thing is this: If you focus on positive people, and positive environments, chances are that you will in any case avoid, as far as possible, people who’d want to do you harm, and you most likely won’t venture into environments where there is an elevated risk for something bad to happen.

In the end, you can’t control everything that happens to you. All of us are trapped on a rollercoaster ride to some extent. Or I should rather say, we are all trapped on some or other rollercoaster. You do have a choice where you sit, though, and you sometimes have a very good idea what rollercoaster takes what kind of turns.

A new year is almost on our doorstep, so it might be a good time for a resolution: Go through your social media, and through your other sources of information throughout the day, and purge what doesn’t help you lead or create a better life. And, perhaps more for myself, maybe less news during breakfast is also not such a bad idea.

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SUNDAY, 2 DECEMBER 2018

What happens when you become aware of exactly how much it matters how you think of yourself and the life you lead, and to what degree you create your own reality – both positive and negative, and you then not only apply these beliefs to efforts to improve your own life by, for example, making more money, but you also apply it to one of your other great interests, namely political history?

* * *

By 1960, seventy percent of the population of South Africa was black, about ten percent brown and Indian, and about twenty percent white. Black people, as well as coloured people and people of Indian descent, were deeply aware of the fact that they enjoyed fewer rights than the white population, and that they did not have similar opportunities as their white compatriots. Various campaigns were launched to put pressure on the government to rectify the situation.

Why did many of these efforts largely fail in those decades? Mainstream history books explain that the white government had access to better weapons, and better tools to suppress the black population, and the coloured and Indian populations, and to keep their aspirations under control.

I think another factor also played a role. I believe a critical percentage of adult black, brown and Indian populations fell for the confidence trick of white supremacy. It can even be said that they were trapped in a prison in which they themselves were the main players.

Again, one can quote Marcus Garvey who wrote: “Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men. […] We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, for though others may free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.”

* * *

“Are you saying they were responsible for their own misery?” anyone who polices what people think and say to make sure it doesn’t violate the precepts of the prevailing dogma of our time may ask.

I just write down what is in my mind, I’ll reply. Other people can make their own conclusions according to their own beliefs.

* * *

Do people who would criticise me for this train of thought imply that black, coloured and Indian people in the fifties and sixties and seventies were not capable of creating more positive, more fulfilling lives? Were people like Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo not evidence that it was possible? After all, they did not internalise the trick of white supremacy. That was why they were considered dangerous, and why the white government considered it so important to inhibit their movement and prescribe what they said to whom! Specifically, these three men, as well as many other black, coloured, and Indian men and women, confirmed that you are able to create your own reality, in which you can succeed despite opposition.

“But one of the three men you mentioned ended in exile, and the other two in prison for decades,” my opponent in such a debate would remind me.

It is true, I will respond, that what other people decide has an effect on your ability to steer your life in a particular direction. Mandela, Sisulu and Tambo ended up in exile or in prison because not enough other people thought like them. That they were not initially successful – or that it appeared as if they had failed for three decades, was not a rejection of the idea that you are able to create your own well-being and happiness. It simply proved that it matters if not enough people believe it. Not to mention what happens when a significant segment of the population believes that resources are limited, giving their support to a government that oppresses other segments of the population so that this group can get more for themselves.

The history of South Africa is a history of negative beliefs and negative perceptions about self, about other people, and about life, which inevitably leads to negative repercussions.

1960 Census

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