Travel blog 02: Boomers in cars and agency

Alexa am I a slave?

Autumn is a good time to leave your homeland behind. Sombre, serious business. Autumn is a very new sincerity season.

It's surprisingly difficult to drop everything and leave on the first plane out of here with nothing but the clothes on your back. Surprising amount of admin these days. Perhaps that's why people don't do it as much any more.

When all this was just a coping seething fantasy in my head before I met her, I was looking into thr option of jumping on the next ship and working my way across the world, and I was revolted against the modern world, learning that apparently that just isn't done any more. You cannot just go down to the docks and sign up for the first crew out of here. You need at least a 3 month course diploma to be allowed to do that. The beaurocracy skims a little grease of even this.

You have to sit in a classroom for three months, and a teacher gets wages and school gets paid and school beaurocracy and electricity bill gets paid for the place and rent and you have to rent somewhere for that time. Money money money. Lots of money moves around to facilitate the simple timeless action of a man abandoning his life and just jumping on the next boat out of here. Lots of grease. Is this more efficient? Is this making society function better?

I was talking with her yesterday about Boomers infatuation with their modern cars. She asks me, why are they so enamoured with talking to their car? Trying to connect the phone to the car and do handles phonecalls? All the fucking (excuse the cursing she is Australian) computer overlay shit in cars that does nothing, and all of it never works anyways? So they just sit in their cars screaming alexa alexa alexa. The fucking shit doesn't even work and they are just obsessed wih it anyway, and buy new cars every year for no reason.

I told her, exactly. All of modern technology is a potemkin village. The car stuff is just skimming the top of a technological and economical boom in the boom-bust cycle of these things. The cars, the technology is not improving at all and it never worked in the first place.

The modern car is the perfect microcosm of how the system works. The car is a mythological symbol of freedom and agency. With a car you can go anywhere you want. This is how the technology was sold in the first place, and, it was true. When cars were first invented, that was the case. And the Boomers grew up in an era of where it was an extremely prevalent symbol in American-western media, as as symbol of personal agency and freedom. American grafitti, Grease.

However, where are we today? To own a car you have to have a licence (teacher, school, government paperwork. Rent, electricity), insurance(same) , and for the most part people don't even own their fucking cars in the first place, butd rent them from their bank (same) . You have to spend months worth of money to even get the engine running. Then, you need a car to function in society. To commute to work in the first place. All of this before even the question of having a cool car and being sexy high status whatever.

Its this symbol of freedom and agency, and now woops now you sold yourself into slavery for 6-18 months, conservatively, to have one. That's the optimistic guess. Is this efficient? Is this making society any better? Is this getting people efficiently from point a to point b to get to work building houses and roads and damns and aqueducts and infrastructure that actually has real tangible value and improves society? Or is it ever more beurocracy parasitically skimming money off the top of every human action possible.

All of the modern world is just Boomers sitting in their car screaming "Alexa tell me a joke".

But, then I talked to some actual sailors and they told me yeah no you can literally just go down to the docks and ask around. Go to a port where people are working and literally just go up and talk to them. It's just not advertised on the Internet.

There still is a system that the parasites are skimming from. There still is a real world out there, where people keep things running. Down underneath all thr grease. It is just not advertised on the Internet. Do you understand what I am saying?

Do you want the experience of freedom and agency in a little vr pod, or do you want freedom and agency? And responsibility? And stakes?

I was worried about getting permission to work in the country on time, because the government website very loudly sigballed: these processes are slow and take 6 months. I thought that applied to me, because I read it on the government website. However, everything was resolved in less than 24 hours. My secret? Government forms and beurocracy is designed for people who are too stupid to fill out a government form correctly. The systems are there for wrangle morons. If you can read and follow instructions and fill out a form correctly on the first try, and spell your name, you are FINE.

do you understand what I mean? You can literally just do shit. There are no more systems, only people, only social relationships. It’s just tard wrangling all the way down. You just have to choose which team you want to be on. You must choose in all moments, whether to be a tard or a wrangler.

In a couple of hours I will be a neet. Tomorrow I'll be homeless. Rootless cosmopolitan. Gonna live in a hotel room and own nothing for the next couple of days. Then we see what happens.

Lot of admin. But all done now. Empty apartment. I was so busy preparing, the only thing I wasn’t prepared for was the feeling of being done preparing everything.