Archive for the ‘Counterculture’ Category.

How to Escape an Echo Chamber

Truth, no matter how inconvenient, is more beautiful than fiction. An Echo Chamber is a community based around a subjective set of assumptions, which never questions those assumptions, and twists everything into supporting those assumptions. It can be useful and profitable to spend some time in such a community, because of the unique lens they [...]

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Very Serious People

We see them all the time. On television, newscasters nod deferentially while Very Serious People tell us what to believe. On the street, we see them wearing their suits, scowls on their faces, always running off to their next Powerpoint Presentation. Who are these mysterious people? Why are they always so miserable and guarded? I [...]

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Failed Kings and Queens

Whether he holds great power or is just a figurehead, the ultimate measure of a king’s success is whether he continues his line. He might conquer the whole world by force and brilliant strategy, but if he has no heir, his accomplishment will be completely unwoven by the competing warlords in the vacuum of power. [...]

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Seven Signs that we live in a Dystopia

A dystopia is a utopia which went astray And admit it, to someone from the 1900′s, we have all the components of a utopia. We have so much abundance that a very tiny minority of farmers can provide food for everyone, and the vast majority never has to worry how big the next harvest is. [...]

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Going Urban

Wanna make something slicker and edgier? Just insert “urban” at the beginning. It has replaced “extreme” as the adjective-du-jour of extremeness (a replacement necessitated by the hijacking of “extreme” by The Man, who proceeded to churn out lots of “extreme Bibles” and “extreme just-say-no-to-drugs movies”). Urban Ninjas. Urban Dictionary. Urban Survival. Urban Exploration. Maybe I [...]

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One Hundred Reality Escapes

This is a follow-up to my previous article, Reality Escapes. Here is a list of one hundred things which might be classified as Reality Escapes. Such classification is arbitrary and subjective. The point of the list is for you to ask yourself which items you look down on. Every item on this list, has the [...]

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Reality Escapes

The thing about reality escapes is, there is no such thing. It’s not like you can run away from the universe, because even if you could, the universe would just expand definitionally to include your new location. When I play We Love Katamari for hours at a time, I’m not escaping from “the reality”, because [...]

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10 Reasons to Be A Hedonist

A hedonist is someone who actively pursues pleasure. In a sense, we’re all hedonists, for even Mother Teresa made the sacrifices she made because ultimately she calculated that was how to maximize her own pleasure. A more precise title for this article would be: “Ten Reasons to be a Conscious Hedonist”. 1. Joy and Happiness. [...]

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How To Starve

When I suggest people take work and jobs less seriously, a common reaction is: “I need money or else I’ll starve.” With technology continuing to obsolete human labor at a faster and faster pace, more and more jobs are gonna disappear, whether we take them seriously or not. A lot of people are free of [...]

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The Overpopulation Myth

The Overpopulation Problem has been imprinted into public discourse for so long that it’s become cliche. For the longest time, I accepted the hypothesis that the world is overpopulated. It’s not that I was an activist about decreasing population or anything. It’s just part of the background “common sense” which most of us blindly accept. [...]

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