Xamuel.com

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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”. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Idle hands, it’s said, are the Devil’s workshop. Let me say, though, if the Devil is still relying on human handwork, then he’s extremely behind on technology! Someone should tell him we’ve invented computers and robotics, and he can start shutting down some of those idle hand workshops and laying off the workers.
A [...]

In the cult classic “Fight Club”, Brad Pitt plays as Tyler Durden, a charismatic anarcho-primitivist who frees lots of men from the lethargic oppression of consumer society. Encouraging men to pick fights with one another, Tyler dismantles deep-held patterns of social interaction, short-circuiting the autopilot mechanisms by which those men used to lead their [...]

A “Basic Income” is a citizen’s dividend, an automatic payment to every citizen, rich or poor, employed or unemployed, no qualifications necessary. A decent basic income would go a long way to repair and enhance the economy. The main problem with the economy is not regulation or deregulation, outsourcing or immigration, housing bubble [...]

All my goals and ambitions are the offspring of one selfish master goal: happiness. Does that make me greedy? Well, if it does, then there isn’t a non-greedy person in the whole world. The only difference between me and the critic of hedonism is that I’m consciously aware of my overarching desire [...]