SEEING THE BOOTSTRAP

September 29th, 2018

It’s possible that come Monday morning, you could walk out on your job in the middle of the day, walk to the nearest convenience store, pick a random assortment of numbers for a lotto ticket and win all the money you’d ever need for the rest of your life.

This would probably be the fastest way to bootstrap your life and level-up.  Chances are slim but it’s possible.

What requires more work and is frankly a lot more interesting, is consciously levelling-up through other means.  Through some other bootstrap.

Everyone has interests and hobbies that they’d much rather be doing while slaving away at some bullshit job.  But few seem to explore curiosity in the direction of how one or two of those hobbies could be expanded  in ways that could make money.

It’s possible that the inuring influence of a bullshit job creates a negative association with money-making.  I.E. anything that makes money must intrinsically be unpleasant and soul-draining.  This might be part of the reason why beginner freelancers are so tentative to charge for their work, or why artists eschew the business aspect of making a living as an artist.

Since the procurement and use of money is 100% behavioral, as in both dictate limits and patterns for behavior and activities that a person engages in, it would be astonishing to find no link between such behaviors and positive or negative associations people have with money.  This is the key to seeing an all-too-human flaw: when we think we see a connection when in fact such a connection does not exist.  For those people who have spent years and years procuring money only through means that they find unenjoyable, it may be very difficult for such people to imagine a life where making money can be fun.  Such individuals might view the wealthy with contempt and view those who think money making is fun as greedy, unattainably lucky, or even insane.

In such an instance, we make the mistake of drawing too much of a conclusion from our own experience, and not enough conclusion from the experience of others.

It’s often said that what monkey see, monkey do.

But perhaps what’s an even more powerful statement about human behavior is : what monkey will do is what monkey has always done.

Our experience, like our thoughts can have an unfortunate reinforcing quality if change is not systematically injected into the equation.  For those people who experience change as unexpected and imposed by the external forces of life, change can likewise garner a purely negative association.

This two-fold associative monster may be responsible for the prison-trap that many people find to be their life.  No effort to level-up one’s life is made because not only is change associated with negativity, but so is the most obvious ingredient for human agency: money.

Luckily, money is not the only ingredient for human agency: hence the whole concept of bootstrapping one’s self in order to level-up.

It’s not a pile of cash that you need to go find first in order to do something fun, worthwhile and potentially lucrative.  It’s the mess of one’s life, or one particular thread of that mess that we need to carefully pull on - doing so might just unravel the associative illusion that blinds us from seeing that a better life is possible.

This episode references Episode 166: The Mess, and Episode 42: Level-Up