My views on god are different than most. I’m not a theist and I’m not an atheist. I’m agnostic as far as I can tell. I don’t see any absolute facts either for or against the existence of a god that created the world and all that we know. I don’t see as truth old books written by writers I didn’t know and edited & influenced by rulers and societies I didn’t know or experience.

I don’t see any proof here in the present that proves or disproves a god. In my mind there is a possibility that there is or was a god, but whether or not a god is acting in response to anything happening here is without a doubt, a resounding…

NOPE.

There is nothing I’d like better than to have a very strong faith in some god that I can’t see. I’d like nothing better than to be able to ignore statistical probability and instead blame someone for things that go wrong. There’s nothing I’d like better than to be judged on what I’ve done – and given the opportunity to redeem myself in case I slip up. An eye for an eye sounds reasonable to me. I could live my life according to that. I could even follow the 10 commandments with relative ease, though it’s taken me until I was 39 years old to say such a thing.

Reality tells me there’s nothing like this going on. If there is a god that made the world he-she-it is not available for conversation, debate, blame, or changing what’s going on here. A god could be watching this whole show – waiting to intervene when the level of horrorshow reaches some climax in the future. I could go for that. I can’t imagine what a god like that could possibly be waiting for though. The world seems like a big scab that gets peeled and re-scabbed over and over to me. At what point would it be enough?

I could also go for the idea that there never was a god that made the world and that this world has very little significance in the big picture. I could be fine with the idea that this world is only important to those of us in it. Life seems important to most of us for some reason.

My idea is… I don’t see life as important. I see it as something I’m not thrilled about having to go through – to tell you the truth. I’d love to blame some idiot god for screwing up the game. I’d love to have a god I could talk to and ask for explanations about why the world is so profoundly twisted. I don’t ‘get it’. Often times I can’t get beyond the simple idea that life is some god’s twisted idea of a joke or having fun.

If the world is god’s idea of fun then he must be having a blast. Why stop it? Just keep cranking up the horror volume and see what people do in response. Surely there can’t be many clicks left on god’s volume control knob.

Could there be?

So, though I don’t see life as important – in it’s self… I’m very aware of the pain and pleasure dichotomy of life that defines all we do. Or, appears to.

There are people in extraordinary pain – physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually… There are people suffering thousands of times more than I ever have in my life. I consider my life to have been quite easy in comparison. I’ve experienced little pain compared to what I could have. I’ve escaped the horrors of war during my childhood and adulthood. I’ve had a mental, physical, and spiritual health that’s been going quite smoothly over my lifetime. There have been bad times but I’ve experienced much on the positive (pleasure) side and overall I can’t say I’ve missed anything I should have experienced in life.

Life could end today and that would be fine. Life could end next week and it’s not necessarily better that it takes any longer than it could. I’m quite apathetic about life – and yet, when I have fun I really can have fun. When I laugh – which is everyday, many times a day – I really enjoy the moment.

When it’s time for this silly self to go away – then it’s time. I’m not looking to prolong anything except the avoidance of pain. Technological advancement to prolong the number of years we live here on earth is just about the biggest waste of time I could imagine.

Instead of trying to heal all that ails us, I think putting all those billions of dollars into creating new and innovative, non-addictive pain meds might be the best focus of our energies.

If everyone with a fatal illness could pass away without pain – what a cool thing that would be? If everyone could realize – time’s up – time to go, it’s been fun – not real fun, but it’s time to go now… and have that sort of nonchalance about dying I think that would be the coolest thing ever.

Of course that’s my own private logic.

Why is life viewed as so important to other people?

How can you think that this life has any profound meaning to it when it’s basically a free-for-all? It’s completely unfair. You might be born to a crack smoking mom and a pedophilic sadomasochistic father and the baby born next in time and space was born to Mahatmar Ghandi and Mother Teresa.

Who we’re born to sets the stage for life… and there’s no rhyme or reason to it that anyone can prove. So, it’s unfair to a sickening level. It’s atrocious – criminal even. If we just start with this one premise – it’s tough to get past it.

How could a good God explain this one?

I’m at a loss. No reason could ever get me over this simple fact… Life is unfair from day 1.

So, while I’m Aiming for Awesome I’m well aware that the world is in a profound state of suck. Life for each of us is a mix of suck and fun that repeats itself over and over. Some of us are on the left side of the bell curve of life… they’re experiencing heaps more suck than fun. Some of us are in the middle of the curve and experiencing some of each. In fact, most of us are here – that’s what a bell curve is… the majority of people fall well within a couple standard deviations around the mean. Some of us at the far right side of the curve have apples growing out of their nether-regions and experience much more fun than suck – and will for all their days on the earth. That’s reality.

That’s life.

To me, the unfairness of life – of the disparity between individuals living it – couldn’t possibly mean anything other than…

Our individual lives mean absolutely nothing in the big picture…

What do you think?

Best of Life!

Vern
If God lives here on earth… she’s in Hawaii.

Why human beings need to involve themselves in games of strategy and adventure online, effectively playing games within a game I don’t understand.

What better game to play than the one you’re already playing – the game of life? Why sit in front of a computer and play Quake, SIM City or some other video game with limited choices, experiences and outcomes that you need to pay for with time, and mental effort that will lead you absolutely nowhere.  Playing such a game over the course of a couple hundred hours will give you a final screen that turns into a mediocre fireworks explosion or says simply, “Congratulations, you’ve conquered the game.  Don’t miss our next game, Quake II which will arrive in stores just before Christmas 20xx.”

Why do some people spend hundreds or even thousands of hours pitting themselves against fictional characters in a game with a meaningless outcome? The big picture is that there’s no real goal or good purpose to these games. They’re mind-candy designed to stimulate some basic human interest. In SIM City its creating functioning cities. In Quake its about exploring unknown places, conquering enemies and extreme violence that we couldn’t otherwise partake of in reality.

In 1995 I think it was, I became interested in adventure video games like Doom II and Duke Nukem. They were novel at the time. It was an amazing concept to be able to play people from across the USA in ‘death match’ tournaments.  It was glorious fun and I spent a couple hundred hours playing, sometimes all night until I had to drag myself away to attend graduate classes the next morning.

When I think of the couple hundred hours I wasted I can’t believe I took part in it.  Why did I play them?  What did I get as a result?

Maybe some relaxation in a schedule filled with school, work and relationships.

But hundreds of hours?  What if I’d meditated instead?  What if I’d written a book?  Learned something online that mattered?  What if I spent those couple hundred hours learning some programming languages that could have been applied toward the year 2000 scare? I knew guys making $150/ hour updating old code from 1998-2000.  What if I had tutored someone and saved up some money to buy a mountain bike and get a different type of fitness (I was running a lot at the time)?

What if I would have spent the time talking to friends?  Volunteering somewhere?  Starting a business?

There are thousands of choices in this, the most awesome game.  There are infinite choices available with infinite possible results. This is the real game. Real life – as real as it gets, and yet some people don’t want to play THIS game. They are afraid of this game. How sad is that?

This is the only REAL game worth playing. This is the only one that matters even a little bit. In the big, big picture this entire game of life might mean the outcome for our future for the next 30,000 millenia. Or it might mean nothing. Better to act like it means a lot, than the other way around since there is always this chance that this life is what all future experience will be based on. That’s a sobering thought.

Isn’t life on it’s own thrilling enough? The outcomes, the rewards are infinitely more compelling than reaching a screen that says, “Congratulations! You killed 78,667 fictional chunks of code designed to attack you weakly within a GUI 2-D interface.”

TV is the all-time greatest waste of time affecting more people in more cultures than computer games probably ever will. In a way, computer video games are even less purposeful than TV. That’s saying a hell of a lot. Computer games have less intrinsic value than TV.

I challenge you today to stop playing any kind of computer game or watching TV. These two meaningless time wasters are better replaced by… well, anything.

Instead do something like…

• Learn a new sport or create one.
• Take part in a sport or exercise you already love.
• Start a stretching program.
• Use the computer to research something you want to learn about.
• Learn meditation, the ultimate relaxation and stress reliever. Download my free meditation course e-book.
• Question your religion… there must be something bugging you about it – see what others are saying about it.
• Teach your child how to do something s/he is interested in – not that you’re interested in.
• Read one of my favorite books Children, the Challenge; Think on These Things; or No Religion, by Buddhadhassa Bhikku; Hannibal, Thomas Harris.
• Start writing a book!
• Get a RSS Reader from Google and subscribe to some interesting blogs with it. It’s an amazing time saver. What’s a RSS reader?
• Start researching how to position yourself for the Ultimate Job.
• Every time you want to play a video game or watch TV get out a sheet of paper and write 10 things you could be doing instead.

Choose one or two and do them!

Best of Life!

Vern

For most of us the ultimate job would be to collect a huge salary for doing something fun. My penultimate idea of the ideal job would be surfing. No, not competing, that’s hard work. I just mean just soul surfing at say, Launiopoko Beach Park in Maui every time the urge hit. A woman would stop by my two-story beachfront hut and hand me a million dollars each month. That would be the ultimate job and no, it doesn’t exist.

But an acceptable, close to perfect job does exist for me and for you though you may need to accept a lower income for a while (or forever). See the “How little do you need?” series if you’re having trouble coming to grips with that concept.

Straight out of college or high school and looking for work most of look for a job working for someone else’s company. It’s safe. Sometimes it’s too safe, the money is good enough and complacency kicks in. A person in this situation might stay in that same job until they retire in 40 years. Others will get bored and try another job probably again working for someone else.

We go after everything we want – the best of everything in so many areas, but not our jobs where we spend eight to ten hours a day doing something we probably don’t want to be doing if we had a choice. We DO have a choice, but we continue on mindlessly accepting it.

WHY is that?

In one word, fear. Fear of the difficult path. Fear of not making enough money. Fear of trying to get the job you’d love and being rejected over and over or facing ‘insurmountable’ difficulty trying.

Everyone knows what their ultimate job is. We’ve all spent time thinking about it. But most of us haven’t taken even one step toward it. Usually our self-talk is that there are so few people doing it in the world or we’d need to take a profound pay cut. Maybe your idea of the ultimate job is skydiving out of planes and filming a team doing aerial stunts. Not many people in the world are making that happen for themselves. But I know one thing, YOU could be one of them.

The world is a big place I’ve been finding out the last 10 years. Even if you exhaust your efforts to find the perfect job in the USA you could go abroad and try there. I think the USA provides opportunities for anyone that is motivated to get their ultimate job. If none exist, you can make the opportunity yourself. A driven person can do anything. Look at this guy who strapped jet engines to his back and flew around in circles at almost 200 mph. Since being in Thailand I’ve met other full time bloggers and two guys that had fishing guide businesses in Alaska. Their ‘job’ was to take tourists fishing in some of the most pristine natural streams and lakes in the world. How strange is that to meet two different guys doing that across the planet in Thailand? There must be more of those opportunities than I ever would have thought.

Over time my idea of the ultimate job changed a lot. Currently my idea of the ultimate job is what I’m doing. You’re reading it. Blogging is my ultimate job and I’m making it work. I’ve written in a journal since grad school and I never stopped writing fiction, e-books and long articles for web sites I’ve had. I decided about a year ago to focus on blogging full time and that would be it. This is my ultimate job but I’ve sacrificed a lot to make it work… for instance, I’m not living in Hawaii where the cost of living is outrageous, I’m living in Thailand where my electric bill was $3 this month and water bill was $4.50. Rent was $100. Food was about $100 this month. Gas? I have a motorbike so, at $5 a gallon gas was just about $40. Will I ever make enough money blogging to move from Thailand back to Hawaii? I don’t know. Does it matter? No, not really. If I can just continue to write articles and survive – that’s what I’m doing. I’m happy as a turtle in mud.

Some Ultimate Jobs:

Blogging about anything you love.
Fishing guide, anywhere.
Hiking guide, Maui, Oahu, Kauai, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Western USA, Alaska, Canada, Swiss Alps, Thailand.
Test driver for new sport super-cars.
Dressing room attendant for Charlie’s Angels movie set.
Travel photographer.
Travel writer.
Actor, Actress. Seriously – this must be the best job in the entire world. Nobody on the planet gets paid more for doing less.
Movie extra that acts only as the recipient of massages.
Professional sports player (any sport).
Astronaut.
Artist of any sort.
Comic strip writer.
Joke writer.

If income was the only area you had to sacrifice to be doing what you really want to be doing, could you make it work?

Best of Life!

Vern

I wrote a post recently about the types of people that I meet and interact with when I’m trying to get an online venture going. I noticed that there are people that are set apart from the rest of us. They are people that are on TOP of the game, whatever particular game they’re playing. I wrote about the online world, but there are many other games people of the world are playing…

What about people that seem to be on top of the big game? You know, the “Game of Life“. Do you know anyone like that?

I know just a couple of people that seem to be at the top of the Game of Life… and you know what? Not all of them are wildly successful at business. What I mean by being on TOP of the game of life is this…

People on Top of the Game of Life:

Wake up nearly every single day in a happy mood. Unless there is a specific and terrible tragedy that occurred recently they are, without fail in a good mood every day they wake up. Seem to wake up earlier than the rest of us too.

Are optimistic about the future every single day. They realize that the future holds the key to continued happiness and being on top of the game. They realize that the future is changeable. The future depends entirely on the actions that one takes in the present. They know that and they love that idea because it gives them power, control over the future.

Are realistic. They understand that, according to probability – which NOBODY escapes, there are both positive and negative events that happen that are outside of one’s control. As much as we want to control EVERYTHING, we cannot. Some things are beyond that. One can choose to attribute these things to a higher power, or, like I do – as just probability. Accept reality and the Game of Life is that much easier.

Love to take action. They like to be doing something that is leading to more happiness, more optimism, more possibility in their lives.

Love to encourage and help others. They love to share something of themselves to help make others’ lives better in some way. It might be just with a certain group of people (family), or it may be that the person has the same attitude with everyone he or she meets. What a wonderful person THAT is, right? Have you met strangers that seemed like they wanted to help you – and you couldn’t understand why? I have. It’s scary, because initially I’m trying to figure out – what is this person’s agenda? And sometimes, there just isn’t one. Some people love to be helpful to everyone they meet. I like that kind of person myself!

Reduce daily stressors. Nothing has the power to bring someone down, bring your life to a lower level than when you face repeated (daily) stressors that don’t seem to end. People on top of the game will eliminate these stressors as quickly as possible, realizing that they are taking valuable time and effort to keep facing day after day. If you have this type of stressor, take steps to eliminate it immediately.

Take care of their bodies. They found a balance between eating what they want and exercising to keep the body in decent shape. They might eat whatever they want – and exercise often to keep their weight steady. Or, they might eat little and exercise little. They might work out on the weight machines at the gym 5 days per week or 1. They might ride a bicycle a couple times per week, walk, or jog. They have found the optimal state for them which allows them to feel good about their body and not have it be a concern that stresses them out day to day.

Take care of their minds. Our minds need a rest to function at maximum level. People who are at the Top of the Game of Life have found a balance between work and stressing themselves out. They allow the mind to recoup when it needs it. These times of relaxation might be some sport, walking, laying down with eyes closed, meditating, yoga, listening to music, or even watching television.

Don’t put much focus on money as providing the ultimate happiness. Maybe in most people’s lives there is a time period where money seems like the most important goal. It seems like, if we just sacrifice everything in pursuit of this goal we’ll find happiness in the end. It’s like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow idea. There probably is no pot of gold, and attempting to create one for yourself is going to take shovel fulls away from the other areas of your life… and the lives of those that are important to you.

Are typically over 50 years old. I’ve noticed this to be true. Rarely does someone in their 20′s or 30′s figure out the key to being on top of the Game of Life until they are in their 40′s or 50′s or older. Why is this? Something to do with having tried a lot and learned a lot more. By the time one gets older there is a life intelligence that kicks in. It’s kind of a reality check that puts things in the right perspective. At 50, if you’re the average male you’ll die in about 25 years. There’s not much time to keep getting it wrong. Naturally the mind has matured and put things in perspective at about this age. Is it possible to be on top of the game of life at 20? YES!

Are eager to share the secrets they’ve learned over their lifetimes. Just ask! When I think of how many times I had the chance to ask people on Top of the Game of Life what they thought about certain issues, or the most important things they’ve learned in their lives… and I didn’t… well, it makes me want all the more to do it now!

If you know someone that seems to have it all – not just money and financial success, but a real peace within themselves and a happiness that is present every single day…

wouldn’t it be cool to ask them…
“WHY are you on top of the Game of Life?“

Best of Life!

If you’re reading this blog – AimforAwesome.com you are likely different from most of society. I’m going to make some guesses about my readers that isn’t based on anything other than knowing that you seem to like the articles I’m churning out for you here.

See if any of these apply to you…

• You’re driven to do something better with your life… or to maintain your current level of greatness.
• You’re probably college educated with a Bachelor’s degree or more. I write at a fairly high level so I know that high school dropouts are not likely visiting this site en masse. I know there are some of you that have not graduated high school – and that’s neither here nor there. Your desire to make your life a little bit more AWESOME by reading this blog is all that matters. Though I don’t have the names, you can google “famous persons without high school diploma” and find some nice results.
• You’re a bit more intelligent than the average person. I’m guessing that the average IQ level of my readers falls between 110-130 mostly.
• You are older than 20 and younger than 65.
• You are mostly men. I write about far more men topics than women topics since I am a man, by all definitions. Ha ha!
• You are a thinker. You are a questioner. But you know what? You haven’t questioned something yet… and that is, whether society and the advertising conglomerates that are feeding you ads in your TV, newspapers, radios, magazines, over your computers and cell phones, PDAs and loudspeakers, billboards, photos, signs, and the rest of it are smarter than you.
• You’ve already accepted that they are smarter than you and on to a good thing. How do I know this? I know you’ve likely fallen for the game that they’re playing with all of society. Those at the top of society, those that are successful monetarily have fallen for the game head and foot.

I know your desires…

I had the same desires for a long time in the USA. I know your desires because I know EVERYONE’s desires that live in the USA. A broad statement yes? Desires don’t differ all that much among individuals in a society. Our American society has been victimized so profoundly… we’ve been psyched out over the years… To our credit it has taken billions of dollars in advertisements to do it, but despite our hard to crack psychology we’ve been cracked and hacked and we’re now complete pawns to the advertising industry and their evil plans for us.

America is funny.

We have all these subgroups in America that want to appear as if they are against the typical people in society… that they are anti-American society… not pawns in the game… I’m talking about subgroups even in high school… in about 8th grade there is a subset of the students that will start smoking. When asked why – it’s “because I can” or “I can do what I want”.

Looking just one step closer to the “why” and we find that they are the ones that REALLY want to be accepted by someone, because they aren’t getting enough of it. Typical ways for students to be accepted is to be part of some group.

There are those that play sports… each sport has students that are well-bonded and get a lot of positive reinforcement from their friends.

There are those that are the “smartest” – the “brains” they were called back in 1984. The brains were the good looking smart people that joined debate team and played stupid trivia and thinking games that allowed them to travel to other schools to compete while the rest of us suffered through Political Systems class with Mr. Lucas.

There are the funny people. The funny people might not even have a whole group of funny people, but the may. A kid could literally stand on his own and not have a group if he’s funny enough. He might not play sports or join any other group, but, by being funny he gets acceptance and a lot of positive feedback from so many different groups that he can stand on his own if he wishes. That’s the exception.

There are the fashionables in high school always a group of girls, sometimes they are cheerleaders, and sometimes just a group whose parents can afford to buy them the latest fashions so they can always appear to be at some higher level than the rest of the students in their grade.

There are the geeks. These are the not good looking people that are interested in technical things and are amazed at things like calculators that do advanced functions. They are amazed and consider it magic until they read enough books and figure out how to build their own calculators. These students, if they begin wearing Matrix trenchcoats band together and sometimes plot to shoot the other students. Bad joke.

Then there are the smokers. Some of those further refine by being the ones that take drugs.

When kids get older and they finish with school they may move into other groups… there are many adult subgroups too. There are the people that are artsy… they love to dress differently but not really differently, they just copy what they think they saw from the 1950′s. They rip their jeans and make safety pin zippers and things. They paint their own clothes and call it unique and anti-fashionable. It’s all a very lame attempt at making themselves a different sort of fashionable among themselves so they can get some positive feedback like the other adults that wear Armani and Donna Karan.

There are guys that get fat, smoke, drink a lot and buy a motorcycle. They are anti-advertising and are quick to tell you how they don’t succumb to the usual advertising ploys… some of them call themselves thinkers or skeptics. Then, they go and buy the loudest motorcycle that exists on the planet, a Harley Davidson, which is also one of the most expensive, some as expensive as new cars now… so other people will look at them and they’ll feel special too. Everyone seems to have this need inside that makes them want to be special. Even if you’re special for a socially negative or societally negative reason, it’s still “special” and it counts for some reason.

There is the Abercrombie and Fitch group that want to appear as if they are not really trying to dress as anything fashionable, but they have the uncanny knack of consistently dressing in a very similar style to each other. They further refine with gross exaggerations of attempting to go against the grain (pulling their jeans half-way down their butt) that really just serve to make them a stronger subgroup with clearly defined needs to be looked at.

There is the pierced group that either wants sympathy or something, I’m not really in-tune with what they’re looking for except acceptance among each other that they all feel the need to hurt themselves to prove that they can take physical pain as well as the mental pain that has been building there for years and maybe decades… They wear leather or some other drastic fabric and they do crazy things to their hair… why? So others look at them and they get SOMEBODY to look at them as nobody was before.

Into which group do you fall? This wasn’t an attempt to cover all the different subgroups in America, but you can probably place yourself into one that you either see here or that you can create and assign yourself into.

You know what every one of these groups has in common?

They are all marionettes (puppets) to the advertising industry that has so shaped American society that we look at everything they do as the definition of what American Society IS. We think we’re living like “Americans” if we act in the way that the advertising conglomerates have been pushing us to live.

That’s really sick to me.

It makes me want to spit…

Billions and perhaps TRILLIONS of dollars have bought the minds of the general public. Yours, mine, your mom’s and your grand mom’s.

While Americans think we are smart because we can “see” instances of advertising that is trying to change our minds and cause us to purchase… it’s too late. There is already a change because the first thing that has already changed is the “NEED” to purchase something else… the NEED to get something better, something different, something newer, something more trendy, something more expensive, something more…

Well, just MORE.

Let me try to clarify with an example…

We think we’re smart because we see that Lexus has used a fancy metallic gold lettering in their ad for the new SUV they have in a 4 page spread in Time magazine. We say to ourselves… ha, they have so much money that they can afford to spend that on their ad… We think we’re smart because we recognize the attempt to persuade us based on some glitzy looking lettering in the ad.

But, the real manipulation of your mind took place much before you saw the ad. The real manipulation by the advertising industry as a whole took place over decades as you grew up and watched what your parents, friends, and co-workers did over the years about buying cars. They bought too much car, and upgraded their cars when they really would have been MUCH better off financially to keep their present car and ignore what everyone else is doing.

The fact that you took even an extra 1 second to look at the fancy Lexus ad means that the car industry has already won your mind. Why would you look for even 1 second longer than necessary to keep thumbing through the pages if you had no desire to upgrade the car you presently had? In your mind is this idea that upgrading your car is always something that is a way to keep you on top of society… in good standing so to speak. It’s like if you were thumbing through the magazine and came across this ultra suave concrete mix powder that was setting the construction industry on FIRE. How many extra seconds would that ad grab your eyeballs for?

For me, none. You too?

You know why? The concrete industry is not something I saw many ads about. They know they are not for EVERYONE. Cars are for everyone. Shoes and clothes are for everyone. Soda, for everyone. Computers, for almost everyone. The car industry has been working you and spending billions of dollars over the years to make you, not just buy their cars on impulse… that happens a lot, but not everyone is fooled that way.

How nearly everyone IS fooled is that they’ve already bought into the idea that getting a new car is a good thing for your standing in society, for your happiness, for your safety, for your well being, and for your peace of mind…

THAT is where they’ve already bought us.

Not just the car industry either. What about the diamond industry? How many American girls will accept marriage without a diamond ring? Not that many. You know why? Even though a girl might accept a ring that isn’t a couple months of the guys paycheck, she knows something…

It should be that expensive if he really loves me and I’m worth it to him.

Yeah, they think this. I was engaged to my son’s mom at one time… I gave her the ring in a very unique way… and you know what? I saw the disappointment in her eyes when she realized it was only about .35 carats and worth $2000 USD. Yep, I KNOW I saw disappointment in her face and in her voice. Positive. It bears revealing that her first husband gave her a ring that was easily 1 carat and very good quality, I’m guessing the ring was around $10K. If it were up to me I’d have given her a gold band… but you know, it’s NOT up to me… it’s up to whatever standard was created in the minds of Americans that are going to get married. The girl thinks her worth is tied up in that ring! Is that the silliest thing you’ve ever heard? If you’re a guy, maybe. If you’re a girl, you understand.

Here’s another example… how many of you bought the video IPODs? This is something I’m totally lost about. It started for me with the MP3 players. Here are my questions…

1. Why do you think you’re going to enjoy watching a 2 hour movie on a screen the size of your palm? Remember when the large screen TV’s were such a fad? Oh wait, they still are. How did we go from that idea to the complete opposite idea that watching a 1.5″ x 2.5″ screen is something cool and something fun to do? I watched some short videos on my friend’s 80GB IPOD and I had to laugh right there as I watched. Even on that screen it’s not perfect graphics. If that screen was RAZOR sharp like the screen on my recent e65 Nokia slider phone I might be able to begin to understand. However, it was horrible to watch. There was obvious artifacting in every scene and all areas of the image on the screen. He paid something like $700 Canadian dollars for the thing and I thought – that’s nuts, he could have bought a NICE computer here in Thailand instead. That computer would have an AWESOME screen and DVD dual level recorder, DUO chip, Intel Centrino, and just a cache of other things that when compared to the cigarette case sized IPOD that played micro video and mp3′s was 19 times more valuable in terms of common sense.

2. Why do you think people bought them?
Answer. Apple has created this subgroup of applets – people that think Apple is the bees’ knees. These applets think that anything Apple does is to be praised and worshipped… and purchased at all costs.

3. How did Apple accomplish this?
Answer. Apple tapped into the geeks that didn’t understand IBM computers and that felt they wanted to go against the grain. The grain being Microsoft’s huge “we do everything that you need the computer for” mentality… and so they swung hard the other way. They supported the only other option at the time… Apple computers which had ‘nice styling’ and colors. Their marketing campaigns were genius, and though they too have spent over a billion dollars in advertising, they have created a group of applet clones that don’t even question with common sense WHAT they’re doing – they just buy up every stupid thing Apple creates because to them, if they own it – they are seen as desireable among other applets. This increases the concept known as “face”. Applets gain face among the other applets if they own more of Apples products.

All kinds of people are subject to becoming non-decision making dolts that buy whatever a company is selling…

Harley Davidson did it above. Alien computers are a hit among gamers for their whacky ads and styles of computer cases. Nike has done this wonderfully, expanding from shoes to all manners of clothes, bags and accessories.

So, the point of this post is that we need to be SMARTER than we are. We think we’re smart, and we’re not. We’ve already fallen for the advertising industry brainwash. They now OWN all of American’s mindset. We accept without question that items that are better, newer, faster, more colorful, have more exotic materials, are lighter, smoother, softer, flashier… are what we NEED.

You don’t NEED what the advertising agencies are pushing. You don’t NEED to have this general concept about Americans and what we NEED. You must decide for yourself what you need. You must be smarter than those geniuses that spent billions of dollars to outsmart you. You MUST be. You CAN’T be the marionette anymore. Don’t let them pull your strings. YOU pull your strings. ONLY you pull your strings. If someone tries to pull your strings, you cut off their hand.

Otherwise they’ll own you and your children…

GET OUT!

Best of Life!

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