Skip to main content

Welfare – Just Another Drug

 

All people want to feel good about themselves. Many are poor and many are rich, but all want that same feeling or sense of value, importance, independence, and well-being. These are the “highs” of life.

Hard work, even if not well paid, gives these senses. Achievement gives the same. They allow the natural down turns and down days everyone has. Achievement modulates depression. Achievement stimulates well-being.

Drugs give an artificial high without work, achievement, or anything else. It’s temporary and chemical. It ends quickly, but more drugs boost the spirits high again. A cycle.

Welfare is similar. It gives the illusion of value simply because you can pay for food or other needs. Like a drug, you can become addicted to this easy cash*. Your sense of value disappears, and you become dependent on your provider. As you need more, you are re-cycled.

*You may see this all around your world. My first experience was in grad school with Teaching Assistants, grad students teaching a couple of classes, taking a course or two, earning enough to live on.  The work and classes were 2-4 hours a day; the rest of the day was spent in the lounge playing bridge – for years on end and no intention to graduate. Horrors! A job, publish, tenure, responsibility?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Accepting Fake Information

Every day, we are all bombarded with information, especially on news channels.  One group claims it's false; another calls it the truth. How can we know when to accept it or alternatively how can we know it's false? There are several factors which influence acceptance of fake or false information. Here are the big four.  Some just don’t have the knowledge to discern fact/truth from fiction/fact/false*. Some fake information is cleverly disguised and simply appears to be correct. Some fake information is accepted because the person wants to believe it. Some fake information is accepted because there is no other information to the contrary. However, the acceptance of  information  of any kind become a kind of  truth , and this is a well studied topic. In the link below is an essay on “The Truth About Truth.” This shows simply that what is your point of view, different types of information are generally accepted, fake or not.   https://www.linkedin.com/posts/g-donald-allen-420b03

Problem-Solving - Obsession

Problem-Solving - Obsession Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Economy," 1854.   Introduction . Many facets of problem-solving are well-known and understood. They range from vast knowledge to critical thinking, to intuition, to insight, and to experience. Today, we add a characteristic, though an important ingredient. It’s more like a condiment-to-food, or a sauce to a delicacy. It’s needed though sometimes not essential. It is mostly helpful with big problems, difficult problems, or imossible problems. It is the quality of obsession. Each of us has experienced obsession in one form or another and is often relieved when the problem is solved. One literally leaves oneself becoming an engine driven to resolve the matter. Obsession is an all-consuming state of mind, possessive, jealous of distractions, and impervious to interruptions. T

Your Brain Within Your Brain

  Your Bicameral Brain by Don Allen Have you ever gone to another room to get something, but when you got there you forgot what you were after? Have you ever experienced a flash of insight, but when you went to look it up online, you couldn’t even remember the keyword? You think you forgot it completely. How can it happen so fast? You worry your memory is failing. Are you merely absent-minded? You try to be amused. But maybe you didn’t forget.   Just maybe that flash of insight, clear and present for an instant, was never given in the verbal form, but another type of intelligence you possess, that you use, and that communicates only to you. We are trained to live in a verbal world, where words matter most. Aside from emotions, we are unable to conjure up other, nonverbal, forms of intelligence we primitively, pre-verbally, possess but don’t know how to use. Alas, we live in a world of words, stewing in the alphabet, sleeping under pages of paragraphs, almost ignoring one of