One of the things I despise about the current Western civilization is the “safety first” attitude.

I know where it comes from – basically, the ideology of human rights, where right to life is the most fundamental right everything else is derived from; can’t have property if you’re dead, can’t have any other rights if you’re dead, can’t have any freedoms if you’re dead. Let’s ignore the slightly inconvenient issue of the abortion rights which negate right-to-life for the sake of a normally inferior freedom of choice, but otherwise, it’s logical that safety would be the first priority because if you get killed or you’re gravely injured, this would make any possible gains moot.

The implicit assumption is that nothing could possibly be worth more than your life; thus, logically, safety comes first, and everything else second.

However, that’s not how I prioritise things. To me, it’s mission first. The reason why I’m here has precedence – that’s, basically, what my life is for. Using it up in order to achieve the goal is the point. What else would I be doing here? Taking pictures of nature? Sure, there’s a place for safety. If I get killed or badly hurt prior to accomplishing my goals, this compromises my ability to accomplish said goals, and this is not good. If I get too poor and thus unable to function in the world in ways that allow me to accomplish my goals, that would also be bad. This makes safety and prosperity valid secondary goals, but it’s always in the context of “mission first”. Never earn money in ways that would compromise the mission. Never try to be safe and survive if that compromises the mission.

The mission, of course, is stay focused on God, do whatever needs to be done, and return to God in at least as pure and powerful a condition as when I came here, but hopefully improve.

Of course I’m not evaluating daily things, such as buying bread and coffee, in this manner – how does this exact brand of instant coffee help me attain my goals? That would be idiocy worthy of Socrates. I don’t feel the need to constantly prove that something is good, true and useful; however, when I really find myself between a hammer and an anvil, remembering that I’m not really trying to survive or to enjoy myself, but I’m here on a mission, and the only thing I need to know is whether I’m still accomplishing it or not. If my death accomplishes it, and prolonged life doesn’t, death is preferable. If suffering accomplishes it and pleasure doesn’t, suffering is preferable.

Most things, understandably, fall into neither category. It’s for the most part completely irrelevant whether I run Windows, Mac OS or Linux on my computer; the articles I write are going to be the same. It doesn’t matter whether I shoot film or digital, or whether I shoot Canon or Sony; the pictures are going to feel the same. It does, however, matter whether I shoot pictures on a really poor camera, or on a really good one, because there is going to be that “thing” about good equipment that allows me to express my vision well, without technical issues standing in the way. Also, really bad equipment already caused visible issues – for instance, I edited the cover of my first book on a Windows 98 machine with insufficient RAM, and it kept freezing and crashing on me so I couldn’t finish resizing the big TIFF image properly, so the cover is somewhat “off”. The printers also messed up the colour calibration of at least one other book – the colours are several hundred kelvins too cool and saturation could be better, so yes, equipment can definitely cause issues. Fortunately, I never encountered a technological issue that would actually prevent me from writing a text, but it came close – MS Word on a very old laptop, for instance, lagged so badly, I had noticeable delay between what I typed and what showed on the screen, due to spelling checker doing its thing. Sure, I turned it off when I figured out the problem, but it’s never pleasant, so when someone asks why I buy expensive hardware, or, in general, why I pay so much attention to any particular thing, it’s because I probably had problems with that kind of a thing in the past, and I am trying to minimise the probability of it getting in my way in the future. I don’t want to have only one computer, because it will eventually update the OS for hours, or its hard drive will fail, or it will just die, and at that moment I won’t have a backup. It happened before, so now my backups have backups. I had situations where I couldn’t get my only computer on the Internet because the drivers for some essential piece of hardware were on the Internet. Having a second computer, or a second car, isn’t necessarily a matter of comfort – it’s a function of putting the mission first, and for that, everything has to work, and everything needs to have a backup in case it doesn’t. Sure, the car I drive is safe, but it’s safe because safety is useful if I want to accomplish my goals, not because it’s safety first.

Basically, if it’s safety first, it means your life doesn’t have a purpose, but is a purpose in itself, which makes it pretty much irrelevant. I see my life as a resource that is being spent in the process of achieving its purpose. Other things, such as money and physical resources, are spent on maintaining my life and abilities, so that I can achieve my goals here. It’s, basically, goal first, maintenance of ability to achieve goals second, and safety probably third, if even that. The third place is still high enough for me to hardly ever compromise safety, unless it’s actually essential for the mission. Comfort is also quite high on the list; probably four, because comfort includes good health, and comfort in general is quite important if you are trying to maintain prolonged focus on hard problems in order to solve them. This, however, means I’m quite willing to disregard comfort if it’s in any way useful for almost anything of any significance, but I still find it useful if I’m trying to work, and I will not intentionally seek discomfort for the sake of some kind of asceticism; also, if it can’t be helped, I’ll shrug it off, but if it can be helped, I will prefer comfortable and practical solutions. After comfort and practicality there are even lower priorities, such as aesthetics, which basically means that I will prefer something nicer if I have a choice and it doesn’t compromise anything more important. In reality, it means that if I have a pen and a notebook on my desk all the time, I prefer them to look nice, but a piece of paper and any pencil will do in a pinch. Even things as seemingly unimportant as status symbols have their place in the list of priorities – for instance, if it allows me to be more efficient in daily matters, I might want to present myself outwardly in certain ways that don’t create unnecessary obstacles; for instance, when doing business, it helps to look like someone who belongs there, and not have to go through several layers of “what’s wrong with you?”. Can I manage without those things? Sure. However, I’ll take all the help I can get, because what I do is hard enough as it is.

I have to repeat that I don’t actually go around and weigh every action against a list of priorities, and I would qualify a person who does as certifiably insane. It’s an unconscious, almost instinctive thing that I just bothered to put into words and made it sound much more formal than it actually is, but in reality it’s in the order of “try to make things look nice and clean if possible” and “get a car that isn’t obviously unsafe, is comfortable and fast enough, and passes the general social scrutiny that everybody instinctively does to evaluate business partners”, however it’s all goal-oriented – until goal is achieved, try to stay capable, in order to be capable stay alive, in order to stay alive stay safe, if possible stay comfortable, in order to increase comfort maintain a clean and pleasant environment, and so on.

Regarding the attractors placed within this world, America obviously has a prominent place, but let’s analyse the obvious elements first.

The American dream is that you can go there and “succeed”, you can “make it”, and it’s usually defined as “you can become rich and famous”, which means you can distinguish yourself from the grey irrelevant masses of bland unimportant lookalikes. There is a specific astral beacon associated with this promise of success, the beacon that points to the vaguely defined finish line of success, making you feel it’s all going to be worth it, in the end. There’s also a feeling that America is special, it’s where the meaning of life is, it’s where you want to be if you want to be a part of great things that await mankind in the future. This is what I mean by the term “attractor”, and it’s obviously created by associating some pretty powerful source of spiritual energy with physical entities, the way one would put a tasty worm on a hook to deceive the fish.

Let’s first analyse the promise of the American dream. First of all, it’s obvious that we’re going to deal with lots of survivorship bias here, because I’ve seen stories by the Croatian immigrants into the USA, who suffered terribly working on building the railroads sometime in the 19^th century, and regretted the moment when they had the idea of going to America to find a better life, because what they got was hell, filled with incredibly hard work, suffering and eventually death. If you look only at those who actually did become rich and famous, and those do exist, you will get a skewed perspective, the way you would get a skewed perspective of the Russia’s post-Soviet 1990s if you only interview the oligarchs. It is a fact, however, that the post-WW2 America did in fact have a period of widespread wealth, and a very rich middle class, which was definitely not the case before, when you had widespread misery and very few extremely wealthy oligarchs, or “captains of industry” as they used to call them.

So, let’s ignore the pre-WW2 times and focus on the golden era of the American dream, when an ordinary person pumping gas could earn several times more money than the European engineers and other elites; life was easy and good in America even for the wide masses, but let’s see what “success” meant. Usually, it’s a house in the suburbs, with a pool, several nice cars, one for each family member, a promise of a wealthy retirement that included carefree travelling on a cruise ship somewhere abroad, you had a nice family and could send your kids to college.

Let’s now see what this material paradise actually means, spiritually. It means that the siren call of the attractor remains elusive, and you never actually have a feeling of “arriving” at the goal; every material thing you purchase comes with an initial “rush” of satisfaction and fulfilment, but it’s very quickly normalised, and so you try to acquire the next thing, trying to check every single item on the list – got a good job, check, got a house, check, got married, check, had children, check, got all the nice appliances for the house, check, got a nice car, check, got a nice car for the wife, check, got all the newest gadgets and status symbols to impress the neighbours and coworkers, check, got the kids to Harvard, check, got a million dollars in the bank, check. At some point, you can decide that you’re fine, and you don’t mind that everybody else around you is the same kind of fine, which means you’re not particularly distinguished in any way, but at least you’re not distinguished in a negative way, so that’s great, or you can get depressed because you invested all that energy and made so many sacrifices and compromises, and the best you can say is that you have a nice, ordinary middle-class life. At worst, you get divorced because you found out that your wife was cheating on you with a pool cleaner while you were busy working for all those material things; she got half of everything, and you are now in a hotel somewhere, thinking about putting a hole through your head. The emotional result is between mild satisfaction at best, and bitter depression at worst, and when you poll the wealthiest, most successful and famous people in America, they seem to be the worst mess of them all – divorced multiple times, undergone all kinds of plastic surgery, addicted to drugs and alcohol, with scandals, depression, suicide and depravity. You obviously don’t have people who are completely blissed-out because they attained the goal the spiritual attractor promised them, that feeling of euphoric bliss and greatness that was promised. There’s just work, sacrifice, spiritual compromises that have to be made along the way if you want to succeed, pieces of your soul that have to be sold or denied, cocks to be sucked and arses to be licked on your way up the ladder, and whisky you have to drink to try to forget and wash out the aftertaste of cock and arse. Then you bling yourself out with expensive trinkets and put on a fake smile entering that cocktail party, pretending you’re happy without a single worry in the world, because you’re living the dream, making a short pause every now and then to snort some cocaine.

Analysis from a spiritual point of view shows that all those people keep investing spiritual energy into the system, trading it for material things, and are on a perpetually energy-deficitary downward path, where they end up completely depleted, but surrounded with lots of meaningless things, having traded the things that actually matter, such as their spiritual energy, dignity and integrity, the things that actually bring fulfilment and joy, for things that promise a lot but actually don’t mean anything. The American dream, in essence, states that physical things will bring you happiness, and this is initially convincing to people who are poor and thus believe that poverty is the cause of all their problems, but the truth is, wealth will only solve the problems that can be solved with money. If your problems are caused by the lack of food, medical care, housing or transportation, then wealth will easily cure those. However, if you actually miss God and that feeling of blissful fulfilment and joy of expanded consciousness that you had in heaven, before, but you don’t know what it is, and the attractors placed by Satan can convince you to seek them as mirages in this spiritual desert of a world, you will keep losing yourself until there’s nothing left.

That thing Jordan Peterson said, that I mentioned in the previous article, is very relevant here – namely, that there’s only so much joy one can experience in human existence, so there’s not much you can add even with infinite wealth and success. There is, however, a terrible and deep pool of suffering and misery of human existence, and if you can keep that away, that’s basically 99% of total possible success you can actually have here. Everything beyond that is trinkets and bullshit – you wear a Rolex instead of a Seiko, big deal. Nobody cares, or can tell anyway. It’s the same with cars; you can get a better car up to a point, but after that it’s exponentially more money for chasing mirages. This means that the promise of the American dream is not all false; there’s some truth in it. Physical wealth can indeed improve things for you if you’re poor, because poverty can cause all kinds of terrible things to intersect your existence. However, you exhaust the pool of possible improvements very quickly, and you exhaust the pool of really significant improvements even more quickly. Basically, it’s like hunger – it’s a real issue if you have nothing to eat, but once you eat something there’s only so much you can do about it. Once you had enough to eat, eating more will actually make you feel worse, and that’s the first lie of the American dream – that having more will always make you feel better. It won’t. In fact, once you managed to leave the pool of abject misery, trying to have more and better things will actually cause you to neglect the most important things – God, your soul, your mate and children, your friends, and so on. If trying to be more successful and famous causes you to make compromises that will break you, this means accepting real harm and real injury in the place that actually matters, in exchange for mirages and nonsense. This is a bad trade by all measures.