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.