agent008t

No, that is terrible.

1. Spending years of your life earning enough money so that you can begin to live at some later date is not a good way to live. Tomorrow is not guaranteed, and even if it was, you will be different and everything and everyone around will be different.

2. Human beings are not meant to live away and disconnected from everyone else. We are community creatures, even if not always very social.

I do think people overall would be happier if it was culturally, socially desirable to be, or at least come across, as humble, and consume little, especially the more resources you have. Think Warren Buffett -- maybe he does spend a lot on himself, but at least he does not come across as if he does and he certainly does not brag about it. The opposite of Instagram culture. Anyone going against this would see fierce backlash, reputational damage etc.

A new religion of sorts.

Perhaps then people would not feel the need to keep up with the Jones' as much, always feeling as if they don't have enough, worrying about their status. Once people have enough, they can have more choice in what they work on, and perhaps the economy can restructure towards more activity that actually makes people's lives better.

As is, people can't seem to stop even using Meta products or X or buying Tesla cars, despite most people likely having poor opinions of the people at the top of these companies. I do not really understand why. It is easy, these companies have no moats, there are easy alternatives, and it would change the world.

An economy does not need mass demand.

It can easily reorient itself (and arguably, already has) to serving the demand of a small minority of asset owners rather than the majority of people. E.g. people building luxury yachts and working to maintain them, working in luxury restaurants, maintaining luxury gardens etc. instead of working in roles that improve the lives of the majority.

Because most people are working on things that improve the lives of the asset-owning minority and not of the majority, the standard of living of the majority is not improved, they have to work more for less.

How many high-paying jobs today actually do anything that benefits the 'common man'?

By late 2001, Amazon share price collapsed by 94% from it's peak in late 1999! It did, however, fully recover by late 2009.

By 'fastmail masked', you mean an email on the fastmail domain, right? I.e. [email protected]? So that if there is a problem with your domain, you can still login to your registrar even if they want to say verify your identity by sending a code to your registered email address?

How do you/they deal with presumably all of their peers doing the opposite?

I have also been thinking about this recently.

The big difference/problem I think is the social aspect. With AAA at least you can expect large numbers of people enjoying them at the same time, so you can share the experience with others (and even then, good luck finding anyone IRL to relate to if you're 35+). People tend to be social creatures, and are largely driven by what 'everyone else' is doing. It's amazing how peoples' tastes miraculously change depending on what their peer group is at.

But if you discover some gem of a game from 1997? You will unfortunately likely feel quite alone playing it.

I don't really have an answer to this. I somewhat envy the game streamers that have a small community around them, so they can play some old game live and get the experience of enjoying it with others.

Also, most people in Western Europe / US care more about how things have changed for white collar / educated workers in their country/block.

Look up other writings by Seneca, e.g. On Peace of Mind. They are great too!

Can the whole supply chain of modern technology operate with zero carbon emissions?

Is Monkey Island 2 even possible to beat without a hintbook?

I enjoyed Monkey Island 1 a lot, but with 2 there was a combinatorial explosion of items/locations, and it just seemed too difficult/unfair. I got the impression they wanted you to have to call the hint phoneline.

Thanks, haven't heard of those RPGs and they look interesting.

The original does play very well. The PS3 version allows to speed up time 3x, which is very useful to make some grindy battles less grindy.