I think many people would believe that the French Revolution in 17/89 really was the death knell for social classes in a formal sense. Because the kings and the queens, well, in this case, the king, Louis the 16th and his wife, Marie Antoinette, they were both beheaded. So that was the end virtually of the French aristocracy. Perhaps not quite because it went on later under the restoration, but still, France really did a poor job of restoring the king and eventually became a republic and it is a republic to this day. And in Russia, once again, the tsar was killed in 1918 and so the aristocracy kind of went out of fashion.
But there are still people that are pretenders to the throne, of course, to Russia. Where I’m going with this is that we should be equal. Right? Because the formal systems that I was born to be a peasant or I was born to be a lord are for the most part in our modern world finished. They’re finished.
So now what limits me is I think money. Just money. Period. So my story. The other day, I went in a shop and there was an old woman there in the shop, maybe 50 years old or so and young relative to me but still a old relative to most of you.
And she was running around literally like a chicken as we say in English. Chicken that had been decapitated and she was being berated by this young Turk, this young man who was obviously the manager, and he was instructing her how to put the various items on our shelf. I watched this for a little while and I thought to myself, my god almighty. That poor woman must really need money because the average person couldn’t have tolerated the arrogance and the abuse, not so much verbal abuse but the abuse of power if you will that was coming out of the individual. And he was going to instruct this woman, a woman that probably had lived a lifetime of children and family and cooking and everything else.
He is going to instruct her how to put these items on this shelf in this convenience store. And I thought to myself, is not there a lesson here? Don’t be a wage slave. That’s the theme of our website. It’s the theme of everything we do.
Don’t be a wage slave. A career is a must. Now for this poor old woman, I think for the most part, it’s too late. She probably has no education to speak of so she has no skill set. Strikes me as a kind of individual who perhaps was looked after by a husband about that age, you know.
Husband left her for whatever reason and now she’s scrambling to perhaps support the family. You know, many stories like this. Perhaps not so much at home here in Taiwan but certainly in North America. Many times this has happened. The man abandons the family.
The woman is trying to raise the children. She doesn’t have the education, needs 2 or 3 jobs and it just goes on. Terrible. Don’t be a wage slave. Get that education and then after you finish your schooling, you are going to have to slave over some job that you dislike with some boss who’s perhaps not that kind like this boss in the convenience store.
But then I’m going to develop my career. But of course, I don’t know what I want. Okay? Get your notebook out and begin to write to yourself. Figure it out.
Figure it out. It’s up to you. Your life is 100% your responsibility. It’s not my responsibility. It’s your responsibility to grow up at some point and get on with it.
Nobody’s gonna babysit you eventually. Right? And if you believe they will, look at the people that are living on the streets, drug addicts, alcoholics. It just goes on. It really does.
And these are the poor victims that have given up. Well, bad luck on them, I guess. Because if you give up, in reality, nobody cares. If you put yourself or set yourself out of the societal game, that’s where you sit, out of the game. And you do not, for the most part, get back in the game And tragically, that doesn’t make you free.
If you were free and you got out of the game, I laud you. I really do. I salute you. The other day, I was watching a program on Mount Athos in Greece. It’s a religious mountain filled with around 20 monasteries and these men, only men, have gone here to commune with God as they see him.
So they have escaped from society. There is a totally isolated island. They look after themselves totally, self serving, self feeding, everything else, self clothing, etcetera because they’ve gone there for a very specific reason. But most of us are not like this. We are faced with the difficulties of life.
And at some point, we have to decide whether we’re going to become involved in life or not. And if we are going to become involved in life, we do not want to end up like this old woman. For sure. Terrible. We want to put some effort into the creation of me and the capacity to earn a living as I want to earn that living.
And I don’t mean you have to go after 1,000,000 of dollars. Of course not. But you have to be able to sustain yourself such that you’re not beholden to an individual like this that you could walk away. I have a friend who recently started a new job and it just wasn’t for her and she stopped it. And I really respected her for stopping it because it was not going to end up well for her.
We all want to be able to do this. Right? And she does have the money to be able to walk away. Good on her, but she’s also planned to have that money as well. She’s built her own economic life.
So there we are. Don’t be a wage slave. A career is a must and you don’t have to be a peasant or a surf or an underdog or a victim for that matter. You can be a winner, a hero in the strife. And there are no heroes and there are no cowards. There’s only action. So get on with it. Get on with it. Why not?
And you know what they say. You know what they say. Critical thinking is necessary especially if I’m going to get on with my life economically, spiritually, philosophically and otherwise, and critical thinking is great, truly great. But I gotta learn to think. You take care. God bless. Bye bye.