To
most of my relatives and acquaintances, I have been focused for the
last three months and much of my spare time over the past year on
trying to get my writing
business up and running. The others, and readers of my blogs,
know different: the writing business is, as it always has been, a
potentially sustainable means for sharing my personal perspective,
knowledge, and skills; but developing those things has been my true
focus. Much of that development is currently embodied in my
research into a simple, unified way to understand history so that
I and others can intelligently contribute to a better future as
defined by select values.
I
don't mean to imply that the time wasn't productive from a business
perspective. A year ago I was completing my book Death
Stoppers Anthology; and this year I conceived and published
in parts the beginning of a new novel, BIOME,
which is a prequel to my first novel (Lights
Out). I also worked on instrumental
music, a purely artistic form I enjoy on a visceral level,
releasing a soundtrack album for Death Stoppers Anthology and
starting one for BIOME. As I did with Lights Out, I've
incorporated life lessons and results from my research into its
prequel, in some ways running the research in parallel with the
fiction as my creative energy spilled into both.
The
many months I spent hunting for a job that could meet my family's
financial expectations were just as depressing as the news and
outcomes of research that reinforced my expectation of a catastrophic
future unfolding soon. Always trying to define and understand the
problems I seem to have a penchant for sensing, I developed a
framework for assessing the financial, practical, and ethical aspects
of potential work, which benefited from understanding
and improving on one of the most interesting predictions of my
main research. As a result, I achieved a level of confidence I have
been seeking for most of my life, which sadly has risen inversely
with confidence in the judgment of others in business and government
who I had respected as a default condition.
I
learned how to get rich, and why
I probably won't. Getting rich involves enabling the
customization of environments (the essence of what my research
defines as happiness), with minimal effort by the customer, and with
mostly invisible costs at the point of sale. Implicit in that process
is hope: the promise of more, for as long as anyone wants it, which
is the essence of perpetual growth. Success depends on deceit,
because each aspect of its realization is based on a lie, or at best
a special case that is treated as a generalization. Customization
requires increasing amounts of resources, which has costs that may be
hidden but are not inconsequential. Limits to resources are real and
we are attempting to exceed them, turning the appearance of perpetual
growth into a reality of rapid decline. Knowing what I know, I can't
lie – to myself or others – and I can't live with myself and
encourage unhealthy and ultimately lethal behavior.
Since
my preferred contribution to making the world better is the sharing
of insights about how it works, and doesn't, along with ideas about
what might be changed based on values and experience, this personal
account is presented as both background and overview so that you, the
reader, can derive some context for what I've shared and intend to
share. It also serves as a reference point in the body of work I'm
most proud of – my writing, which is available on my
blogs and Web sites.
Finally
in this last blog post of 2015, I would like to acknowledge the love
and support of my wife Debbie. Over the dozen years we've been
together we have helped each other through many challenges and grown
closer through those and the good times; finding home always where we
were, rather than where our stuff was. Our relationship has been a
daily reminder of how much good remains in the world: what – and
who – must be cherished, not as an abstraction but as the essence
of life worth lasting for as long as possible.
