I always got a kick out of that Guild tag back in the day when I was playing World of Warcraft; Switching Addictions... indeed!

Haven't played my precious video game for a few days now, I must be burnt out. Good stuff. Time to transition my time to the next activity.

@edicted/addiction
@edicted/addiction-employing-restraint

I've spoken on addiction a couple times.

It's not a disease. The push to start calling it a disease was to convince people that mental health issues are real and not some make-believe thing that can be countered with a tiny bit of willpower, but in my opinion that's just replacing one bad piece of information with another.

Addiction is simply the symptom of a much larger underlying problem; usually a coping mechanism to deal with that problem in an indirect manner, as the problem itself is usually too hard or seemingly impossible to fix directly.

The sources of addiction are endless:

• Poor or abusive marriage/relationship.
• Financial servitude.
• That nagging feeling that you're trapped in the Matrix.
• Existential dread of a meaningless existence.
• Knowing the things probably aren't going to change.

At its core, addiction is usually seeded with some kind of depression or general unhappiness/pain.

I think for me personally the most depressing thing about this largely boring existence resides in the limitless unrealized potential of it all. We've got so many resources in our colony:

• An entire planet suited to our survival and bent to serve our will.
• 7 billion people.
• The ability to provide and support every person on the planet.
• Exponential technological gains.
• The ability to expand into space and perhaps even transcend dimensions (Why not go full sci-fy? We're living it!)

And here we stand!

• Puttering around in a broken system.
• Wondering how we can make a few pennies on the dollar by enslaving others financially with artificial scarcity.
• Breeding billions of mindless drones that will do the bidding of their masters without even knowing it, and even defend them when the elite come under attack.
• All our productive energy turned from making the world into a better place to bickering about politics at the children's table that no one at the top actually cares about.
• All populations have been successfully divided an conquered.

If that's not depressing, I don't know what is.

Honestly, if I wasn't living it, I'd actually be quite impressed and awestruck by how it all turned out. What a magnificent cancer cluster we've created! You can have it all: my empire of dirt!

One great big festering neon distraction I've a suggestion to keep you all occupied: learn to swim!

If we look at how far technology has come in the last 100 years, we should all be millionaires (at least!). Yet, people back the 50's had more opportunity than we do. The Baby Boomer generation doesn't understand what's happening today. They project their experience onto us: just pull yourself up by your bootstraps; they are out of touch and out of time.

My family has tried to support me, but they don't know how. Thanks for the $2000 suit! I guess I can use this to become a higher-class financial slave? Cool. Thanks for the "education", same story.

I make for a very bad financial slave.

Oh shoot, if only I could start up that career so I could get that house with a white picket fence and wife with 2.5 kids to fill it.

That's what we all want, right?

Regardless of how things have been, I've always had my head in the clouds. Where are things going? What could be? And the way I see it, our entire species stands at the precipice of oblivion. Evolve or die. Learn to fly or crash and burn. Considering all that's going down in the world today, of course I feel that this timeline is approaching at an alarming rate.

While I've never had the support that I've needed, at least now I know what I need in the first place. I need tutors to teach me. I need people to follow me and help me complete my projects. I need to embrace decentralization and the concept of shared ownership, utilizing the unending zealous work ethic that it ultimately promotes.

Efficiency! Morale! Synergy! Automation! Distribution!

I'm light-years away from where I want to be, but as I've been reminded even in the video games I've been sucked into, a tipping point can come that changes everything as the system builds itself.

And so, what should I work on now, in this moment? My spider-senses tell me Escrow services on Hive/Steem are a lynch-pin. Unfortunately much of what I've learned about this Graphene API over the last few years is rendered useless when I found out that escrow doesn't seem to work on DSTEEM. That's unfortunate. I guess I'll have to start all over again and work on some HiveJS. Again, so strange how it mimics my video game bender, one that I also had to restart from ground zero a few times before I got it right.

Truth be told, perhaps all my struggles of the present will be rendered somewhat pointless compared to the gains made by a hopeful tipping point. Perhaps the only real chance I have is to wait for that epic bull run that gives me the resources needed to fully support myself.

I'll try regardless.

The struggle builds character, or so I'm told.

Destroy the evil power!

As an Atheist (mostly) The Great Satan isn't a single entity. Satan is not here on Earth pulling strings before some final apocalyptic battle. The United States is not the beacon of evil the Middle East and the rest of the world is led to believe. At the core of everything wrong with this world lies a quite simple emotional mindset: greed. And it is pervasive and worldwide.

This is why we can't have nice things!

If you think that the Great Satan can be defeated with weapons and hate, he'll simply laugh while gaining strength. No, it won't be that "easy".