We live in amazing times. You look around, you find brilliant writers that didn’t stand a chance a few years back are now publishing their own e-books and selling them with great success. You find excellent filmmakers crowdfunding their projects and bringing their vision to reality. And you find incredibly clever digital architects building revolutionary platforms to bring all of those dreams to reality.

But here’s the crazy part,

You turn on the TV and you find the exact opposite. There is absolutely no shortage of peculiar personalities that seem to be hell-bent on convincing you that technology is the enemy and that the robots are coming, or that the Muslims are coming, or that Ebola is coming…

So you have to choose wisely what do want to believe.

Maybe we are going to hell in a hand basket at a fast pace, or maybe the guy is a fruit basket and a nut case.

Who knows?

But here’s how I see it. I’m barely in my early thirties and I’ve already survived over ten different imminent Armageddons: 2012, the Mayan calendar, Y2K, the blood moons, Planet X… And this is just off of the top of my head.

The End is Most Definitely NOT Nigh

I would like to argue a case that the quality of life on earth is getting better and not worse, and that everything points that it’s probably going to keep heading that direction.

For instance, during most of recorded human history women were not allowed to join the workforce, hell they weren’t even allowed to choose a spouse for that matter. Until just a couple of centuries ago, women were basically condemned since birth to a dreadful lifetime sentence of conjugal rape… Just because you know, they were born with the wrong genitalea.

They weren’t called the ‘dark ages’ by accident. It’s because the darkness ruled.

But what happened after the government’s say-so was removed from the equation? What happened when a new paradigm shift came to town and no one was obliged to ask permission to be with the person they love?

The quality of life in this planet immediately skyrocketed. Did it not?

“Baby this love is so great we need to get the government involved! We need to bring lawyers and judges…” - Doug Stanhope.

However, the change was nit as easy as it sounds. When that paradigm shift finally arrived, there were many people who voiced some grave concerns. Concerns that if the women were “allowed” to marry whomever they wanted, or if they were even “allowed” to work, then there would be no more jobs left for men, and then the economy was going to crash, and then we’re all gonna die…

For the sake of the argument, let’s call them “The end is nigh” people. One thing is clear, these people seem to be coming from a place of fear, to them anything new and different is scary and terrifying, and everybody who thinks differently must be a danger and a threat.

It’s hard to be in that situation I imagine, totally consumed by fear, living life in a permanent state of fight or flight.

But here’s the thing, no one should ever “allow” any other person to do whatever they wished to do. Under any excuse!

The end never justifies the means, and your freedom ends when it touches another person’s freedom.

So a gay couple want to get married? So fucking what? How is that any your business?

Now, I know that one or two of you maybe scrolling down to the comment section to call me “a SWJ” to which I will save you the time and answer with this:

I don’t know what that means! If you mean that I have some Seriously Wonderful Jokes, then in that case: Thank you! All I'm trying to do is to make a point that no one should ever have to ask permission for anything.

No, but God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!

You poor bastard! Here’s the thing, you are not having sex with them, then why is it any of your problem who or what they decide to fuck?

As a straight male, I never understood that phenomena. You would think that if anything, there would be more women for me, right? But no! If we “Let” them gay people marry each other, then there will be no more babies, and goodbye human race!

There’s always a buck to be made from an impending apocalypse, ain’t it?

The thing is, there is no “we”, there is no “them” and more importantly, there is no “let”. People are free to do whatever they want, and the more we reduce the permission aspects of things, the better it is for everybody.

The Endless Prelude To an Apocalypse.

It’s needless to say that most advances in human history occurred as a consequence of reducing the status-quo’s shackles on several aspects of our very lives.

Take food for example, one of the few elements that are crucial to the survival of the human species along with water, air, fire and Wi-Fi. The five elements.

It’s easy to forget that the minute we gave a goodbye kiss to the government absolute monopoly on agriculture, breakthroughs started happening left and right: Irrigation systems, fertilizers, advanced machinery…

The fear people however believed that their best idea of agriculture was slavery, and they dreaded the day when “we” were ever going to “let” slaves go free.

They gave all kinds of excuses, that the slaves were not fit to be members of society, that they could not perform any other sort of job, that they were savages, that they would take vengeance in their hands to retaliate against the harms that they suffered…

Oh, and I almost forgot: That the end is nigh.

What actually happened was the exact opposite, before we knew it the number of people involved in agriculture went down from 70 percent to almost 3 percent, with a far greater productivity.

It’s the same thing that happened when the “permission” was removed for women for them to join the work force. Instead of collapsing, the market naturally expanded to adopt the new-comers, and naturally, the quality of life dramatically increased as a consequence.

And contrary to what some people seemed to believe, people did not only NOT go extinct, but the average man started to enjoy a better quality of life than medieval kings.

Examples of this trend are countless, take that of the printing press for example, and the effects it had on civilization. With the free flow of information, the world not only didn’t end, but a case can be argued that a lot of freedoms and advancement we enjoy today, were a direct consequence of that paradigm shift.

Closing Thoughts

It’s easy to observe that de-centralization is easily, easily the number one liberator of man. In fact maybe we shouldn’t call it the Blockchain as much as the breaker of chains.

Some people are gonna be afraid, but that’s ok. It’s normal, sooner or later they too will join.

They say that with technology we are growing disconnected, maybe we are or maybe we’re getting more connected than ever.

Or maybe it’s all one giant paradox. I don’t know.

Here’s what I know, that technologies is improving our quality of life in ways that we didn’t see before, and sometimes that’s all that some of us need, to appreciate the moment and enjoy the ride.