I'm sick of modern life.

I hate the fact that just about everyone in the world has been robbed of a natural, free life. I used to feel clueless as to what I wanted in life, so I would try to get serious suggestions from other people and they always answer with "Just enlist in the military!". I respect the people serving in the armed forces but I feel like its essentially a trap. All I've ever wanted is a sense of adventure but it seems like you absolutely need to have money just to feel alive. Those stuck with boring jobs and little cash to spend on leisure are forced into mundane existences and inevitably end up wandering throughout our days in a never-ending haze without ever feeling alive.

I want to travel and experience other parts of the world but gas is simply too expensive.

I want to move somewhere that's not so rural but I need to have a job lined up before I can just get up and leave... which isn't going to happen.

I want to earn a living as a musician but its becoming almost impossible these days.

I really wish I was born before our modernity engulfed us. Sure, I would have been surrounded by sickness and war, but I would die with honor in battle before I lost my humanity and became the apathetic zombie that most of us are today. And I would have at least had a sense of freedom.

Life shouldn't be this way.
/rant

reply to post by BirdOfillOmen


Yeah...........well............I remember having to walk through the snow about 50 yards to the outhouse. Anyway, while enjoy the warm bathroom I have now, I could go back to those days.

Used to heat water on the huge wood cooking stove and pour the water into a galvanized tub in the kitchen to take a bath. Looking back, it seemed to be the way to do things. I didn't mind.

Finally my grandparents had enogh money to add a bathroom to the house. An actual bathtub and a toilet.

Granddad didn't use it for about 5 years. lol He preferred the tub in the cellar, where he would haul water down to it to take a bath. It was just a tub he bought cheap. When the bath water drained, it just emptied onto the rocks. He said, I don't like using the bathroom. If I splash water while taking a bath, it could ruin the floor. And besides, I like to hear the tinkle on the rocks in the cellar when I pee :lol

Taking a bath in the cellar, once I was old enough, lol, instead of in the kitchen was always an adventure. Freezing cold in the winter, and snakes watching me in the warm weather. lol:

Hey, you could always join the military, get disabled in a war, then get to live a simple life like me.

reply to post by BirdOfillOmen


I feel every word of that man, life is hard. We wander through it essentially lost, not knowing how we got here, where we came from, wondering what are purpose is. I also hate the fact that we are forced to play the game known as life.. We have to use materials to get more materials.. We live in this materialistic world, that i also wish was NOT. I believe there is more to "life" then this however.. I think were not just pointlessly here, we all have some type of purpose, and that gives me a little comfort. Keep your head up man we will all eventually wake up from this dream..

Mate

As posted by kyred things used to be much harder. And I'm not really sure what you mean by a natural free life ?

Sure when you look at your own society you will see most people working to make a living to pay for the things they need and want. It's easy to see how things have changed, all you need to do is look at the standards of living and the freedoms people have in the developing world.

Do you want to go back 50 years, take a trip to Cuba.

Do you want to go back 100 years, take a trip to Yemen

Do you want to go back 200 years, take a trip to Somalia

If your looking for a simple free life let me know if you ever find it, sans money, because it hasn't and never will exist.

Cheers

The agrarian lifestyle is highly romanticized. Go outside, dig a ditch, say 20' x 1/2' x 1' deep. Then decide if you like modern technology.
Second Line

reply to post by Gravity215

If I was digging that ditch for purely my own benefit...

reply to post by myselfaswell


I dont think you quite understand where the op is coming from, I dont think he is saying that he wants to return to the dark ages, I think he simply longs for the freedom ancient nomads must have had. Being able to wander freely where you will in tune with the seasons, being responsible for the cultivation/gathering of your own (non- toxified/genetically altered) food, being able to just pitch a tent/build a shelter wherever you want to rest for the night without having to pay a ridiculous fee, not being bound by city limits or financial restraints, living life the way it was intended without the imposition of government and corporations. Being free to have a real adventure in a rough enviroment without having to work like some mindless drone in a 9-5 job that does little for your body let alone your soul.....
I get it.
I think you trust the authorities too much if you believe their propoganda about life pre "civilisation" (what exa ctly is civil about the world we have created?) being tough and life expectancy being low and yada yada yada. "Cities PROGRESSED us" oh yeah? How? Give me one example of how things are better today than they were before we built a city and crowned a king?
We all know deep down what life is truly supposed to be about, we all know that (individually) we arent living up to our true potential, yea we enjoy our bread and circus but beneath the drug/chemical addled brains lives a soul dying to be free.... We know what we need to do but we are so insecure and scared that we dont do it.

But dont worry, the time is coming when we will have the opportunity to wrest free of the chains of "civilisation" and embark on our longed for adventures and truly live again! Hopefully in 2012, maybe sooner, maybe later, but soon........ I for one welcome the change with open arms "wine, song, food and fire, clothes, shelter and seed, no more need for the old empire...."

reply to post by BirdOfillOmen


Seriously? Find someone online who lives in Juarez, Mexico and see if they want to trade lives with you in Ohio. You really think everyone 50 years ago got to have lives full of travel and adventure without loads of money?

And honestly, anyone who's ever really wanted to be a musician and wasn't born in to it, had to live dirt poor and work a #e job for a while until they made it big - and what, like 5% are able to make a living doing it. If it's what you want, man up and dive in to it. And learn to love Ramen and small living spaces.

Your whole post just comes off as whiney and over-privileged. Your life is what you make it

you seem happy holding a controller...
anyhow each style of living has its advantages and disadvantages.

reply to post by Hawking

You come off as a pretentious #head that obviously skimmed through my post and decided that, instead of adding anything of value to the conversation, would rather try to pass some pseudo-virtuous fortune cookie crap to sound wise and ambitious.

I have no problem facing challenges and working hard in life. I'm saying it is actually getting to be impossible to earn a living as a musician unless you conform to talentless, generic music standards.

reply to post by Rhebefree

Thank you for trying to understand what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm talking about. There are so many restrictions in life that there really is no freedom in all of it. There's a void between action and reaction to the point where we have to depend on other people to survive. Everything's "simulated" if that makes sense.

Humans are complacent. We are essentially a society of convenience, this is our curse as well as our blessing. As long as modern man has a refrigerator, a pot to piss in, a wide screen T.V. and a job, he is not likely to make a fuss. He will "stay in line"

Man has forgotten his primitive self, the importance of certain ceremonies or body modifications to signify his journey into manhood. So now he fully believes that once he hits the age of eighteen he is a man. We have placed less and less importance on our life and what it could mean and in doing so we have embraced an empire of material excess. We are all children of technology. Nature no longer suits us so now we replace her with concrete jungles in an attempt to strangle out our past and build walls around our psyche. We push the envelope until it disentigrates into a void wide enough for us to fall in and make ourselves at home. But as this void deepens we become the destroyers of flora and fauna and begin to hold the natural world in contempt for we can no longer identify with her. Her frailty is now an exact mirror image of our ugliness and rightly so. If we do not change this process of taking and giving nothing I am afraid it is our children who will, eventually, reap what we have sown.

Originally posted by BirdOfillOmen
reply to post by Rhebefree

 

Thank you for trying to understand what I'm saying. That's exactly what I'm talking about. There are so many restrictions in life that there really is no freedom in all of it. There's a void between action and reaction to the point where we have to depend on other people to survive. Everything's "simulated" if that makes sense.

That makes perfect sense, dont worry about what some of these others are saying, just because you werent born in a rusty shack to a dying mother (I assume you werent) doesnt mean you have no right to feel trapped and frustrated, no body today is free regardless of where you were born. First world countries may have plumbing and computers but that doesnt make us free, not by a long shot.

I remember watching a program on the history channel about the frontiers people. And they read a diary from a mother of a family. It stated that she was happiest she ever was in her life because everything she was doing was for the benefit of her and her own family, not working for others.

I think that is was most people are trying to convey when they say they don't like modern society.

Yeah, I don't want to churn butter for 4 hours but I would like to feel a true sense of freedom. Working for Mcdonalds or any other corporation surely isn't "free". Starting a successful small business in this economy is nearly impossible as well.

reply to post by mnmcandiez

Yes! Exactly what I mean. Life would have been a pain in the ass back then, but everything you did was something that had significant meaning to you.

Originally posted by toxicblud
Humans are complacent. We are essentially a society of convenience, this is our curse as well as our blessing. As long as modern man has a refrigerator, a pot to piss in, a wide screen T.V. and a job, he is not likely to make a fuss. He will "stay in line"

Man has forgotten his primitive self, the importance of certain ceremonies or body modifications to signify his journey into manhood. So now he fully believes that once he hits the age of eighteen he is a man. We have placed less and less importance on our life and what it could mean and in doing so we have embraced an empire of material excess. We are all children of technology. Nature no longer suits us so now we replace her with concrete jungles in an attempt to strangle out our past and build walls around our psyche. We push the envelope until it disentigrates into a void wide enough for us to fall in and make ourselves at home. But as this void deepens we become the destroyers of flora and fauna and begin to hold the natural world in contempt for we can no longer identify with her. Her frailty is now an exact mirror image of our ugliness and rightly so. If we do not change this process of taking and giving nothing I am afraid it is our children who will, eventually, reap what we have sown.

I agree to an extent, though I believe that it is TPTB who are the greatest threat to "big mama" we simply made the gross mistake of embracing their lies rather than listening to the "spirit". I think if something were to somehow break the veil cast over our minds it would be the catalyst for true change and redempion, a massive EMP for instance, then those of us who are wise can bugger off and ensure our children dont have to suffer.... They could then live a life truly worth living

reply to post by Rhebefree


I understand what you are saying, but in the end we have no one to blame for our deafness but ourselves. I am not denying that society has contributed considerably to it, merely stating the obvious.

Many many years ago, back in the dim, dark days of the late Reagan administration, I was a young, stupid, and (they tell me) exceptionally fearless and alert security guard in the USA. Through a series of coincidences, I got offered what seemed like the job of a lifetime for a young man craving adventure: I joined a specialized security detail guarding a metals depot in Eastern Siberia immediately after the fall of the USSR. I now realized I was chosen because I was essentially rootless and nearly homeless, and if I disappeared from the face of the planet almost nobody would be any the wiser.

At the time,though it seemed like the ticket to a life of infinite horizons. And in a sense it was. I have done far better than I dared dream. The past two decades have taken me all over Russia and the CIS as well as to dan civil war Sri Lanka and East Timor, Indonesia. And all these years later I still live abroad, although I am much more settled now and spend almost all my time safely behind a computer rather than out in the field. But I am a statistical anomaly for sure. If I am to be honest with myself, I must admit that luck has played more of a role than skill in my continued existence. So I cannot reccommend my "road" (really a series of nearly-random events) to anyone else. Almost everyone I worked with in the early post-Soviet days is dead.

But one thing has struck me. For better or worse I seem to have an unusual relationship with fear, in that it is very hard for me to fear something unless it is right in front of me. It took me many, many years of introspection to realize this is my peculiar point, different from most people. This lack of fear is not really a blessing...its a form of stupidity, ultimately. A lacking of a thing that most people have. But if you can overcome your fear and roll the dice, it will take you somewhere interesting every time. Not necessarily good, but interesting. If you are feeling bored with your life...work on overcoming your fears.

There is more I could say...as I grow older, this life grows stranger, lonlier...I don't know where it will take me. But is this really that different from what anyone else experiences?

Originally posted by silent thunder
But one thing has struck me. For better or worse I seem to have an unusual relationship with fear, in that it is very hard for me to fear something unless it is right in front of me. It took me many, many years of introspection to realize this is my peculiar point, different from most people. This lack of fear is not really a blessing...its a form of stupidity, ultimately. A lacking of a thing that most people have. But if you can overcome your fear and roll the dice, it will take you somewhere interesting every time. Not necessarily good, but interesting. If you are feeling bored with your life...work on overcoming your fears.

Spot on with how I am. I no longer have that driving angst that most people have. I started to be a little too careless and now I no longer fear anything until its in my face. I became apathetic once I tore down those walls that keep most people fighting a pointless, internal war. But at least now I'm more open-minded than I used to be and I am genuinely considering all kinds of crazy possibilities that will no doubt get me passionate about life again in the near future.

And that's really cool how you got to do all of that. Sounds like an interesting lifestyle, to be honest.

reply to post by toxicblud


How can a slave be blamed for being born into slavery? For knowing only what his master teaches him?
We are the inheritors of a slavery, a system our forefathers chose. That is no excuse for ignoring the voice of the "spirit" (or whatever you call it) but the burden of guilt lies on the shoulders of those who enslave, not the slave. If, when, we are given a new choice, a new crossroads, and we make the wrong choice then and only then will our children have cause to curse us under their breath..... But Im hoping we vote to not let the slavery continue!