Consumers....

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(I was writing my last post, and I had an overwhelming urge to break off on several different tangents.)

I watch a large amount of televsion, much more television than I really should be watching. Unfortunately, I have to give alot of credit to the screenwriters and marketing wizards, because they really know how to "hook" you into vegetating in front of a screen. Companies that use Television as their medium of advertising spend over one trillion dollars a year for commericals, and they have been very effective in getting defenseless people to make frivolous purchases that they otherwise they would not have made. If they hadn't succumbed to impulse and bought that new outfit or stereo, then they could have saved their money for something important or worthwhile such as thier retirement or children's college. How can one person stand against the billions of dollars being spent to bombard them with attractive offers to buy things that they can live without and will probably break within five years anyway?

I kept track of the time I spent watching TV in a journal over the last year and I realized, much to my horror, that I had invested 22 hours a week(almost a full day) in front of a TV. Angry with myself, I wondered what more worthwhile endeavors might I have undertaken with that time and I could have improved myself as a human being. In the summer, when I watch Cardinal baseball games, I spend even more huge chunks of my day just sitting in the chair. The other main shows I enjoy are Boston Legal and FRASIER, and I also spend hours just randomly flipping through channels just to see if I might be missing something good. As I watch alot of programming, I also watch a ton of commercials.

As a little boy, my parents would buy me tons of toys, like little remote-control cars and such, that I had no interest in playing with. They probably spent 10,000 dollars on toys but I would have much rather had that money put into a college account(I had approximately 62$ when I graduated high-school.) But the toys they bought seemingly broke upon exposure to the earth's atmosphere and just wound up in gigantic, untouched piles of plastic detritus in the corner of my room. I was far more interested in books and my toys for "make believe" went untouched. The kids my mom brought over to try and play with me seemed somewhat interested in those toys, but I just let them play with them and stuck to my reading.

My parents and the vast majority of NT people I know place an inordinate value on having large amounts of "stuff." The mysterious central cultural heads broadcasting to us have us convinced that once something we own becomes even slightly dated, we have to run out and buy the new, updated, better version. We are convinced that we constantly have to be one step ahead of our neighbors and have the new line item before they manage to acquire it. In my house right now, we have 6 televisions, 4 computers, 6 stereos, 2 microwaves, 3 pianos, and about 2000 articles of clothing; and only three people live in our house. Do we really need all of this consumer stuff? NO. All we are doing is putting a huge drain on the world's power supply and we are throwing away our money to buy junk we don't need. In a couple years, as our current technology becomes outdated, my dad will be back up at Best Buy or Sears bringing home some more massive electrical monstrocities.

Corporate leaders are waging a strikingly successful campaign to convince us that our value as people is based on the things we own, how much money we make, and our physical attractiveness. These marketing experts are very saavy and they know how to push our buttons and manipulate us in to doing their bidding and handing our money over to them. They know how to get us with heuristics, testimonials, and bandwagon affects, and they can disguise it in a way that we don't even realize it hits us. It costs car companies about 700$ to build an average sedan, and with the right consumer pressure, we turn around and give them 20,000$; a grossly unequal transaction. Then, the veichle loses $4,000 of its supposed "value", the moment it is driven off the lot! We can buy a microwave at Sears for $400 that we will the thrift store will eventually resell for $25.

Nothing we can buy at a store besides basics like food and hygiene items are essential to our survival. Our ancestors, as recently as 1900, would laugh hysterically at the feminization/demasculinization of our society and shake their heads at the trivial things that we preoccupy ourselves with in our lives. Our pioneer ancestors survived by their wits and thrived on a self-sufficiency that is unfathomable today. The main issues that we deal with today in government were considered in the 1920's to be "Women's issues." For better or worse, in 2009, we are a country controlled by special-interests and the meek. The old concepts of what it means to be strong and masculine are being destroyed, because it is no longer necessary to survive to have those outdated qualities. The 21st century is a culture tailor-made for females to thrive in, and males are being repressed because being tough, rigid, and a hunter goes against the sensitive and egalitarian postures our schools teach and we are required to adopt if we want to assimilate into society.

I mentioned in a previous post that I felt that our society was ready to experience a massive paradigm shift the likes of which we have never seen before; ten times greater than 476, 1789, 1865, 1945, or 1991. I feel that a defining aspect of this massive cultural change will be a complete takeover of the U.S. government and most positions of leadership in America by women. In todays High Schools and Colleges, women hold most of the leadership positions such as body president and regulate the social lives of NT peers when sitting on student council. The millenial generation will only have experience with female leaders and thus will choose from a pool of overwhelmingy female candidates for political office in the 2030's. Previous generations of students chose only male class officers, whom then went on into national politics.

Women already make up campus majorities in college and the birth rate has actually evened out in the last 10 years from 45/55 male/female to an even 50/50. Perhaps our bodies are sensing that men are becoming obsolete so we are subconsciously passing down X chromosomes. In my extended family, for example, I have five sets of married cousins and they have produced a total of 15 daughters against two sons. One of my cousins has four young girls and no boys, and another had three daughters until they finally had a son. Many other people who I talk to report that it seems like their families produce nothing but daughters an only have an occasional boy. Girls of this generation will move towards getting professional degrees which will enable them to make much more money than their male spouses and they will naturally be able to dominate fields such as business and law, with the rate they are taking over college campuses. Guys, on the other hand, appear to be moving into minimum wage jobs or into trade fields like construction or drafting. But in a declining service economy, old manufacturing jobs will be hard to come by.

So we are gearing up for a couple centuries of female and minority rule in America. Perhaps it will be a golden age of peace and tolerance. Perhaps not. At least, if there are a ton of unattached educated females who can't find compatable men to marry, it will be easy to date. But it will be a service society with only service, interface, occupations, so it will still be virtually impossible for an AS person to hold a job. Because we have been transitioning to a service economy since 1945, that is why Autism and AS have emerged, the inability of non-social individuals to adapt to a socialized and urbanized society. It was much easier for an AS individual to hide on the obscurity of a farm or to maintain a predictable factory job. There was no pressure in rural areas to conform, and there were only a few consumer products available that one had to worry about having to purchase so he could keep living. In the old days, one with AS could just "disappear" into the night. It was also much easier to find a spouse in those days or to just get sex at a brothel, instead of having to go through the complicated social courtship rituals we have these days that AS men can not possibly carry out.

We live in a completely absurd cycle of life where we spend hours working at jobs we detest just so we can earn cash to buy stuff that we don't need. I would rather have free-time and "go without", and just make enough money to provide for my basic essentials. But such an attitude is incongruous with our modern culture. Employers see this and are on the lookout for unmotivated individuals such as myself. When I go into a job interview, employers can see, before I even open my mouth, that I am not "with them." I walk with them and breathe their air but I am not one of them and I never will be. These job managers are trained to spot unmotivated young men such as myself, and I might as well have the words DONT HIRE ME tattooed on my forehead. But at least I will break the ridiculous life cycle of overwhelming responsibilty and needless stress to achieve a false goal built on lies. Our society is 85% artificial and I don't want but a small part in it.

I don't gain the gratification from making a purchase that is expected. It has been shown that when an NT person hands over cash to by an item, blood actually rushes to the brain and they incur a mild "high." I feel sick when I spend money. Before I buy anything, I ask myself, "Do I really need it?" I think about how I will feel afterwards when I have handed over hard-earned money for a plastic item that will just sit on a shelf and collect dust. Filling my house with junk is stupid, because I am still a self-sufficient hunter-gatherer at heart, and I don't need material things to be happy. A man has to hit rock bottom to view society objectively; not merely exist on the periphery or fringe and still retaining his creature comforts. One can't begin to really understand life if he can keep retreating to a safe place. It is only when one has nothing that he can cast off his shackles and begin to grow. The things we own control us. Our houses tie us down in one place and our vast possessions hinder any freedom of movement we might have. If we want to, we can not just give everything up and start over, because we have all of our inorganic plastic objects we have to take with us. So we become sedentary and fat, living in our little fireboxes, getting false comfort from our "stuff."

D