Just came across a quote The demand to be prepared for all future actions and situations is the cause of all our problems. Every situation in life is so different, and our preparedness to meet that situation with this knowledge we have of answering and dealing with such situations cannot help us. If this was put into practice, this would wipe away all of politics, morality and ethics, philosophy, economics, religion. It would probably leave only technology and science. I think it's a true statement. It explains why most of us are miserable, marriages fail, people commit suicide. Stability is a myth created by man, but not because "things change in life" - our body is not controlled by the 'person' within it, but acts in its own intelligent way according to the given situation, beyond the limits of what is possible to understand.
Off the bat that first sentence is incorrect. So my uncle cut of his hand with chainsaw and got addicted to the opium. No demand to be prepared cut off his hand. In fact if he was MORE prepared he might of not cut of his hand and subsequently suffer from opium addiction for many years. personally dislike everything is one thing statements. sidebar- an interesting quote on preparedness is from albert eistien " you cannot simultaneous prevent and prepare for war"
I have made a lot of money in the stock market because I was prepared. I learned how to read charts, and I put that into action. I identify a significant support, and if the stock drops below that, I get out. when a stock drops down to a support, and bounces, or if it breaks through a key resistance, and both cases, I get validation that it is a genuine move in the charts, I buy back in. I always plan my moves ahead of times based on the posibilities. When I am not prepared and hesitate, I don't make money, and have even lost money. If it wasn't for this preparation, today I would be unemployed and homeless. Instead, I am unemployed and enjoying life. For example, I just got back from Europe with my wife, son, and grandson. We spent a lot of money and had a lot of fun. That's far better than being homeless. We are planning our next vacation when my son get his next school vacation, maybe back to the South of France, or soemthing like that. Obviously that statement doesn't make a lot of sense. It should speak about being prepared for the wrong things, or being prepared in a non-flexible cut in stone fashion---that never works.
Technology and Science may be good for the body, but faith and the creativeness of human intelligence (though flawed) is better for the soul - meThinks
Marxist ideology tried to scientifically shape society and look what that got the people who were subjected to it---a bunch of slaves to the state. Naziism as well was a cult of technology and science (granted it bastardized spiritual concepts towards its own purose). Who would want to live in a society of nothing left but science and technology? (Granted, there is that side of science, cosmology, quantum physics, and the like, that is crossing over into philosophical and spiritual realms, so even there the concept is flawed). Then there is the point that being prepared relies on empirical rational evidence and objectivism, which is the backbone of science, so would even that be left of we destroyed all preparedness?
You might want to read the quote again focusing on the word "demand". Then again, I might want to rewrite my post because I don't think I'm being understood. We're not saying to not be prepared - you'd be dead if you didn't prepare. Just to not require that every circumstance in your life is catered for before it happens. Because predicting every outcome to be catered for is actually impossible, and yet it this is exactly what people do.
I'm quite in favour of avoiding 'over-preparedness' because you just don't know what life is going to throw at you, and even if you did, you'd be incapable of rehearsing the appropriate response. Besides, life isn't about attempting to be some kind of omniscient being that foresees everything. It's definitely been more organic, spontaneous and surprising in my case.
It's not even as if people consider what life is about, and THEN decide to be prepared. It's not a conscious decision, it's a natural evolution of our instinct - from hoarding nuts and berries for the winter as caveman to amassing stock and property portfolios for retirement. And really, in a western country what's the worst that can happen to you? I would say cancer, AIDS, or being murdered. Those things you can't prevent. If you get wrongly convicted and put in jail, what's there to worry about? You get free meals and a bed. Even if you lose your job, have no money and are starving, some charity will take you in and probably give you housing too.
Actually I think that still fits with my post #3. In the post you quoted from I was referring more to the comments you made about only science and technology remaining. People who don't understand the financial markets may very well think that I am over-preparing for something I have no control over and don't know what is going to happen. Before placing a trade, I know where all the key supports, and resistance lie on the chart, I have drawn up-trends and down-trends on the charts, I know where all the moving averages are that I think are significant, and have gone over them to make sure that they are siginificant to that stock. I do this on a daily chart, a 30-minute-30-day chart, sometimes a 1-minute chart, and also review the weekly and monthly charts. I also have other indicators up such as Stochastics and the MACD. When I place a trade, I already know all the potential turning points. I also know that there is a possibility for a false indication, so I know how to let the stock prove itself. Finally, I know that 'anything' can happen. Based on all this, I have an expectation on what the stock should do, after I buy, I also know at what point, when the stock is not doing what I thought it would do, I should get out, because I will most likely lose money to continue. Secondly, I know that when investors get too happy about the market, and everyone is bullish, I jump out completely as soon as it turns down just a bit. When everyone is panicked and very bearish, I know to jump in completely at the peak of the panic with the slightest turn up. Both of these ways of preparation have made me a lot of money. The times when I have lost money is when I have strayed from this kind of preparation. (And of course a divorce which took away my first fortune, I wasn't prepared for that at all, even though I should have been). The second strategy about the overall market is the biggest. And it is precisely then that people would yell, "Are you crazy? You have no idea what is going to happen next!!! How can you prepare for such a thing!!!" But I would make a lot of money if I didn't even trade in between those points. I have always gotten out on every market top, and gotten in on every market bottom since 1987, including many of the smaller corrections between the major moves. In this strategy, I do the opposite of just about everyone else. I don't think the problem is one of preparation, or overpreparation. I think it is a problem of being non-flexible. You have to know how to be flexible. You also have to be rational about what you are preparing for: if you are overprepared for doomsday, for example, and end up doing things for an event that never occurs---well that was pretty stupid of you. You could prepare for such things with out going overboard and doing something stupid, because, more than likely they won't happen. But I think the bigger problem than people over-preparing for something, is not taking responsibility for their own choices. I do believe very strongly that everything that does happen to you, falls back to choices you made. You can always blame it on someone else---but in the end, the choices you made put you where you are. Some of those choices may go back to your early childhood when you didn't know any better----but they are the choices you made.
Seriously? Well, this is where you an I differ. I see no basis for believing something like that - even if the principle of causation existed (we don't know), the calculus of factors which combine to cause something to happen to you is surely much larger than simply your own choices.
No seriously Walsh. As an example, let's say that I decided long ago to walk around a city in the western hemisphere of our planet, and that after years of walking around in that city, that suddenly an asteroid struck the western hemisphere of our planet and all western hemisphere life was destroyed, and that my choice... Wait, the asteroid, because of my choice, no... wait a minute... My choice that... Ummmm... Ok, Let's say that the sun exploded... No, wait, darn it...! I'm just joking. Yes, I do know that there are things that can happen to us that are beyond our choices. Certainly a young Jewish man who grew up in the German slums of the 1930's had little to no opportunity to escape Germany and the concentration camps where chances are good he would have been killed. At the same time, looking back on my own life, I have had a lot of good things happen, and a lot of bad things happen. And I can trace back every single thing to a set of choices I had, and the decisions I made that created that event. There are many many things I could blame on someone or something else. In many cases the result of what happened was because of someone else pulling the trigger so to speak, but there was a series of events that led up to that, in which I could have made different choices, and the outcome would have been completely different, and probably more in my favor. This does not mean that I cannot hold others accountable for their part in bad things that have happened. Nor does it mean that I could predict what would happen. But I will tell you this---I have believed in taking responsibility over your own decisions and understanding that you have control over your own destiny since I was a teenager and first started to understand Sartre and some of the other existentialists (Not that I agree with them entirely). I even proved this to a couple of girlfriends on two separate occaisions in two separate but oddly related sychronicities. And I believe that with that understanding of the universe, the outcome of your decisions can be so much more powerful. I have lived out many of my dreams. I have done some pretty crazy things; I have put myself into some fairly precarious or dangerous situations; I have been at the top of the heap and the bottom of the heap. But I have had a lot of fun, a lot of excitement, and there is not a bit of my life that I regret. Even as my first wife, after the divorce, was stealing a fortune out from under me, I was having the time of my life in the Philippines. If I had my life to live over, there are a few things I would do different--but I have never really suffered, I have never fallen into a truly dark hole. there were rough patches. But even during those rough patches, I have enjoyed my life. I knew what choices put me there, and I knew what choices I had to get out. Here is an example, when I tried to return home to America, the immigration laws had just changed and my wife and step-kids had to get fingerprinted and all kinds of new crap based on the immigration reform that took place in the early 1990's. If I had tried 6-months earlier, which we thought about doing, it would have taken 3-months to get their visas. After submiiting the applications and getting the initial approval we had to show up at the US embassy to get their fingerprints. The Filipino clerk whose job was to take the prints, was obviously inexperienced and appeared to be smearing them. I asked about it and he said they were ok. Almot 2 years later, after continuously bugging the embassy about the status of the visas, and going through all kinds of crap with immigration, during a period where we gradually fell into poverty, my parents had a local Senator look into the matter (the second one they approached) and he discovered that the hangup was that the fingerprints were smudged. He pushed the matter with immigration and within a matter of months we had the visas and I was heading home with my family. I knew there was something wrong with the fingerprints. At the time something told me to push the issue, but I didn't. I could have chose to get the visas 6 months earlier, but I didn't. In fact, I could have chose to stay married to my first wife, who was Japanese, and would have had no problem getting a visa (but I would have regretted that decision). I also had the option of going home to America alone and fighting the issue here. I would have been able to work, and send money to my family, and I am sure that I would have gotten them here. But I chose to stay there despite the problems of no income. But we got food on the table everyday. I spent everyday with my newborn son, bonding and watching him grow up. I experienced numerous life changing events that were part of a bigger picture---a spiritual path I had been on since I was a teenager. I witnessed a very surreal scary-movie-like series of events that accompanied the death of my wife's first husband and father of my stepkids. I witnessed a miraculous healing of what several medical doctors, each independently, called a hopeless mental breakdown of my 7-year old stepdaughter (adding that it was very strange to happen at this age), only to have it cured within minutes by what we would call a witch doctor (and that was my decision. My wife wanted to ask for an exorcism at a Manila cathedral. Having already witnessed one in the Philippines which left a mentally ill man in worse condition than before he arrived, I said 'no, if we are going to go that route, lets find someone that knows the old ways before the Spanish. A Witch Doctor or some kind of native healer.' That meant going up to the mountain tribes that were a long way out of Manila, but the taxi driver, as he overheard us, said that he knew of someone in the Cavite Province that was only an hour away.) And I did have fun and excitement waiting for that visas. It was a struggle at times, but like I said, we had food on the table every day, and my lovely wife to hold onto everynight. Today I am unemployed. Other than watching my investments, I don't have anything I 'have to do.' Well, except help my wife with the housework for an hour or two---if I choose not to, my day may not be quite as pleasant. I don't have to worry about my mortgage. I spend the afternoons kayaking on a nearby lake. We often head off to one of the local hot springs, where we spend a few days. I am writing when I have the chance to sit down, which I enjoy and produces some income, and I may head to Europe again soon. I am in my early 50's and outside of allergies, very healthy. Choosing not to work has its repercussions, but if those occur, I know why. (In fact, numerous people are trying to get me to work with them, one is a start up company, another is an established brokerage firm, I can't get people to understand that, right now, I feel like it is too much work to go to work...)
PS: I am spontaneous as well----for example, I have often travelled into a place with no hotel or anything else planned for my arrival. I know that I can probably find a really cheap deal from the telephone boards that are located somewhere near the baggage claims for both hotels and rent-a-cars. Take that time-share salesmen with your stupid inflation argument! (I would never own a timeshare). However my stepddaughter now works at a Marriott so I definitely get a cheaper employee rate at a decent hotel, so that's what I do now.
