Real diversity would be if people with different experiences of time were allowed to live at their rhythm. Fake diversity is when people of various skin colors and "genders" do the same repetitive, alienating tasks that the technological system demands of them. The only outcome of "diversity" has been the expansion of the system, to the point of including women and migrants in the tasks of the system. Mankind hasn't been made richer because of it.
No longer trying to change myself
I'd rather live and die by my stupid principles than coerce myself until I can't recognize myself, just to be more agreeable to an authority structure, or to do things the "proper" way according to some (vaporous) collective opinion. Life is too short for me to not be myself. This applies to the following:
The so-called "inevitability" of AI replacing everyone, which I don't believe in, but even if it was real and inevitable, wouldn't make me want to change my life just to accommodate it. If I can't out-compete the AI overlords, I might as well enjoy my life while I am free
Doing things which are supposed to be "healthy" but which I don't enjoy, which includes many forms of exercising. I don't mind eating healthy because I enjoy most foods, but exercising feels either unenjoyable, such as going to the gym, or boring, like going for a walk
Doing things the "right" way when I am not interested in it, such as considering painting to be the "right" form of visual art, and drawing merely being a preparatory phase for it. I don't care about painting, I only like drawing
Bring back duels
Some benefits I can see from reintroducing duels to our society:
They make death a regular part of life, which means people no longer take it for granted, instead of sleepwalking for 20, 30, 40 years of their life as they do now
They give a clear, high-stakes way of resolving conflicts, such as love triangles, or deciding who should be in charge. How can we respect a political leader if they have never been in a position of risking their life for what matters?
They make women feel valued because men are literally risking their life for their hand. On that note, bring back chivalry too, we need a healthier outlet for masculinity instead of being an influencer on social media, being a woman-hating incel, obsessing over one's muscles and performance at the gym, and all the shenanigans of acquiring absurd amount of wealth and power
They create real consequences towards being a toxic person online. Know someone who talk all kinds of smack but never faces up in real life? Now you can give them a lesson. Note: not all duels that I am talking about would be done to death
I got a job again
Let me recap the past months that have consisted in me getting a second job:
I quit my first job in April of this year because I was fed up with it, it was taking a lot of my time and energy which I wanted to put into my creative projects
My parents go on holidays for many weeks, leaving me time for me to live life at my own pace and dedicate myself more to writing and drawing
Once they come back, I tell them I have quit my job, and they are terribly disappointed with me. I could have made the choice to live by myself and not care about their opinion, and I think it would have been wise in a sense to pursue that, but I have decided to get a second job so that my transition to my creative focus will be cleaner
Setting up all the necessary things to go all in on my creative projects, in terms of mindset (making the best of my time without an external structure to make me do so), logistic (living by myself), and bureaucracy (taxes for independent creators are notoriously annoying when getting started) are not necessarily difficult, nothing that can't be overcome with some effort, but at that time I decided against it because I didn't feel prepared to make that kind of transition
So I am giving myself one year and a half in this new job until I leave and try again at my creative projects, and this time I will be a lot more decisive and uncompromising, especially because the state of our society will no doubt be noticeably worse, meaning that there won't be anything more meaningful to me than work on my creative projects
That's where I am right now, and I am resuming work on November. I can imagine that some people would call me a coward for not going all in on my creative pursuits, that I shouldn't be too afraid of financial difficulties and what my family thinks of it, but at the same time, I am not convinced that my current situation would have made it realistic for me to pursue my creative endeavors full-time, even after several years of commitment and living on my current savings, so that I can reach a point of breaking even solely from my writing and art. I am not good and visible enough to have the type of audience that can support me, I also have to be realistic on that front. I am not giving up on my dreams, and in a sense these blog posts are part of that, I am already doing the thing I would want to do if money wasn't a concern, but I also must be practical and realistic about what I can pursue in the short-term.
The main thing I have learned from this is my time and stress management are both quite poor, and that I have put off any improvement with regards to those areas in my life because I was telling myself that they would largely be solved when I would quit my job. It is true that having the extra time from not going to work makes a big difference, time and stress-wise, but also, the mind can get surprisingly creative at finding ways to waste time on all sorts of nonsense. I think it's fair to say that if you aren't doing at least a bit of what you'd do if you weren't constrained by your job while working in it, you are not going to magically change that as soon as you quit. But who knows, people are different, but I have learned that it is very toxic to put off your life towards some future of when you quit your job and finally become "free". Being outwardly free is worthless to those who are inwardly shackled.