A More Cynical World EP: 112 by Trevor Freeman Lyrics
My name is Trevor Freemen and this is another episode of the Ordinary Life- a More cynical World: Episode 112. Before I get into the topic I’m going to answer a question. So a listener asked a question about my car the other day and most you guys know I have a 65 Mustang and I made a short video talking in there and when I was driving I was using hand signals and he said, “are you turn signals out?” and the answer was “Yes”, but I said I had an interesting story about it. I have some fucked up stories with that car I swear to God. With the turn signals it was pretty ridiculous how they broke. So my car used to have a steering wheel cover on it, right. It was the kind that was wrapped with a string to keep it tight and in between my steering wheel and my steering column there’s a little gap. One day I was driving, I was making a turn and the string wrapping around my cover came undone and wound itself in between the steering wheel and the column, it ended up in there and when it wound up inside of there, it pulled a bunch of wires together causing them to ground out. So not only was my horn permanently going off but there is literally fucking sparks and smoke shooting out of my steering wheel. Like I’m talking massive sparks that burned the shit on my arms because this steering wheel cover wrapping got caught in there somehow while making a turn and my horn just went indefinitely until I yanked all that shit out of there. but that’s not even the craziest story of my car. So one more story real quick before we get into the topic here which was one day I was working on my car, I took the steering wheel off it was actually to get into the fucking wires that got fucked up from my turn signals and they put the steering wheel back in, I made it tight as fuck, I tighten that bolt to the point where it would not budge. A few days later I’m driving and I’m making a turn on a very busy street. I successfully made the turn, I’m going straight again and I realize my steering wheel isn’t as responsive as it should be and then I realize it’s not working at all and my car starts to veer off into oncoming traffic and I look at the steering wheel and I realize well fuck it’s not even attached to the fucking column anymore. I was holding the steering wheel like this off of my car while it was moving kind of like a little child holds a toy steering wheel when he’s driving in the car next to Daddy. That was me; I was a child with the steering wheel. So I hit my breaks in the turn lane in the middle between the oncoming traffic in my lane just in time. Everyone looked at me like I was some kind of fucking psycho and so I just held the steering wheel outside my window. They continued to look at me like I was a fucking psycho. So I just screwed it on my hand really quick, tighten the bolt with my fingers and drove off but yeah I mean nothing weirder than your steering wheel coming off your fucking car when you’re driving right so that explains the craziness of owning a 1965 Mustang.
Anyway, so let’s get into the topic I want to talk about. I entitled this podcast episode A Cynical World because I’m going to be talking about cynics. Cynicism was a former philosophy back, back long fucking time ago and cynics were kind of a little bit sadistic to themselves. They thought that you know renouncing society, reputation, going to deprivation, making life hard for them was the goal, escaping all societal structures but what they primarily looked at was things that they thought were useless. This might resonate with some of my listeners. Here’s the tasks that cynics said were useless. Marriage, child rearing, military service, commerce, quest for reputation, abiding by human laws, constraints of social customs, efforts to acquire a liberal education; they said all those tasks were useless. I don’t know if all of them are but definitely some of them strike a chord with me. But I want to talk about one specific cynic, his named was Diogenes. Now he was known to be kind of a dick and he was also very poor, he lived in a fucking bathtub filled with filth essentially and he desired it to be that way. One day Alexander the Great, who was a great ruler at that time, maybe the greatest or the most feared man in the world at that time sought out Diogenes; this filth ridden mother fucker to get wisdom from because he heard he was a great philosopher. After Alexander talked to Diogenes he was impressed, he was impressed by his philosophy and he offered Diogenes anything that he wanted and Diogenes just responded that he wanted him to get out of the way of his sunlight. He didn’t want money; he didn’t want anything but Alexander the Great said, “had I not been Alexander I would have lived like Diogenes.” So you have this great emperor, ruler, wealthy, powerful saying that I would live, if I wasn’t this specific person Alexander, I would choose to live like Diogenes, a homeless philosopher living in his own filth which is kind of a weird thing to think about, right? That’s a big jump but I don’t think it’s that big of a jump actually and I’m going to explain why I don’t think it’s that big of a jump. So if you’re watching this video I’m going to do a visual demonstration here, if not I’ll try to explain in a way that my podcast listeners will be able to understand what I’m doing.
So right now I’m holding a wire, it’s just a long skinny wire, it’s actually plastic okay. I want you to imagine something. Alright so I have this wire, the far right side is Point A, the center’s Point B and the far left side is Point C. So you have ABC down the wire. Now A is one group of people, which is the ultra-elite, ultra-wealthy, powerful. B, which is right in the middle, is your middle-class, your average man, your worker bee. Then C at the far other end of the wire you have several groups of people I would say. You would have the free spirit type people, the Diogenes, could be homeless, who knows? You have the wild men, the mountain men, right? Many people might be assuming I’m trying to draw an economic equation here but I’m not. Although A is probably the wealthiest, the empires, the rulers; B the middle classes right in the middle and the wild men – C, are probably poorest. But that’s not the analogy that I’m trying to draw here. What I’m going to do is I’m going to take one end of the wire A, the rich, ruler, powerful and the other end C which is the wild men, free spirit, hippies, Diogenes, whatever and I’m going to bend these two ends up to make a circle and connect points A and C. So, you have basically the rulers, the ultra-elite people right next to the wild men. They’re like opposite sides to a coin, they’re practically touching and at the very bottom of the circle you have the middle class. So what does this represent? This represents in essence freedom. It’s an example of obedience and freedom. So you have the ultra-wealthy and the wild people at the top. They have more freedom and the middle class which is at the bottom, which most people assume, middle class is in the middle, no, middle class is at the bottom when it comes to freedom and obedience. Why is that? Well, the ultra-wealthy obviously have a lot of choices in life. They don’t necessarily have to listen to a lot of people if they don’t want to. Now the wild people you might say well free spirits, they don’t have any power. Maybe they don’t have economic power but they have power of choice and they don’t have to obey people because they’re not playing a game.
Now the middle class is playing a game. When you’re in the middle class you have to keep certain rules and orders going to stay in the middle class. If you tell your boss to fuck off you won’t be able to stay in the middle class, you’ll probably drop to the low-low class where you’ll be unhappy. You know you’ll think I’ll be a wild man but most people who drop lower class ain’t looking to be a wild man. So in order to keep their middle-class positioning they have to impress a lot of the ultra-wealthy, they have to be obedient to a lot of people. Some people in middle class have twenty fucking bosses. Eight different bills they have to pay, they have mortgages, they have debt out their fucking ears to where they literally have to obey everyone to not lose that middle class section. like I said the rich don’t have to really obey anyone they could quit their works and they have so much money now to do it, they could tell everyone go fuck themselves. The wild people they tell everyone to fuck themselves anyway without the money yeah maybe they have a rougher quality of life but they have more freedom and lost obedience generally speaking. so what this was, was a fad experiment and I think that’s why Diogenes, not Diogenes, Alexander said if he was not him, he would be like Diogenes because he recognized in Diogenes this poor philosopher that he had his own form of freedom without the obedience the same way he did as Alexander the Great and he was able to connect with that. That’s why Alexander the Great could say well if I wasn’t myself I would be commoner fuck who is in the market all day spending all my money. No he said he’d be like Diogenes, the poor man, the wild man and I think that’s exactly why. you know I used to tell people that I would rather be homeless than go back to this lifestyle I had, where I had fifty thousand micromanaging fucking people tell me what to do all day and being buried in debt. I’d rather be fucking homeless because then, yeah life might be rough but at least I wasn’t taking orders from everyone. Might have been rough and the whole point of this experiment was to look and see what all these classes in the world represent, the pros and the cons and who’s closer to who and who’s playing what game and who abides by what rules and I think the cynics said it best.
You know another interesting point or thing to look at here too is the ability to enjoy life. I remember when I was doing my regular 40/60 hour in the office work week, well I was very micromanaged. You know I’m talking if you’re five minutes late, you go into fucking detention that kind of micro-management. I remember one job I would go to lunch, I had thirty minutes right. I would rush to lunch, I’d go to the same place every day because it was the only place close enough to eat, which was a sub sandwich place and I would stuff that fucking sandwich down my face as fast as I could so I wouldn’t be late back to work. It was the most flavorless lunch imaginable but not because the sandwich was bad or didn’t have flavor but because I didn’t even have the time to enjoy damn sandwich doing the hustle and bustle of my worker bee life. But it wasn’t just because of time worked; it was because of the regimentation of being five minutes late I got to go to detention, principal’s office, going to get written up, that bullshit. Working a lot hours isn’t a big deal but when you work under that premise, its bullshit and most jobs or a lot of jobs people work that is the reality and because I had to rush it and force it, that sandwich had no fucking flavor, zero. But you see when you have time to enjoy something as simple as a sandwich it’s worlds apart different. So the wild men and the ultra-rich for example they can have the time to enjoy that sandwich. You know the ultra-rich because they have really the power to choose how long they take their fucking lunch, the wild people because they have nowhere else to be after their lunch. you know think about it when was the last time you sat down for a cup of coffee and you took a sip of that cup of coffee and you savored the flavor you actually tasted it. It wasn’t just to shove it down your throats so you get your caffeine boost but you actually sat there enjoyed every sip and tasted what it actually tasted like. It’s remarkably pleasurable when you can actually sit there and enjoy something as simple as a cup of coffee. You have the time to do that. It’s unreal because you realize that you can be incredibly fulfilled with pleasure and happiness from the simplest fucking things if you can just take the time to really experience it, experience the taste of that coffee. It’s absolutely remarkable but I remember the hustle bustle I didn’t have the time to even experience a fucking cup of coffee. It was just how fast can I swallow this cup of coffee and get back to my fucking desk before I get a little note that says come see me signed your fucking boss. It was fucking terrible having to live like that.
You know it’s like now I can sit down and have a cup of coffee and it is like heaven every time. Just like [unclear 16:10] with the sunlight, he said just feeling the sunlight on his back was incredible, incredibly pleasurable experience, the funny thing is too is that when you’re living a simpler life it is easier to enjoy those small experiences you know for the stimulation that you get as a simple free time life kind of person from a cup of coffee the ultra-wealthy person might have to take a trip to Hawaii to feel the same fucking pleasure that you do with that cup of coffee but either way to the wealthy person you know trip to Hawaii means nothing anyway, it’s like a $2 coffee so it all balances out. But if you’re not on the path to be ultra- wealthy a simpler life can make you enjoy things so much better than when you’re doing what I did or had to rush or cram a fucking sub sandwich down my throat in ten minutes or less or I’m fucked, I have to worry about losing my job and then not be able to pay my rent and then nightmare cluster fuck of it all tumbling down on me.
So this was just a point out a few things. Sometimes taking a dive below middle class can be a lot better than being in middle-class. Sometimes the pleasure of enjoying a cup of coffee is better than buying a new Miata and getting 20K in debt. It’s not always such a linear simple thought process where it goes CBA in order from shit to good. So you just have to ask yourself, what you want your life to be like. Do you want to bury yourself in responsibility and obedience to have slightly more luxurious items? Is one way of life necessarily worse, better, different? It’s really up to you to decide and like a few people mention on my other preempted video to this one, a podcast that will not everyone can live these alternative lives. Most people have to live middle class. Well you’re right in for society to function most people do have to live middle-class. However no matter how many people I tell this to or tried to point in different directions very few people will actually do it or even want it. you know I could shout this to a million people through megaphone and there’s still be no problem because those million people aren’t suddenly just going to go a different direction. now most people will never change their position in life out of the middle class, whether it’s lower or upper, it statistically true but you can, if you want to go a different direction you can, your brother can, your best friend can, hundred thousand people could do in the world and no one even fucking notice. You don’t have worry about the whole world abandoning middle-class ideas and doing the jobs that nobody wants but has to do because it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to be this moment where everyone abandons society and how it works. Everyone needs to fulfill a role that’s correct and some people need to fulfill a middle-class role. Some people need to fill a poor role, a rich role, all kinds of roles. But there are so many people in this world that if you decided to change your role nobody’s going to notice except for you.
Anyway, so let’s get into the topic I want to talk about. I entitled this podcast episode A Cynical World because I’m going to be talking about cynics. Cynicism was a former philosophy back, back long fucking time ago and cynics were kind of a little bit sadistic to themselves. They thought that you know renouncing society, reputation, going to deprivation, making life hard for them was the goal, escaping all societal structures but what they primarily looked at was things that they thought were useless. This might resonate with some of my listeners. Here’s the tasks that cynics said were useless. Marriage, child rearing, military service, commerce, quest for reputation, abiding by human laws, constraints of social customs, efforts to acquire a liberal education; they said all those tasks were useless. I don’t know if all of them are but definitely some of them strike a chord with me. But I want to talk about one specific cynic, his named was Diogenes. Now he was known to be kind of a dick and he was also very poor, he lived in a fucking bathtub filled with filth essentially and he desired it to be that way. One day Alexander the Great, who was a great ruler at that time, maybe the greatest or the most feared man in the world at that time sought out Diogenes; this filth ridden mother fucker to get wisdom from because he heard he was a great philosopher. After Alexander talked to Diogenes he was impressed, he was impressed by his philosophy and he offered Diogenes anything that he wanted and Diogenes just responded that he wanted him to get out of the way of his sunlight. He didn’t want money; he didn’t want anything but Alexander the Great said, “had I not been Alexander I would have lived like Diogenes.” So you have this great emperor, ruler, wealthy, powerful saying that I would live, if I wasn’t this specific person Alexander, I would choose to live like Diogenes, a homeless philosopher living in his own filth which is kind of a weird thing to think about, right? That’s a big jump but I don’t think it’s that big of a jump actually and I’m going to explain why I don’t think it’s that big of a jump. So if you’re watching this video I’m going to do a visual demonstration here, if not I’ll try to explain in a way that my podcast listeners will be able to understand what I’m doing.
So right now I’m holding a wire, it’s just a long skinny wire, it’s actually plastic okay. I want you to imagine something. Alright so I have this wire, the far right side is Point A, the center’s Point B and the far left side is Point C. So you have ABC down the wire. Now A is one group of people, which is the ultra-elite, ultra-wealthy, powerful. B, which is right in the middle, is your middle-class, your average man, your worker bee. Then C at the far other end of the wire you have several groups of people I would say. You would have the free spirit type people, the Diogenes, could be homeless, who knows? You have the wild men, the mountain men, right? Many people might be assuming I’m trying to draw an economic equation here but I’m not. Although A is probably the wealthiest, the empires, the rulers; B the middle classes right in the middle and the wild men – C, are probably poorest. But that’s not the analogy that I’m trying to draw here. What I’m going to do is I’m going to take one end of the wire A, the rich, ruler, powerful and the other end C which is the wild men, free spirit, hippies, Diogenes, whatever and I’m going to bend these two ends up to make a circle and connect points A and C. So, you have basically the rulers, the ultra-elite people right next to the wild men. They’re like opposite sides to a coin, they’re practically touching and at the very bottom of the circle you have the middle class. So what does this represent? This represents in essence freedom. It’s an example of obedience and freedom. So you have the ultra-wealthy and the wild people at the top. They have more freedom and the middle class which is at the bottom, which most people assume, middle class is in the middle, no, middle class is at the bottom when it comes to freedom and obedience. Why is that? Well, the ultra-wealthy obviously have a lot of choices in life. They don’t necessarily have to listen to a lot of people if they don’t want to. Now the wild people you might say well free spirits, they don’t have any power. Maybe they don’t have economic power but they have power of choice and they don’t have to obey people because they’re not playing a game.
Now the middle class is playing a game. When you’re in the middle class you have to keep certain rules and orders going to stay in the middle class. If you tell your boss to fuck off you won’t be able to stay in the middle class, you’ll probably drop to the low-low class where you’ll be unhappy. You know you’ll think I’ll be a wild man but most people who drop lower class ain’t looking to be a wild man. So in order to keep their middle-class positioning they have to impress a lot of the ultra-wealthy, they have to be obedient to a lot of people. Some people in middle class have twenty fucking bosses. Eight different bills they have to pay, they have mortgages, they have debt out their fucking ears to where they literally have to obey everyone to not lose that middle class section. like I said the rich don’t have to really obey anyone they could quit their works and they have so much money now to do it, they could tell everyone go fuck themselves. The wild people they tell everyone to fuck themselves anyway without the money yeah maybe they have a rougher quality of life but they have more freedom and lost obedience generally speaking. so what this was, was a fad experiment and I think that’s why Diogenes, not Diogenes, Alexander said if he was not him, he would be like Diogenes because he recognized in Diogenes this poor philosopher that he had his own form of freedom without the obedience the same way he did as Alexander the Great and he was able to connect with that. That’s why Alexander the Great could say well if I wasn’t myself I would be commoner fuck who is in the market all day spending all my money. No he said he’d be like Diogenes, the poor man, the wild man and I think that’s exactly why. you know I used to tell people that I would rather be homeless than go back to this lifestyle I had, where I had fifty thousand micromanaging fucking people tell me what to do all day and being buried in debt. I’d rather be fucking homeless because then, yeah life might be rough but at least I wasn’t taking orders from everyone. Might have been rough and the whole point of this experiment was to look and see what all these classes in the world represent, the pros and the cons and who’s closer to who and who’s playing what game and who abides by what rules and I think the cynics said it best.
You know another interesting point or thing to look at here too is the ability to enjoy life. I remember when I was doing my regular 40/60 hour in the office work week, well I was very micromanaged. You know I’m talking if you’re five minutes late, you go into fucking detention that kind of micro-management. I remember one job I would go to lunch, I had thirty minutes right. I would rush to lunch, I’d go to the same place every day because it was the only place close enough to eat, which was a sub sandwich place and I would stuff that fucking sandwich down my face as fast as I could so I wouldn’t be late back to work. It was the most flavorless lunch imaginable but not because the sandwich was bad or didn’t have flavor but because I didn’t even have the time to enjoy damn sandwich doing the hustle and bustle of my worker bee life. But it wasn’t just because of time worked; it was because of the regimentation of being five minutes late I got to go to detention, principal’s office, going to get written up, that bullshit. Working a lot hours isn’t a big deal but when you work under that premise, its bullshit and most jobs or a lot of jobs people work that is the reality and because I had to rush it and force it, that sandwich had no fucking flavor, zero. But you see when you have time to enjoy something as simple as a sandwich it’s worlds apart different. So the wild men and the ultra-rich for example they can have the time to enjoy that sandwich. You know the ultra-rich because they have really the power to choose how long they take their fucking lunch, the wild people because they have nowhere else to be after their lunch. you know think about it when was the last time you sat down for a cup of coffee and you took a sip of that cup of coffee and you savored the flavor you actually tasted it. It wasn’t just to shove it down your throats so you get your caffeine boost but you actually sat there enjoyed every sip and tasted what it actually tasted like. It’s remarkably pleasurable when you can actually sit there and enjoy something as simple as a cup of coffee. You have the time to do that. It’s unreal because you realize that you can be incredibly fulfilled with pleasure and happiness from the simplest fucking things if you can just take the time to really experience it, experience the taste of that coffee. It’s absolutely remarkable but I remember the hustle bustle I didn’t have the time to even experience a fucking cup of coffee. It was just how fast can I swallow this cup of coffee and get back to my fucking desk before I get a little note that says come see me signed your fucking boss. It was fucking terrible having to live like that.
You know it’s like now I can sit down and have a cup of coffee and it is like heaven every time. Just like [unclear 16:10] with the sunlight, he said just feeling the sunlight on his back was incredible, incredibly pleasurable experience, the funny thing is too is that when you’re living a simpler life it is easier to enjoy those small experiences you know for the stimulation that you get as a simple free time life kind of person from a cup of coffee the ultra-wealthy person might have to take a trip to Hawaii to feel the same fucking pleasure that you do with that cup of coffee but either way to the wealthy person you know trip to Hawaii means nothing anyway, it’s like a $2 coffee so it all balances out. But if you’re not on the path to be ultra- wealthy a simpler life can make you enjoy things so much better than when you’re doing what I did or had to rush or cram a fucking sub sandwich down my throat in ten minutes or less or I’m fucked, I have to worry about losing my job and then not be able to pay my rent and then nightmare cluster fuck of it all tumbling down on me.
So this was just a point out a few things. Sometimes taking a dive below middle class can be a lot better than being in middle-class. Sometimes the pleasure of enjoying a cup of coffee is better than buying a new Miata and getting 20K in debt. It’s not always such a linear simple thought process where it goes CBA in order from shit to good. So you just have to ask yourself, what you want your life to be like. Do you want to bury yourself in responsibility and obedience to have slightly more luxurious items? Is one way of life necessarily worse, better, different? It’s really up to you to decide and like a few people mention on my other preempted video to this one, a podcast that will not everyone can live these alternative lives. Most people have to live middle class. Well you’re right in for society to function most people do have to live middle-class. However no matter how many people I tell this to or tried to point in different directions very few people will actually do it or even want it. you know I could shout this to a million people through megaphone and there’s still be no problem because those million people aren’t suddenly just going to go a different direction. now most people will never change their position in life out of the middle class, whether it’s lower or upper, it statistically true but you can, if you want to go a different direction you can, your brother can, your best friend can, hundred thousand people could do in the world and no one even fucking notice. You don’t have worry about the whole world abandoning middle-class ideas and doing the jobs that nobody wants but has to do because it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to be this moment where everyone abandons society and how it works. Everyone needs to fulfill a role that’s correct and some people need to fulfill a middle-class role. Some people need to fill a poor role, a rich role, all kinds of roles. But there are so many people in this world that if you decided to change your role nobody’s going to notice except for you.