No one should be poor. No exceptions.

My stint in poverty wasn’t even that bad. Sure, I had $40 for food and gas for two weeks while the soles literally fell out of my shoes and off my feet while working in a hot kitchen for several years. But I wasn’t a migrant, legal or otherwise. I had an okay upbringing, and didn’t have trauma cut my future before it even started. I was never homeless. And so on.

Nonetheless, I felt taken advantage of over time. Eventually, the restaurant I worked at moved to a new location with me, gave me a rise to $10 per hr, which was huge to me, and then cut my hours in half. I had to get another job after helping these people through so much. I was one of the original employees at that location and was pushed out by management.

So, there was one burning question in my mind: why was I pushed out? But the question transformed into “Why did I have to go through that at all?”

One of the reasons I got an economics degree is to understand the most popular answers deeply. People are poor because they don’t work hard enough, they’re unskilled or low-skilled, government is taking your money, etc.

All of it is bullshit. All of it. Every last trash excuse that justifies poverty is a lie. Neoclassical economics is a theory of selfishness and misanthropy.

Poverty is a policy choice. Poverty, by America, by Matthew Desmond, is an excellent book about this. We give tax breaks for people owning second homes, for example. What else could the money collected from owners of second homes do for social policy? Reagan cut corporate taxes. But, if those taxes were higher, how could the money be used to alleviate poverty?

Essentially, I lived poverty, tried to understand why I endured it, and came up empty. There’s no reason other than selfishness why I endured it. And the same is true of everybody in poverty today around the entire world.

“Try not to be a dick” is probably the most base but somehow most meaningful phrase I’ve ever heard and I try to live by it. Sure there is a lot more to me and things go a lot deeper but I feel if everyone at least attempted to adhere to it then who knows what things might be like.

“Never trust a fart.” This phrase has inspired healthy skepticism ever since it was coined by Abraham Lincoln.

I’m trying to be more kind. Normally, I tend to be analytical and abrupt. If someone is wrong, I try to demonstrate it a simply as possible and move on. If they’re right, that is good, there’s no reason to celebrate; move on. I find most people don’t respond well to any of this, for their own reasons. So, I’m trying to set that aside and simply be more gentle when handling interactions with another person.

Don’t ever, for any reason, do anything to anyone for any reason ever, no matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you’ve been… ever, for any reason whatsoever…

-Michael Scott

Not a direct answer to your question, but I read How to be Perfect last year. Michael Schur (creator of Parks and Rec) wrote the book as an exploration of the research they did to make The Good Place.

It’s a survey of philosophy for non-philosophers and does a great job breaking down how to make good choices without being preachy.

Here’s the link

So many to choose from :) I guess for today it will be… Shit happens.
Bad things can happen to you for no reason. You can agonize over it, wonder why, etc. Or you can accept that it happened, focus on dealing with the consequences and try to make the best out of it.
It’s not always easy, but I do feel it has made me more laid back and happier in general.

Edited because Thelsim doesn’t know how to proofread

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Be excellent to each other and party on dudes. It’s a fun movie with a simple principle which I try to follow. It’s also a reminder to have fun and enjoy the little things. The world would be a much better place if everyone followed it.

That stupidity is worse than malice.

It’s a relatively uncommon moral value that I follow. Without going too much into details, I picked this up after realising that people caused me more harm through actions that didn’t benefit them, than through ones that did it. And then realised that it was not just towards me - people cause more harm to everyone else due to stupidity than malice.

This has the following consequences for me:

• If I do something wrong, I can’t excuse myself through “I had good intentions”. I actually need to fix it, or admit that I don’t care.
• It made me more lenient towards people acting on their own interests, in a selfish albeit transparent way. Including myself.
• It makes me avoid fools that keep screwing everything up, and then saying “but I thought that…” (no, you did not think - and that is the problem)

[Edited for phrasing.]

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Everything is a story, the only bits of truth we will ever find will come from nature if we make the correct question and understand correctly the answer.

Everything changes.

Work, on physics, can be defined as force*distance. It looks like what we do for living. A big effort does not guarantee big results. So work smart.

Some people say that war cause technology leaps. I think that “a lot of people working together to achieve a difficult goal” is the source of those leaps. War is just a sad instance of that setting.

I believe that curiosity is a virtue. Identifying and Explaining are the two tenets of my philosphy, to seek out and to understand is my way of living.

(this is a reference to somehting, but that something has influenced me so much)

Overwork and the pursuit of wealth is detrimental to you and your relationships. Earning enough for a simple life and then stopping allows time to be a decent human.

I walk an average of three hours a day. My young adult children ask me to go with them to the movies. My wife works enough and no more. We split the chores and have few resentments. The crows along the river swoop down when I pass by. I stop and feed them peanuts.

I learned this by becoming aware of just how little it served me and my family to really put in the hours and take every opportunity that came my way.

Be brave, be kind, and work hard.

The last one is the only one I really manage.