Guns, Books, and Bitcoin

Though I suspect many generations of thinkers before us felt the same, in many different cultures and many different parts of the world, it’s hard not to believe we stand on the precipice of humanity. The advancement or regression of our numerous cultures, perhaps even our species, looms over us as we hold more power, both destructive and benevolent, in the palms of our hands than ever before. Aptly and ironically named, the same web that connects us to one another also confines us within its ever-expanding, exponentially-multiplying tendrils of privacy and attention stealing algorithms.

Everywhere we look, a screen captivates us and sends a spike of dopamine coursing through our brain. We sacrifice our sleep as we fall down the late night YouTube rabbit hole again and again. We click on the articles we know will enrage us. We foray into the comments section of political Tweets, even though they’re ruled by faceless trolls we never have and never will meet face to face in our physical world. We look at how many likes we have, judging our success not by tangible achievements in our lives, but by how many people we may not even know double tap a screen based on a filtered photo that barely scrapes the lens of reality.

We fiend for superficial attention like junkies, helpless within our own addictions, begging for the black-souled suits on Capitol Hill to save us with regulation rather than take responsibility for our own behaviors and work to improve our own lives. We are trapped in our cellular prisons, worried about left versus right, impending war and famine, individual and collective rights. And though our ability to communicate with each other, as well as our access to the tools and knowledge to solve any problem we’d like to is at an unparalleled high, our real awareness of the physical world has decayed into rot.

Ask the people around you what they think the future looks like. Chances are good that the picture they paint will not be one of roses, fresh air, and freedom. It will be one of a widening wealth gap, authoritarian rule, disease, and climate wreckage. Yet if you were to ask those same people what they’re doing to ensure a better future for themselves and their own children, chances are good they won’t have an answer at all, and they’ll go right back to slurping down Starbucks and scrolling through their smartphone, offering uninformed opinions on meaningless shitposts.

For the people unwilling to try (and most likely fail a time or ten), there is not much hope. Human weakness has been overcome by technology and human psychology has been reduced to a pathetic phoniness that depends less on discovering the truth than it does on receiving confirmation from strangers. America is obese, addicted, dishonest, and institutionally dependent. The frontier lifestyle this country was founded on, full of hardships while plagued by immoralities, is all but dead.

And in its place arises a dystopian nation of corporate serfs, chained to their desks by debt and a misplaced hope for upward mobility that will provide just enough money to keep pace with inflation.

But the world hasn’t ended. There is no slave driver’s whip cracking into your back. You don’t wake up to a bucket of water in your face. You don’t have to maintain a guard rotation at night for fear of being bushwhacked by thugs and thieves. You have choices; more choices than anyone before you ever had.

Among other things, this is a book about three important choices you can make right now that will change your life forever. They will make you more self-sufficient, more confident, and less dependent on the opinions of high and low society alike. And though they may not lead to you living the same life as your favorite Instagram influencer, I argue that if that’s really a life you want to live, these three choices will give you the ability to pursue it.

This is a book about individual responsibility, accountability, and action. This is a book about hope.

This is Guns, Books, and Bitcoin.