To have the capacity to define oneself is, in my mind, the root of all important consequences in our lives.

We exist, first. The rest is conversation. So the man labelled a coward is not truly a coward; he just is. The man labelled a hero is not truly a hero; he just is. If you allow yourself to be defined by the opinions of society, you allow yourself to fall under the rule of mob mentality. Nothing is as smart as a man, yet nothing is as stupid as men.

To have the courage (philosophically speaking) to define yourself in the world is synonymous with having the courage to recognize your true freedom as a human. And the material expression of this recognition is our capacity for agency; that is, manipulating the world to our desires. If everyone calls you an idiot, and you believe it, you are only capable of doing what an idiot does. If everyone calls you an idiot, but you disregard their opinions, you are capable of whatever you define yourself to be.

The end goal of our lives is not, in a strict sense, to be 'true to ourselves'. The truth is there is no truth to ourselves; we are what we believe ourselves to be. Therefore, logic is of no use in trying to 'establish' our selves. That process assumes you can reason into your being from first principles. But since our being is first (before the principles), those principles tend to be rooted merely in social reactions.

To be an employee under modern capitalism is an absurdly bad bargain. You are asked to trade away your entire life in exchange for stability. Your only free time is on the weekend, during which you must repair yourself from the workweek. You won't starve, sure; but neither will you live.

The most vicious part of this deal is that if you do not realize the insanely poor trade off early, you will quickly be blinded by the monotonous routine (not to mention the social pressure; this bargain is made by almost every one).

There are three kinds of people: the pragmatists, the idiots, and the adventurers.

The pragmatists understand that this is a bad deal. They're not fools. Work sucks, but it's better than starving, and at least they can buy some nice things for themselves and their family. They define themselves as either too stupid or too risk averse to become adventurers, so they reconcile themselves to working for the rest of their lives. But they're not dumb enough to work hard; rather, they work just hard enough to not get fired. They skate by, perhaps applying to new positions opportunistically, but mostly staying in one place and coasting. They enjoy what life they can.

The idiots are blinded by narratives, either pushed by self-interested adventurers or society at large. They believe in some sort of mission for what they're doing, or that work is, in itself, a valuable and respectable thing to be good at. The idiots work very hard, much harder than the pragmatists. They improve their skills so that they can apply to new positions, and carefully curate what they say online so that they will stay 'employable'. This probably includes industry blog posts or whatever their career's version of 'open source commits' is. They don't seem to realize that the upper limit of what they can achieve through this method is still employment. A nicer prison, sure, but a prison nonetheless. The idiots are generally guided into middle management or even low executive positions; they tend to be good at coaxing the pragmatists through reward or punishment. And besides, the adventurers don't want to directly deal with the pragmatists.

Finally, the adventurers realize that work is awful and understand that they need to find a way out. They believe they are intelligent and clear-sighted enough to make that happen. There are multiple ways to do this, but the two most popular are to own a wealth generating property, or to steal the money you need to buy your freedom (in this sense, stealing is not necessarily illegal, as certain variations of thefts or frauds are not illegal or are loosely enforced). This process involves risk, which makes these people adventurers. But they are cognizant of the fact that on a risk-adjusted basis, this is a bet that's very much worth taking. In the meantime, however, many adventurers still have to solve the 'money problem'. You do need some cash in your pocket to avoid starving. So adventurers often start by being employed in some day job, but spending all their time getting prepared for their great escape (usually by building skills). This makes them incredibly unproductive, as they expend little to no effort satisfying the requirements of their job. From the outside, adventurers may seem like pragmatists; importantly, however, adventurers are actually working below firing-level. They know that how little they do is unsustainable, and this gives them time pressure to execute their plan before they're fired.

Right now I'm digging into: computer networks, cryptography, machine & assembly coding, C coding, and computer architecture.