Dae

The secret is to be incredibly neurodivergent and unlock the secrets to extreme hyperfixation. The more you lose track of time, the better, as this is also the threshold where hunger ceases to exist.

-source, one incredibly autistic fuck (me)

Tl;Dr, yes*

I find this discussion to be an exercise in frustration. There’s a lot of philosophical jargon that gets glazed over and nuances that often get ignored. I also think it’s an incredibly complex and complicated topic that we simply do not have enough information available to us to determine in a scientific manner.

For instance: what kind of “free will” are we talking about? Often it’s “Libertarian Free Will,” that is, absolute agency uninfluenced by any external factors. This much is disproven scientifically, as our brains run countless “subconscious” calculations in response to our environment to hasten decision making and is absolutely influenced by a myriad of factors, regardless of if you’re conciously aware of it or not.

However, I think that the above only “disproves” all notions of free will if you divorce your “subconscious” from the rest of your being. Which is where the complication and nuance comes in. What is the “self?” What part of you can you point to as being the “real you?”

From a Christian perspective, you might say the “self” is your soul, which is not yet proven by science, and thus the above has no bearing on, as it cannot take the soul into account. But from the opposite side of the spectrum, from a Buddhist perspective, there is no eternal, unchanging, independently existing “self.” And as such, the mind in its entirety, concious awarness or not, is just another part of your aggregates, and from that perspective it can be argued that a decision is no less your own just because it was not made in your conscious awareness.

With my ramblings aside, I am a Buddhist and so my opinion is that we do have free will, we’re just not always consciously aware of every decision we make. And while we cannot always directly control every decision we make, we can influence and “train” our autopilot reactions to make better decisions.

Relatable tbh. I think a good part of it was depression in my younger years, but, I used to be an incredibly angry person.

It took a long time for me to accept that the truth is, you don’t get angry about shit you don’t care about. Hard to accept that half the things I’d get angry at weren’t worth it. The other half anger just wasn’t a helpful response. Been a long process of learning to have a better reaction for me.

He sold his company for eight figures and used that wealth to build these communities for the people most in need, not (just) his (now former) employees.

But even if he was still CEO, the fact remains that it’s not just for his employees and pay is still just half the equation: he doesn’t control the price of rent, and the real solution is rent control. Otherwise nothing stops landlords from just raising rent higher ans higher once they figure out that employers will just pay their tenants more.

So yes, good pay matters, and we need comprehensive minimum wage laws and worker protection, but we also need rent control. And preferably to banish all landlords to the shadow realm.