Kimberly Steele

Consequences of the Craft

It serves me right to be the recipient of anyone's ill wishes because I used to wish ill upon others. Not only did I used to engage in the prideful sin of throwing curses, I was good at it. Of course I could be wrong, but I believe I was able to rain hell on people. My secret weapon was my perception of any given target's Achille's heel. In order to nail someone to the wall on the astral plane, you must be able exploit their primary weakness. In most cases, people wear their primary weakness upon their sleeve and do not even bother to try and hide it. If you can intuit someone's worst choices and tendencies when pressed, you can influence them to choose the worst of all options offered. If someone is a reckless idiot and an attention whore, you can push astral forces to make their stunts more dangerous. If someone is a bad driver with road rage, your ill-wishing will make them more likely to be stuck behind a slowpoke. They will be more likely to overreact and speed through a yellow-going-red light, potentially T-boning a car full of sixteen year olds. You can push a lazy hedonist towards more of the same, and lo and behold he will give himself cirrhosis of the liver from his hard drinking or his husband will leave him and he will be destitute. This is what may happen if you were as good at it as I am. If you're not good at it, and most people don't have the talent, you'll do the magical equivalent of pooping where you eat. All of the above results may happen to your enemy, but like a grenade, you'll detonate your own life, worsen your own weaknesses, and generally bring nearly immediate misfortune to you, your family, your pets, and your circle of friends. You will create an invisible miasma around yourself that others, despite the endemic condition of spiritual retardation, will sense and draw away from.

Magic is the formation, process, and reverberation of intention. We all do it, and by "we", I don't just mean humans. Everything on this planet, including the forces we humans cannot perceive or see, possesses intention and in that way has its own life. The wind has intention to blow in a certain direction and it is countered by the intentions of objects standing in its way like trees and houses. The tree has intention to drink sunlight from above and water and nutrients below while exhaling oxygen. The human has intention to drive his car to work and the car has intention to be recognized for its labors as it hurls through space. Intentions cooperate, bump, and clash all the time. No intention exists in a vacuum and there is no being outside of a god who understands the multiple symphonies of intention going on at any given time in any given place. The world is no less magical than it ever was, it is that we humans, especially those of us in the industrialized West, have become utterly retarded when it comes to sensing, recognizing, and controlling intention.

Enter the people who think of themselves as clever: politicians. Politicians are clever because they force proxies to do harm on their behalf while walling themselves off in fortresses. They dwell in luxurious bubbles, which is the first clue they do not operate on behalf of the common man. The most powerful politicians are infamous for sending hitmen to literally kill their enemies. Most politicians would not be caught dead without a toothy grin on their faces. This is to hide the price of being a politician, which nowadays is to sell one's soul (not literally) and to claw one's way to the top of a pile of bloody and messy grifts. The politician wishes harm upon all while pretending to operate as a "public servant" LOL for personal gain and power. The average citizen has the urge to see the politician's head on a pike like the average Christian had the urge to see the local Karen put to death in 1600.

Magic has always been the weapon of otherwise powerless people. Hatred can be weaponized on the astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of images and imagination. Those who say the astral plane does not exist are morons who have yet to contemplate that an airplane does not just appear from nowhere: it was invented by men who put images in their mind of a flying machine and combined enough images on the astral plane to make a flying plane. Back in the day, women were far more powerless and were more often doing witchcraft. Intention is neither septic nor clean by default. It is what it is. The same sorts of images that make planes fly can load them with working bombs. The people who are good at malicious magic often feel disenfranchised and have a great deal of stored hatred.

I used to be amazing at weaponizing my hatred on the astral plane -- I was a prodigy and a natural. I had the aim, the power, and the temporary ability to dodge immediate consequences. Bad, bad things happened to people I did not like. I stopped and I am glad I did. There is an energetic state one has to occupy to be the equivalent of a torturer/assassin on the astral. It's not a happy place. It's also not a grateful place. There is little room for gratitude when you are constantly worried about your own Achille's heels and are constantly focused on the faults and vulnerabilities of others.

Another reason I stopped is that I got tired of worrying about causing collateral damage. Let's say I believed my enemy deserved his accident or his diagnosis. No matter who I was targeting, the ultimate result impacted his or her loved ones and dependents. When I was still fully atheist, I had the urge to curse someone and then realized she had lots of pets who depended upon her. She was a good pet parent and probably still is to this day. For once in my ridiculous life, I stayed my hand and just let her be, not for her sake, but for the welfare of her pets.

You're a Witch! She's a Witch!

Unless you are genuinely sweet to your core, you have likely aimed some of your own bad intentions at others and gotten results. This is a mere fact of life. Perhaps the intentions of others got in your way, perhaps you suffered immediate consequences, and perhaps you got away with it. The hard truth is that you have people aiming their bad intentions at you right now and you are likely suffering the consequences of the bad energy that made it through. I have been a writer for a long time and a jerk for even longer, and I reliably field would-be witches attempting to assault me on the astral with their malefic energy.

When you have malefic energy being thrown at you, you have choices. In the case of normies, they do not know bad energy is being thrown at them at all because they deny it exists, they deny it has power, and they deny the astral plane of images it comes from because they are too deliberately ignorant to attempt to research occulted knowledge. Let's call these people the ignosophers -- they love ignorance and we will leave them to it. They are dismissed because the grown ups are speaking now.

When you are an Evangelical normie, you believe that all bad energy thrown at you comes from Satan and that those throwing the energy are agents of the Dark Lord. You are wrong. The friction produced may be coming from within you and your own uncontemplated dissonance and misunderstanding. Some of it comes from the fractured spiritual ecosystem in which you dwell and some of it comes from other would-be witches trying to hex you. Because you produce malefic energy yourself, you will attract it on the plane of images as like attracts like. Your invocations of a deity you make pretenses of serving while acting in the opposite manner of what that deity stands for will likely invoke other things that are not Divine.

When I was an atheist witch with no banishing rituals in place, I believed that I was immune to the bad energy being thrown my way and exempt from consequences. I was wrong. The more I threw hatred in response to hatred, the more lathered-up and vulnerable I became on the astral plane. The astral plane is the same one we encounter in dreams. My dreams were full of drama, hags, and shadow men, the last two being parasitic entities who are attracted to malefic energy and feed off of drama. By reacting like a clueless idiot to various stimuli, I painted a kick-me sign on my butt on the astral plane and dragged my energy lower than it needed to be.

Most people are somewhere between atheist and Evangelical. I would call them the casually religious. When bad energy gets thrown at a casually religious person, she often does not know it explicitly. She senses it. She knows something is not right. Perhaps she knows who it is coming from and will react in her mind with hatred, wishing the person would just go away. This sort of impotent energy has almost no effect on anyone or anything except for her as it makes her sad. If she is a bit more towards the feisty end of the spectrum, she will wish harm on the person in her mind, seeing them step on a rake in her astral replay or hoping they'll get a good and hefty dose of what they are owed. This more focused energy will disrupt the hated person's life if she is a natural witch. If she is actually into ritual magic and does ritual magic against the nuisance person, she can deal out a great deal of harm because of the added power a physical ritual lends to the force of images. Those on the more religious end of casual cause harm by praying for others without their permission. Prayer is really, really gross when aimed at people who do not want or ask for your prayers. A prayer aimed at the unwilling is the equivalent of camping out on someone's lawn and pooping on it and then throwing that poop in their open window. No sane person makes that kind of effort, and to add insult to injury, the prayerful moron tries to invoke great power in order to throw crap.

In my own case, I have been public about having done the Sphere of Protection every day without fail for the last seven years. The Sphere of Protection is a banishing ritual that takes about 5-10 minutes and acts as an astral shower or bath. I also tend to bathe every day, so it's no surprise that I fell into the habit of the same sort of thing on the plane of images. The Sphere of Protection is great on its own for cleaning up one's astral plane existence, but when combined with the mental plane practice of discursive meditation and serial attempts to get the advice of the gods through regular divination (Ogham in my case) it lends a powerful set of shields when someone tries to hex me. I also pray to several gods and I never, ever pray on someone's behalf without their express permission. This is also protective.

She Hexed Herself LOL

When a would-be witch tried to hex me recently, a few of her blows landed on me despite my walls of astral, mental, and spiritual defense. I was able to figure out what she was up to via divination. It is highly unlikely she consciously knew what she was doing. As a result of her malefic energy, I had a couple of klutzy moments and a day that had every opportunity to turn septic had I let it. A loved one who does not have a banishing ritual suffered a minor flesh wound that needed a Band-Aid. In other words, it was a nothingburger that I easily handled. By throwing her crap around, I'll bet she had a string of terrible days. I'll guess she made herself sick or did the same to her loved ones, and overall ended up worsening her personal relationships and causing herself far more worry and anxiety than she was able to project onto me.

If you want to defend yourself against the bad energy of conscious or unconscious would-be witches, I suggest at the very least a daily routine of prayer to gods and discursive meditation. Obviously the Sphere of Protection or another banishing ritual such as the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is advised as well. Once this routine is in place, it is fairly difficult for the average semi-skilled witch to get through. By being unlike the witch, I sent her energy glancing away from me and towards the Unmanifest that Dion Fortune talks about in the Cosmic Doctrine. I was unlike the witch because I refused to react to her with hatred. I don't hate the witch because I don't care about her. When I see her in my mind's eye on the astral plane, I see a sad, desperate, anxious person who doesn't deserve my contempt or my compassion either way. In her vain pride and self-importance, she sent blows that sailed past me. The banishing ritual I do ensured it along with my lack of interest in her and her life. Her problems arose when the energy blew towards the void and found their mark in entities that feed on human drama. We call these entities demons in our lack of understanding. By trying to hit me with her best shot, she painted an All You Can Eat sign on her house and opened the door to whatever nasty thing from the lower astral who wants to walk in. Demons cannot get in without an invitation.

The most repulsive and defensive part of my wall is my gratitude. Whenever I have anxiety or begin to covet a thing or situation someone else has, I play the Glad Game and imagine A. How my situation could be worse and B. Why I am lucky and grateful. Somewhere along the way in the last seven years of banishing rituals, discursive meditation, prayer, and divination for myself and others, I became a more grateful person. Gratitude is trust in the Divine. I trust the gods to provide for me and I am not worried or anxious like I was when I was actively hexing other people as a stupid atheist ignosopher. I am not at all afraid of death and I am certainly not afraid of some piddling little wannabe witch.

Second of all, when we shoot straight to the heart of the cat lady stereotype, having biological children offers zero guarantees you won't die as alone as the craziest of cat ladies. Most of the old people languishing in nursing homes right now -- literally begging to go to a home that no longer exists -- have at least one child. More often than not, it is the child that put them in the nursing home to begin with. Dying alone these days is more of a function of class than parental status. Basically if your adult children dwell within the PMC or Professional Managerial Class (or if they want to be there) it is highly likely you will die alone. Their PMC aspirations will be nearly directly proportional to how much physical and emotional distance they put between themselves and you. Consider Asian immigrants who confine their experience with their elderly parents in India, the Philippines, etc. to whatever return visits the work visa and budget will barely allow. They don't come to the US to live like white trash.

The Age of Isolated Hyperdependence

There has never been a better or a worse time to raise a child than the current era. On the upside, childbirth is somewhat easier than it used to be because of sanitation, surgery, and drugs. Very few in the industrialized world are starving in any way except etheric starvation. On the downside, we live in a culture of isolated hyperdependence where the child is the most isolated and hyperdependent of all. In ancient Greece, when a couple had a child they could not afford or did not want, they left the baby in the public square. If the baby was not adopted, he or she was left to die. Cultures around the globe did the same thing: abortion and infanticide is nothing new. In almost every ancient culture, boys were apprenticed and trained as warriors shortly after puberty. Girls were married off around the same age. In the supposedly-enlightened Victorian era, children were routinely exploited as laborers, hence the various portraits of child labor in Charles Dickens novels. The molly-coddled TV/iPad/console childhood is a blip on the radar of world history. It will be shortlived.

The Eternal Child

Humans remain in an infantile state far longer than other mammals because of our large brains. In almost every species of the mammalian kingdom outside our own, adulthood happens within a single year of being born. Adding fuel to the fire, modernity has enabled us to extend infancy from cradle to grave. Being able to extend the life of someone born with compromised lungs, compromised guts, or a compromised brain is a double-edged sword. If the disabled, autistic, and mentally retarded can live into their 70s, which nowadays they can, the logical result is a large population of adult orphans who have no way of making a living or working together outside of gaming chats. I may be lampooned for my cats but at least I will not leave an adult human child behind to deal with the collapse of the only world she has ever known.

The burden of responsibility that goes with being a human mother can and does drive women crazy. Nobody is more psychotic than the regretful mother, and all mothers have regrets at some point. As selfless as the mother's journey often turns out, the choice to have a child is just that: a choice. It is a choice that usually began with the statement "I wanted..." Yet maybe she didn't get what she thought she wanted.

I did not have the biological urge to become a mother. To my mind, it really needs to be there for a woman to become a good mother, regardless of whether she conceives or adopts. Without the overwhelming urge to become a mom, the species would quickly end. All a man has to do is shoot his rocks off; women have to be there no matter what, and if they aren't, all hell breaks loose. The fatherly version of toxic is either to be a controlling dictator or to up and leave. The motherly version of toxic is much more insidious and complicated.

MINOS: Married in Name Only

The MINO is a common type of devouring mother. She hates men and she hates her man. Though she may have occasional outbursts of affection, she's mostly in it out of the grudging acknowledgement her kids are better off with their dad in the picture and/or for the money. Like many women, she tends to externalize blame, using men and masculinity as her scapegoat. A MINO will often openly lust after men in the community or celebrities. No attractive male piece of eye candy is off-limits to the MINO: she will go after a neighbor, the mailman, or her teenage daughter's boyfriend. She spends her time re-living her halycon days and has no sane way of accepting the ageing process. She is also known as a cougar or MILF and usually ends up divorced.

The Karen is a control freak, Type A, borderline personality who seeks to control others via shame. Her shame, of course, is a projection of her own shadow. Karens are frightened of people who see beneath their facade of having it all handled and together. The Karen exists in a dual reality of wanting to be pitied and wanting to wield infinite power. At the root of the Karen, there is a festering ball of shame and regret for the avalanche of bad decisions and behavior that started as a single snowball. She knows at any opportunity that she could have stopped herself from acting like a Karen but pretends that circumstances put a gun to her head. She knows this to be a lie. Karens usually have children because they want the clout and virtue signaling that goes along with being a mother in our civilization.

Smother Mother

As silly as it may seem, the next 25 minutes determine who and what you are going to be.  

I don't miss being young, because I felt burdened with the gravity of my potentials at all times.  Much of my young life was eaten up in fear of trajectories I deemed not good enough for the likes of me.  Motherhood was one of them: I saw motherhood as near-unadulterated suffering.  Though I grew up near more than anyone's fair share of stay-at-home moms, I was confident I would not have the luxury of staying at home if I became a mother.  When I wasn't dreading the future, I was mired in cringe about the past; either my own or someone else's.  This is the curse of our era: we are taught to indulge the human tendency to marinate in the negative.  There is no better way to marinate in the negative than to amplify the past and future at the expense of living in the present moment.  An unhappy, unsatisfied ingrate will always fall for the ruse that the past was shameful and the future is bleak.  Such an unsatisfied ingrate is an easy target for advertising and a buffet of hypochondriac and genuine conditions that lead to a state of dependence and indentured servitude.

Many of my essays contain information I wish I had been told as a young woman, and this is true of the current essay.  Back in the late 1980s, I was desperate trying to finish high school.  Though I had completed a bunch of required courses by my junior year, I still needed a ton of science and math credits to have any hopes of graduating.  The school district I was in was considered one of the nation's finest: all young adults needed STEM.  Meanwhile, I was going through a horrific breakup with my first real boyfriend and the deaths of two grandparents.  I was plagued with depression and night terrors.  So of course the single worst thing happened: the school forced me to dissect a cat.

I made many sincere attempts to get out of the cat dissection.  I claimed a religious exemption: no dice.  I tried saying it was against my morals as a vegetarian.  Nope.  In the end, I was forced.  Of course the female cat I dissected was pregnant.  The sights, smells, and general awfulness of the experience left me with zero recollection of the anatomy and physiology I was supposed to learn.  Instead, I can call up the hideous sight of arterial and venal grit into memory like it was yesterday.  The only thing the experience instilled in me was a homicidal rage towards the teacher at the helm of it all whom I will call Mr. Murray.  I honestly hope he rots in hell and that all the smugness and materialist comforts he enjoyed are just out of reach as he drowns in a stinking pond of formaldehyde... not forever, but for long enough to matter.  

Little did I realize it then that I had multiple opportunities to walk away and utterly improve the trajectory of my life.  When my religious exemption was denied, I could have woken up the next morning and said "I am now done with public school".  In Illinois, parents don't need to explain why they are pulling children out of public school for homeschool.  The laws have never been strict.  I could have easily walked.  

In hindsight, I should have quit public school somewhere around age twelve, when my debilitating and embarrassing periods arrived and it became abundantly clear I could learn more by messing around on a primitive IBM computer or reading for 30 minutes than spending the day at school.  All that time, I labored under the delusion school was mandatory.  It wasn't... at least not in Illinois!

I'll never be grateful for being forced to dissect a cat, but I am grateful for the way things turned out.  There are certain turns of fate that could not have happened any other way.  In the movie Peggy Sue Got Married, the protagonist Peggy Sue goes back to her own past to explore what would have happened had she avoided getting pregnant in high school.  Spoiler alert: in the end, she chooses not to change anything because to do so would mean she would miss out on the experience of having her beloved children.  I feel the way about my life the way Peggy Sue ended up feeling about hers.

I have no regrets and neither should you, however, the past can inform us that the next 25 minutes have the potential to shape our destinies.  We may want to alter our situations but we can still be grateful.  The foundational change you can make in the next 25 minutes is not what happened to get you here but the attitude you have towards what got you here.  The choices of the past are now beyond affecting, but you can affect your attitude now by focusing on what was good by being grateful.  At any given time, if you are not laboring in a prison camp or dodging bombs and grenades, you have a lot of choices and that in itself is a blessing for which to be grateful.

In my own teenage case, I should have looked at the 25 minutes that stretched before me where I had to dissect a cat -- an activity that I found revolting from the spiritual level -- and used my two working legs to walk away from the school and back home where I belonged.  My parents would have been angry but they would have gotten over it.  I would have discovered homeschool laws were on my side.

Let's say I faced more opposition: I still could have walked away.  When we push it to extremes, there is a core version of me that will happily fight to the death rather than do what is against my spiritual will: I am ready to be a hardcore nasty person, as should all of us when faced with a true enemy.  I am grateful I don't have to invoke my innate, latent serial killer to get what I want.  This isn't North Korea.  I am glad, because if it was North Korea, you could probably number me among the disobedient dead.  

I'm Bored!

The most offensive statement in existence and the unfortunate saying of our times is "I'm bored".  Delivered in a whiny voice by a child or someone acting like a child, it is the epitome of lack: not for things to do, but of gratitude.  I was watching a documentary on an Australian six year old who refused to go to school.  In one of her daily battles with her mother to stay home, she won.  The girl marched up to her mother, who was trying to work, and wailed "I'M BORED!"  The mother was all excuses and "Mommy needs to work, darling."  If I was the girl's mother, I would have replied "You're bored?  Go clean the bathroom floor until it sparkles and shines.  Don't forget to thank it for its hard work when you finish."  If my daughter failed to do the task or tried to push the envelope by whining, I would ignore her until she either found a way to constructively entertain herself or died.  This is why I did not become a parent.  I did not feel it was my job as some parents do in this era to entertain or instruct my child their every waking minute.  I am of the opinion that there is no human being (aside from infants in the cradle) who is owed constant coddling.

When people who depend on you become parasitic and attempt to steal your time in an entitled fashion, it is OK to say "find something to do and educate yourself."  When you detach, you gift them with the next 25 minutes by refusing to become an enabler.

Sow a thought, reap an action
Sow an action, reap a habit.
Sow a habit, reap a character.
Sow a character, reap a destiny.

Maybe you have to spend the next 25 minutes at a job you don't like where you only work for the money.  It becomes your duty over the next 25 minutes how to brainstorm a change of life.  Imagine a life where you can thrive on earned wealth (perhaps less of it) but does not include working your current job.  How do you make that happen?  Perhaps it seems impossible as getting out of the cat dissection by walking away from public school seemed to me in 1989.  I would remind you that it is possible because once again, you're not in North Korea. This is not to blame you if you feel stuck. Nevertheless, if you are going to change it, you will have to try.

Every soul incarnated onto this planet is extraordinarily good at one thing at a minimum.  We've all got an opportunity to shine.  In my case, the main things in this incarnation are finally fairly cut and dry as music and writing.  I also have plenty of other skills, such as an affinity for caring for cats (while they're alive and well, thank you very much) and cooking.  When life conspires to keep you from developing your true talents, such as when Mr. Murray wasted my time that should have been spent learning domestic arts and caring for companion animals, it is your duty to find away around.  You build your unique strength until your power topples your enemies for the trifling weaklings they always were.  All you have to do is change the next 25 minutes.

Magic is the formation, process, and reverberation of intention.  When you follow a celebrity, you give them the energy behind your intention.

It is useful to block celebrities.  Blocking them stymies the revenue they make from views and clicks even if you never followed them in the first place.  If you want to block celebrities where it counts -- at the level of egregores and astral pyramids that make up the basis of their power -- your goal should be to become as unlike celebrities as possible.  By becoming wholly unlike them, you strike at the root instead of lopping off branches.

No.1 Be Kind to Service People

There are many celebrities who get off on being rude and holier-than-thou, especially when it comes to service people.  There are celebrities who are so obnoxious, they don't allow people to look at them in person, which seems very odd as their careers are based on being looked at.  Unlike celebrities, most of us, including myself, have worked retail and waited tables.  It is NOT OK to leave without paying.  It is theft and if any of us normal people did it, we would be arrested and charged with a crime.  I am a proponent of tipping even when service is legitimately bad.  Long ago, when my husband and I were not yet married and dating, we went out to a restaurant and the waitress was terrible.  She messed up the order, took a crazy long time to serve the food, and brazenly flirted with my fiancee (now husband) despite him showing a distinct lack of interest.  He wasn't going to tip her at all, but I insisted he tip 10% because I know how awful waitressing is as a job.  I am not bitchy to any person who is serving me because unlike celebrities, I know at any moment the tables could be turned and I could be the one serving them.  Do unto others is a simple rule, that is why it is called the Golden Rule.

No. 2 Stop Obsessing About Your Looks

Celebrities are vain as hell.  Don't be vain.  They are terrified of natural aging.  Their view of aging as a disease that must be cured yields uncanny and ghastly results.  Refuse to get anything done.  Don't throw your hard-earned money into a plastic surgeon's luxury vacation fund or his McMansion lifestyle.  It's OK as an older person to leave being sexy to the younger crowd.  Chasing the appearance of being young and fertile after the age of 40 is more than a little pathetic.  70 isn't typically a sexy age and anyone who needs it to be should probably examine his or her priorities.  Personally, I find it creepy when 40 year olds look 20, and when I was 40 I easily passed for 28. When 70 year olds look 40, it's worse.  I am not saying discard all concern about your looks after hitting 40.  I am saying put it in a sensible place.  40+ should be about a transfer from the vitality of youth to the vitality of earned wisdom.  

No. 3 Stop Lending Your Precious Energy to Their Prefabricated Worlds

When you are heavily invested in gaming, following influencers, television, movies, sports, news, and fandom in general, you sacrifice the building of your own unique world for someone else's shabby image of escape.  Notice how seductive these worlds are. Meditate on how much time and resources you've given up to invest in activities that gave precious little in return.  It is much harder to develop a hobby, especially a skilled one that involves working with your hands, than to sit on your couch with a joystick or a remote, but at the end of your life, you'll have a great deal more to show for it. Pay attention to your own world of home and hearth instead of idly allowing your brain to be colonized by corporate-owned entities that don't have your best interests in mind.

No. 4 Don't Allow Them to Gatekeep

Let's say you are talented, cute, and hardworking.  When you set yourself out to get the attention you deserve, there are going to be sleazy people who want you to mold you in their disgusting image because misery loves company.  They will sense you have power and they will ask or coerce you to trade romantic or sexual favors in exchange for making you into a star.  Don't fall for their tricks.  If a would be gatekeeper makes a move on you, tell them it is a HARD NO and get as far away from that situation as you can as fast as your legs can carry you.  Their gatekept world is falling apart anyway as we speak.  Leave them to their shoddy, rehashed franchises and their Let Them Eat Cake posturing galas.  That scene is beyond cringe and jumped the shark long ago.  Better to remain in obscurity than to sell your soul for a trifling price.  Better to have three fans who truly get your art than three billion brainwashed sheeple.

No. 5 Don't Allow Them to Gaslight

Celebrities pretend to be the arbiters of taste and class.  We are not in the age of Pisces anymore.  Nobody is uniting under a single banner.  Celebrities don't get to make trends: you do what is right for yourself.  What looks good on you does not necessarily look good on other people.  One lifestyle does not suit all.  Celebrity beauty standards are warped and toxic.  If you like a style, wear it, and screw what anyone else says.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yet the only beauty that actually matters is what comes from the inside.

No. 6 Clean Up Your Own Messes

From leaving hotel rooms trashed to flying around on private jets, celebrities do not take responsibility for their own messes.  Many of them think they are far too good to care for their own kids, cook their own food, do their own dishes, unclog their own sinks, sweep their own floors, saw their own wood, and grow their own vegetables. The very last thing a celebrity is willing to do is clean her own toilet.  I clean my toilet every day and I thank it with this rhyme: "Toilet, toilet handling waste, thank you for your saving grace."

No. 7 Clean Up Other People's Messes

I don't like to admit I do this because I don't want to virtue signal, but I pick up trash in the forest preserve when I go there and I pick up trash around stores.  I go to the dollar store fairly regularly and once day I noticed the view of a meadow right beyond the store was quite beautiful. The only thing ruining it was some trash that had accumulated by a nearby fence.  I took about 5-10 minutes out of my day and collected the trash and threw it in the garbage can.  The spirit of place there communicated to me by showing me a brief vision of some children in the future.  The children noticed the beautiful view and there was no trash to distract their young minds from its loveliness.  

No. 8 Be Grateful For What You Have Instead of Chasing MORE MORE MORE

There's a native American creature of legend called the Wendigo.  It's a cannibal monster.  The more people it eats, the thinner and hungrier it gets.  The reason celebrities move so frequently, take so many luxury vacations, get plastic surgery and injections, and change sexual partners so often is because they don't know how to be happy with what they have already got.  A disclaimer: sometimes you've got to leave old things behind.  Say you were born into an abusive family -- that's reason to leave.  On a less dramatic front, things and people change and need to be replaced.  Within limits, newness can be very good.  Celebrities take a good thing too far.  Their overlarge homes and ridiculous overconsumption should be avoided: not only is their greed terrible for the environment, it is a terrible reflection of the state of their souls.  During the Great Depression, there's a saying attributed to President Calvin Coolidge: Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.  Question anything you have to buy new: can you do without it?  Buy used and thrift.  Give things away you're not using.  If you hate something about the way you look, focus your attention on disciplining your mind, not fixing what you think makes you ugly.  The problem is your attitude, not your nose or your cellulite, trust.

If you are in a long term romantic relationship, consider keeping it.  Celebrities rarely do that.  I have been married to the same guy for 24 years...my first and only marriage.  My parents were married for 59 years until death did they part.  It's difficult to be married for decades.  Focusing on the positive is an absolute must.  A sense of humor can and will save your marriage far sooner than counseling ever will.  

The bottom line is if you want to become unlike most celebrities, you have to focus on the good within yourself most of all and before everything else.  Develop an obsession with your own strength and uniqueness, not theirs.  You are the one who matters.  You get yourself up in the morning.  You are the one who must ultimately forge your own path.  Make your path one of self-discipline, thoughtfulness, doing unto others, humility, and gratitude and you will overcome the cacomagic of celebrities via your own positive force.
 

Dysmorphia

When a person cannot play the Glad Game with her own appearance, she becomes dysmorphic.  I have been dysmorphic about the lower part of my face and my weight for most of my life.  Instead of appreciating my braces-straightened teeth and having no health problems with chewing or swallowing, I have often wanted to change what my lower face looks like out of unhappiness.  Instead of appreciating my powerful legs -- I can leg press 300 pounds! -- I fixated for years on my chubby, flabby knees and my assortment of cellulite patterns.  Lots of people are dysmorphic whether or not they admit to it.  Celebrities and influencers of our era put it all in the open.  They get ghastly surgeries and procedures.  Last decade, the trend is to get your fat completely removed via liposuction.  For awhile, the trend was the Brazilian Butt Lift, which lifts nothing and involves having body fat removed from the belly area and re-injected to create bulbous mounds on each butt cheek.  Another current trend has people reinjecting butt or belly fat into their faces, which means whenever they overeat or become hormonally imbalanced, their faces will swell.  Yikes.  I am extremely relieved I didn't have the money or the wherewithal to go down the slippery slope of "treatments" for my flaws.  

There is no money to be made on a person who looks at her face, sees acne, asymmetry, overlarge or over-small features, and shrugs and says "Meh.  My nose may be funny looking and my teeth may be 3 different colors, but my smile is genuine and puts people at ease.  I'll ignore my nose and try to smile more."

All advertising depends on people who are dissatisfied with themselves and their lives.  Home Depot would be out of business if average people chose to make the best out of what they were given instead of lusting after shiny, giant kitchens and vaulted ceilings in the master bedroom.  In the Boomer era, a family of six often lived in a two bedroom house with a single shared bathroom and was not considered poor.  The modern counterpart of the same family of six is dissatisfied because their house lacks an in-ground pool and a three car garage.  

Weaponized Shame

Women especially tend to wallow in shame and regret when playing the Glad Game is too subtle or too much work.  This is not to say men don't wallow in shame and regret too, I am just writing what I know as a woman.  Women live in fear of being shamed and outcast from groups.  The most awful among us use shame as a weapon to keep others in line.  As William Blake said, you become what you behold.  Those who use shame as a weapon are usually running away from their own shadow selves and are afraid to face their own shameful acts.  Women tend to have a monopoly on weaponized shame because mothers are the setters of limits for their children. Scolding ensures a child's survival -- without it, a child easily becomes a dysfunctional, depressed, dopamine-addicted brat.  Shame is a form of self-regulation: when in balance, it inspires diligence, creativity, and productivity.  Those who do not or cannot play the Glad Game become self-toxic and self-hating.  The self becomes septic because it is our biological predisposition to remember and amplify negativity.  Shame is pushed outward and as a consequence, travels inward.  As above, so below.  The heavy lifting of all work from physical to spiritual involves identifying the good and amplifying it until it becomes a mighty fortress unto itself.  Imagine if the shamers actually developed talents within themselves they could actually be proud of...

Why Allopathic Medicine is Mostly Useless

Aside from getting an ingrown toenail excised or a broken arm set, I would rather die of whatever ails me than visit an allopathic doctor's office for treatment.  Allopaths largely view Nature as the enemy.  They think that manmade replacements of Nature's failures are the answer.  They fetishize avatars of human beings: unrealistic caricatures of what humans should and would be in a perfect world. Babies and little children are pumped full of brain and body damaging vaccines because of the aforementioned beliefs.  "Tech will save us!" rallies the allopathic ignoramus, and he refuses to see the lights of intelligence blown away into darkness when he administers triple and quadruple vaccines into a child's arm.  He refuses to watch Vaxxed for fear of a mild itch that indicates he still has a conscience.  Of course vaccines aren't the only way innocents have their potential for normal, fulfilling lives stolen away by collective allopathic ignorance.  

Nowhere is allopathic medicine more damaging than in the arena of chronic disease.  A healed patient is a non-existent customer and everyone, especially your doctor, knows it.  The allopathic answer to a heart attack is a stent or series of stents and a pacemaker.  Kidney disease?  Get on a list for a transplant and have a machine take the job of cleaning your blood via dialysis.  Diabetes?  Metaformin and synthetic insulin.  Cancer?  Declare war and use chemicals that resemble napalm to "cleanse" the body.

The first rule of good health is YOU MUST BUILD STRENGTH to overcome disease.  It is sad this needs to be said, but you don't build strength by eating crappy, factory-farmed food and Jell-O after being drugged up and having chunks of organs removed from your body.  You begin with cleaning up the patient's diet and then grow from there. Allopathic medicine is obsessed with amputation and replacement.  Healing, as Hippocrates said, comes from food first.  Removing a body organ or part should only be a last and final resort.  

Allopaths have completely lost the ability and knowledge of working with the patient's existing strengths.  Instead, they lap up whatever is thrown their way from pharmaceutical companies.  They are of a lower class than whores.  At least prostitution is a somewhat honest profession that provides relief to its customers every now and then.

Framed Another Way...

I am a piano teacher.  Imagine if I took the same kind of negative approach to my job as an allopathic physician.  Instead of recognizing my student's natural ability, my interaction with them (for which I would be paid handsomely, of course) would consist of five distracted minutes where I mumbled some nonsense about the magnificence of Chopin and blamed them for their current state because they weren't practicing enough. My sole contribution to helping them learn piano (other than the five minute diagnosis) would be a prescription for Adderall sent to their local pharmacy to help them concentrate.  Nice!  No wonder they would want to sue me.

Parents who ignore or punish their children without recognizing their achievements are jerks.  When a parent constantly berates a child for his shortcomings and cannot lift a finger to help that child discover his unique talents, the parent is considered abusive and rightly so.  

Instead of fighting in self-dug trenches, I seek to build what is good in myself, for I am a better person than I was yesterday, if only by the slightest amount.  It does not matter how small my goodness happens to be, how awful I have been, or how retarded I am in general.  I find the goodness and I focus on it after a brief acknowledgement of the negative.  Said the drop of water that became the trickle that became the river that carved the Grand Canyon... "You've got to start somewhere". 

I have not gone hungry or faced any real threat of hunger in this lifetime.  In lives past, I believe I starved to death several times.  One of them was when I was an ugly, short, singing sailor from Portugal.  A couple of times, I starved by virtue of being an average peasant child.  The odd part of having starved to death in previous lifetimes is how it manifests in the present one.  In my case, I know that I could starve to death again.  I would not be happy about it but because it happened before, I believe I could handle it with slightly more grace.  

Scarcity is not just about food... not by a long shot.  Entire economic models are based on scarcity -- capitalism springs to mind. Fear of scarcity, otherwise known as FOMO or the Fear of Missing Out, is an extremely powerful force.  Since mankind began, it has been used as a lever to control human minds, both individual and en masse.  

Think about the ads you've seen or have been forced to view: GET IT NOW before it disappears!  WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!  Fear of scarcity convinces our feeble minds to be temporal.  That's not where it ends though: we aren't supposed to merely live in the moment.  We are supposed to exploit it for all it is worth.  Fear of scarcity tells you that you need to get what is yours NOW at the expense of everyone and everything, including your own body, mind, and soul.  

Dentists Suck

There are plenty of examples to choose from when looking for the exploitation of the temporal at the expense of all else.  One is the common dentist's office.  Dentist's offices are routinely housed in ugly buildings in what can be called disposable architecture.  Disposable architecture in the form of office buildings and strip malls puts function over form.  Huge parking lot deserts engulf blocky, brutalist buildings that squat on the landscape like protruding warts.  Car-centric infrastructure prioritizes greed and the ends justifying the means and is the tragedy of the commons writ large.  Once we are inside the door of the dentist office, we are bombarded by messages insisting they create smiles when in reality any given dentist office is an expensive torture chamber that attempts to create physical beauty.  Though dentists are technically doctors, much like other allopaths, actual human health is the last thing they promote or encourage: if the patient is not a returning customer, the gravy train grinds to a halt.  If dentistry was actually about health, the first sight upon entering a dentist's office would be media informing patients about nutrition and oral health.  Teeth are bones.  Like any other bones, they depend on what enters the body for their health.  A dentist may chide about sugar, but that is the tip of the iceberg.  Bones deteriorate because of acidosis, which is almost always the result of consuming too many refined/simple carbohydrates and animal products while not moving enough.  The bottom line is dentists don't care about your physical health because they are both greedy and willfully ignorant about the rather obvious connections mentioned above.  The traditional dentist's office model of business recurs with stunning regularity: a harem model of unhealthy, female, often obese "helpers" surrounding a man or group of men who own the practice.  The point of such an organization is the sale and in the dentist's case, the sale is about facial beauty, hence copious advertisements featuring models with Photoshopped chiclet teeth advertising proper brushing and flossing.

Idiocracy

In the satirical film Idiocracy, a film set in a dumbed-down future, Costco is depicted as a place to shop, go to law school, and to get various sexual services at inflated futuristic prices.  At the present moment, Costco and its competitor, Sam's Club house a bizarre array of services, including optometrist's offices and tire shops.  Like dentist offices, warehouse stores occupy the landscape with zero regard for aesthetics.  Costco is a tragedy of the commons that exists mainly to enrich a small handful of fortunate people at the top of the pyramid.  This tiny percentage, which has been called the one percent but is actually more like the top twenty percent, represents a class that does not understand conscious financial worry.

I had an ex-boyfriend who delighted in using scarcity to torture his female admirers.  I don't think he engaged in his odd form of sadism with any subtlety or introspection.  He operated by instinct.  His thing was openly admiring a girl's features, implying a lack or deficit in whomever he was trying to inflame with jealousy.  So not only did the target lack sex appeal, she also lacked him.  The It Girl would have him for a hot minute.  He soon moved onto the next one, or two, or three, destroying the previous girls' fragile egos in the same way.

Perceived scarcity raises the value of a person, place, or thing.  I believe my music will be appreciated far more after I die than while I am alive.  I guess I will have to be careful about figuring out how to make my Will.

Right now, money is scarce (and yes, I am cleaning my toilet daily with zero disregard for monetary ups and downs).  I keep having to spend money I don't have.  This gives money an inflated value and presence in my mind that it does not deserve.  As a child of the upper middle class with plenty of old connections there, I can confidently say the upper middle class does not share my problems.  They jet-set around, buy all sorts of crap, and take a great deal of it for granted.  Whether this changes their brains for better or worse remains to be seen.  There is no one size fits all.  It's complicated.  

The upper middle class does not like scarcity.  They are very bad at handling the emotions it dredges up, hence toilet paper hoarding from 2020-2023 and compliance with absurd orders and experimental shots during the Covid era.  The question is, to my mind, how to predict what they will do given a new confrontation with scarcity and how to avoid direct fallout when it drives them crazy as it did a few short years ago.

Scarcity and Prison

The worst way to die is in an oubliette.  For those unfamiliar with the concept, an oubliette is a dungeon made from a pit in the ground.  Oubliettes are usually found under old castles and fortresses.  The term oubliette comes from "to forget" and speaks of a place where no one can hear you scream.  

I think oubliettes are the worst way to die because death comes slowly and with no witnesses.  If you are pulled apart by four horses or stuck and bled in an iron maiden, you're at least aware of when it is going to end.  Immolation or drowning is similarly quick.  Even impalement can be sped up if you have the willpower to deliberately relax and get it over with.  In an oubliette, your pain is dependent upon the training and serenity of your mind.  Left alone and to their own devices in a place of forgetting, some minds disintegrate into the worst torture imaginable.

Prison is when the state uses scarcity via deprivation to torture its inmates into compliance.  Prison is society's oubliette used to sequester those who have done shameful and antisocial acts.  Prisoners inevitably compensate for what has been made scarce: normal relationships are supplanted by lliasons or outright rape by the same sex (or opposite sex if the prison allows transsexuals).  Deprived of good food and alcohol, prisoners find other ways of sustaining and intoxicating themselves.  Damien Echols was falsely accused of murdering three eight year olds when he was eighteen years old.  He was sentenced to death by legal injection.  During his long stint in prison, he was put into solitary confinement several times.  Deprived of sensory stimuli, he taught himself Western ritual magic from books, often working on magic day and night.  He credits the study of magic to his survival.  In Echol's rare and unusual case, he replaced his physical world with connection to spirit, kneecapping the efforts those who sought to punish him for crimes he did not commit.  

If mortality is a prison, and I believe it is, how is scarcity being used as a lever of control?  Though it is clear there is only one escape -- death -- how can we get around the forces who would seek to punish us?

I looked really, really young until I hit menopause at 48. I'm half-Japanese and half-European with a bit of Mediterranean in there. Two primary traits that kept me looking young: 1. Extremely oily skin — like vat of Crisco oily — from age 12 until menopause. 2. Huge, uncontrollable, coarse, mutant hair that is still giant to this day, though I’ve lost approximately one third of it.

There's a funny meme about Asian women who look 18 until they hit menopause and suddenly turn into grannies. I embodied that meme despite looking more white than Asian. There was a definite moment where I became insecure about it. I started wearing false eyelashes for a brief period of about six months after menopause fully manifested itself. I looked OK in them but I got tired of installing and pulling them off my eyelids at night. Plenty of women get what is known as eyelash extensions and I am aware of why they do it: The eyes are the first to show age. It is where the skin is the thinnest and saggiest. Waking up to puffy eyes that aren’t distinguishable as essentially “male” or “female” is rough. Getting older as a woman is de-feminizing, and not just because we lose our periods. The waist thickens and the breasts shrink, giving everything a more uniform, gender-neutral old person vibe. My regimen of 25 push ups per day is the only reason I still have somewhat defined shoulders. The nose and ears get larger, which is ugly on a man and absolutely hideous on a woman. I have always had giant hair to hide my giant ears, but there is no hiding the ever-larger nose. In the end, left to age naturally, we all end up looking like wizened old Hobbits at best.

This was in 2012 when I was 38. I had pinkeye and I could not wear eye makeup that week.

That said, people who are able to sort of turn back the clock with plastic surgery and fillers do not look good from my point of view. I will admit there is no small amount of schadenfreude in celebrities ruining their looks because they tried to escape the ravages of Father Time. I’m not in the financial strata that can afford to have procedures so that was and is off the table. I was a candidate: I have never liked my face & body on camera to begin with. I have a severely deviated septum, a crooked nose, a large, misshapen lower jaw despite having it reduced when I was a teenager, general facial asymmetry, and of course I never felt thin enough despite being of average weight. Beauty standards for Gen X were always fairly brutal. Look at our ideal women: Whitney Houston, Kim Basinger, Heather Thomas, Heather Locklear. All of them were thin as rails. To this day, I hate seeing myself on film and I cannot manage to watch myself for any more than a few minutes at a time. I was always dysmorphic and old habits die hard. It has been easier just to give up on being in front of a camera. Maybe I will be able to detach from my dysmorphia entirely and create video after video, but I doubt it.

In an odd turn of fate, I’m actually glad I wasn't born with a better jaw or without fat, cellulite-ridden knees: it taught me that those things are not the end of the world and they do not make the woman. For despite my copious flaws, I had a turn as the hot girl. At 28, I looked 21. At age 42, I looked 28. The women reading this are jealous and I suppose there are some reasons why they should be. Pretty privilege is real. I got out of tickets. I got free stuff for being cute. Nevertheless, I kind of hated being cute and it often sucked: women hate the hot girl and men look at her like a piece of meat. Sometimes I resented being cat-called and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I felt my life was threatened because I was hot. At age 21, I seriously contemplated jumping out of a guy’s car because I sensed he was thinking about the logistics of driving me somewhere so he could sexually assault me. I had been set up with this “nice” guy by one of my teachers. I needed a car ride and we were both going to the same destination. That night was one of the worst of my life. Being cute often does not get you the attention of the man you want — instead you get a predator or a would-be predator.

Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. Some people did a "meh" when presented with my brand of beauty. Others were reduced to pitiful, drooling slaves who would have given a kidney to be with me. As a younger woman, I arrogantly thought that my beauty could secure the life I wanted. Most pretty girls harbor a similar delusion at one point or another: we are taught from day one that being pretty is important because you can get something for it, and usually this is the Perfect Man.

I may have seen the writing on the wall, because around the age of 37 I came up with the quip “If you don’t let go of pretty by age 40, it will eat you alive.”

I was 46 in this picture (taken from a unpublished piano lesson video).

I was not wrong. My Gen X peers who don’t let go of pretty are having full internal meltdowns. There is a slippery slope women hit where they get a tweak or two and suddenly they are having their faces pulled off and reattached at the hairline and neck. Do it too many times and you end up looking like a low-rent, blowup doll version of your former cute self.

Even AI prefers wrinkles. I went down a peculiar internet rabbit hole of AI generated women. The AI-generated young women all had freckled, tanned skin, full lips with prominent upper teeth, and light eyes with streaky, curly highlighted hair. More fascinating were AI’s ideal “older” women, none of whom had the puffy, Madame Jigsaw look sported by celebrity plastic surgery addicts. Instead, the AI ideal of the 50 - 70 something has the odd combination of eye wrinkles, neck sagging, prominent naso-labial folds, super-long hair, and a bit too much sun.

The AI version of an ideal hot MILF.  Notice how the algorithm screwed up her right eye.  

Though it is estimated that money problems cause 20-40 percent of divorces in the US, I would speculate the percentage as much higher.  We have become a money-obsessed civilization, yet we seldom talk openly about it.  The funny part is that schools to this day center an educational spotlight on penises and vaginas, or in the case of woke schooling, the surgical mutilation of penises and vaginas in order to appease the Big Pharma grift demons.  No public school bothers or has ever bothered to give tweens and teens a primer on how money can affect a marriage.  When I was in a northern Illinois high school in 1989, I had to jump through hoops in order to take an elective course on doing one's own taxes.  If death and taxes are inevitable, it follows that estate law and tax codes should be required to graduate secondary school to the same degree learning one's native language and Constitution is required.  

The Class That Ruined Everything

The greed of the upper middle class that I grew up in is just as responsible as the fabled one percent for ruining everything.  The upper middle class is utterly self conscious and utterly un-self aware.  Everyone wants to be in the upper middle class, because the upper middle class deludes itself that it is the middle class and the middle class deludes itself that it is poor.  The poor join the fray by desperately wanting to join the upper middle class like everyone else.  As for the rich, they think of themselves as gods.

Upper middle class Boomers who once comprised the middle class signed on to forcing women into the workplace.  This was done as triage when the economy began to falter in the 1970s due to cheaply available petroleum coming to a peak around that time.  Like many other measures, the erasure of women's power within the home was an amorphous trend driven by unconscious drives.  Driving women into the workplace had three effects: 

1. It cheapened labor and kicked the can of economic reckoning down the road
2. It greatly lessened the quality of marriage and parenting for all
3. It created a Wendigo of insatiable consumerism

Women, especially white women, had a moment in the 1950s and 60s of being caught between worlds.  On one side, we had the elegant, slim, beautiful, dirndl-skirted and aproned 50s housewife.  Her station, although enviable in some respects, came with hard limits.  Household appliances like vacuums and washing machines were supposed to be freeing, but she ended up chained to them as she rotted inside the house. Contrast the Victorian habit of delegating housework to one or more maids and skipping off to luncheon -- the 50s housewife lived a version of solitary confinement.  The modern tradwife of fetishized etheric labor is a fantasy of what housework could be as portrayed by DIY Hollywood and copious phone camera filters.  

Women were dumped into the workforce (many went voluntarily, of course) as a reaction to the emptiness and intellectual vacuousness of tradwifing.  Betty Draper was a waste of potential and she wasn't all that fond of her children, at any rate.  The result of women being put to work outside the home whether they liked it or not was the latch key kid of the 70s and 80s.  I knew several of them.  Nobody used to freak out when a nine year old came home to an empty house, left to fend for herself for three hours until mom and/or dad returned from work.  Try the latch key arrangement out nowadays and your kid will probably end up as a foster.

A World Where Almost Nobody Has a Stay-at-Home Mom

Belatedly, someone figured out that moms are important.  I had the luxury of a good mother who stayed home.  The emotional comfort of knowing my sane, stable mom was there for me in the house was priceless.  When I was a child, I sensed what my life would become and I chose not to have children because I knew I did not have a snowball's chance in hell of recreating the better aspects of my own childhood.  I was right.  The area where I grew up is dominated by boomers because they are the only ones who are entrenched enough to afford to live there.  As for my childhood contemporaries, they all ran away and their parents are long divorced.  This is a typical story.  The dream was dead before Gen X reached puberty.  Broken homes became the new normal and then the old one.

Broken homes beget broken homes.  When both parents have to hustle to afford basics their own parents took for granted (on a single income, no less) such as a roof overhead, a yearly vacation, ample food and medicine, it takes its toll on a marriage.  Women tend to externalize blame where men run away from it.  It is easy to fall into a toxic blame game where the woman skewers the man's weaknesses as being endemic to maleness itself.  Men run into the arms of someone novel and new, whether she is physical, avatar, AI, eTHOT, or porn, for the quickest remedy to etheric starvation (the endemic disease of our time) is a polar reaction with a new etheric opposite, also known as cheating.  Remember that a man mates with the woman he perceives as a great etheric provider and a woman mates with a good physical provider.  When a woman has to provide both etherically and physically for a man, she does not have a man; she has an overgrown child.  The last thing most women want is a Baby Huey along with whatever children she may or may not already have. 

 The Wendigo

Every astral pyramid seeks to  rule the world and one of the most insidious astral pyramids ever to seek reich status is the Power Couple pyramid.  The astral ideal of this structure can be Double Income No Kids (DINK) childless or with children.  In that sense, it does not discriminate.  The vision itself is of a rich, good-looking, shiny happy couple, upwardly mobile and perpetually young.  They are at the top of their game.  They are relatable and portrayed in rom coms as Happily Ever After.   They are somehow not snobs, yet in real life, they have few friends in low places.  Their big house or luxury townhome/apartment sucks up massive amounts of electricity and petroleum.  Their jet vacations, taken multiple times per year, squeeze the Earth as if she was a nougaty candy filled with sweet, light crude.  Their constant inflow of imported Amazon Prime goodies ensures that no local business will ever be able to compete.  They love to virtue signal about buying and supporting local though.  

Humans being human, monetary advice rackets are the primary scheme by which power couples become obscenely wealthy using Other People's Money, otherwise known as unearned wealth.  Though there are many more, two examples spring to mind of monetary advisors for whom money has become a Wendigo.  

Robert Kiyosaki (born 1947) is the creator of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad media empire.  He made a fortune in real estate first and followed up by amassing clout and wealth writing books about how to get rich.  Kiyosaki's main claim to fame is his advice to seek money by owning and renting real estate.  He urges people to save their pennies by getting an extra job, avoiding lattes, and hoarding cash until they can invest in their first income generating rental property, exploiting the fact that we all need someplace to live.  The next step in the property ladder is to own an apartment building.  Kiyosaki references a mysterious Rich Dad who supposedly gave him all of this great advice as he grew up in Hawaii.  In January 2024, a much-sued Kiyosaki revealed he is a billion dollars in debt.  Whoops.

Dave Ramsey (born 1960) is the creator of another money advice empire.  Like Kiyosaki, he advocates saving pennies until the resulting hoard can be put into real estate investments. Ramsey is an evangelical Christian who unironically owns 10 million dollar homes and sells inspiring lectures about how he lost it all and made it back in the 1980s.  Like Kiyosaki's biographical Rich Dad schtick, his origin story is 90 percent fabrication, 5 percent inspiration, and 5 percent actual truth.  Ramsey seems to be a bit better loved than Kiyosaki at the moment. The whole Christian label seems dissonant.   Of course I could be wrong,  but I don't think Jesus approves of his flock owning 10 million dollar mansions while making jet travel money off of get rich seminars.  

The secret is that anyone can get obscenely rich -- you just have to be willing to sell your soul by thinking of money all the time, day and night.  Selling one's soul is not a matter of doing what is against your nature or what you are good at, either.  It's better if you have talents and skills; otherwise you don't have much to sell.  The common thread among all soul-sellers is the willingness to accept the slow, often unnoticeable process of corrupting, small compromises of dignity and ethics.  If you buffet yourself with constant reassurances you are ethical, righteous, and upstanding, all the better.  As much as selling your soul is seen in myth as an act of rebellion, it's actually an act of ultimate conformity.  In our demonic age of  modern materialist competition, such transfers is are barely noticeable.

A Tale of Two Misers: Hetty and Getty

Hetty Green (1834-1916) was an American financier known as the Witch of Wall Street who was infamous for her extreme thriftiness.  She was born into a rich whaling family of Quakers.  Showing an early aptitude for finance, Hetty bucked the traditions of her time and helped her father manage his businesses by the time she was in her teens.  Hetty amassed her own fortune by  her 30s -- no small feat for a woman of that era -- and married fellow millionaire Edward Green only because she was sure he wasn't after her money.  Hetty spent much of her adult life battling her own relatives in court for various inheritances despite being the richest woman in the world.  Though she had enough to bail out the city of New York during the panic of 1907, rumors swirled that she saved that money by ruthlessly refusing to treat her son's leg injury after a sledding accident.  Her son eventually had to have his leg amputated.  Rumors aside, it was a well-known fact that Green owned one black dress and likely stank because she avoided washing it (except for the dirtiest parts) in order to save on soap.  

John Paul Getty (1892-1976) was an oil billionaire and art collector.  Getty's parsimony was legendary.  He installed a payphone in his 16th century mansion, Sutton Place, so that his guests wouldn't run up phone bills, because heaven forbid he part with some chump change putting invited guests at ease in his giant Hogwarts ogre hall.  Getty was such a cheapskate that he refused to pay for treatments for his young son's brain cancer. Timothy Getty was the child of John Paul Getty and his fifth and final wife, Teddy.  Timmy went blind from the tumor.  Getty complained about having to pay the medical bills and then stopped paying them altogether.  He was absent from his son's birth and largely did not seem to care the kid existed.   The child died at age 12 of his cancer and Getty did not care enough to show up to the funeral.  Later, Getty would make history again for miserliness by refusing to pay a 17 million dollar ransom when his teenage grandson and namesake John Paul Getty III was kidnapped in Italy.  Citing "if I pay this time, my other 13 grandchildren will be kidnapped and ransomed", Getty Sr. refused to cough up a single dime.  Five months later, after Getty III's desperate mother raised money on her own and the kidnappers mailed his severed ear to his family in a box, Getty partially relented and all parties settled for 2.3 million dollars.  Getty III went back to being a druggy after his unceremonious escape/release.  He overdosed, suffered a debilitating stroke, and died age 53.

Les Miserables

As a former member of the upper middle class and a current member of the lower middle class, I feel I can confidently say money isn't everything.  The pursuit of class and not class itself is what makes people miserable, and miser is the root of the word miserable after all.  It means wretchedness and despair.  Every miser is miserable, including the ones with massive fortunes such as Getty or Hetty Green, who also specialized at making the people around them miserable.

I refuse to become a miser in the interest of gaining a bunch of unearned wealth.  I reject unearned wealth because someone else had to earn it, and embracing it now means I will have to earn it later, including in my soul's future lives.  When Robert Kiyosaki suggests forgoing niceties in the interest of saving enough money to become a landlord, I turn off my ears.  When Dave Ramsey uses his brief sojourn to the state of financial distress as a point of leverage, I consider it to be a fib if not an outright lie.  He wants us to think he's a mensch.  He is desperate to appear relatable.  Not for one second do I believe Dave Ramsey and his wife were in a truly desperate situation on par with what millions of Americans deal with every day.  In his darkest hour, Ramsey had family, friends, and church to fall back upon.  He will never intimately understand grinding poverty, even if that is ostensibly what his Bible instructs him to do in the form of voluntarily taking up the cross.  

That said, you came here for financial advice and financial advice is what I shall give.  Broken clocks are right twice a day.  Instead of throwing out everything the aforementioned rich people have ever said and done, the first advice is salvage from Robert Kiyosaki: pay yourself first.  Even if you only have twenty five dollars to your name, make sure 100% of it pays for your needs.  Not your debts; you.  If you have an average week, save 5% of your income in a rainy day fund.  If you have a slight boon or are doing a little better than usual, make it 10 percent.  If you have a windfall, make sure half of it gets put away for you.  Always prioritize yourself with your money and save for a rainy day by paying yourself first.  Ignore everything else Kiyosaki says because he is most likely lying, fibbing, or wrong, especially when it comes to his advice about buying real estate for fun and profit. 

The second piece of advice comes from Dave Ramsey: pay your smallest-balance credit card off first and then throw your energy into paying off the rest of them.  Paying off a small balance is obviously easier than paying off a large one and by doing it you'll give yourself encouragement to keep going.  Keep a budget, potentially a cash one where you allocate money for things in jars.  Other than that, Dave Ramsey's advice needs to be heavily scrutinized and filtered. He obviously does not live the frugality he preaches and is the real estate version of a televangelist preacher.

The third piece advice comes from Hetty Green: "buy low, sell high".  Buy stuff when nobody wants it and wait until it is worth lots, then sell sell sell.  This lesson can also be gleaned by watching the movie Coming To America.  Don't be like Hetty Green and spend your life chasing inheritance money.  Don't divorce your husband for being a financial spazz when you've come to the rescue of bankrupt-ass New York City. Also, buy more than one outfit and wash your rotating wardrobe with plenty of soap.

The fourth piece of advice comes from John Paul Getty, and that is DO NOT BE LIKE JOHN PAUL GETTY.  His fortune may have come from oil but I'll bet it continues due to those tunnels underneath his museum.  The guy was gross; he was the real life Mr. Burns.  Speaking of burns, may he burn in hell.

Weird and Wacky Ways of Generating Wealth

Overall, my best advice for staying afloat is to stop patronizing the Avatar.  No, I'm not talking about James Cameron's blue race or The Last Airbender: I'm talking about that image of ideal self we all carry around within us.  Fantasy Avatar Kimberly has straight, uniformly-colored teeth.  Her knees are graceful and elegant instead of chubby and full of rippled cellulite like mine.  Avatar Kimberly has a spacious four bedroom house in an exclusive neighborhood.  Her house has a guest room, a library room, and a sitting area.  The real Kimberly does not have a washer dryer -- Avatar Kimberly has both of those, and on the main floor to boot.  In order for the real Kimberly to match Avatar Kimberly's lifestyle, she would have to get her hands on a fortune.  I'm sure Kiyosaki's and Ramsey's successors would be happy to sell me a seminar...  Don't indulge the Avatar.  Look at your humble self and refuse to buy into the ideal image that would have you purchase the world and lose your own soul.  You are not your image -- the body is temporary.  If you have the benefit of youth, it's not going to last, so don't try to prolong it.  Accept your real and plain self and don't go to extraordinary lengths to match it to the Avatar.  Also, keep in mind all advertising is pushing you towards the Avatar via consumption of its products.

I'm not Avatar Kimberly or anything close, but I do manage to keep a roof overhead and enjoy the occasional latte at my neighborhood coffee shop.  In my mind, which is all that matters, I am rich.  I am rich because I am mentally and physically healthy.  Health is wealth, my friends, and if you don't believe it, consider the example of the billionaire who is so disabled, he cannot drink his $400 champagne unless he has a straw and the help of a nurse aide.  I stay healthy by avoiding doctors and mostly eschewing their advice.  I force myself to do moderate exercise every day without a gym membership: jumping jacks, push ups, and squats.  I walk local trails whenever possible.  I pay attention to my body and when it gets out of whack, I address it with diet, supplements, and herbs.  I avoid etheric starvation by exposing my spleen area (underneath the heart, basically the rib cage) to direct sunlight and by making homemade food.  

Here's some odd advice that you won't hear anywhere else: if you want to make and keep money, clean your toilet everyday.  Get out the paper towels and make that latrine sparkle and shine.  Call it superstition if you must, but cleaning the toilet with the image of having a comfortable amount of earned wealth brings money and health.  Cleaning the toilet every day appeases both local and universal spirits.  Ancient Greeks did it to please Venus Cloaca and modern day Japanese do it to honor Ususama-myoo.  Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda, Matsushita Konosuke, founder of Panasonic, and film director Takeshi Kitano were/are all daily toilet cleaners.  The secret is to clean the toilet without fail while preserving the magical image of yourself cleaning your own toilet despite being extremely successful.  Combined with drive, vision, diligence, and hard work, toilet cleaning is the easiest way to get divine and semi-divine help to further your material goals and ambitions.

When work dries up or when you are in the need of extra help, do a green candle spell to bring earned money.  Aphrodite helps those seeking earned wealth, so in my case, I burned a green candle atop a green jar filled with some bits of frankincense and myrrh for six weeks starting on a new moon while playing the Orphic Hymn to Aphrodite. Personally I used the green candle spell kit from Lucky Mojo to great effect.  The spell was so successful, I had to ask the gods to slow it down a bit because I didn't have time to do all the work being thrown at me.  

The great secret to all wealth -- and I am talking real wealth, not the kind that Getty and pals tend to amass -- is generosity.  If you are a miser and hoard everything you get while obsessing about how to get more than you need, that will be your karma.  You will have lots of material things and you will awe others who devote themselves to the chase of material things.  You can be the sort of person Getty disdained and laughed at, giving away whatever you can spare and even much of what you cannot, and the weirdest thing will happen: you will always have enough.  The hidden law of generosity is that the generous will always be taken care of by the Divine.  Generous people have the kind of satiety money cannot buy.  A wandering deity once shared with me that generous acts sublimate everything they touch to the power of seven, including those who made the generous act.  Generosity improves. 

On the opposite end, miserliness degrades all it touches to the power of seven.  As if trying to prove that point, Getty's family was/is a disaster.  His fortune was apparently cursed.  Every woman who married that sociopathic bastard lived to regret it, and it is likely the Getty fortune will curse the seventh son of the seventh son.  And don't tell me about rich people's philanthropy: we all know they use "charity" as a scheme in the same way Getty used art: to launder money.  There are very few überrich who actually give it away, and those who do seldom do it in secret... gotta have that virtue signal.  Money given away with an agenda is not the same as wealth given from the heart.  Poor people donate to charity more often than rich people because they know how much it hurts to be poor and how much difference a little bonus can make. 

I know plenty of people who have more money than I do -- in some cases, a great deal more -- who are miserable because they don't know how to be genuinely grateful or generous.  Better to die penniless because you gave your last cent to someone you believed needed it more than you than to live a hundred years as a rich miser.  To the rich misers and rich miser wannabes out there... it's never too late to say Thank You and give it away in liberal amounts to the needy.  Try it... it feels good, and it won't make you as poor as you think.