Kimberly Steele

This fat individual is my beloved feline, Kiki. The snacks in question are Temptations cat treats. To be fair, my cat is elderly and there's no way I'm going to put her on a diet at this phase in her life. I won't deny her treats, though I can't allow her to eat them 24/7 as is her inclination either.

Let's say there is a sale on chocolate bars. Instead of buying just one or two bars to savor, I scoop the entire shelf of them into my basket because hell, why not. I can afford it! Then I go home and binge. Or maybe I put them all in the freezer for later.  Or sell them for a profit.  The moral here is that I could have let my community share in the treats but instead I chose to stop everyone else from enjoying the chocolate so I could abuse it like an illegal drug.

This sort of tragedy of the commons pops up all over the place, in fact, this scenario played out rather oddly in the form of toilet paper shortages in 2020. Alternately, let's say I have the privilege of free time. I decide to use my free time to binge on Netflix or videogames in place of any work I could do that has a chance of improving myself the world around me. My mindless bingeing spirals into an addiction, and before you know it, shooting zombies in an onscreen fantasy land and/or watching the dramatization of a math teacher who sunk to selling meth becomes how I occupy most of my non-work day.

Everyone should be able to let off a little steam now and then.  Enjoying a little extra food, Netflix, games, or toilet paper is not problematic.  It's when the glut becomes a way of life that we lose appreciation for what we are given.  Inundating oneself in any form of pleasure for weeks, months, and years at a time is the quickest way to become desensitized to that pleasure.  Recovering drug addicts say that they are unable to feel joy in the things that used to bring them joy.  Their threshold to feel good at all has been raised to a stratospheric height.  To glut is to run away from the at first inconvenient/annoying and later on horrendous tests of deprivation.  

The Opposite of Gluttony: Orthorexia 

Ah, the "nothing is ever good or pure enough for me crowd".  I once made an hour and a half trip to Chicago with two friends of mine in order to go to a vegan restaurant on the North side.  My friends, also from the suburbs, traveled with me by train.  When we got to the restaurant, my now ex-friend went full prima donna, refusing to eat at the place because they did not have canned or bottled soda.  We sat at the restaurant for a half hour while he threw the thirty-something's version of a tantrum.  A long argument ensued -- he had designs on backpacking through Europe -- about why his Land of Precious attitude wouldn't fly in most parts of the world outside the molly-coddled US.  He won.  We went to another restaurant one or two el train stops away where they had soda in cans and bottles.

Never Say Diet  

Orthorexia is also ingratitude.  Dieting creates a push to which there is a corresponding pull.  Don't create the push and you won't get a pull.  Don't pick at the scab because you are bored -- instead of healing, it will bleed and potentially get infected.  Dieting is molesting to the scab to the point where it becomes a gaping wound far worse than the original mosquito bite.  

Dieting is always a short term project, no matter what the guru diet writer claims on his book jacket.  The body has a perverse way of fighting back.  To diet successfully to ultra-thinness is almost guaranteed to either permanently damage you, make you into a terrible person, or both.  Depriving oneself of food is an addiction.  I know this because I have been vegetarian for 30 years of my life and vegan for 11 of them.  There is a self-righteous glory in denying oneself of certain types of food.  Though I personally do not have an eating disorder, I know plenty of vegans who are disordered eaters. 

Dieting is a form of killing the messenger.  The appetite for food is the messenger -- dieting murders him and buries his body in a shallow, fetid grave.  An unhealthy relationship with food should never be addressed with a diet.  Instead, it should be tackled first and foremost with discursive meditation.  Dieting is the ultimate thoughtstopper that is designed to prevent you from analyzing your own psyche in a meaningful way.  It is a bandaid.  Why sit still in a chair and think about your life's troubles when you could be planning an improved grocery shopping list that will deliver The New You in a few short weeks?  

Changing your eating habits needs to be an extremely mild, almost unnoticeable process if it is going to stick.  Personally, if I wanted to lose weight, I would not revamp my diet or my portion sizes overnight.  Instead, I would subtract one food item, let's say corn chips, and eat salted nuts instead.  It is really important to replace the missing food item when you are trying to make a change -- this is why successful vegans have to expand their diets beyond the unholy trinity of french fries, ersatz meats, and box wine.  I would create no friction for my body to resist.

Long ago, I was forced to take a class in high school called Aerobics Slimnastics.  This class, which was the alternative to skilled sports that I sucked at, required us to document our daily calorie intake for eight weeks.  For a friend of mine I'll call Gina, documenting what she ate triggered anorexia.  I remember her being proud of limiting herself to less than 800 calories a day.  At 4'11", my weight hovered around 110 pounds through most of high school.  Gina was six inches taller than me.  She got down to 95 pounds at one point.  I'm pretty sure she was subsisting upon 500 calories a day.   I remember the sadness in her eyes when she said, "Do you remember when we were kids and we didn't have to try to be thin all the time?  Those were the days."

Dieting is Ungrateful

Like my soda-preferring ex-friend, there's not a great deal of gratitude in dieting.  Dieting is a rich person's game -- the poor cannot afford to play.  I remember when I first fell into the lower middle class and I pondered the delectable irony of my vegan peers who extended Herculean efforts to stop themselves from hoovering up vast amounts of delicious, Instagram-worthy food I simply could not afford.  There's nothing like choosing between paying an electric bill and a grocery trip to keep the waistline trim, especially when you're an ethical vegan and fast, non-homemade food is largely off the menu!  

I believe that in the future nobody will go on diets... they won't need to because they won't have enough food to get fat in the first place.  

Moderation

Moderation will never sell any diet books because it is boring, it is cheap, and it works.   A leitmotif of my Seven Deadly Sins meditations has been this theme of not diving off the plank at either end of the pool.  

I weigh more than I did high school -- I would guess that I weigh about 125 pounds or so but I have not weighed myself in nearly a decade.  I don't get weighed at the doctor because I don't have health insurance, so I don't visit the doctor for regular checkups.  Despite my middle-aged weight gain, I remain serenely unconcerned.  Getting fat isn't the end of the world.  Staying skinny does not make me a better person.  Another bonus is that when your hips and arms inflate, your head stops looking so huge on top of your body.  But even if I lost all of my padding and became a hideously shriveled, black-haired lollipop, I wouldn't sweat it.  I'm old and it's not my time to be the object of desire -- that torch I gladly pass on to women younger and prettier than me.  

What seems to work the best for me and always has is eating when I am hungry.  I don't torture myself about a late night sandwich.  If I'm hungry, I just eat.  I have neither binged nor purged in this incarnation and I have no plans to start.  I wish I could go back in time and somehow get Gina to eat a normal, home-cooked meal despite the admonitions of the crazy Aerobics Slimnastics teacher, who by the way was morbidly obese.  I don't talk to Gina anymore, but I suspect she still battles with food as most of the women of my generation were conditioned.  

And so I wrap up my Seven Deadly Sins meditations -- I hope you enjoyed reading them half as much as I have enjoyed writing them!  The Aristotlean approach of transforming each Sin into a ternary was one I employed (and still employ) to understand the Ogham.  As always, I appreciate any thoughts you care to contribute in the comments and though I doubt I need to mention it, I thank everyone in advance for avoiding the use of profanity.

 https://www.bitchute.com/video/WWsu98TTNnh9/

The people who have already gotten the vaccine are in for one hell of a ride.

Modern people in the so-called First World are absolutely beset with Sloth.  We are physically, emotionally, and mentally lazy.  Take me, for instance.  Here I am, drinking my cup of tea.  I didn't flap my arms and fly to India to grow it and pick it.  I certainly didn't gather the water from the nearby river (frozen at the moment) and I didn't build the filter that made the water potable.  I didn't build the stove that boiled the water.  I didn't mold or fire the pottery that brewed it.  I did almost nothing to make my beautiful cup of English Breakfast.  When I deposit what's left of my tea back into the ecosystem, I won't be doing it into a cold, self-constructed outhouse.  No, I'll be doing that business in the toilet in my petroleum-heated home, full of rooms I did not build.

The Lazy Man's Load

The above example is meant to illustrate just how much most of us take for granted.  It's a rare soul who can deal with how much privilege we have nowadays by the simple virtue being born into this era.  For those who call themselves Social Justice Warriors, any attention brought to the mundane luxuries of middle class life tends to trigger violent and extraordinary dissonance.  "Not me!" They cry, grasping desperately at their victim card, eager to play another round of Who Is The Most Oppressed?  Ridden by anxiety, the Social Justice crowd would rather spend their lives mired in depression and prolonged mental breakdown than go deep and potentially skewer their precious egos in the process.  For as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.  

Back when I was a kid and I didn't want to practice the piano, I would distract myself with every form of demoralizing nonsense.  I would run into many brick walls: not being able to sightread with proficiency, difficulty concentrating, boredom with repeating a passage I needed to learn, and that would stop me from practicing because it was pointless.  I was never going to be smart enough, coordinated enough, or graceful enough, and since I couldn't win I got distracted with doing other things I had a chance of being better at.  Because I remember my own state well, I make a special point of combatting this form of demoralization with my music students.  I tell them they just have to practice and that they must learn to ignore those feelings of not being good enough or talented enough. 

I say, "You must stop weaponizing your own insecurities and aiming them back in your own direction." 

Once those insecurities have been set aside, no matter how compelling they seem, you have to sit down and get to work.  Yes, there is a twelve year old who can play the piano better than you can.  To top that, there is a six year old who plays better than the twelve year old, and that has not stopped the twelve year old.

In short, don't work so hard at creatively sabotaging yourself or making excuses why you cannot practice.  Practice, even if it isn't the best quality practice or you can't manage the sonata the six year old mastered in a week.   

Enablers

The saddest thing I have ever seen was an adult child getting out of the car with his mom after a trip to the grocery store.  The grocery bag spilled.  The twenty-something son, who suffered a mental disorder (or several of them) but was physically healthy and robust, stepped over the upturned bag and went into the house.  His mother was left to pick up the groceries and schlep the rest of the cargo into the house on her own.  

There's a woman I know, now elderly, who has come home for forty years to a husband who has never had a full time job and lives on the couch, drinking beer.  She runs a business that puts a roof over his head and pays for their family to exist.  She says of her slovenly mate, "I love him, so what can you do?"

I know a man whose wife inherited a small fortune: approximately a hundred thousand dollars in money and possessions.  She has not worked since her marriage and subsequent inheritance in the early 2000s.  Though he is the breadwinner and works sixty plus hour weeks, she does not pick up the slack by cooking, cleaning, gardening, or running a business out of the house.  She has already spent her inheritance several times over and has a raging shopping addiction.  To this day, she still doesn't lift a finger around their overlarge, McMansion-size house. 

Lazy people don't think of themselves as lazy.  The lazy person will often complain about how rough they have it and often they are tortured by mental illness and depression.  Look closely at the ones who seem content and in stark relief you will witness how they numb themselves with endless hours in front of the television and with compulsive spending.  Examine them and you will find their hoard, their inability to let go of mental and physical junk, and their insecurity.  Underneath their laziness, they are terrified.  

Zombie Like Me

Zombies represent a couple of phenomena in our culture.  The first is the Shadow.  Zombies are classic shadow projection for us humans as a species.  For one, zombies are dumb.  They are ruled by instinct and base urges.  They are incapable of working together on purpose: look at any zombie horde in a film and you will see they have no organizational skills.  Zombies are also cannibals who ruin every place they occupy and destroy every living thing in their path.  Propagandists can Ted Talk all they want about the glorious potentials of the human mind: we all know people are zombies at heart.  There is no Star Trek future because we couldn't get along for enough time to settle another planet even if we could survive the radiation or the relentless cold of outer space.  

That's what makes the I Believe In Science group such a farce.  The proud scientist with a cushy job (the kind that has health insurance and paid vacations) who obediently wears a mask to lower the transmission possibilities of a flu with 99 percent survival rate is not smart.  Instead, she is superstitious.  How many comfortably numb scientists, those without the backbone to stand up to a soft mandate, would act nobly under harsher circumstances?  The Siberian gulags reduced normal people to their worst in a few weeks.   In a few short, brutal strokes, the comfortable scientist is easily transformed into a slavering zombie.

In the Jordan Peele film Us, zombies are portrayed as doppelgangers: dumb, menacing mirror image stalkers who menace their living counterparts shortly before death.  Though the zombies of Us were mostly non-verbal, the one who did feature a voice explained enough to reveal a healthy dash of privileged guilt.  I believe the zombies in the film Us represent the families in the euphemistically termed "developing nations" who make the stuff that keeps the affluent Western salary class up and running.  For all of the bellowing we hear from the fortunate about equality, there are always those telltale Made In China tags that speak of hideous alternate realities where Uyghur slaves are worked quite literally to death.  If they cared as much as they claim to care, how could they let such a thing happen?  Aren't these the same people who claim that if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention?  If we judge them by their actions and not their words, it would follow they must not be paying attention...

Martyrdom: The Opposite of Sloth

There is an old Iranian tale about a sculptor who saw a beautiful woman passing by in a caravan.  He fell in love with her at first sight.  Utilizing all his skill and resources, he bankrupted himself and built a palace for her in the desert with every luxury.  He built the place thinking that she would see it and fall in love with him an live happily ever after.  When they met again, the girl rejected his efforts.  Despondent, he threw himself from the highest tower in his desert palace.  

Martyrs don't always die for good causes and the Iranian sculptor in the myth above is one of those martyrs.  The Bible wisely describes this form of pathology "pearls before swine" and cautions any talented, motivated people who would waste themselves on lost causes.  The three enablers of my previous paragraphs would do well to ask themselves hard questions, such as what caused them to get involved with a Sloth in a co-dependent relationship and how much it would cost them to get out.

Martyrdom doesn't always help the people it is ostensibly for: a classic example is battle-prone parents who stay together "for the children".  

Diligence

Diligence is the recognition and observation of limits. "Diligence" is far too simple a term for the balancing point between Sloth and Martyrdom, so if you can suggest a more subtle word or phrase, I'm all in. 

Gratitude, as per usual, comes to the rescue as the condition of Sloth as well as Martyrdom are marked by a lack of gratitude.  For the Sloth, their ungratefulness creates a petulant expectation that the world owes them a living.  Correcting slothfulness involves lucid assessment of one's own limits: for instance, admitting I am gifted but lazy was the first step to developing better practice habits as a musician.  If you cannot calmly walk through your own negative behavior because you're either too afraid to look at it or in complete denial it exists, you won't be able to correct it.

For the Martyr, there is a single-minded compulsion to overwork for work's sake, and there is an absence of appreciation for the here and now because the future they are working for is always more important than the present.  I once watched a documentary about awful working conditions for Chinese factory workers.  In one factory, these workers -- entirely women -- sewed cheap clothing all day in fourteen hour shifts.  Conditions were horrible.  During her interview, one of the young women spoke about how she put up with the relentless abuse and horrors. She survived by thinking of her brother, to whom her pittance was going to in order for him to continue his studies.  She spoke of him as if she was the lowly disciple and he was the Savior.  It was obscene.  She unquestionably accepted her suffering in an act of Sartrean bad faith, immolating herself on the pyre of Chinese filial piety.  

Diligence is the acknowledgement of privilege as well as the acknowledgement of one's own shortcomings and the resolution to do the thing.  Diligence rejects "should" and it rejects demoralization.  Diligence does not play mind games of avoidance.  Diligence does not greedily presume exact results.  Diligence can act as a retreat from limits in the case of correcting martyrdom or a pushing of limits in the case of correcting sloth.  Both paths wrangle thoughtstoppers and prevent a slide into futile directions, dredging the muck from the subconsciousness and watching it wriggle and squirm in the light of day.  Now, off to practice the piano...

The other sex addict, the man, was raised in a Catholic in name only, non-churchgoing household. He was a late bloomer who lost his virginity to a woman at eighteen and short time later to a man. He knew himself to be gay from a young age. He felt tormented for his gayness and was depressed for decades over being made fun of for his slightly effeminate bearing in school. Once he felt sufficiently free to do so, he began to compulsively bed different men to the tune of three or four per month. Like in the case of the woman, he ended up with a common venereal disease. For him, the illicit thrill of "getting away with it" has compelled him to cheat while in committed relationships. Unlike her, he still compulsively seeks sex via apps like Tindr -- though I imagine now that he is nowhere near as attractive as he once was, I would not be surprised if he was paying for sex. Sex addictions are the ultimate in diminishing returns.

Satiety

I learned early on that lust has dire consequences. As a female child of the Professional Managerial Class, it was instilled in me at an early age that certain paths led to surefire ruin. One of those dark avenues was drugs: I came of age in the fried egg, This Is Your Brain on Drugs era, and my superstitious fear of them was almost as ridiculous as my trepidation about toilet seats. I was also told that having a baby before my late twenties or early thirties was life-ruining doom. I was supposed to have a career, you see, and to do that, I had to go to college. I was supposed to have lust in the proper order, for my degree, my career, and then my lawfully-wedded salary class husband. I was supposed to join the ranks of mostly-barren thirty-something women who jacked themselves up on pricey fertility treatments.  All so I could have kids graduating college just as I collected my first social security payout...  

There Can Be Only One

From Bad To Worse: Chastity

Balance: Enjoyment

I don't think I could have achieved a balance of my lusts as a young person. I narrowly avoided the life-ruining pregnancies and addictions that I feared, and had I been forced to face them by having a baby or becoming addicted to crack, I don't know whether it would have helped or hurt. It is only on the other side of libido and sterilization that I am able to look at my younger years with a critical eye.

Like many in this culture, I rarely enjoyed myself when I was young, despite having a good home, plenty of money, and oodles of entertainment designed to amuse me.  I was too preoccupied with either guilt or wanting to get to the next thing to enjoy the moment.  That's our culture: when you are doing a thing, always think of the next thing!  Progress!  And if you have any extra, you'd better hoard it and save it because you wouldn't want anyone else getting in on that action.  It's no wonder I was so stunted when it came to normal human stuff like enjoying time with friends or working behind a sales counter.  I had no idea how to enjoy any part of my life.  

Our materialistic culture insists we must always be the pawns in a push-pull game of denial and indulgence.  Financial gurus shame us for buying a latte while commercials goad us into thinking we need to have one in hand in order to be hip.  My thoughts are that if you want a latte, just buy one and be done with it; nobody can reasonably be held accountable for every purchase.  Poverty's root cause is not the occasional four dollar drink and beating oneself over it is pointless.  

Enjoyment is a balance of the way one perceives time.  The lusty perceive time as fleeting and scarce, so that's why they have the urge to jam an entire apple pie down their throat in one sitting or to boink the entire football team because they can.  The chaste shrink in fear from the idea of having a sliver of pie or kissing the star quarterback despite the fact he asked.  The chaste don't suspect time will run out and they wouldn't want to take a risk.  They are masters of delaying gratification, and they end up missing the opportunity for it altogether.  Balance takes into account the moment as ephemeral.  Kissing the quarterback behind the bleachers may not be the wisest idea, and the piece of pie might cause a couple pounds on the thighs, but since some moments only happen once, you go for it, damn the consequences.

Whether you call it the etheric, the ethereal plane, prana, chi, or the Force, there is a kind of energy all around us that refuses to be denied, regardless of materialist-rationalist dismissals of it as woo. As John Michael Greer often says, anyone who can sense the vibe of a crowded room is sensing the etheric plane. I think of the etheric as one degree more subtle than smell.

Emotional labor such as picking up and putting the house in order has a positive emotional impact first and foremost.  It reaches up through the planes, and like a bolt of lightning, connects them.  As an example, let's analyze the emotional impact of putting a favorite toy in its designated place.  If a favorite toy has been put in its designated spot, there is no upset or disruption when it comes to finding the toy. If the dishes are clean and put away, it is easy and a tiny fraction more joyful to make a snack when one is struck by hunger in the evening. If the decor of the sleeping area is thoughful and soothing, restfulness will ripple through the consciousness of all who sleep there.

Making a home involves a million small actions to balance the energy that flows through a space.  Each action on its own is meaningless and insignificant, but when you combine smaller actions and channel them through a filter of generosity, reverence, and humility, a home becomes a fruitful, holy bed of spiritual development.  Understanding the importance of the etheric begins with the recognition of the "little stuff" that most of us were born and raised to take for granted.  God is in the details.

When a capable cook creates a dish, it is imbued with their etheric energy. The same is true for the not-so-capable cook. If you've ever had that aunt or friend who could ruin the taste of water if they boiled it, you've experienced a cook who etherically spoils any food they touch. I have a friend like this: she enjoys cooking, but something always tastes off about her creations. She follows recipes to the letter. She doesn't notice the off-taste of her food. I have noticed this is usually the case with people who etherically spoil food.  Contrastingly, I patronize a local hole-in-the-wall restaurant run by an extremely capable cook. She makes a salsa that consists of four or five ingredients, none of which are exotic or difficult to attain. Like everything else she cooks, it tastes like the nectar of the gods.

Cooking is a form of alchemy.  European Medieval and Renaissance mages knew more about alchemy than us modernites, but when we look at the process, the basics are identical.  Cooking, like alchemy and chemistry, gathers up a set of ingredients and processes them into a new form.  The new form represents certain properties that are stripped away as part of the alchemical process and also bonuses that are a result of the melded ingredients: solve et coagula.  The hidden ingredient in alchemy and cooking is the etheric energy of the alchemist/cook.  Etheric energy is the element that gets skipped over and ignored by modern chemistry and treated as if it does not exist.  

Though I'm no high roller on the material plane, I am the etheric equivalent of a millionaire.  I am physically female and etherically a virile, muscle-bound lumberjack. *cue music about being OK and sleeping all night*  I have more etheric energy than I can possibly use.  Because I spew it out like a toppled fire hydrant on the etheric level, I have no trouble attracting males.  My problem is that to the average etherically-starved person (regardless of their gender) I am an All You Can Eat Buffet in a desert.  This means I attract all forms of desperado and psychic vampire without trying.  Before I took up regular banishing ritual and discursive meditation, my etheric excess made me vulnerable to the etherically starved, who instinctively drained me despite having no conscious intentions of vampirism.  

Just about everyone is etherically starving.  The reason modern people are so plagued by addiction, whether it is to food, sex, shopping, etc. is because addiction to substances and/or bad behaviors replaces the void left by etheric poverty.  

Being overweight in general tends to indicate etheric starvation, but diabetes is the acute version.  The etherically starved person eats and eats and eats but is never truly nourished.  Americans are especially prone to etheric starvation because we live in ugly environments, we spend an unusual amount of time indoors or in a car, and we eat devitalized, over processed food that has been stripped of etheric energy.  

Hyper-processed food mimics etherically rich food by replacing the unseen element of loving care with sugar, fat, and salt.  A homemade birthday cake made by a good cook becomes more nourishing than a Twinkie with the exact same portion size and ingredients by the presence of the unseen element.  Comfort food is far more comforting if it is made by a loving hand.  Etherically-poor food, for instance food that was produced mostly by a machine in a factory, provides calories without sustenance.  It has its own version of fairy glamor in that it tastes pretty good upon eating it, but eat too much for too long and all you can taste is the stale grease or the one-two punch of too much sugar.  When an etherically-starved person has the opportunity to eat a well-crafted, etherically rich dish, they gorge upon it like a zombie who has just discovered brains.

Appreciating Objects

You can instantly enrich your etheric environment by simply acknowledging the objects and places you take for granted.  For instance, I am a much safer, better driver because every night, I thank my car as if she was a person for getting me where I need to go safely.  We can argue for a country mile whether or not I'm crazy or my car is sentient.  The result is what matters: an unusually unblemished driving record.  Saying a silent and secret prayer of gratitude before, during, or after you eat is another way of imbuing your food with etheric force.  Your gaze will begin to fall upon food differently if you take a moment to thank both the visible and invisible forces who brought it to your plate, and this consideration in turn sublimates the food and helps you to digest it more thoroughly.  

Languages that assign genders to nouns reveal the passionate animism of our ancestors.  The materialist-rationalist atheist social justice warrior recoils in horror at the thought of his ancestors associating cups with femininity and chalkboards with masculinity: die Tasse; le tableau.  He uses this as evidence that they were uncouth primitives.  Surely they knew far less than he does in his state of politically correct, post-graduate educated superiority!  

A Magical-Etheric Experiment

As an experiment, try tidying one small portion of a room: maybe it's a bathroom sink, a side table, a desk, or the bed.  How does the space feel?  If you were walking into someone else's home and you saw the exact same space, what would your general impression be?  Take a photo of the space in its messy "before" state, then clean it.  Once it is tidy, add something decorative to the space.  Keep it clean even if it requires giving up other items or throwing it away. For instance, if it is your bed, make the bed every day.  If a particular piece of clothing or paperwork keeps getting left on the bed, be ruthless: give it away or throw it away. Thank the space daily for its cheeriness and its contribution to your life.  Do this every day for three weeks.  At the end of the three week experiment, take another snapshot of the space.  How does the space make you feel?  Is it changed somehow or does it feel exactly the same?  I look forward to hearing from anyone who tries this experiment -- I will do a follow up post in approximately three to four weeks. 

Thank you for refraining from profanity in the comments section.

Lack of money is cited as the number one cause of depression as well as the number one reason couples get divorced. “If only I had the money, I could do whatever I want,” is the common refrain.   Money is the perceived panacea of our time.  It is the balm that heals all wounds.

Napoleon Hill will be remembered primarily as a huckster who went bankrupt multiple times with multiple marriages, but his philosophies are essentially sound.  Unfortunately, in Hill's case, one has to weed out the good advice from a sea of rapacious greed to get at it.  In some ways, he was Donald Trump before it was cool.   Osteen never once opened the doors of his megachurches or McMansions to the homeless or the needy. When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, Texas in 2017, Osteen closed the doors of his megachurch and tweeted that he was praying for everyone’s safety. In other words, he answered the question What Would Satan Do: Deluxe Mammon Edition. As far as Byrne, she has written multiple sequels to her original tome and has never been photographed without her signature, only slightly desperate poop-eating grin.

Paris or Bust

A young Paris or Bust man who says “If I were rich, I would host Christmas for the orphans and give them tons of presents and a wonderful party every year” is lying. He who does not donate $10 to the local food pantry while he is middle class can become richer than Roosevelt — the embedded habits won’t change. The appetite for material wealth is like a drug addiction. If you grew up rich, you might remember being miserable and ashamed because of it, but there will always be that craving left behind of when things were easier. This is the way it was for me for a long time, and it is only my religious practices that got the monkey off my back once and for all.

A Minute on the Lips...

Material wealth is a Wendigo. Once a taste is had, the yearning to consume isn’t likely to stop without a fight. That’s why for every fantasy I have of earning a billion dollars, I counter with a fantasy of becoming penniless and homeless. I argue that people who addicted to wealth actually worry about becoming homeless all the time, but since they do not admit it in any honest way, it becomes a much greater fear for then than for a lower middle class person, who must always confront the specter of homelessness whenever a bill arrives or the car breaks down. The only people who don’t live in perpetual fear of being poor are poor people.

For many in this age, the concept that infinite independent wealth might never arrive like a rescuing knight on a shining steed is downright intolerable. Our lives of luxury have only served to whet our appetites for more. This is how you get a young man who lives on his parents dime and inherited a suburban house to think of himself as “middle class” or (if he is in a foul mood) “poor”. I’ve known a person who complained that her parents could not afford to finance her film career — her artsy, honors student upbringing gave her an inferiority/superiority complex and a hopeless, debased obsession with the type of celebrities who frequent the pages of W Magazine.