You don’t have to play the game to succeed, you only need to know the rules, and use them to implement what is right. The game was created by the corrupt who had no other way of succeeding because they lacked the courage, the will, or the ability. They drove a path to hell and deceit, but instead of moving upward and away, they stayed in the depths, and moved to drag the weak down with them. If doing what is right does not sound like success, you may want to re-evaluate your reason for living.
What is right is instinctual, but based on the objective standards of reality itself: past, present and future abstracted away from the desires of any one individual, without excluding the concept of the individual. The subject and object in eternal union. If anything can be right, subjectivity wins, and a random moron in power can wake up tomorrow and decide. This is the archetypal dystopian ruling a Third World country in civil war. “What is right for you is not right for me. I want endless money and sex.” Morons, attack.
The players only see the game and its trappings, and despite being clever manipulators, from time to time must still work themselves into the ground to achieve opulence or relative wealth (“I’m not rich, but I’m richer than you, as you can see by the car I drive.”) Being players, and remembering it’s only a game, these achievements are rendered meaningless. This is a stark and simple reality they fail to escape because their motivations were in error from the start, and now they are entrapped by the networks that gave them their place.
In the game, your competition is lazy and stupid, so whatever you want to achieve, you can become one of the elite in a shorter time frame than you expect. It’s all so easy. At the elite level, your desire will be tested, which means your beliefs will be tested against the strength of your ideologies and vice versa. You will be expected to do things you do not want to do in order to climb the next rung of the ladder. If you were never in the game, you won’t even notice, but this is the reason for your confusion and frustration as to why you stay where you are.
How much money do you need? Enough for a place to live and food to eat. Excess comfort and luxury corrupt you always. They treat vagabonds and the poor like subhumans because these have in many ways given up. “We contribute to the economy.” But every Monday, 92% of them wake up to go to jobs they hate. The remaining 8% have the courage to create their own jobs, jobs for others, or live for their dreams.
Your goal is to model the task in front of you as if it were the frontier. Otherwise, you may as well just join the others. The dream is the frontier, and the frontier instructs the dream because the dream in its infancy is not realistic. You have more time than you think, but not as much as you need to do everything you want. You may want to give up at all points: before you start, as you start, and even in the thick of it. Failures (call them setbacks if you want euphemism) along the way are a guarantee, but if you never overcome your fear, you will only have regrets.
You should give yourself options, but not so many that you become indecisive or go in circles. If you follow through, eventually you will have no options, and this is precisely where you will flourish the most. Only crossing the frontier will make it clear what the dream is and should be, what obstacles you will face, and what type of morons will be there to try and stop you. If you become disillusioned, that is no time to give up, but instead to push on, because then you know exactly what you have to do, how the game works, and how reality works.
The frontier is unexplored territory, the space for dreams to be realized, but also marks the border for stepping into reality, and in the realm of reality, the game stops. The lies, the cheats, the pretense: reject them all. If you never enter the game, you have nothing to fear, but the temptation is always there because throwing yourself into what’s immediately in front of you cannot always yield results. If you don’t have any dreams, a part of you is dead or dying. If you choose the easy answers of the game, you must accept corruption, and enslavement to fear.
Future Consciousness 