I'm excited to be here!

[JColumbia]

Hi everybody! This my second time coming here. My previous visit, I was fairly new to things libertarian, felt that with this, so much to know as it was a wide spread philosophy that many people shared and something I could agree with through and through. I'm an introvert (I've always been) and was conflicted about things like having the mindset that doesn't let go when you get out of the military after having spent 13 years of your life there. Since then, I've done some looking in to things and I am convinced we would be so much better off without any form of government in our lives. Not going waste a lot of time talking about me because if you want to know, you'll ask and I'll tell you what I can. Too much to say.

 

Real excited, can't wait to chat with y'all.

[JColumbia]

It's extremely difficult to reach out and talk to people. I feel so unwelcome in the neighborhood where I bought my house and at work where I've been for several years. There's like high school type drama at work and it's real cliquish, it's just really awful.

 

I can't get in and change my profile- but I'm a forty year old guy. The name can be deceiving. I live in the most corrupt in the union next to California. I want to say more about what I do for employment, but for some reason, I decided to use my actual name. Suffice to say, I work on and around 200 ton equipment in a union job where the pay is just too good to just pack up and leave. I wish I could. I want to move to New Hampshire. I am mentally and physically (I love the cold) ready to move to Alaska.

 

I love dogs, more specifically, chows. I have a year and a half old blue chow male.

 

I obsess over Rock n' Roll, like The New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders, Slaughter And The Dogs, The Saints, Roxy Music, The Gun Club, and Bowie. This stuff is so important to me. I like renaissance music and find myself tuning in on the hurdy gurdy. Someday, I plan on figuring out how to play it.

 

I like ancient European and early American history.

 

I've always shunned away from norms and rejected fitting in to society since I can remember. I guess it's just something I do. I didn't have any idea why I did it when I was a kid. I flat out rejected school my entire k-12 experience. I went to college for a bit, but I had no direction. All of my teenage years and some of my twenties were all about punk rock until I was so desperate to get out of it, that I thought by joining the military, I could start over and have a decent life and some kind of occupational skill. Funny, because I've never been good with authority. I guess I found some way to just swallow my need to rebel because it meant my life was gonna be awesome when I was done. I always thought that if I could figure out what it is I wanted, I wouldn't have had to dabble in everything and ended up with something more akin to happiness.

 

I used to read a lot of fantasy books. Done with that. I read a lot of William S. Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, a little James Joyce, some Yeats as young man. I like to write poetry to women- it's how I met all the women I dated when I was younger.

 

I guess by never figuring out what I wanted in life, I am here, now looking for philosophy. I love it when information hits me like a revelation. I love it when things make sense and they connect. What little I know of philosophy, like what Stefan Molyneux has discussed on his intro to Philosophy, has changed my life. I want more of that.

[Kurtis]

Hello JColumbia!

 

There are several things you mentioned that resonated with my own experiences.  

 

I too had a lot of misdirection in my life, being unclear of what it is I could/should be doing.  This was quite confusing as I knew I was nowhere near my potential, but didn't know how to go about improving that situation.  I kept changing my external environment which resolved nothing.  Finding FDR and philosophy was the key that started unlocking all these answers for me (self-knowledge) and allowed me to start making the internal changes to heal what had been broken for so long.  So yes, this stuff is mighty powerful and life changing

 

I also used to read a lot of fantasy books when I was young.  Was pure escapism for me (and not in a constructive way) .  There are some interesting shows where Stef discusses fantasy stories and how harmful they can actually be.   This is a good one:

 

http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/1554/the-mindfrackery-of-harry-potter

 

I haven't read Harry Potter, but the parallels are there with most fantasy works I've seen. If you search the podcasts for #fantasy there are a few others.

 

I'm happy that you found your way out of the military.  It was basically random luck that I avoided it myself.  I was all set to sign up but the military college I was going to attend shut down the year I graduated high school.  In Canada there were only two of these, and I didn't want to move across the country to attend the remaining one.  In later years (but still pre self-knowledge) I still thought about trying it, or some other form of violent authority like the police. It wasn't until more recently that I connected the dots between the violence I experienced as a child and my attraction to these authority establishments.

 

Welcome to the forums and I look forward to your participation.  

[Stephen Jennings]

Welcome, i'm new here and looking for the same thing.

I'm liking the ancient history interest, it's my favourite subject and quite frankly fascinates me, so hopefully we can learn who we are, and where we came from at the same time.