The Limits of "Bettering Up"

I just did ten minutes of an introduction on this topic and never even made it to the topic. It wasn't bad. If you want to hear it, reach out. I'll publish it for you. But I literally stagged midway through. I was like, I can't better up, better up, pbon family, the next generation do better. We want the kids to do better than we did, want the kids to have more opportunity than we had. Hey, God drives my attention sometimes, and he's been driving my attention to watching these videos and reading these articles about people who truly believe that the bettering up, the sort of this generation will do better than the next is over and they're miserable. They're sad. You know, I'm buy it. I can't get ahead. I can't do this. I can't do that. The straw and listen. If you're quiet enough and open enough with your thinking, God will pilot your attention. He will show you things. You know what I mean. I used to deny it. I used it because it sounds too crazy to the average person. Right, God will pilot your attention. Sure, sure does he talk to you? You know what I mean? Is he is there a devil on one shoulder? And an angel on the other Well, that's that's the case for everyone, whether you believe it or not. But uh so, I'm listening to these people a lot. I don't know why. It has nothing to do with the work I want to do, what I want to do in my free time, what I want to do for you guys, you know, I mean, has nothing to do with that. It's just this thing that I'm drawn to is listening to people lament their current situation. And I didn't know why. But I don't necessarily ask why. I usually just dig into it and go, okay, let's hear you know what is being said, and all that kind of stuff. And I'm listening to a guy today right before I hopped on. It was like the straw that broke the camel's back. And he was a banker guy, and I don't know if he was rich or not, but he was talking about, you know, what his life was like and what the life of the next generation will be like, and how he had dreams about being a thing and doing a thing and he started to tear his dreams down, and one of his dreams was to be a writer. You know, I wanted to be a great writer and all that kind of stuff. And as I got older, I realized that wasn't possible, or that wasn't going to happen, or all that kind of stuff. Right, And I hear this a lot, you know what I mean? He was smart enough to say I wasn't brave enough to do it, because that most of the time is the case. Right, most of the time that's the case. What's really hard to do is to get a nice fat Paine check every week and then surrender that and put everything on yourself. Do you know what I mean? It's it's on the face of it, it's stupid. Right on the face of it, it really is. It's dumb. It's like, live your safe life and you know, party on the weekends and buy big steaks and lobster tails at dinner and be happy. And you know what, everybody really fundamentally should be happy about that we just live in a society that is so great and so wonderful and so incredible that we have so much free time that we can sit down and go, well, I know, life is great, but what would it look like if I had another life or a different life, or if life, you know, opened up a different way from me. That's a measure of a great society. I don't care what you say. You know what I mean if you think people who are dying of the bubonic plague in Europe had time to worry, like I wonder what would have happened if instead of being a cobbler, I was whatever? You know what I mean. It is literally this sort of existential dread of what I could have been. It literally is a It is proof of the massive amount of opportunity that exists. But most of this content that I watched springing boards off of this one idea that the generation before you should do better than the generation coming up should do better than a generation before it. And I'm listening to this guy talk about houses and cars and debt and money and all these kinds of things and jobs, and I started thinking, the metric is different now, and that's where people are getting hung up. The metric is different, and the metric had to change because it's impossible otherwise. In other words, your home, your family home, if you were born in nineteen fifty, was a very different animal than your kid's family home it was born eight ninety, probably not only in square footage, but in amenities, right, and the home and the size of a home, and the cost of a home. These are these are This is one of the core metrics of like bettering up. As my parents would call it. We want you to do better than we did, right, I think that mentality. We want you to do better than we did on the metrics that we use. We want you to make more money, we want you to go on more vacations, we want you to have nice cars. We want you to have Right, it's a serious limit to that. I mean, just think about it. You just think about it easily. Right. You grew up in a you know, a thousand square foot house in the fifties or whatever. I don't know what the average square footage was, probably less, probably eight hundred. All right, So your kid winds up in a fifteen hundred, two thousand, right, their kid winds up in a you know, twenty twenty five hundred. Their kid winds up in a three, and the kind was sick seven. Obviously, there's a law of diminishing returns here. Right, you get to a house size where it's like this is pointless. This is pointless and way too expensive. Better car? Right, that whole thing now, it's not denying that the game is screwed right now. Right I live in a house that it's three times more than it should be worth, literally three times almost more than it should be worth right now. And I understand that that's a farce and that's affecting kids for sure. But I'm talking outside of the current conditions, just the idea that we want our kids to have a better job and make more money, want our kids to have better cars, want our kids to have you know, the cheapest car that you can buy today is the cheapest new car that you can buy today is so much better than the mid tier car that you had in the nineties. My parents had cars. They never worked. I know many many kids who just had your parents just lived life with cars that just broke down. You know, it was like a given. It was like we're gonna go out five days this week. One day of the week is gonna break down. It was a whole different world, you know. I drove a Key Corrillo in the Black Key Ario in the early two thousands, right, I think I got it like nine or something. Oh wait, maybe seven. I drove that thing for like ten years everywhere everywhere States everywhere, and it never broke down once. No, it broke down once. I had to put it in a shop for repairs one time, and it wasn't even a big deal, like literally broke as I turned it on leaving work. This is unheard of. When I was growing up, you didn't have no car for ten years unless your dad was like a mechanic, you know what I mean, and he could hop in there and fix everything. But the fruit, the truth of the matter, was begging. Cars were crap. Now everybody's got a great car, So how does that get better? How do we improve on that? Since we've reached a point of like this efficiency, you got to remember it was also not that much of an ask. If you were born in, you know, nineteen hundred and you wanted a salary to go up for your kids, you know what much you had to do, the world was going to take care of that. Nineteen fifty. Same deal, you're born in nineteen fifty, whatever money you made. I think my grandpa worked for Sears right in nineteen fifty, fifties, right sixties. I mean, it's almost nothing he had to worry about. My dad was going to make more money than he made. You know what I mean? Now, carry it's with same mentality, right, carry that out. Well, I made X amount of money, so I want my son to make this much. I want my son to make you know, five hundred thousand a year. Okay, that's a lot of money. It's insane money. Well, what's he gonna want for his kid? Then I want him to make like seven to fifty to a million a year. And the next generation and the next generation and the next generation. Right, And what you start to realize is like, this is not a You're putting a generation in position to fail. And it's not even that society has peaked fundamentally. It's peaked in a certain way. It's peaked at a certain metric of measuring square footage and you know, salaries per year. Now, listen, there are guys out there. If they're willing to sell their entire soul, sure they can keep growing an income and money in the bank and all that kind of stuff. It's you know, it is doable. There are guys out there who do it. What does it mean to better up? Though? Because in my head I think about self reliance and independence. Right, every game that we play gets hijacked by the lizards. You got to understand that, right, every game doesn't matter what it is. Every game that we play as a society gets hijacked by the lizards. And the square footage game and the salary game and the cost of living game has been hijacked by the lizards. It's never been more clear. Control is a serious desired outcome. It's never been clear. Right, You've never seen it more clear. You're looking at it, you're watching it. You're watching a myriad of ways that they've decided they want to try to control your life and your time and steal it all the way through, you know whatever, fifteen minute cities, poly sees, jobs, debt, the whole nine yards, right, credit scores? I mean, is there anything more ridiculous than a credit score? So all these things, you know, in my opinion, are created to take advantage of people who have sort of tethered themselves to this old idea of bettering up right, living a great like. I think there's something to be said about you know, Dad is living a great life. Why can't I just have his life? In other words, like, there's an end to it, right, There's an end to the constant improving, like the bettering up made sense when you grew up in a household where you had six brothers and sisters and Dad ate a loaf of bread for dinner every night because there was no food, and you watch that you said, oh man, this is not good right, and everybody, you know, the hand me down into this and that and the whole thing. Like, there were legitimate issues in those days. But I think one thing that there's a level of pressure being put on the generations coming and maybe even the generations like mine who are in the thick of it, that is like, what, what is a good life? And I told my whole life to live a good life, to do better right, to be in a bigger house, to make more money, that kind of thing. Again, for a guy like me, I was part of that generation where I could have stumbled through life half inebriated because I came from a poor family and bettered quote unquote better up. You know what I mean. It wouldn't have been much of a struggle to make more money than my father made. It would have been virtually impossible for me to not wind up living in a house that was nicer than the house I grew up in. But again, carry that out, carry that out three four generations? What does that look like? Bettering up? And I just think we've brainwashed not the lizards, not the politicians, not the people who are like always responsible for the brainwashing. But I do think we've brainwashed a generation, if not multiple generations, to believing that it's this game is all about adding right. Sometimes it's exponential. Right now, it's an exponential thing, right to have the same house that I have. It's an exponential thing for my son. You'll probably have to make two to three times the money right to get a bigger house. And you know, it's a losing game. It's a losing game for these kids because it's the wrong game. It's the wrong game. So what is the right game? Well, I think the right game is the individual desire, you know what I mean, that's the right game. The right game is to figure out what you actually want in your life. See. But it's hard for people to get above, to get above and out of the atmosphere of the gravity of societal wants and desires, right, It's hard for them to get lift off and to be able to say, like, get above the clouds and above. The people who are saying oh, you should have a nice big house and a nice, nice car and that nice car. And now it's like burnt into their mind at a very young age. I've been burning it into my kids had you know, debt free life as long as you can, That's what I've been burning into their heads. No subscriptions, no freaking you know what I mean, unless you really want the thing. But don't you know, you don't want to wake up and have twelve subscriptions and eighty thousand dollars in college debt and ten thousand dollars in credit card debt and then be like, you know what, let's get a more game for five hundred thousand dollars. Right, you're done, you're in prison. That's effectively like walking to the police station and saying, hey, can you just put me in this cage and lock the door. In fact, that would be better. It would be better to do like several months in jail, because at least you'd have the freedom to read and work out and you know those kinds of things. Whereas you can get caught up in a lifestyle that is I just work. Yeah, I have a nice house, I'm never there. I just work. That's what I do, and then we sell this fake bill of goods to men. I don't care what you say, you know what I mean. I just don't. It doesn't matter to me what you say if you have no other option, and you have no other option, and sometimes you're in that boat. I've been in that boat. But if you think that your purpose on life is to spend all of your time at a job to be the quote unquote provider, like, no matter who's influencing you on that, take that up with your kids, do you know what I mean? Like you're watching all these Charlie Kirr clips or whatever the situation is. You got a guy on the internet telling you, and maybe it works, you know, maybe it helps you get out of bed and get to work when you don't want to work because you've been working for so long and so doing so much damn work. It's unbelievable. But I'd say probably the people to consult when you're in that boat or the children, the children that you made, right, I made These kids are on this earth. They know that I'm their dad. They see me exhausted on the weekends after I'm done mowing the lawn and doing the weekend work, and then you know, I need to watch a football game or whatever. I need to do something in order to balance out the suffering of the week. And I'll never forget a guy like I don't even remember who it was, but on the Unity he was breaking down the amount of time a busy dad can spend with his kid. And he was talking about how he would come home from work and do dinner and tell the kids to sit still at the dinner table and clean up, help the wife clean up dinner, and then you know, by the time he took a shower and got whatever, everything was kind of leveled out. It was like twenty minutes till bedtime. It was twenty minutes till bedtime. And he would talk to his kids and he might read them a story at the end of the night, and then they would fall asleep. And he would say, that was what my life was with the kids. It was, you know, forty five minutes a day. That was unacceptable to me. That was completely unacceptable shit to me. Now, maybe some people have kids that suck. I don't know. You know, I know not all kids are created equal. I could tell you that much. So some kids are real pain. And he asked to be around. I've been around these types of kids. I don't know if the parents had their way with them and mess them up or what. But both of my children were a lot of fun, you know, and you wanted to hear them talk, and you wanted to them, and you wanted to you know, draw with them, and you wanted to do these things so that you could see their reaction or hear their thoughts and all that kind of stuff is amazing. It is amazing. Still, if you didn't see the Family Gear, you gotta see the Family Gear. It's great. Watch the Family Gear. If you're a member, watch me and Jake opening the Mrs and trying the Mrs from Mrs World and you'll see. I mean that it's a beautiful video. It's it's there's so much in that video about raising kids and being a dad and enjoying it. Man. You know, with one of the standout things, it's like he's wearing this goofy hat. I don't know why you were it. I had no idea. You know, he bore this hat and he covered tried to cover his face. I don't think. I think maybe he didn't want to be recognized or something. Like that. I don't know. You don't know. With kids, I don't ask either. The best thing you can do is not get into it. They're doing something weird, but it's just them being weird. Like the best thing you can do is just don't even get into it. Just let them be, you know what I mean, Because this is where they'll If they can get in this groove, then they'll live a good life no matter what happens, because they'll lock into this idea that this is who I am and this is what I like and this is what I want to do with my life. And if you're can lock into that path, man, you'll have an amazing life. You'll have a far better life than one where you feel the pressure of the generation before you pushing you along to do better, to make more money, to live in a bigger house, to have a better car, to have a better wife, to have better dogs, to have a better fence, to have a bigger yard, to have right, the bigger better mentality the whole point of this video, the bigger better mentality. What I'm getting at was, you know, through the eighteen nineteen and it probably was only through the nineteen hundreds, but through the nineteen hundreds. The bigger better mentality was easy. It was easy. Then college came along and it got even easier. It was like, oh, okay, well we send the kid off to college, and you know they're gonna make more money, they're gonna do better because I didn't go to college. So the bigger better mentality was easy. The bigger better mentality is broken because it had to break. It was always gonna break. We're not gonna live in a world where everybody makes fifteen million dollars a year and lives in ten thousand square foot houses and has private jets, you know what I mean. It's but I think we have a generation coming up right now, and we have generations looking into the future thinking how am I going to do better? I'm going to like I'm going to theme parks and beaches and you know, vacations and going out and buying the things that I want, my things that I order delivered to my house within two hours. Like, how's it gonna get better? It can only get worse. This is what's in the minds of these kids and adults. I think it can only get worse because it is so damn good. It can get worse if we keep looking for improvements on things that are already great, on things that are already acceptable, on things that are already tremendous, right, which is the vast majority of what we deal with on a day to day basis in our society. We have a tremendous society that works really well. The outliers are the problems, right. The problems get the media attention. So it's easy to assume like all hell is broke loose. So I just wanted to talk to you about this because you may be in the boat of thinking I should be bigger and I should be better. You may have children who are looking out into the world and going, you know, my parents did really well, How am I going to do bigger and better? How am I going to live a better life? How am I gonna make them proud in that way? And then overall as a society we have to flip. We have to make up the new rules in the new metrics. We have to understand that like more debt, bigger house, better cars, more education has reached the limit for a lot a lot of families, right, And if it hasn't reached the limit yet for your family and your lineage, give it too three generations, you know, in other words, if you're sitting in a in a home that you think is too small, making not enough money, driving not driving a car you want to, or something like that, those those same silly metrics, right, then we'll give it three generations, three generations, and the average person is going to be butted up against real limitations, and we're gonna be having You'll be having the same conversation or they'll be having this conversation in their head, which is what does a better life look like? What does a better life look like? Number one? It's up to you and you should program that into your into your kids so they know that. Right. I don't have to approve of your better life. If you wake up and go, God, this is great. What there is no better than that? Right? And we also have to we have to look at the metrics. Right, with all this money, with all this square footage, with all this vehicle, with all this capability, and all this freedom, what have we found ourselves in? We found ourselves in this dichotomy of the people get all the things that they want to keep themselves busy, and we at the top figure out how to control them through those very gifts. Right, I was just talking about the kill switch on vehicles. You could talk about smartphones, You can talk about all kinds of things. Right. The metrics have changed as they should, and that's a beautiful thing. We just have to recognize that we got to talk about it. You know, what are your thoughts. I'll talk to you soon.