When Good Isn't Good

There's an online streamer who goes by the nickname of HasanAbi. What does he stream about? I actually have no idea, I just know of him. I also know that a few years ago there was a discourse around the size of his head. He's known for his small head, and apparently his viewers always teased him for it (as people who watch online streams typically do).

Then there was a Korean streamer, I actually forget who it was. It was either Jinnytty or Hachubby. But anyway, they got to meet Hasan in real life and the first thing they said was: "Wow, your head is so small!".

So this sounded really bad to Hasan at first because it felt like he was being teased by this Korean lady who never saw him before. Then a plot twist! Having a small head is actually a great asset for Koreans because in Korean beauty standard, a smaller head is better than a bigger head.

Even Google says this:

Hasan went from a frowny face to a smile in an instant. The fact of the matter remains the same, his head is small compared to his body; but what could have offended him a few seconds ago was now pleasing him. So is there goodness or badness inside of the head just being small, or is it up to the perspective?

I started with this story today because I wanted you to think about something. It's easy to see that certain things are good or bad depending on perspective. A big box of cigarettes you can buy at the airport duty free shop is amazing for a smoker but it's quite horrible for a non-smoker.

But what if good, the entire concept of good, isn't really good at all? What if good itself can be bad?

I like talking about procrastination. Procrastination is an umbrella term that encompasses so many different behaviors and I could talk about it in 100 different ways. The fun thing about the 100 different ways is, it usually ends up with the same conclusion: we prefer doing nothing over doing something.

Why is this? Why do we love defaulting to idle so much?

Many people consider “labor” as “suffering” and “rest” as “comfort”, and “play” as “joy”. But if we look outside the human world and look at the animal kingdom the purpose of labor ultimately comes down to survival. We have to do something to get food to eat. Farming and hunting happen to provide us food but it also expends energy.

Animals, including humans, need exercise to be healthy. But when we think in terms of concept, labor and exercise are different; we think labor is difficult suffering but exercise is voluntary play.

Activities that sustain survival are labor and exercise at the same time. Animals in the wild always use their energy for their next meal so you don’t see any obese animals. Most animals in the animal kingdom live their natural lifespan barring being hunted by humans or other animals.

Humans enjoy a longer average lifespan but they suffer from ailments throughout their life and they likely die due to illnesses. But the people who enjoy a naturally longer life share one prominent trait: they have a physically laborious job and don't overeat.

Animals bred by humans have a similar fate to humans who prolong their unhealthy lives. Many domestic pets and animals kept in captivity are susceptible to infectious diseases and other human-like diseases like stomach ulcers. Chickens, milk, etc are marketed with "not treated with chemicals" as if that's a selling point precisely because... Most of the times they are treated with chemicals to get them forcibly healthy. Why would they be healthy when they're kept in captivity and do nothing but eat and lay eggs or poop?

Humans created tools to make their life more convenient. With the great convenience productivity increased, which led to excess that people fought over. Then with fighting skills and technology improving some realized that it's so much better to just reap the benefits that others have worked for, and boom! Humans invented slavery.

In times of slavery the enslaved had a worse quality of life than wild animals. Animals get to at least enjoy the fruits of their labor but the enslaved never got to fully take the fruits of their labor. They always needed to work for them and their slavers which inevitably led to overwork. Most of them died young or were otherwise incapacitated after a certain age (if not mistreated to death by the slavers).

On the opposite end the slaver didn’t do any labor which of course led to lack of exercise and illnesses that come from lack of exercise. As a result both parties started dying early, with opposite reasons: the enslaved died due to overwork and malnourishment while the slaver died from lack of exercise and overnourishment.

Consider your life when all of your problems are solved. What the heck would you even do? The slavers had this exact problem, they were also bored out of their mind for they had nothing to do. This necessitated the development of entertainment. The three "pillars" of entertainment were intoxication, singing /dancing, and sex. When one works, play is rest; but ironically when one overdrinks, has too much sex, and sings / dances their heart out it’s actually much more tiring than work (I've been exhaustedly hung over before, so I can tell you that from experience).

Play ceases to be a means of recovery from strenuous work, it ends up becoming an additional burden on the body. Those who engaged in play not as a relief but a distraction needed to further develop play to satisfy their uneasy mind, so more and more stimulating ways of play were developed.

We don't have to look far for examples of this. Look at the classic Mario games you grew up playing and look at whatever the hottest game of the now is. People simply can't be entertained by Mario anymore.

As demonstrated by all of these, an unequal social structure brought about suffering to both the ruling and the subject. Even the ruling became a victim to the social structure. Those who get paid are allowed to participate in play but isn't that more like... Work? Rather than play?

We now have jobs that sing, jobs that dance, jobs that give sexual pleasure, and jobs that serve drinks. Now play and labor are completely separate concepts. There is a social class that only does labor, and there is a social class that only does play.

Physical activity was a natural part of life but even that has fallen to the same fate. Now we have professional athletes who get paid to exercise and and people who watch them by paying money as spectators. People who don’t play sports talk about Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan. The discussion is about sports but it has nothing to do with their health, it's just a discussion about OTHER people's health and performance.

In the past people divided themselves by class to have the slavers and the enslaved. Now we have a division between capitalists and laborers. The enslaved and laborers have to work until they die and the slavers and capitalists play until they die. This raised a social consensus that labor was a lowly thing to do. Labor was a thing designated for the poor and under-resourced.

As this social divide deepened the workers started thinking “I, for once, don't want to work. For once I want to hire other people to do my work. I want to be in comfort, I want other people to work instead of me”. So one might partake in labor but the ultimate goal is to graduate from a life of labor. They are motivated to work because the money they get from it will one day grant them freedom from labor and the ability to play all the time.

This happens to be the goal of life for a sizable amount of people. Labor is not the goal; play is. Or in the context of today's writing, IDLING is the goal. But with this outlook labor has no meaning or gratification so it naturally follows that life is full of suffering.

You don’t want to work, but you have to for money. So you work to get money and now you have to relieve stress to go back to the workplace tomorrow. So you pay to play. You go to the boxing studio to box but the coach gets paid to box while you pay to box. Getting paid to box is work, paying to box is play.

Getting paid to sing is labor and paying to sing is play. As such play and labor have separated. Paying means you are voluntarily choosing the action. Therefore, the driver of the decision is the self.

On the other hand getting paid means you wouldn’t do it if you weren’t paid; so the driver of the decision to work isn’t the self, it is money. I remember my surf instructor in Hawai'i wistfully saying "I'm doing this so my son can have a better life than me", as if he wouldn't be doing anything remotely related to surfing if it weren't for money. As someone who loves Hawai'i and surfing that really broke my heart.

Interestingly the self-driven decision is also fueled by money. I want to pay money so I can rest up and make more money tomorrow. We're still in the same framework of being controlled and dominated by money.

This is the extent to which we are controlled by money. The goal of our work is “working less to get paid more”. But how can I logically get paid without labor? If I'm charging the person who hired me $1k per hour but never work the hour, we call that fraud.

"I want to work less and get paid more, ideally I don't want to work at all and just get paid" expressed in other words is "I want to fraud and steal from others".

Our daydreams of “if only my passive income would allow me to be free”, “how great would it have been to have bought Apple stock or land in Palo Alto in the 2000's”, “I need my parents to favor me instead of my siblings for inheritance”, these ultimately mean that we want to become a capitalist extractor.

So is what's good, really good? Idling and getting all your needs met, it SOUNDS good. But is it really good? How can you see that a life of movement, a life of action, and a life of practice, no matter how hard or strenuous it is, is the GOOD life?