2024-12-18 Journal Entry

Today is an off day for me. I think I need to be taking more of these while I travel, days to just sit around and write and do nothing in particular. I don’t want them to have to be super productive days, days where I will but for the wrath of god write or get a bunch of stuff done or whatever.

I had dinner with Dan’s family yesterday, and it was the first time I was trying to explain my year off to someone who doesn’t really know me particularly well (or really at all). I think they were fairly comfortable with my vagueries, which is fine. What I really want to convey out of all of this is that the world is wide open. That my future possibilities are open and waiting to align with where my values are. There’s something in here about how everyone really does have a niche, and that those niches are generally created instead of found. Like, I have this thought about how I would be open to starting a business or something, but that I don’t really want to operate in the traditional business model. What I really care about is freedom and flexibility, and litte more than that. I also really appreciate the “freely given, freely received” aspect of Buddhism, and I’d love to try and carry that forward in a way that’s interesting and exciting. How can we best encourage giving without expectation of a reward? How do not reward hoarding?

To back up on that, why do people hoard or try and get a lot of money? My read is that it’s primarily about security, that by having more things we’ll be more secure either because (a) we’ll have so much money that we can’t possibly spend it all, much less go hungry or whatever; or (b) that we’ll be more secure because we’ll be remembered. (b) is perhaps easier to address by not having prices on things. But then of course you’re just reinventing the economy of bartering or whatever – everything gets a price eventually.

Well I guess to back up even further – I’m not really trying to make this a communist utopia or whatever, and I’m really not sure what “this” is. A community? A platform or tool? My reference model is something like a monastery, each person doing what they can and receiving what they need and so on, but truth be told I don’t actually know exactly how that works for people in old age or people with medical problems, etc. Presumably they’re just not in monasteries? But when I went to Meteora there was definitely and “elderly hut” on one of the grounds where old monks were cared for, so there’s some amount of precedence for it. And great teachers are definitely cared for, but I don’t have a great sense of how that works for non-priests or whatever.

Perhaps this is a manifesto after-all. It’s just like “intentional communities 101” though, and I’d love to see how that works in practice. Perhaps it’s really just about being self-sufficient and developing a community around that.