What's the Matter With You?

Nothing! Mind over Matter:

If You Don’t Mind, It Don’t Matter

Where can a person find the best deal on religion, astrology, crystal gazing, pop psychology, palm reading, and psychic fortune telling? Why, right here of course, because Cheap Dude charges what it is worth: nothing.

Are you uneasy and unfulfilled because none of the crap you buy makes you feel any better? Cars, appliances, clothes, toys, electronic amusement devices, nothing dulls the ache, the feeling of impending doom, the knowledge that everything ever made will fall apart?

With luck some folk find solace in religion or drugs (or, in the peyote cults, both!) Magic Invisible Super-Being or Chemical Compound, if you feel better, your money is well spent. Segments of your time, in salary form, are traded to ensure that other times are pleasant, even euphoric. Every culture finds peace--and fun--with multiple Gods and Mind Alterants, even Christianity with its trinity and saints, coffee candy and wine.

With reason, you can save all that money too, or spend it wisely. No one is under any obligation to believe anything without evidence. Any wacky idea can be “taken on faith,” logic has to play a part.

Chemical happiness can help get you through dark periods of Unspeakable Bummer, but is not a viable long-term solution. Tolerance builds and it quits working, you get sick, and the melancholic ennui is worse after all. Other than the occasional drunken revel, or psychedelic redefinition of time and space, it is better to face ugly reality with the original caveman brain we all were born with.

So keep your money, reclaim your own time. Or not. Stop beating yourself to death to buy nonsense you don’t really need. Or, go ahead, beat. When we are deceived by the constant insistence that certain ideas or products or services will make us feel better, we freely surrender our time/money to the Owners. (Churches have Owners too, and Budgets.) We don’t feel much better, except perhaps a little gratitude for the freedom to keep pursuing ever-elusive happiness.

At the end you may or may not wonder what it was all for. No matter how much crap you accumulate, at the end it adds up to the same sum: zero.

In that light, let us examine our lives, and stop surrendering to every charlatan insistently peddling diseases and their cures. Stand up straight, trust yourself, and move forward. Or not.

Inside, you have everything you need, if you look around a while.