To Steve

Dear Steve,

Your recent death was a great fuckin' fuss you know. You would have loved it had you been around, but, then it would not have happened. You are in heaven now, which obviously i don't believe is true. You are buried somewhere underground, rotting away, stinking, with maggots devouring your flesh and converting you into manure. But lets just call one's location after death heaven, its more polite.

Anyway. I didn't know how big of an icon you were in minds of people till you died. I only thought you were a skinny freak who made shiny toys for grown ups. It was a wonder to me how this planet is full of rich grown up babies, that you were rewarded so much for your endeavor. I know you did some really good stuff in addition to making toys for grown-ups, like making my fonts better, advancing user interfaces quickly and showing me that there is no correlation between actually advancing humankind and the reward you get from it. Now I know that making affordable shiny toys that please our dumb will make you far more richer than making an actual significant advancement for humankind. And yeah, even though i can control my computing machinery with a command line pretty well, I love the lovely fonts and windows popping all over my computer screen, i prefer the GUI you know. You had some 350 patents related to all that! Wonderful. You were a genius indeed, filing so many patents in this area and getting them. But I do not own an iPad/Pod/Phone etc and it is not just because i am not rich enough, or that I think that these products don't have freedom of use. I think its a waste of fuckin money and playing with your toys would be a waste of my time too. On these iShit. But seriously, I sometimes just fail to see how you certainly made the world better connected. Yes, I think I am getting old. I know, my bad, but I cant help it. Excuse me.

And that's not all. You did more. I think more than the technical aspect of it I think you showed us how to do the management thing well in this fucked up system. I think every entrepreneur and every manager should have you as an example. Not only that, you were the worlds best salesman too, hands down. Though I personally don't think this entrepreneurial managerial bourgeoisie shit is gonna last very long, but just for the time its around you know. Honestly, I think you were one of those men who found a loophole in the system and exploited it till your death, instead of using all your resources to fix it up.

You did what you wanted to do and got rich doing it too. You had everything you wanted, except for a cancer cure of course, discovering which is much less rewarding obviously. But all you wanted was to get rich I know, everyone has to die someday. You made a fool out of a fucking mega-lot of people, even continuing to do so, yes i know, you dog! I only know one wise-ass who said; "Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died." But who is listening that to that lone idiot. You even made your company richer than the US before you died, using this fucked system's holes, especially the capitalistic ones. It was one hell of a job indeed, seriously, you were the one who actually did it. I sometimes wish I had a company like your Apple Inc., sometimes I wish other things. But no fuckin' doubt I salute you Steve. Rot well.

Happiness Simplified

The last time I checked, there still was no god there. So, instead of corroding away sitting here & watching my language skills turn into rust, I thought maybe I should just scribble away every worthy line of thought that pops in my head. So where was I ? Yeah! There being no god there. Many people are so convinced otherwise. They need someone to turn to for all their answers but don't want to look for them themselves. This is exactly the kind of situation where deities fit in beautifully. They have all the answers and all the power and they are the good guys, yay! Well, whatever. The fact remains that people have to learn to think for themselves. They have to figure their fuck out themselves, because if they don't, someone who does figure fuck out will remain in control. After all it was a very evil man who once very correctly said, “What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.”

Now in order to think for yourself you need to know what you should be doing, so that you can direct your efforts somewhere, but what should you be doing? Confusing aye? Instead of going with the regular high level philosophy lets go with the simplest of things; lets devote this one to doing that which makes us happy.

The human institution is a merciless one. You exist as one only as long as you are adding up to this large structure, this wall, like the popular song says. The moment your individuality starts to conflict with the existence of this institution you are screwed. So there is a large constraint on choosing things to do. But being a minuscule part of a very large system doesn't mean you are crap. In this large machine you can be a gear or a wire or a liver or a pivot etc etc. All of us have to accept being a small part of this gigantic machine, and there is a certain kind of force that drives us in this machine. There is a school of thought, called Hedonism, which argues that pleasure is that force. Stated more simply, a hedonist strives to maximize net pleasure. The driving force in case of a pure hedonist is net pleasure. But hedonism is just the very basic. Without diving any deeper into philosophy I would just like to say that in our times the thing that resembles that driving force the most is happiness. We are hardwired into the universe and what makes us happy is what binds us in our place.

I have observed a place where Buddhism is the popular religion. Even though by nature it is more a way of life if you get know it, but the thing is that it teaches us how to live happily. Once when I told a schoolgirl this, who was from a muslim family, she was confused with surety. “What is one supposed to do with happiness?”, she said. Now like I said we are bound by our existence and happiness directs us towards our function or goal. How do you explain that to someone who has 'popular behavior' installed in place of 'philosophy of life'? So, I said; nothing, it just makes you less miserable.

Anyway, she had a point, you cannot just follow immediate happiness. After-all humans have become the dominant species on this planet due to their intellect, not by being happy little birdies. After we had an idea we made half the beast extinct with sticks and stone and named the times stone age. The thing is that we can think and when it matters we won't act on predefined knowledge of our ways. This sets us apart from other species who have a greedy approach to behavior. Unlike them we can be less greedy for “happiness/pleasure/satisfaction” at certain times to grab the larger chunks later on. Being an intelligent creature encompasses that.

So actually we are not trying to be beastly-satisfied all the time or be just robotic goal seekers all the time. We are being a good deal of both when we say 'trying to be happy'. Now let me make this simple yet memorable. As a basic, I propose a simple formulation. The factor that decides every-time what we are doing is approximately a weighed sum of happiness we get and the value we bet on the fact our future will be happy. Just don't get the signs wrong in the following :P !!!
deciding-factor = c1 * happiness + c2 * value

Put in words; when happiness and value are counter ie when immediate happiness makes you miserable in the future (like getting high on crack), or when placing too much bets on your future will devastate your happiness (like giving up too much youth to get into some college someday), in both cases you are fucked. When both have negative signs (like being high on crack to become a crack addict in the future!), don't bother, obviously you are fucked. The best thing to have is positive direction on both, letting your happiness guide your future and your future be a bet on the things that make you happy.