Begging Bowl '25: I'm Looking for Two Readers Willing to Help Me Buy a New Thrift-Store Shirt

The goal is to move incrementally toward a kind of happiness that actually makes us happy. That's the goal of my work.

I admire unvarnished honesty, which is scarce. And like everything else that's increasingly scarce, it behooves us to hoard our stash. In the unvarnished honesty box, I keep "When it becomes serious, you have to lie," (Jean-Claude Juncker, May 2011); "You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" (World Economic Forum - WEF, 2018), and the evergreen classic, Goldman Sachs bankers are "doing God's work." (Lloyd Blankfein, 2009).

Making a living as a writer is hard, and getting harder. There are few middle-class jobs (whatever that is--please remind me) with conventional paychecks and benefits for writers of any stripe, and fewer crumbs spilling out of the free-lance basket as AI chatbots churn out content in near-infinite quantities.

Writers produce a product that has a cost but no price tag because it has no value in the marketplace. It takes labor to produce an essay or analysis, but since all content that isn't artificially scarce (i.e. content that requires a streaming/digital subscription to access) is "free," then our product is competing for visibility / value in an Attention Economy with a super-abundance of content, generated not just by mainstream and alternative media but by hundreds of millions of social media participants and commentators, and of course AI chatbots.

The value proposition of supporting individual creators is a tougher sell than a subscription to streaming services with essentially unlimited content. With the collapse of advert revenues flowing to individual creators--only those with millions of views collect a living from adverts now--we're reliant on individual supporters like you for our livelihoods.

The competing content is near-infinite, while attention and paying supporters are scarce. The competition for visibility, income and subscribers is driving a perverse incentive to create more of what makes it near-impossible to gain visibility--clickbait titles and endless streams of tweets, Notes, comments, etc., in a manic reach for attention that reminds me of a mass of swimmers whose struggles threaten to drown us all.

(The selling of sex is of course a much more lucrative realm, as 20-year old Sophie Rain proves by earning $43 million on OnlyFans. Impressive by any measure.)

It seems to me that stripped of niceties, we're all beggars now, asking for "spare change" from supporters. The street corner has been replaced by Substack, Patreon, Kickstarter, Medium and the rest of the creators-supporters-income-platform universe.

Please excuse my shredded work shirt. Being a beggar is not exactly high status, and so we try to cloak the unvarnished truth of the matter with niceties, much like unfortunates who have just been laid off saying "I'm exploring other options," which include any means to avoid, well, begging.



As a "creator", ahem, I'm a beggar. I feel no shame, as begging for your support is now part of the writerly profession, and why put on airs? I am of peasant stock, and rather proud of it, as the peasants do the hard, tiresome work of growing the food and keeping the status quo glued together, while the knights and nobles (in today's world, the RIF-RAF -- Rich Internet Financiers and the Rich and Famous)--get the glory and the wealth.

I have a craft, wordsmithing and analysis, but what benefit does my craft offer you in exchange for spare change? Two things come to mind.

1. Consider the beggar who offers you a blessing for the coins you drop in the battered copper bowl.

A blessing has a peculiar nature: it is both "worthless" as it is intangible, and potentially life-changing, along with the act of giving. A blessing can be empty or it can become a powerful force in our life.

2. My focus is on actionable insights that prompt us to change our lives for the better. It's not easy to modify the trajectory of our lives, and the world we inhabit seems designed to distract us from changing course.

If a hard rain's a-gonna fall, then time no longer stretches lazily into the distant future. The future is now, or we've already lost control of it.

So here's my value proposition: a blessing for changing your life starting now via actionable insights into the world and the messy, uncertain, inherently risky process of change. Change comes in all sorts of forms; it can be internal or incremental, barely visible, or surprising and visible to all.

Here is a list of this year's Musings Reports that are reserved for those who toss a few coins in my begging bowl.

What's Actionable in AI? 2/1/25

Where We've Been, Where We're Going 1/25/25

Is Digitization Catastrophic for Civilization? 1/18/25

Is the World Becoming Uninsurable? 1/11/25

Six Dynamics That Will Shape Our Future 1/4/25

OK, we've reached the rattling the begging bowl denouement: I'm looking for two readers who are willing to help me buy a new thrift-store shirt to replace the one that's shredded from toil and time.

My work slippers are also approaching the point where replacement becomes necessary, and if you're willing to toss a few quatloos in the bowl to fund this, I would be very grateful.



Two final thoughts. It's gratifying to earn the praise of readers, but uncomfortably self-congratulatory to post whatever praise drifts my way. I'm swallowing the discomfort because this is, after all, me rattling the begging bowl:

Thomas1760:
"I listened to your interview with Adam Taggart twice. I sense calm wisdom... need to be specific in my reading and research, so when I come across a resource with calm wisdom (wisdom is making the complicated simple) for a fair price it helps me to organize my intake properly. This area A.I. is obviously extremely important to understand. Now, I have a good resource and I don't need to shotgun it."

Secondly, the point of changing one's life is to increase our security, prospects and happiness. The French writer Michel Houellebecq's observation strikes me as a succinct summary of the status quo: "I have the impression of being caught up in a network of complicated, minute, stupid rules, and I have the impression of being herded towards a uniform kind of happiness, toward a kind of happiness that doesn't really make me happy."

The goal is to move incrementally toward a kind of happiness that actually makes us happy. That's the goal of my work.

There are multiple ways to toss a few coins in the begging bowl ($7/month or $70/year):

1. Subscribe to my Substack

2. Become a patron via patreon.com

3. PayPal or US mail.

To those who toss caution to the winds and subscribe: thank you. It's going to be an exhilarating ride.




New podcasts:

SPECIAL REPORT: Did China's DeepSeek Just Pop The AI Stock Bubble? (56 minutes)

CHS on Geopolitics and Empire: Anti-Progress, Resource Constraints, & Digital Neofeudalism (1:29 hrs)

KunstlerCast417: Charles Hugh Smith, Progress and Anti-Progress (1 hour)

Charles Hugh Smith on the Extremes in the U.S. Economy and Markets. (26 min)

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My recent books:

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases originated via links to Amazon products on this site.

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $18, (Kindle $8.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

The Asian Heroine Who Seduced Me (Novel) print $10.95, Kindle $6.95 Read an excerpt for free (PDF)

When You Can't Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $18 print, $8.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $9.95, print $24, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $8.95, print $20, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $5, print $10, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $4.95 Kindle, $10.95 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free


Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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