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I haven’t posted much lately because I haven’t been able to articulate my thoughts. There’s just so much going on in my head right now.

I’m unsure about my diet – I don’t know who to believe and what to believe.

I’m unsure about weather patterns it’s affect on the future of this country – I always try to be two steps ahead, but I really don’t know where my fiancee and I should live when we return from our overseas trip. Water is of great concern to me, and from everything I have read and heard Adelaide doesn’t have too brighter future.

I’m unsure about finance – nobody can be trusted anymore. Worldwide, economies will do anything to hold power via money at any cost. Australia’s population is planned to hit 35 million by 2049 despite the environmental issues, in order to keep property values from crashing, keep the economy “booming” and to supposedly keep our nation secure. Do we try and place our money in the perfect location to try and “win” from the instability in the world right now? Do we just do as everyone else does and keep our money in property, assume it’s the best investment ever, or do we just exit the world as we know it?

On top of all this, I just can’t see how I can bring a child into this world. My fiancee feels the same way. It’s just not fair to be making a decision like that. We love kids, but without knowing our own future, how can we possibly bring someone else into the world with that uncertainty?

There are so many to list, and while I want to consider them all and decide where I stand and what I want to do, I also know that I need to clear my mind. I think way too much and need to relax.

Interesting times…

Last night was a late one for my fiancee. I have probably mentioned it before, but she is a teacher. She currently has a student teacher in her class, and had to write his report last night (on top of all the work that she already has to do). I spent last night doing what I usually do – researching anything and everything.

When I had the chance to catch up with her for 15 minutes before bed, we just talked about everything going on in the world and how people handle this information. While she is just too busy to research “the truths” of the world, she hears most of it from me. I always try to provide unbiased information, and let her form her own opinions. She is oblivious to most of lies and deceitfulness of the world, although when I do give her information she takes it on board and processes it as she sees fit.

Others however, just don’t want to hear it. Intentional ignorance? I don’t know.

There’s a hundred different examples I could pick, but to name a few:

• Diet – meat, milk, etc. Unnecessary products that do us more harm than good.
• Finance – the sham industry. Built on debt, and fudging numbers.

They are probably the two most important to me, but even small things like Internet censorship I fear is for the wrong reasons.

Like most people, I have a fairly diverse group of friends. I went to a private school and have some VERY well off friends from there, but after working and spending more time mountain biking, many of my friends are now from the lower socioeconomic side of town. I know people from all sorts of different backgrounds, and with differing life stories. Regardless, a good 90% of them, appear to simply not be able to use their brain. Their life is purely about money, possessions and all of the ridiculous issues that go along with it.

I have mentioned in the past about how I try to get people to think. Trying to tell someone that eating meat will give them cancer is unfair. Not only will your average meat eating Australian bite your head off and disregard what you were trying to tell them, it is only my opinion that our diets will give us cancer. Until the World Health Organisation states that eating meat will in fact give you cancer, you can’t expect people to believe it. Rather, I try to produce the facts and let people do with them what they please.

My main aim is just to make people consider things. Whether it be about diet, or property values or whatever. Just consider it, and then research it. Better your life with the truth!

From the Global House Price Crash Forum, “maveri” wrote:

As we grow up we leave behind our childish view of the world and form our own opinions and source our own data for ourselves – we move on from our parents view and form our own.

What our parents told us about the world is viewed in a different light than what it used to be. We realise that their perspective is limited and designed to portray a certain aspect only and at times, the view that they portray is for their benefit in large measure, either for control or for protection or worse, for harm.

I find that the majority of my friends, and specifically my best friend (who just about disregards everything that I say as a conspiracy theory, even when the statistics are there to prove it) who have trouble “believing”, usually hold the same opinions of their parents. They are the sort of people that vote how their parents vote, and couldn’t tell you why, they eat how their parents eat, sleep how their parents sleep, and work and live and everything else – just as their parents do.

So talking to my fiancee last night, I said “either I have some uncanny ability to be able to open up my mind, and consider the extremes (not necessarily believe them, but entertain the idea), or others are extremely close-minded”. This probably sounds very arrogant – it’s not intended to be that way, it’s just born out of confusion from myself. I genuinely don’t know if others are ignorant because the truth is so scary, or if they just genuinely are oblivious to everything going on, because they just can’t compute it all.

Either that or I’m just going insane and everyone else is right.

I had some mates over on Saturday night, and the topic of property came up. I was half pissed at the time and lost my cool at one of my mates who decided to antagonise me over my opinion about house prices and the oversupply of housing in Australia.

You know those debates that you just can’t win? I don’t cope when having them. It frustrates me how you just talk to a brick wall and there is no give in their argument whatsoever. This particular argument was with someone who has never taken an interest in property or economics, and bases all of his opinions off of what his family has done in the property world (another speculator family).

The issue is, people rely on statistics and charts and newspaper articles to believe everything nowadays. From a statistical point of view, in 2006 (the last Australian census) 10% of Australia’s dwellings were unoccupied. The stats prove my point in a very basic sense, but are they really unequivocal?

When I go anywhere I see for sale signs all over the place – houses, cars, even things like sofas sitting on the foot path! I think garage sales have gone through the roof, and on the whole people are trying to free up their cash. Times are tough for a lot of people. If you are one of the lucky ones who has escaped the bad times, good luck to you, but make no mistake that there are a lot of people are out there hurting very bad.

Talking to friends in real life, or reading forums – people ARE losing their jobs. Some are working part-time now instead of full time, others just suffered a few grand pay cut. Statistics don’t prove this that well, and when you need to take averages into account, it’s often very hard to prove a lot of the things that you argue for.

…in 2006, 10% of Australia’s dwellings were unoccupied.

When you suggest to someone that there is an oversupply of housing in Australia, they absolutely scoff at the idea. It’s hard to get your head around something that goes against everything that everyone had told you when it comes to investing.

The most direct situation is when a tenant loses their job, another tenant will move into their house. As far as the landlord is concerned, there couldn’t be an oversupply in the market, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to fill his property with another tenant. While this can be true for a lot of people, if you look at it from a “whole of Australia sense”, the number of tenants decrease, while the number of properties stay the same.

When in dire straits, people will lower their standards – maybe sleep two to a room. You might find a family home with 10 people living in it. They split the cost of the rent and in the mean time two other investment properties sit empty.

In a deflationary environment rents can back peddle. After all, if people cannot pay your price, they simply cannot pay your price. It’s not a decision, it’s just blatantly not possible. As rents re-adjust and come back down to a reasonable level, the oversupply problem eases and people start to rent on their own again rather than sharing. It’s a very similar situation with the house values themselves.

When faced with this oversupply argument, most people just say that it’s not possible. When you link it to a house price crash, it’s just disregarded as a conspiracy theory or something along those lines.

As always, I just ask for people to consider the fact that I (and the others hundreds of thousands of people), may be on to something here. I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t need people to take my word as gospel, I just want to see my friends and family consider it and do their own research, before committing to a rather large uneducated decision.

My fiancée and I took my mum out today for Mother’s Day. We visited a botanic gardens up in the hills which was beautiful, then grabbed some lunch at a bakery. It was a nice day.

We all had a good chuckle at the botanic gardens… People’s laziness never ceases to amaze me. They make all the effort to pack half of their house in their car, along with their kids and then spend the time driving for an hour or so to a nice botanic gardens.

Presumably people go to these places to “escape”, yet when they get there they seem to flock like sheep. Everyone tries to score a park as close to the gardens as possible, then after five or so laps finally concede defeat and park the extra fifty metres away. Being such a busy day at the park there was never going to be a chance that someone would get a close park, but they always try.

After parking they get everything out the car, and everyone in the family loads up with things to carry. It’s time to find a “spot” – they walk to the closest place that they possibly can to sit down and have their lunch. Because so many people think like that, they end up “escaping” to a park where they are surrounded by others that are also “escaping”. Yet they are surrounded by others that they were trying to escape from in the first place. Insanity!

My fiancée said to mum at one stage “I can’t get over these people, not walking five more minutes to get to the nice spots that we go to. Although I suppose it’s good so those areas are free for us!”. Too true.

I really love not being lazy. Today gave me the biggest boost just walking around the gardens. The air was freezing but it just smelt so clean and fresh. Walking around to the much quieter areas the three of us had a good chance for a catch up and could actually talk without others being around. Good times.

I’ve been watching a lot of The Sopranos lately. I love the show, and to be honest I don’t know why. The life that they are leading is one that would just never interest me. For those that don’t watch the show, it follows the life of a mob boss, and everything that goes on around him in his day to day life. Long work days, carrying the pain of killing people (often loved ones), and stress about work and the consequences of his exploits (being arrested or killed). His family has every possession they could want, yet so many problems as a result.

Walking to the bus interchange today I noticed that someone had spray painted “Life?” on the path. It wasn’t like the usual graffiti that I see around there. This was written more like one of those “No Milk” or “Go Vegan” tags, which aims to make people think. It made me think for sure. I don’t know what it was meant to mean but to me it seems as though it’s asking me, as I walk to the interchange to catch a bus to work. Is this life? Am I living? Or am I merely just “getting by”? Doing what everyone else does and calling it life..?

It also reminded me of a radio show called “Hack” that I was listening to a few weeks back. On this particular show they were talking about death and all things death. One of the people they spoke to was a freestyle motocross rider who “flirts with death” for a living. When asked about life, he says that a lot of people are nowadays just living and working 9 till 5, and he’s more scared of that than dying. For him it’s all about feeling life and “being alive”.

Incidentally this morning as I was thinking about all of this, I played a song called Entertainment by Rise Against. The line that struck me was “We’ve all made petty fortunes but we can’t afford a life”, and I really think it rings true in a lot of people’s lives. Why do so many of us earn decent wages, but never seem to have enough to really enjoy life? I’ve spoken about it before – working to live or living to work. For most it’s a very fine line, unable to shake the expectations of friends, family, colleagues and so forth. For others it’s easy to just leave the life that is expected of them, in order to live the life that they will enjoy.

After just having four days away from work over Easter, I’ve had a good break to catch up with my fiancee. Yesterday we just laid on a rug and lied in the sun for an hour or so, just talking about everything and enjoying the outdoors together. That, to me is living. I’ve realised that in order to enjoy life I only need a handful of things, very few of which have anything to do with money. Today I’m in an office surrounded by people still trying to get a big enough hit of coffee to wake themselves up at lunch time.

This ain’t living.

So I’m at a crossroads.

I have a lot of free time.. too much probably, and in that free time I like to read websites. Alternative media, whatever you want to call it, so I actually read the news that I want to find out about, not what the papers write just to make money.

Over the past year I’ve really been into the Global Financial Crisis and the housing bubble. When I started delving deeper though, I started to see the cracks in the stories and began to read up on related conspiracy theories, to get a better idea as to what is really could be going on in the world. The problem is that now I just don’t know what to believe and what not to believe. Have these sorts of stories been around for hundreds of years, or has each generation had these sort of “scares”? Have our parents heard this sort of bleak news when they were younger and everything has worked out for them, or is this just a new thing? Do I really pay attention to this information or do I ignore it?

Ignorance is bliss no doubt, I believe that on so many levels. Finance, diet, lifestyle, and so on. I know corruption is rife worldwide, and often it’s so rife it’s actually unintentional in a lot of cases. But organised corruption on a massive scale – do I just keep on riding my bike and push it out of my head?

I’m so stoked with life on so many levels, but just so lost went it comes to what I should believe in.

I’ve finally made one decision – I’m over religion. Growing up as a kid with an atheist father and a true Catholic mum (by true Catholic, I mean one that doesn’t go to church), and being sent to a Catholic school, I had religion in my life but never forced upon me. I’ve always had the option to believe in something but the option to believe in nothing. Nowadays I see religion for the ponzi scheme that it is. Good luck to those that have found God and choose to believe though, I have no issues with it. That’s out of the way now, but there’s more to decide on.

Do I choose to believe that the New World Order plans to create a global government, and make our countries states. Is the Global Financial Crisis an engineered crash by the Global Elite? Is population control a reality? Who really attacked the twin towers?

Obviously not every conspiracy theory is true, but why are we always so quick to assume that they are false? There are a lot of truths out there once you start to look into them. What is crazy and what isn’t?

This is where I’m at.

New World Order is everywhere at the moment, just check out Google News. It’s as though something that has always been labelled as crazy is now actually happening. This video abbreviates some info into a more professional presentation.

Ugh, I don’t want to be going insane. What should I believe in?

So I was just on a car forum that I regularly talk on to kill my days at work. People were talking about “cheating” in a relationship and what they consider to be ok and not ok. I told a comical story from a few years back where I ended up in a less than ideal situation with a girl from a party that I was at. I didn’t do anything that I considered as “wrong”, although probably pushing the boundaries a bit, and my girlfriend didn’t see it as an issue either. The point that I was trying to make, was that everyone has differing opinions, and what works for some won’t work for all.

I think the biggest mistake that some people make is pretending to be someone who they aren’t, just to make a relationship work. If you are your true self 100% of the time, there’s nothing to lose. Your partner knows what you are like, who you really are, and what to expect. This in my opinion is how quality relationships are formed.

Anyway, I copped a barrage of abuse. Closed minded sheep that are set in their ways. The comical thing was that the majority of them posting abuse at me had never had a decent long term relationship. By the sounds of it, most don’t communicate when in a relationship and try to conform to the rules that society set for their relationship, only to end up failing each time they try.

The point that I then brought up was whether or not they would dump someone for cheating, or try and work things out. Literally all except one of them said they’d dump the other person.

Now I hate talking about this crap, but it is interesting. I think it’s a perfect example of people getting hung up on small things in their life, rather than just living it an experiencing it for the journey. I’m not suggesting that people let their partner walk all over them, but I just believe that people are too quick to break things off nowadays. Fact of the matter is, life won’t always go your way.

I was talking to my fiancee the other day, relaxing down by the river on a Sunday afternoon. After talking about her niece and nephew, she said “imagine if we couldn’t have kids”. In the past I’d have thought that she would be devastated, but after asking her what she would do she just said “that’s life, you’ve gotta move on”. For sure, I’d be disappointed for a bit too, but it’s not as though my life would be over. I think some people place too much emphasis on too few things. To me, life is a journey. Ups and downs, good times and bad, but ultimately every time there is a good or bad occurrence, it just opens a new door.

I get annoyed or unhappy from time to time like everyone does, but I really think you can make a conscious decision to “look on the bright side of life”.

When we talked about the possibility of not having children, I realised that although at first we’d be disappointed, it would mean a life of togetherness. Most parents I speak to say that the time before they had kids was the best time in their relationship. I could handle living my whole life like that!

Being a kid, life is just fun. You roll with the punches and keep on going. You don’t hesitate, because nothing can stop you. If you fail, you just get up and try again. As we get older, we lose this carelessness. We get hung up on the small things and let life beat us down and stop us from living the life that we really want.

If you take a step back and think about life, it’s amazing. Embrace it for what it is and enjoy as much of it as you can. It’s the best journey you’ll ever experience.

I caught the bus in to work this morning. It’s an hour and ten minutes by bus, and 35 minutes by car, but I prefer the bus. Less stress for me. When I drive I am just in disbelief of how terrible people are at driving, how inattentive they are in the mornings, and really, I just feel like a sheep when I’m in that car on the way to work.

Now granted public transport isn’t much of a step up from driving. It just makes me a sheep that is either too broke to drive, or cares about the environment a bit more than the next sheep. Ideally I ride my bike, but I’ve been lazy lately. When I used to work in the city it was a 35 minute ride to and from work, and I literally rode every day of the year. It’s not so easy when your commute is an hour and a half. It probably doesn’t help that I ride a single speed though.

This morning my connecting bus left before mine got to the interchange. At first I was a bit annoyed but I realised that if I caught the train I’d only get to work 5 minutes later. No biggie. I waited for the train while it was raining lightly and it was actually enjoyable. A few minutes to myself, in the rain. Nice! When I arrived at work though, people think I’m crazy. “An hour and 15 minutes to get to work? And you’re jacket’s wet! As if you don’t just drive!”

What I can’t get over is just how people are unable to think for themselves. The majority of people that I know just follow what the TV tells them to do, or what the sheep next to them is doing. I knew if they asked them why they drove a car they wouldn’t know. You get answers like “Because that’s what you do, you drive to work in your car. Everybody does it.”

I got started with a dude the other day that was telling me how bad alcohol is, and how awesome he was because he didn’t drink alcohol. Pity he drinks three or four cups of coffee every morning, and is one of those “I can’t function without my coffee” people. So I told him…

Caffeine is the most widespread drug on the planet. It is more addictive than alcohol. Served to children at all ages, and has huge range of negative effects.

Granted, alcohol is not good for you, however, think about when caffeine is taken. Breakfast? Lunch? Dinner? Every day?

Think about when alcohol is taken? Once a week? Once a month?

Obviously the amounts vary per person, but caffeine is a socially accepted drug. You can chug it all morning at work and no one bats an eyelid. If anything, you’re the odd one out when you don’t drink it. Try having a scotch at 9am. I doubt it would go down well with your boss/wife/etc.

So you can be addicted, and be on a drug during work, or while living your “normal” life.

This guy is happy to be told by the newspaper (and I use the term loosely) that alcohol is so insanely bad for everyone (and don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating how good it is for you), but he’s in a little dream world that tells him that his excessive coffee drinking is fine. The same guy drinks a few litres Pepsi Max every day and refuses to believe that people can be “in shape”, and eat a diet with more than 8 carbs per week in it.

Why do people need the latest fad? You only have to read your local paper to know what I’m talking about. New diet, the latest phone, new cars, etc. They don’t know what else to need. How often are people told that they should go for a walk outside and enjoy life? Told to look up at the sky and be amazed by the clouds? Told to go for a ride on their bike with the kids? No one benefits financially from those activities (except for the Government, but they are too blind to plan for long term benefits of people being fit and healthy and are happier for the short term benefits of claiming tax from TV sales and other crap), and after all, a newspaper is just an advertising medium. The paper is just doing what they do to make money. Same with the TV station.

All I’d like to see is people thinking for themselves. Believing in what they TRUELY believe in, not what they are being told to believe in. Fat chance though. In this last year I’ve learned what it feels like to be in a minority group. Only thing is my group isn’t due to my race or hobbies or orientation, it’s because I’m happy to think for myself.

Do you think for yourself? Or do you just follow the other sheep? Once you open your mind up to the possibilities, it’s hard to become an ignorant sheep again.