“He only earns his freedom and his life who takes them every day by storm.” --Johann W. von Goethe
Geez, maybe my dear friend Tom thinks Mr. Goethe actually meant what he wrote. Tom is worse than the nastiest alarm clock attacking my sacred slumber. The man can wake you up from the doldrums of a so-so job: he will pester you into doing what you want to do. ’Hell beguile you, enthrall you, and invigorate you until you give up the pitiful misery of a disliked career. If Tom can’t stimulate you into your active pursuit of work life happiness, you’re doomed anyway.

Damned fools we are, all of us. Rich or poor, we are inconsistent and so funny in the handling our wallets.

Your happiness and your money require your boundless and playful freedom to make mistakes:  are you willing to screw up? Will you mess up good and often?  Can you do regrettable things and decide not to regret them? You are entirely responsible for your adventure and for the outcome. More so, you must be able to laugh about issues that drive others to suicide. How much fun can you take?

Hope lies between you and your happiness.  How can you be happy today if you are waiting for better times anxiously? Peddling hope can produce shit loads of money as you have witnessed and experienced unfortunately (ever been a member of a church or part of a network marketing religion?), but it is always a win-lose type of transaction. Being a sucker for hope is costly and it deprives you of your happiness, while your freedom remains uncultivated.  The best thing you can do with hope is giving it up for good.

Abandon self-improvement.  If there wasn't the Monday Morning After, motivational and self-improvement seminars could be such a meaningful way to spend your weekends and your money.  And how has that been working for you? What more is it than plain addictive behavior on a deeper and more sophisticated level? Agreed, our silly attempts to improve ourselves do have entertainment value--as some sort of spiritual masturbation.  Beyond that, all offers of self-improvement products imply that you're not good enough. Self-improvement is detrimental to your self-esteem. It destroys confidence and intuition, the most important traits you need to enjoy yourself and ultimately to make money.

Get rich quick!  Come again? Making plenty of money can be fun and if I can contribute to your drastically or gradually increased income, I shall be grateful. However, neither I nor anybody else can promise that it'll happen to you soon or ever:  There is NO "ironclad system for people like you"!  In fact, there aren't even other people like you, because you are an individual with all the benefits and disadvantages that come with it. At any rate, you can have a grand time with or without accumulating assets. The discussions of "rich" and "poor", the differences, and how to make it from poor to rich are absurd and construed. Only bloody idiots try to get rich.  Being rich won’t buy you anything, having cash in your pockets will. I suggest for you to stick with simply making money. There is nothing wrong with money and:  the--legally and ethically sound--ways of monetary acquisition are practically unlimited.

Freedom is free.  Duh!  Happiness is easier to obtain than you think. And you got some money already. I won't teach you new tricks, I refuse to give you advice, and you don't have to learn anything.  You are indeed good enough as you are today. What, then, is my mission? What's the purpose of my stuff?

I'm not on a mission from god. There is no absolute truth to anything and I am not conceited enough to believe in any purpose. If my writing makes you laugh, great!  If I can instigate you to explore your freedom and if you feel inspired to make regrettable mistakes, what more could I ask for?

Disclaimer:  Note, that everything you are going to read and digest here is NO investment or professional advice whatsoever!  My ideas have entertainment value at best and before you put any of them to use, do yourself a favor and see your damned physician! In a nutshell, this is what you can expect:

No Promise
No Delivery
No Benefit
No Guarantee
No Satisfaction

"Reason Foundation's tolerance, civility, and consistency in defending individual liberty make it a haven for believers in a free society of all shades of opinion". --Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate in Economics

"Reason," writes The Columbus Dispatch, "manages to offend leftists with its defense of biotechnology, free trade and school choice, even as it appalls conservatives by supporting gay marriage, open immigration and drug legalization."

“I never have time to think about the real Andy Warhol, I’m just so busy ... not working, but busy playing, because work is play when it’s something you like.” --Andy Warhol

“So glad to hear from you - your newsletter was great as usual. I think of the Mary Poppins song, "I Love to Laugh" - just insert "I love to hate," and it's hilariously true.
Thanks for the reminder!” --Kay G.

Money has less in common with money than you may be inclined to think. In fact: everything else is more connected to money than money itself.  Weird?  No need to panic:  just get your mind off your dough for a minute or two. Profound, eloquent, and hilarious: Ajaban will "guide you through the Apocalypse for fun and profit!™"

"I'm dumbfounded, awestruck, perplexed, befuddled. I'm a miserable bastard going through a divorce and unemployed, who at 35 doesn't know what to do for peace of mind or soul. I'm not looking for you to solve my problems - I just find your writings fascinating." --B.T.

"Did you know that you belong in the loony bin, you screwball? No one can help you anymore, you idiotic imbecile."
Anonymous, Schweinfurt, Germany

"You are a menace to society."  --S.B.K., AZ

"I'm listening to your tape on my piece-of-shit clock radio tape player. I love it because it runs slow and you sound like SATAN and Arnold Schwarzenegger all in one. I wanted to thank you because just reminding me to embrace my failures allowed me to drive through the city of Hollywood without being depressed by the concrete environment. I previously thought only when I "had it made" could I ever feel that way about that."
C.K., CA

“You have unconventional wisdom that's unique to you.  I'm not sure what the mainstream would think of what you have to say. I've noted when I talk to people along the lines that you lay out, they tend to get turned off or even a little pissed off.  I think the reason for this is it tends to go against everything they have been taught and believed all their lives.  Well, I'm going to go back and read some more of your rants as I find them quit refreshing.” --K.B.

"To me the ideas as published on your site are new and refreshing. I have done a lot of the other motivational stuff such as goal setting etc., and it is time to break out of that and get a life! Your approach seems much more natural and I would like to learn more about it."
R.S., The Netherlands

"I have not laughed as much as I have reading the information on rumpelstilz.com. Laughing is something I have needed to do right now because I have been taking life all a bit to seriously over the last couple of months. I have been able to laugh at myself and the mistakes I have made with money as I read through your website. You know what? The sun will rise tomorrow whether I have money or not and it is up to me to choose the attitude of how I will greet the day and others around me." --M.P., Australia

"When economists reach agreement on the theory of capital, they will shortly reach agreement on everything else. Happily, for those who enjoy a diversity of views and beliefs, there is very little danger of this outcome.
Indeed, there is at present not even agreement as to what the subject is about." --Christopher J. Bliss,
Capital Theory and the Distribution of Income

“Oh, Egbert, you are so funny! I'm in stitches everytime I read your newsletter. To take an unvarnished truth and make it funny is one thing, but you are completely off the charts in driving home a point with such alacrity and humor! You hit the bull's eye and drive the arrow clean through the wall!” --L.C.

"You've got to follow your passion. You've got to figure out what it is you love — who you really are. And have the courage to do that. I believe that the only courage anybody ever needs is the courage to follow your own dreams." --Oprah

“I totally appreciate your reminders and insights. I need the wake-up call. It's comforting. I do print them out from time to time and read them out to my mother, and she loves it too. It lets us know it's ok to be more ... human. God bless U.” --P.

“You've got to find what you love.  Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.  And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.  Don't settle.  As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it.  And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.” --Steve Jobs

Stay Hungry.
Stay Foolish.

Measly $25 can increase quality of life, yours and theirs: kiva.org.
Be somebody’s banker. You’re rich enough!

“Thank you Egbert, your articles delight me tremendously!” --Christine

”Oh, by the way ... I really enjoyed your newsletter on 'will power'. It opened my eyes on how habits come about.  I'll drink to that!  You've been the highlight of my day.” --B.A.

"Wow, your site has an attitude.  Every god damn site I go to is so politically correct, other than porn sites. You say it like it is. Thanks." --C.

Employees hate their jobs almost by definition. According to Forbes Magazine, 87% of Americans don’t like their jobs. No surprise here. Shocking is that hardly anybody questions the status quo of modern slavery. We, the citizens of a developed country, scream for MORE jobs we can hate? That’s what “developed” means: hating what we do with our lives?!

If you despise your current job, chances are you won’t like your next job either. 87% hate their jobs today and 87% will hate what they do next month. Am I suggesting a revolution against “the oppressors?” Indeed, but who is the oppressor? The “evil corporations?” Absolutely NOT! Employers only provide the means for you to do what you crave to hate (“It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.” --Voltaire).

School and college have prepared us to live life in hatred, to live the best years of our life looking forward to end it--with retirement. It is insane to quietly accept being bereft of an enjoyable and productive life. WE are guilty ourselves of murdering our individuality, creativity, and our freedom.

You desire to love your job or to find a job you can enjoy? Are you out of your mind? It won’t happen soon, but if you hate what you do today you can hate it better in the future ... much better, in fact. My new book “How to Better Hate Your Job” seems crazy--and indeed it is unruly, wild, and provocative. No, it is not politically correct. I’m so sorry, dear!

Oh, you are self-employed, an entrepreneur perhaps, and you believe this book is not for you?  Think again:  can you afford not to know what’s going on in the minds and in the subconscious regions of job-hating employees? Really?! Even if you are not an employer, you deal with such people every day.  Even for you it’s time to get a clue.

Get your copy now--Paperback or FREE eBook download--and tell your friends, enemies, and your hunchbacked relatives about it. For the time being, it’s an “Advanced Reader’s Copy.” Some bugs still need to be eliminated and few things have to be altered before the final version will go to print. So? What are you waiting for? ’It’s important to do at least one regrettable thing every day ...

Money by Mistake

Don’t learn from your mistakes. Repeat them.

"The psychological necessity for a belief in causality lies in the inconceivability of an event divorced from an intent, by which naturally nothing is said concerning truth or untruth (the justification of such a belief)!" --Friedrich Nietzsche

"We have no sense for the causa efficiens: here Hume was right; habit (but not only that of the individual) makes us expect that a certain often-observed occurrence will follow another: nothing more! That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions." --yep, again Freddy Nietzsche

Hola Amigo,

Woo-woo ideas like the "Law of Attraction" and "The Secret" surf the brain waves of individuals who consider themselves intelligent, educated, and somewhat rational. Misusing the scientific term "law" while neglecting utter lack of scientific evidence, we are living the worst part of the 1980s all over again. Except we are doing it with five times the excitement. Oh, and today's marketing machine behind The Secret movement is certainly brilliant.

If you are one of the LOA (law of attraction, as it is called by the faithful) disciples, I hope it's working for you. I am not making fun of you! I just think we are a funny species altogether. Every one of us engages in activities and employs beliefs that are powerful enough to raise other people's eyebrows. What more can you wish for? But, if you are in this droll attraction business and you like to describe yourself as a "down-to-earth" person, think again.

The law of attraction has roots in Eastern thought and in esoteric Christian traditions, like the Rosicrucians or the Essenians. One must wonder why the condition of our world doesn't look prettier and people aren't happier after working with that stuff for thousands of years. Sure, humankind is stupid--especially when we do things in groups--but I don't believe we are that incompetent. Of course I could be wrong, as I have been so often. So far, the law of attraction hasn't been such a blessing for the acts we have committed throughout human history, and I am thrilled Rhonda Byrne is finally turning the tide. I wish her the best of luck.

Something else puzzles me: we seem to respect ideas like The Secret just because they are ancient. If it's thousands of years old, it must be good and true. Oh no, we wouldn't question the snake oil sales method. Since it is so obvious it can't possibly be a hoax. We actually believe that stuff. Perhaps we are desperate for the aged theories because in our world nearly everything is outdated by the time we leave the store with a new purchase. You wouldn't look into a computer manual that's five months old--remember when Java was hot?--but you apply 5,000 year old superstitions to arrange important areas of your life. Just in case, I better throw some salt over my shoulder ...

If we--anybody--could implement intent X by doing C (as the cause) and accomplish result E (the effect), and every single time we repeat the process the result is unwaveringly duplicated, yeah, we'd have discovered a sweet little pattern if not a "law" of nature or whatever term fits your religion du jour. Well, if you want to become president of the United States, it's still a 50/50 sort of a deal for the last two remaining Hansels in the race. Perhaps you should teach your favorite candidate some LOA claptrap because hundreds of millions of dollars don't seem to tip the scale.

George Carlin said something to the effect that your chances to get your prayers answered are usually around 50/50, whether you pray to God, to the sun, or to Joe Pesci. I don't have to be a pessimist to realize that the probability of winning one of the next thousand lottery jackpots is still a bit worse than 50% and so are your chances for a couple of other looney desires of yours. Attract all the toys you want, but there are distinct moments when the holy law of attraction bites the desert dust.

For instance, there is only one job opening for the next U.S. president and we've burned through, what, a dozen applicants? The more presidential candidates engage in the attraction business, the more will discover that the so-called law of attraction has exceptions. Imagine 1,000 presidential hopefuls, and you know at least 999 will fail. A minor flaw of the law, you say? Uh, had Mitt Romney only read The Secret ...

Rubbish! Amongst 300 million Americans, 0.0000003% will successfully attract the oval office and become president. That's an impressive sales argument. The best LOA dude, the toughest student of the secret of the ages, gets it? Don't insult your and my intelligence, baby! To be honest, one American will become president with or without the law of decep~ ... sorry, attraction I mean. The difference that LOA makes is zero. What's quite evident in the election for president is not so clear when people are wishing full time to upgrade their personal mess. A myriad of factors determines the outcome, not just the perfect execution of a 4-step-plan to get desire X off the ground.

'Mechanistic' is what I'd call the law of attraction business, a mechanistic world view and it is as outdated as the steam engine. The Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace, an otherwise brilliant mathematician of the late 18th and early 19th century, wrote: "We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of the past and the cause of the future." Mothballs have gotten the better of that kind of universal mechanism, of the idea that everything can be explained like the inner workings of your cuckoo clock. Not even Sir Isaac would give a hoot about that anymore.

But there are leftovers, last twitches of that misguided philosophy, and they are called "anthropic mechanism:" not everything, but human beings and their affairs can be explained in mechanical terms, supposedly. We sure are addicted to structure we can hold onto, aren't we? Nothing scares us as much as raw freedom. Predictability bores us--ask your wife--yet it provides us with the delusion of safety. Limited adventure appears to be attractive, but we demand guarantees. An adventurous day or brief vacations to unusual environments are great. An adventurous life, however, carries too much risk to end up a loser. Hence our love affair with cause and effect. Let's keep the sock drawer perfectly organized. Stripes and plaid don't match.

You wake up in the morning and there is a pimple on your nose. You never have pimples but today this ugly thing grins at you: swollen, shiny, and embarrassingly obvious. This is how the damn universe works. The nastiest pimples don't show up on regular days. No way: it's the day of an important interview, you are looking forward to a black-tie dinner tonight, or you are going to the opera with a new date.

Now, what caused the pimple? Firstly, it does NOT matter at this point because it's already there. Secondly, you will never find out what the cause of this evil effect may have been. Reaction to food you ate the night before? A hair growing root-first out of your skin? Something dirty you came in touch with? Stress in anticipation of the day's events? WHO CARES about the cause?

We are afraid the effect (pimple) of an unknown cause may become the cause of an unknown effect. Our opera date will be appalled and we'll never see her again. Looking like this, we may not get the job as the concierge of the Ritz Carlton. And who knows what's next? It's hard for us to believe that our innocent pimple may not wreak havoc in our little world. The pimple may not cause a thing, desired or not. The date maybe turned off by the insecurity we display in reaction to the pimple, and the pimple itself is no problem for her. Or, she finds it particularly funny how this tiny pimple has the magic power to bring a man to his knees.

Anyway, if causes and effects were such surefire tools, we would experience much more control over our private and business affairs. Apparently we do not. We plan to cause certain outcomes and the effects seem to mock us instead. We desire for our households and our companies to run like clockwork, and then we are humbled by reality. Reality doesn't care much about our concerns. It plays dice with our sincere theories of cause and effect.

Eager to prove our theory right, and while zealously trying to elevate our romance with cause and effect to a full-sized law, we are repeating our favorite mistake once again: we take ourselves too damn serious!

If you could meticulously plan ahead, and everybody and everything involved performed precisely according to your will--from RD, production, weather conditions and behavior of international markets, and on to the last buyer--you could cause one hell of a nice effect. Alas, the world around you doesn't seem to work that way. You are not the only one experiencing occasional pimple attacks. Unforeseen things happen in real life that even countless hours spent around the Monopoly board haven't prepared you for.

Here is the problem (largely simplified):

If your environment functioned perfectly according to your will, other people were condemned to lead their lives determined by you. Perhaps you claim to have "free will" and you don't hesitate to use it, but everybody else must give up their free will for a deterministic life, pre-chewed by you? That's pretty funny. I'm sure you have touched up and new agered the rough corners of your beliefs a little, so that it looks as if others do exactly what they want while doing for you what you expect of them. But I have serious doubts.

A huge factor why employees hate their jobs is this very deterministic and even fatalistic taste of employment. Employees painfully experience daily that free will and life forms inside a cubicle exclude each other. They don't know what they are talking about, but you do? You know "what's best for them?" Just like mom? Right. We wish, we will, we cause ... and the rest of the population works in the fulfillment department, manufacturing the effects. God, I wish I were like you! And then, not even plans of so-called omniscient and omnipotent beings unfold perfectly--well, unless they were planned to be messy, that is.

For LOA and cause/effect thinking to work properly, we'd have to live in a deterministic world. But then again, we would be part of it and our intentions weren't derived from free will. Whatever we believe to be a creative idea, "our idea," brimming to cause a new and better world, is just the predictable and mechanical effect of an earlier cause, rendering creativity and intent terrible delusions. In the perfect world of cause and effect, we are reduced to being cogs and wheels in someone else's game. No trace of freedom here.

The Secret and the law of attraction collide with your freedom to live as you please because the cause-and-effect religion deprives fellow human beings of their free will. I understand we would love for our future to develop smoothly, peacefully, and in pleasant ways. I couldn't agree more, and it's fine with me if you read Hermes Trismegistos, perform Ouranos rites, or pray to Joe Pesci. It may calm your mind, lower your blood pressure, and keep you from causing any real damage. Besides that it's a bit childish, don't you agree?

Do yourself a favor and re-evaluate free will. Do you care? Do you believe your world is deterministic and the concept of free will a luxury? If so, then don't bother. In case freedom matters to you and you have any interest in expanding it for yourself and others, limitations of cause and effect will become brittle and previously clear lines will appear somewhat blurred in the future. Sure, you may "attract" individuals and things you like, but a "law" it is not by any means. How so? 'Cause I, the prophet Ecgbeohrt, predict you will attract plenty of dillweeds and doofusses as well. Oh, maybe they attract you, and since it's the damn law you have no freedom to escape their bottle of will: you're stuck in their world and bound by their deranged determinism.

Your choices are determinism or freedom. Both don't work. And of course if it's determinism, you've never had a choice. But I like to think you do. Causes and effects are in your way. I always advise against breaking the law, but the disreputable "law" of attraction craves to be broken.

For your freedom's sake.

Egbert

P.S.: “Before the effect one believes in different causes than after the effect.” --Friedrich Nietzsche

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