The View From Here

I thought this opin­ion arti­cle was great… Henry Rollins: Tee­ing Off: Help Your­self to Self Helpfrom The Huff­in­g­ton Post I can still remem­ber my mother com­ing back to our apart­ment after one of her marathon Erhard Sem­i­nar Train­ing, oth­er­wise known as EST, week­ends and exclaim­ing such cultish bull­shit as, “Be here now!” “You’re an ass­hole!” Well, she got it half right but I remem­ber won­der­ing what grave mis­for­tune befell adults to send them run­ning herd-like into hotel ball­rooms, pay out­ra­geous sums of money to sit in fold­ing chairs and be told for hours, by some­one they had never met, how badly they were fuck­ing up their lives. This group cry was clas­si­fied as self-help. Why you had to do it together with hun­dreds of other peo­ple was beyond me but it made my mother happy in a slightly dis­turb­ing waiting-to-be-beamed up kind of way, so what the hell? Self-help books, CDs, shows, sem­i­nars, and retreats are every­where. Your neu­roses are big busi­ness. The only down­side is per­haps some­day you’ll become strong enough to leave the tem­ple with your wal­let, so self-helpers are always quick to remind you that you’re not quite cured and they should know — they were once [ ... ]

DEBT FREE AT AGE 28!!, orig­i­nally uploaded by lemon­jenny. This arti­cle and it’s com­ments are quite sad. Con­sumer debt in Amer­ica is hor­ri­ble! The sto­ries here (some stu­pid, some sad, some amaz­ing, some uplift­ing) speak to a real prob­lem in our soci­ety. What will my gen­er­a­tion do when they retire? We so often hear about the United States as being the wealth­i­est coun­try in the world, how­ever if you pulled the top 5% from that cal­cu­la­tion — how wealthy would we be? I think our pub­lic school sys­tems need to teach per­sonal finance to our chil­dren. As soon as a per­son turns 18, they are assaulted with credit card offers and often times, they accept because they want the lifestyle that MTV and pop­u­lar cul­ture por­trays. There is a gen­eral stu­pid­ity to per­sonal finance in my gen­er­a­tion to be sure (i.e. the num­ber of peo­ple around me who are so very excited by their high tax return as though that is some­thing to be proud of). At any rate, these sto­ries got me think­ing [ ... ]