And now that I'm 41, it's only gotten worse. I really only chase low-hanging fruit like food, sex, exercise. Nothing else seems to be worth the effort.
Sunday, May 5, 2019
Monday, November 21, 2016
The Weeknd's "Starboy" was just meh until I saw the lyric video, then I was really blown away at the overall tone and message of the song. It's cryptic, and really hard to decipher on first listen.
Did you know that "Can't feel my face?" was really about cocaine and not a woman he loves? Come on now, be honest, if you have never done cocaine it would be hard to draw the connection. In similar vein "The Hills" is about him having an affair with an adulterous woman of some fame.
"Starboy" is essentially about his descent into decadence and unabashed egotism, as his fame and fortune allow him to buy whatever he wants, and unleashes his dark side, of bragging about his riches, of going out of his way to making other people feel bad about their mediocrity. While the message is ridiculously materialistic in nature, you get the feeling he is painfully aware about it all, through the way he says "I'm a motherfuckin' Starboy", to "We don't pray for love, we pray for cars".
Isn't it funny how society at large tries so hard to keep pushing positive feel messages like "love is all you need", "i don't need money to have a good time", "i don't need no diamond rings". This all serves to make Starboy feel like a refreshing confession that "hey, I got materialistic because I made 55 million dollars in 2016, who the hell wouldn't become materialistic with all this money". I'm biased though, I like Abel Tesfaye a lot because he has that sweet high buttery voice, and he's got lyrical and musical talent. If Drake sang something of a similar nature I'd be rolling my eyes and going "whatever dude".
Did you know that "Can't feel my face?" was really about cocaine and not a woman he loves? Come on now, be honest, if you have never done cocaine it would be hard to draw the connection. In similar vein "The Hills" is about him having an affair with an adulterous woman of some fame.
"Starboy" is essentially about his descent into decadence and unabashed egotism, as his fame and fortune allow him to buy whatever he wants, and unleashes his dark side, of bragging about his riches, of going out of his way to making other people feel bad about their mediocrity. While the message is ridiculously materialistic in nature, you get the feeling he is painfully aware about it all, through the way he says "I'm a motherfuckin' Starboy", to "We don't pray for love, we pray for cars".
Isn't it funny how society at large tries so hard to keep pushing positive feel messages like "love is all you need", "i don't need money to have a good time", "i don't need no diamond rings". This all serves to make Starboy feel like a refreshing confession that "hey, I got materialistic because I made 55 million dollars in 2016, who the hell wouldn't become materialistic with all this money". I'm biased though, I like Abel Tesfaye a lot because he has that sweet high buttery voice, and he's got lyrical and musical talent. If Drake sang something of a similar nature I'd be rolling my eyes and going "whatever dude".
Friday, October 28, 2011
The other day I was shown a piece of land in an area that I've always liked. It was sold for about 2700万円, which is USD356,427 according to google.
I have about five days to decide whether or not to buy it.
From my experience, decisions like this, spending huge amounts of money for something you're not sure about, is a recipe for misery, procrastination and "thought cycling". Any activity done to avoid the decision process, for example, talking about it, thinking about it calmly in a coffee shop, is quite welcome, but the decision is never actually made.
It sounds so easy on paper, but a decision has a huge potential for regret. It's so easy to freeze up and balk.
Which is why I now understand why CEO's are paid so much. They're paid to make big decisions and live with the consequences. This is emotionally disturbing because of how accountable you are. You ever felt what it's like to be blamed in public? This is why people love criticizing and whining about things behind their computer monitor on the internet. There's no accountability. They're always right, even without any kind of formal expertise. But if you put them in the limelight, they start becoming all mellow, their balls shrink, and they lose all the acidity in their arguments, because they suddenly have this knee-jerk reaction to please everyone.
Decision-making should not be taken lightly. To be told, for example, as a programmer, that you have to do X, and that the road to achieve X is Y, and you just a little bit of lateral freedom to do Y... this is fucking child's play. You do NOT have any right to complain about the decisions up top, because it's very very possible that if you were put on top, you would freeze at every decision because it's a lot harder than it looks.
BIG Decisions are HARD. So HARD, that it's shocking at how HARD they are when you are first faced with them.
Big decisions involve great loss of money, or people's lives and happiness are at stake, huge risks and such. Deciding what furniture for your room, or names of projects, or who should do what in a silly little club, are not big decisions. If you fuck up it doesn't really matter all that much.
I have about five days to decide whether or not to buy it.
From my experience, decisions like this, spending huge amounts of money for something you're not sure about, is a recipe for misery, procrastination and "thought cycling". Any activity done to avoid the decision process, for example, talking about it, thinking about it calmly in a coffee shop, is quite welcome, but the decision is never actually made.
It sounds so easy on paper, but a decision has a huge potential for regret. It's so easy to freeze up and balk.
Which is why I now understand why CEO's are paid so much. They're paid to make big decisions and live with the consequences. This is emotionally disturbing because of how accountable you are. You ever felt what it's like to be blamed in public? This is why people love criticizing and whining about things behind their computer monitor on the internet. There's no accountability. They're always right, even without any kind of formal expertise. But if you put them in the limelight, they start becoming all mellow, their balls shrink, and they lose all the acidity in their arguments, because they suddenly have this knee-jerk reaction to please everyone.
Decision-making should not be taken lightly. To be told, for example, as a programmer, that you have to do X, and that the road to achieve X is Y, and you just a little bit of lateral freedom to do Y... this is fucking child's play. You do NOT have any right to complain about the decisions up top, because it's very very possible that if you were put on top, you would freeze at every decision because it's a lot harder than it looks.
BIG Decisions are HARD. So HARD, that it's shocking at how HARD they are when you are first faced with them.
Big decisions involve great loss of money, or people's lives and happiness are at stake, huge risks and such. Deciding what furniture for your room, or names of projects, or who should do what in a silly little club, are not big decisions. If you fuck up it doesn't really matter all that much.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Is something wrong at Apple? Or is something wrong with us?
With today's news that Apple has finally missed quarterly earnings expectations for the first time since 2008, Steve Jobs' death, a "disappointing" iPhone 4S release (depending on who you ask)...the question begs to be asked..
Is something wrong at Apple?
Will they no longer be able to dominate?
My opinion is: They will still dominate, they will still make fantastic products, but... the magic will be gone. Already you can feel the magic waning. This is not entirely Apple's fault. Consumers, as whole, have gotten so demanding, so selfish, that if Apple doesn't releasing a ground-breaking device every 12 months, we bitch and whine as if we were denied our God-given right to gadget gratification.
This pattern is pervasive in all of humanity. You buy a gadget x. You enjoy it like crazy for the first few weeks as if you were carrying a portable cocaine intravenous drip. Then after a month, your interest wanes, and then a year later, you're back at Best Buy sniffing for new models, envying the latest and greatest that other people are carrying, wishing that your two-year contract would magically be cut in half, so you can get your next gadget fix as soon as possible.
This kind of pathological behavior is no different from drug addicts. I call it Gadget Cocaine. The problem with Gadget Cocaine, is that every smartphone model you buy can only supply you a finite amount of pleasure that diminishes exponentially over time. And once that pleasure has been used up, you have no choice but to go back to Best Buy for the latest and greatest, gawking at the next models, and repeating this pattern endlessly. The only way to keep yourself happy, is to keep buying up new models to refill your supply of Gadget Cocaine jollies.
Actually, this wouldn't be so bad if you could extract the same amount of pleasure from each gadget you buy. But the problem is, just like real drugs, is that the more Gadget Cocaine you take, the more your body becomes tolerant to it. You become numb to the pleasures of getting a new gadget, and it takes more and more gadgets coming in at a faster rate to keep you satisfied.
If you were once satisfied with buying one new gadget per year, that will not last forever. Soon one gadget per year will only make you feel... okay. You'll need two gadgets a year... then three, then four. Unless you resort to some kind of meditation and strive for non-attachment, your desire for Gadget Cocaine will keep ballooning without bounds like the national debt.
I say this with confidence because this is exactly what has happened to me. When I was in my early twenties, strapped for cash, buying a new computer, or cell phone, would make me so fucking high that the jollies would reverberate for about half a year.
Now, with so much money at my disposal, in the span of less than a year I have bought a iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 White, Macbook Air 2011, Galaxy S2, Macbook Pro 2011, Macbook Air 2010, Macbook Pro 2010, iPhone 3GS White, iPod Touch 4G, iPod Touch 3G, iPad 2, iPad 1 - basically every major Apple product release, I snatched up right away.
My latest purchase, an iPhone 4S, gave me so little pleasure, so little feeling, that within a few days of purchase, I didn't really have any feeling for it anymore. It was just... another iPhone.
Now when you see news headlines that say "iPhone 4S out for 2 days, rumors about iPhone 5 already circulating", it starts to all make sense now, doesn't it? The phenomena that is occurring within me, is also occurring on a massive scale in the general population.
And this is Apple's dilemna. Apple needs to keep feeding Gadget Cocaine to the masses. You'd think that releasing a few new iDevices each year would do the trick. Well it used to to the trick a few years ago. You could blow people away with incremental releases, small updates to existing iDevices. It was all kind of new back then. It'd keep them happy. But now people have had too much Gadget Cocaine, their brains have become numb to pleasure, become used to pitiful incremental releases...that to blow them away now... is to Change Everything Again.
How can Apple do that - with the pressure of continually updating the iPhone and iPad family of products - with the pressure of satisfying endlessly increasing Wall Street earnings expectations - how can they even have any kind of intellectual freedom of making a new iDevice?
My feeling is, they don't. They are weighed down with the pressure of just feeding us with Gadget Cocaine as increasing rates, and the only way they can sustain this is by doing the obvious - upgrading existing models without major redesigns. Stick faster processors, make something a little lighter, a little thinner... but without changing the internal design concepts.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? This is exactly NOT how Apple made it big. Steve Jobs did what even I couldn't forsee, he said fuck you to the status quo, fuck you to the accepted conventions, and made an entire classification of devices. I have a feeling that while making the first iPhone may have been fun and entertaining, it must've gotten progressively harder and harder to keep innovating something ground-breaking afterwards.
Now that he has passed away, Apple will most likely resort to playing it safe, being conservative, and gasp... focused on satisfying customer's immediate demands. But this is not the road that Apple used to take. Innovation is not just sticking faster processors and making things thinner. It's precisely what Jobs did with the iPhone and to a lesser extent, the iPad - to Change Everything Again.
With the masses clamoring for their next Gadget Cocaine fix, with Wall Street clamoring for higher earnings, with investors breathing down Apple's back for stockpiling so much cash... I think Apple simply cannot Change Everything Again. Customers are too difficult to satisfy, there is no more intellectual freedom, and there is no more Steve Jobs.
Is something wrong at Apple?
Will they no longer be able to dominate?
My opinion is: They will still dominate, they will still make fantastic products, but... the magic will be gone. Already you can feel the magic waning. This is not entirely Apple's fault. Consumers, as whole, have gotten so demanding, so selfish, that if Apple doesn't releasing a ground-breaking device every 12 months, we bitch and whine as if we were denied our God-given right to gadget gratification.
This pattern is pervasive in all of humanity. You buy a gadget x. You enjoy it like crazy for the first few weeks as if you were carrying a portable cocaine intravenous drip. Then after a month, your interest wanes, and then a year later, you're back at Best Buy sniffing for new models, envying the latest and greatest that other people are carrying, wishing that your two-year contract would magically be cut in half, so you can get your next gadget fix as soon as possible.
This kind of pathological behavior is no different from drug addicts. I call it Gadget Cocaine. The problem with Gadget Cocaine, is that every smartphone model you buy can only supply you a finite amount of pleasure that diminishes exponentially over time. And once that pleasure has been used up, you have no choice but to go back to Best Buy for the latest and greatest, gawking at the next models, and repeating this pattern endlessly. The only way to keep yourself happy, is to keep buying up new models to refill your supply of Gadget Cocaine jollies.
Actually, this wouldn't be so bad if you could extract the same amount of pleasure from each gadget you buy. But the problem is, just like real drugs, is that the more Gadget Cocaine you take, the more your body becomes tolerant to it. You become numb to the pleasures of getting a new gadget, and it takes more and more gadgets coming in at a faster rate to keep you satisfied.
If you were once satisfied with buying one new gadget per year, that will not last forever. Soon one gadget per year will only make you feel... okay. You'll need two gadgets a year... then three, then four. Unless you resort to some kind of meditation and strive for non-attachment, your desire for Gadget Cocaine will keep ballooning without bounds like the national debt.
I say this with confidence because this is exactly what has happened to me. When I was in my early twenties, strapped for cash, buying a new computer, or cell phone, would make me so fucking high that the jollies would reverberate for about half a year.
Now, with so much money at my disposal, in the span of less than a year I have bought a iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 White, Macbook Air 2011, Galaxy S2, Macbook Pro 2011, Macbook Air 2010, Macbook Pro 2010, iPhone 3GS White, iPod Touch 4G, iPod Touch 3G, iPad 2, iPad 1 - basically every major Apple product release, I snatched up right away.
My latest purchase, an iPhone 4S, gave me so little pleasure, so little feeling, that within a few days of purchase, I didn't really have any feeling for it anymore. It was just... another iPhone.
Now when you see news headlines that say "iPhone 4S out for 2 days, rumors about iPhone 5 already circulating", it starts to all make sense now, doesn't it? The phenomena that is occurring within me, is also occurring on a massive scale in the general population.
And this is Apple's dilemna. Apple needs to keep feeding Gadget Cocaine to the masses. You'd think that releasing a few new iDevices each year would do the trick. Well it used to to the trick a few years ago. You could blow people away with incremental releases, small updates to existing iDevices. It was all kind of new back then. It'd keep them happy. But now people have had too much Gadget Cocaine, their brains have become numb to pleasure, become used to pitiful incremental releases...that to blow them away now... is to Change Everything Again.
How can Apple do that - with the pressure of continually updating the iPhone and iPad family of products - with the pressure of satisfying endlessly increasing Wall Street earnings expectations - how can they even have any kind of intellectual freedom of making a new iDevice?
My feeling is, they don't. They are weighed down with the pressure of just feeding us with Gadget Cocaine as increasing rates, and the only way they can sustain this is by doing the obvious - upgrading existing models without major redesigns. Stick faster processors, make something a little lighter, a little thinner... but without changing the internal design concepts.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? This is exactly NOT how Apple made it big. Steve Jobs did what even I couldn't forsee, he said fuck you to the status quo, fuck you to the accepted conventions, and made an entire classification of devices. I have a feeling that while making the first iPhone may have been fun and entertaining, it must've gotten progressively harder and harder to keep innovating something ground-breaking afterwards.
Now that he has passed away, Apple will most likely resort to playing it safe, being conservative, and gasp... focused on satisfying customer's immediate demands. But this is not the road that Apple used to take. Innovation is not just sticking faster processors and making things thinner. It's precisely what Jobs did with the iPhone and to a lesser extent, the iPad - to Change Everything Again.
With the masses clamoring for their next Gadget Cocaine fix, with Wall Street clamoring for higher earnings, with investors breathing down Apple's back for stockpiling so much cash... I think Apple simply cannot Change Everything Again. Customers are too difficult to satisfy, there is no more intellectual freedom, and there is no more Steve Jobs.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Why it's so hard to stay on top?
I have found a disturbing phenomena that pervades human beings.
When you have no success, the goal is to simply succeed, once. Really not much thought is given to what happens after you succeed. Since most people have never really succeeded even once in their lives (in a big way), it's safe to say very little people give much thought to what happens after you make it big.
It's quite simple really. After you succeed, you change. It's inevitable really. The fame, money, respect that people shower upon you is intoxicating. Only the Dalai Lama could stay indifferent to all this drug-like ego massaging that is bestowed upon you.
Just because you are humble now, and believe you have always been humble, does not mean you will stay humble after succeeding. It's like saying, I've never done drugs up until now, so even if I did heroin or crack I'd be able to stop anytime.
It's so intoxicating, that like drugs, it also has the power to rewire your brain in many ways. I actually feel that people are biochemically altered after their first success. They had a little too much dopamine in too short of a time, and that can potentially fuck up their thinking in many ways. They get big-headed, they get arrogant, they have superiority complexes, they have persecution complexes, they feel paranoid and insecure, they feel like they don't have to put up with any shit from society anymore. None of these are really game-changing in of themselves, but bundle them up all into a single package, and it's something that can really fuck you up.
When you've never tasted success, when you're a virgin, you have nothing to lose and none of this emotional baggage. You're less afraid to take risks, to be different, to do something your own way.
Once you've gotten success, and are so afraid to lose it - thinking becomes more short-term - you need easy ways to maintain the status quo, easy ways to boost revenue. Creativity takes a dive. You start delegating more often, because you've upgraded your social status and don't need to put up with everyday life shit anymore.
Artists tend to suffer the most from this kind of phenomena. Just look at George Lucas, and how he screwed up the Star Wars prequels in such a big way. All the inside scoop videos tell the story of how even his staff were objecting to Jar Jar Binks, but he wouldn't have it any other way.
Natural born leaders however, can probably take this opportunity to expand aggressively, hire good employees, and start a company. But it would take miraculous qualities such as those found in Steve Jobs to continue producing game-changing stuff. And I have no doubt that it just gets harder and harder as time goes by.
There is a certain lightness, purity, innocence of never having made it big - that can never be reclaimed once you do. How much that lightness, purity, and innocence contributed to your first success, is also the reduction in chance that you'll make a second success.
When you have no success, the goal is to simply succeed, once. Really not much thought is given to what happens after you succeed. Since most people have never really succeeded even once in their lives (in a big way), it's safe to say very little people give much thought to what happens after you make it big.
It's quite simple really. After you succeed, you change. It's inevitable really. The fame, money, respect that people shower upon you is intoxicating. Only the Dalai Lama could stay indifferent to all this drug-like ego massaging that is bestowed upon you.
Just because you are humble now, and believe you have always been humble, does not mean you will stay humble after succeeding. It's like saying, I've never done drugs up until now, so even if I did heroin or crack I'd be able to stop anytime.
It's so intoxicating, that like drugs, it also has the power to rewire your brain in many ways. I actually feel that people are biochemically altered after their first success. They had a little too much dopamine in too short of a time, and that can potentially fuck up their thinking in many ways. They get big-headed, they get arrogant, they have superiority complexes, they have persecution complexes, they feel paranoid and insecure, they feel like they don't have to put up with any shit from society anymore. None of these are really game-changing in of themselves, but bundle them up all into a single package, and it's something that can really fuck you up.
When you've never tasted success, when you're a virgin, you have nothing to lose and none of this emotional baggage. You're less afraid to take risks, to be different, to do something your own way.
Once you've gotten success, and are so afraid to lose it - thinking becomes more short-term - you need easy ways to maintain the status quo, easy ways to boost revenue. Creativity takes a dive. You start delegating more often, because you've upgraded your social status and don't need to put up with everyday life shit anymore.
Artists tend to suffer the most from this kind of phenomena. Just look at George Lucas, and how he screwed up the Star Wars prequels in such a big way. All the inside scoop videos tell the story of how even his staff were objecting to Jar Jar Binks, but he wouldn't have it any other way.
Natural born leaders however, can probably take this opportunity to expand aggressively, hire good employees, and start a company. But it would take miraculous qualities such as those found in Steve Jobs to continue producing game-changing stuff. And I have no doubt that it just gets harder and harder as time goes by.
There is a certain lightness, purity, innocence of never having made it big - that can never be reclaimed once you do. How much that lightness, purity, and innocence contributed to your first success, is also the reduction in chance that you'll make a second success.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Why money can make you miserable even if you're careful Part 2
What happened over the last year, is more or less a microcosm of what has been happening to people in general over the last twenty years. A sharp, unrelenting focus on pursuing increased levels of wealth, power, and fame - with very little thought given to the actual consequences.
After scoring those huge sales in the first few months, sales eventually started dropping. And while I was still able to be quite satisfied with that amount of income (it was, after all, over 10 times the amount I was making before), there was always this nagging feeling that, if I put some more effort into it, I could make more.
At the same time, rivals took notice of my app and were not pleased at how I was taking a huge portion of their potential sales. I started getting strange bogus reviews on my app that said things somewhere along the lines of:
"I bought this app but it's nowhere near as good as what all the other reviewers say. They're all shills"
and countless variations of it. Every time this happened, sales would drop a sizable 30%-40%, but the worst part was the psychological damage it caused. I couldn't stand being fucked over unfairly by someone else, so I started obsessing over finding out who wrote these reviews. Once I did, it was the start of a most tiring and bothersome "behind the scenes war" where we'd try to manipulate review pages to our own benefit.
I absolutely despised this pointless activity, because it focuses your energy on crude, dishonest things. Even worse, I don't think this is a necessary evil of business. When both competitors bash each other openly, both sides lose mores sale than if nobody bashed anybody. Everybody loses. However, if you just let the other competitor bash you without retaliating, it's truly gut-wrenching as customers falsely believe you are the scammer while the real evil-doer is supposedly selling a "great genuine product". You're the only one who loses while the asshole gets away with more money that he really doesn't deserve.
It was about that time I could feel a sour black pus growing from inside of me... a genuine hatred for all my competitors and a desire to crush them. So I beefed up Real英会話 with a newfound gusto, added in-app updates, a phrase request system which would cleverly encourage users to leave good reviews, in hopes of constantly flooding out the fake bogus ones.
All my efforts paid off, as my sales shot up again to stratospheric amounts starting from February 2011, which posted record sales of ¥7,771,645 in a single month.
Things like this don't happen without people taking notice, so it wasn't long before I my tax accountant suggested to me to form a company. I always hesitated about making a company because I had no interest in hiring other people, and it just seemed like a lot of paperwork and stuff to save what was at most 5% in tax.
It felt good to be noticed - especially by my dad, who was blown away by the numbers, and even my tax accountant, who said that this kind of revenue for a single person in Okinawa was almost unheard of. I felt smart, talented, above everyone else...
However, I noticed that the amount of time I spent on work started to grow slowly, to the point where I had no idea when I was ever really just laying back and having a good time. I completely stopped playing video games, I barely watched any movies, I never just "hung out" with people. My mind was so sharp and focused on making more money, and that meant checking reviews every 10 minutes, answering support mails every 30 minutes, and never letting my eye off the ball. Can you imagine trying to eat lunch with a friend, only being bothered by the idea that some hideous review was just posted and taking your sales away? Anything that was unrelated to making money, having intense sex, or stuffing my body with good food was instantly labeled a waste of time. I became obsessive, irritable, neurotic.
Slowly, I grew increasingly irritable at small things. Red lights. Forgetting to put beer in the fridge. Forms to fill out. Then, I grew irritated at microscopic things. Waiting for water to boil. Having to get out coins from my wallet. Or having to bring that stupid bill to the cashier every time I ate out at Eco Room. I started becoming bossy and ordering my secretary to take care of these microscopic annoyances, which she did... and that made me happy again.. for a while...
In the end, I just wanted everything that I wanted more instantly and more intensely. It's as if my mind were screaming: "MORE! MORE!! FASTER! MORE PAINLESSLY!! 2 CLICKS TO 1 CLICK! 1 CLICK TO AUTOMATIC!" and it would just never stop.
After scoring those huge sales in the first few months, sales eventually started dropping. And while I was still able to be quite satisfied with that amount of income (it was, after all, over 10 times the amount I was making before), there was always this nagging feeling that, if I put some more effort into it, I could make more.
At the same time, rivals took notice of my app and were not pleased at how I was taking a huge portion of their potential sales. I started getting strange bogus reviews on my app that said things somewhere along the lines of:
"I bought this app but it's nowhere near as good as what all the other reviewers say. They're all shills"
and countless variations of it. Every time this happened, sales would drop a sizable 30%-40%, but the worst part was the psychological damage it caused. I couldn't stand being fucked over unfairly by someone else, so I started obsessing over finding out who wrote these reviews. Once I did, it was the start of a most tiring and bothersome "behind the scenes war" where we'd try to manipulate review pages to our own benefit.
I absolutely despised this pointless activity, because it focuses your energy on crude, dishonest things. Even worse, I don't think this is a necessary evil of business. When both competitors bash each other openly, both sides lose mores sale than if nobody bashed anybody. Everybody loses. However, if you just let the other competitor bash you without retaliating, it's truly gut-wrenching as customers falsely believe you are the scammer while the real evil-doer is supposedly selling a "great genuine product". You're the only one who loses while the asshole gets away with more money that he really doesn't deserve.
It was about that time I could feel a sour black pus growing from inside of me... a genuine hatred for all my competitors and a desire to crush them. So I beefed up Real英会話 with a newfound gusto, added in-app updates, a phrase request system which would cleverly encourage users to leave good reviews, in hopes of constantly flooding out the fake bogus ones.
All my efforts paid off, as my sales shot up again to stratospheric amounts starting from February 2011, which posted record sales of ¥7,771,645 in a single month.
Things like this don't happen without people taking notice, so it wasn't long before I my tax accountant suggested to me to form a company. I always hesitated about making a company because I had no interest in hiring other people, and it just seemed like a lot of paperwork and stuff to save what was at most 5% in tax.
It felt good to be noticed - especially by my dad, who was blown away by the numbers, and even my tax accountant, who said that this kind of revenue for a single person in Okinawa was almost unheard of. I felt smart, talented, above everyone else...
However, I noticed that the amount of time I spent on work started to grow slowly, to the point where I had no idea when I was ever really just laying back and having a good time. I completely stopped playing video games, I barely watched any movies, I never just "hung out" with people. My mind was so sharp and focused on making more money, and that meant checking reviews every 10 minutes, answering support mails every 30 minutes, and never letting my eye off the ball. Can you imagine trying to eat lunch with a friend, only being bothered by the idea that some hideous review was just posted and taking your sales away? Anything that was unrelated to making money, having intense sex, or stuffing my body with good food was instantly labeled a waste of time. I became obsessive, irritable, neurotic.
Slowly, I grew increasingly irritable at small things. Red lights. Forgetting to put beer in the fridge. Forms to fill out. Then, I grew irritated at microscopic things. Waiting for water to boil. Having to get out coins from my wallet. Or having to bring that stupid bill to the cashier every time I ate out at Eco Room. I started becoming bossy and ordering my secretary to take care of these microscopic annoyances, which she did... and that made me happy again.. for a while...
In the end, I just wanted everything that I wanted more instantly and more intensely. It's as if my mind were screaming: "MORE! MORE!! FASTER! MORE PAINLESSLY!! 2 CLICKS TO 1 CLICK! 1 CLICK TO AUTOMATIC!" and it would just never stop.
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