From Non-Things to Things to Perfect Days

"Perfect Days" is a movie about a Tokyo Toilet Cleaner who is able to find peace and joy in his simple enchanted existence It's a beautiful movie with a beautiful message, Living and being in the world, what Martin Heidegger called Dasein the essence of what makes us human.

The movie has an interesting soundtrack including the song Perfect Day by Lou Reed. At the time I wrote this post there was a copy of the movie on YouTube. 

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The book "Non-Things Upheaval in the Life World" by the philosopher Byung Chui Han explores similar themes of how to re-enchant an increasingly abstract, lonely and unfulfilling technologically mediated life.

This person named Davood Gozli on YouTube explains it better than I can.

The Good Old Days of 2008

I took this picture in Anaconda Montana on August 25th, 2008. This for rent sign was for an upstairs apartment in a nice old granite business building in downtown Anaconda. 

I could imagine working in Anaconda in 2008 and paying $200 dollars per month for an apartment plus heat, light and a damage deposit. You wouldn't need a car if you worked in one of the local businesses. Based on a quick perusal of Zillow it looks like rent in Anaconda for a one-bedroom apartment is about 5 times what it was in 2008. If you were working full time for Montana's minimum wage of $10.55 an hour, and paying today's $1000 monthly rent, you'd have about 500 dollars left over each month after rent for food, clothing, transportation and medical care. The moral of this story?

Warren Buffett said it best, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."