Young & Healthy, Do You Really Need Health Insurance
Two Cents
The concept of health insurance is simple: it's the healthy people paying for the sick people. It's similar to unemployment. When you are working, you are paying into unemployment, so if/when you do become unemployed you can collect from it.
Basically, when you are paying for health insurance, you are gambling that you WILL not be sick or need to use it. But if you do need it, it is there for you.
Sometimes you need to immerse yourself in the magic and adventure.
"Choose your friends wisely."
"People aren't always what they seem."
"Everyone dies, but some never live."
2. "Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith
3. "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
I may need to re-read this book again. The last time I read it, I was a junior in high school and didn't have the right mindset to truly grasp the concept of it. My mindset today is totally different and I would understand book better now.
4. "An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth" by M.K. Ghandi
5. "Song of Solomon" by Toni Morrison
6. "The Three Body Problem" by Liu Cixin
7. "100 Year of Solitude" by Gabriel G. Marquez
8. "Self-Reliance" by Ralph W. Emerson
9. "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari
Obama isn't the first person to put this on his top 10 must reads, so I guess I should pick up a copy to see what the big deal is all about.
10. "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling
"We don't know what we don't know."
11. "Future Face" by Alex Wagner
12. "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing
13. "The-Post American World" by Fareed Zakaria
14. "Frederick Douglass" by David W. Blight
15. "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville
BONUS
Gee, I wonder what the 16th and bonus book is. But why wasn't this book number one on the list???
It's strange, I was reading the second to final chapter in "Everything is F*cked" the same day the Bruins marketing team, partnered with the Barstool Sports to promote its rally towels. Of course this move by the Bruins sparked a huge outcry since the highly visible sports blog has had a less than stellar reputation.
I won't be bring up past incidents Barstool was involved in because 1. they're in the past and 2. those things have little to do with how it relates to "Everything is F*cked."
As Mark Manson explains in his latest book, there are two types of value in the marketplace innovations and diversions. Innovations are things that replaced one type of pain for a more tolerable type of pain. In the book, Mark uses the example of the polio vaccine. Instead of experiencing a lifetime, a short one, of debilitating pain, one exchanges it for seconds of pain from a needle stick. There's still pain, but it is brief and short-lived.
Compare this to diversions, which are things to numb the pain. This is where Barstool comes in. The value it created in the marketplace was for the adult male population that loves two things: sports and the opposite sex. It gave them a place to go for both. Barstool followers eat this stuff up, but none of the content is of any true value.
It is like alcohol (which is also a vice of many Barstool followers). Alcohol has calories, but they are empty calories. As people are ingesting the cold, frothy adult beverage, they are taking in empty calories, but those calories are about as useful as a winter jacket in the Sahara desert - making them gain weight without adding any nutritional substance.
Barstool founder and content strategist, Dave Portnoy, is not very different than Edward Bernays, who essentially coined the idea of marketing towards peoples feelings. Bernays was the guy that pushed cigarettes onto women when smoking was seen as a taboo for a woman to do back in the early part of the 1900s. These two guys made a living giving people things they don't need. Seriously, do you really need see El Presidente eat a slice a pizza from a random pizza shop in New York City? No, it's pure voyeurism.
Diversions in society are very dangerous. All they do is mask the pain and that ends up making it worse, because you're going to want to keep consuming more and more of these diversions to continue numbing the pain. And that, my friend, is the story of all drug addicts.
