There's two aspects to meditation: focus and insight. Focusing the attention on one specific thing, whether a statue, flame, the breath, a mantra, increases the ability to direct focus. When focus is reasonably steady and one relaxes into just being a bit, then the insights about how what we think of our unitary self is a composite set of conditions and how composite sets of conditions constantly change, and so on, start to affect our understanding of our body/mind and life and all that. This practice sound like a focus based practice, which are useful and give rise to all sorts of enjoyable mental states (and can indeed be very instrumentally useful for managing anxiety or increasing performance or that sort of thing), but not really the same as loosening attachment to the ups and downs of each moment.
That’s similar to Neurath’s boat:” We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”
Still better than the third world. For instance, UK is seen as a vassal state of US, and it lost its old glory. Still people want to migrate to UK. Many French speaking folks from Africa want to migrate to France and others.
Politicians and folks in the third world are not keen on developing their own countries. Clean water, clean energy, better education, less corruption are not something they are striving for. Politicians there want to make money for generations, while sending their kids to US/UK/EU for studies, while at the same time selling bad policies for public (freebies, this or that scheme just to garner power to make more money off looting via contracts, natural resources).
Everyone can make their own compounding drug in their basements, thanks to Telegram and other hidden platforms: source sema/tirz, get bac water, mix them.
The West has started to destroy itself from the inside: Politicians and activists always focus on increasing incomes (increase wages) and increasing employment (full employment for everyone), while the cost of living (rent/mortgage, health insurance, auto insurance, etc) goes up. Reduce the cost of living as it helps all kinds of people.
Japan seems to have gotten there; in their case quite a bit is due to population decrease though. That’s probably viable in advanced economies but not in growing economies.
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