Marriage, Money & Politics: For Love or… for the Movement?

I've put so much work into these the
anti-vegan videos just trying to promote health and stop this movement which is killing people making them sick what I want to ask for our donations essentially I somehow gotta get money now I make videos about eating raw meat the natural human diet I make anti vegan videos because plant-based diets are the number one reason why human health has been destroyed 602 dollars per month most of you know that I don't get any money from YouTube I've never got one cent from YouTube because they disabled the Adsense ten years ago when I made the account and they don't answer my emails nothing because they hate my channel it's obvious you which is all about veganism and of course this is all very unstable anyway because my YouTube account could get bad anytime a lot of you asked me or the last years months where I get money and how for the raw meat and everything and the thing is that I had a girlfriend who I split up it now whose parents are millionaires and they gave me 500 euros at least every month usually more so I never had to think about money and I would never make a video like this and actually can't stand videos like this when people make them but I'm in a situation where I gotta do it I pretty much can't afford this diet anymore because I don't get the money anymore because I met somebody else and I chose her over everything else and I was actually gonna move to the Canary Islands I had already planned it out because the parents are gonna pay for it so financially I was all set and I gave it all up for somebody else and now because plant-based diets are the number one reason why human health has been destroyed 602 dollars per month the thought that we'll have been running through many of your minds is this what were his girlfriend's parents thinking when they decided to become donors and patrons supporting this particular cause his bizarre political slash nutritional movement to destroy veganism were they themselves true believers in what he was preaching did they just sort of tolerate it did they think well our daughter loves this guy so even if he's a little bit crazy or this is a waste of time and money he will support this undertaking it's it's just interesting to imagine who those people must have been or how they must have felt about their daughter and their money being devoted to supporting this this particular cause but for me a lot watching this I'm also self-critical and looking at the the parallelisms you know I have to think about how my girlfriend's parents right now in real life how they regard me and my pursuit of my equally incomprehensible right because I know my girlfriend's parents regarded veganism as a cult when I first got involved with my girlfriend her parents denounced me as a cult leader her parents and at least one of her brothers I forget if it was both wrote denouncing me the harshest terms possible comparing me to Jim Jones and Jonestown and and really seriously saying that veganism was a dangerous cult that she was being drawn deeper and deeper into and to be honest with you that creates a rift between me and them that's never gonna be bridged it's never gonna be okay we're never gonna be cool with each other me and her parents me turbos it's been a year and a half now it's not getting better it's also not getting worse but there's a very real sense in which they don't support anything I'm doing or ever would be doing like you know in terms of veganism or my career or activism this YouTube channel obviously but they also don't support my aspirations just even in baking baking bread baking cakes vegan cuisine they have zero sympathy for that and zero zero support for that so that's that's not something's gonna go away and I know it and my girlfriend knows it again you can just imagine again I I don't have to imagine an alternate reality in which I have a girlfriend who is a millionaire as this guy claims his eyes Grover mouths I could just have a nice girlfriend who was middle class or even poor but whose parents actively supported this actively wanted to see he can imagine but I could have a girlfriend and their parents are poor but they sincerely sympathise with and support veganism you know again I might have had a girlfriend his parents were poor but sincerely supported Buddhism in that earlier period of my life and that would change everything you know for better maybe for worse and again looking back at my life what if I had stayed on one of those paths because I had more support to do so I wouldn't be in this situation I mean I'm in now for better and for worse now I admit all of the causes have been involved in political ethical ecological the ecologic us also linguistic all of them are of more self-evident value than the particular cause of promoting you know meat-eating and in trying to UM try to debunk veganism this guy's on but nevertheless you have to admit from an outsider's perspective from the perspective of unsympathetic and in comprehending parents or your mother-in-law your father-in-law however you want to put it there's a kind of parallelism here that for me is striking and worth reflecting on worth exploring in my own life past present and future most you guys probably know this about me regular viewers would know this about me but they probably never thought it through explicitly now I used to be a scholar researching Buddhism no I didn't just do the language in the religion I also did history and politics subjects like slavery that Buddhist monks don't want to talk about like the history of slavery with him but ISM history of imperialism and anti-imperialism so political stuff but it also did the hard work of learning the ancient language the scriptures are written now think about how different my whole life would be if I had been born with parents who supported that kind of scholarship think about how different my entire life would be if I'd met a wealthy girlfriend whose parents supported that kind of scholarship you know what take the word wealthy out of the equation like let's just say I met a middle-class Chinese girl just a family that wasn't poor because I mean the amount of money it takes to support scholarship of that kind is is really nothing this guy was saying he was living on maybe 500 euros a month um but even including making trips to visit you know archeological sites with ancient stone inscriptions or manuscript Oriya and archives was very very cheap I know exactly how cheap it was to be that kind of Buddhist scholar cuz I did it with no support from my parents and with no support from any girlfriend or girlfriends parents in fact during that whole time in my life I literally never owned a credit card I never owned a credit card and I never owned a mobile phone in my life I lived a very very cheap existence and I paid my own way you guys will have gathered my relationship with my parents was very negative and had a period of 10 years where we we were not on speaking terms at all and you know it's true if I used to say this to them I said look I remember I said this directly to them and these words said look if I step on a landmine if I accidentally injure myself I will reach out to you I will call you for help oh but that's about what it'll take if it's not something as serious as me stepping on a land line like don't don't expect the air for me and what can I tell you I was lucky but obviously my whole life would be profoundly different it would have been different going through these different phases if either my parents or my girlfriend's parents had supported that no I could say the same but the period of my life war was more interest in humanitarian work a war was more interest in the publishing industry you know publishing nonfiction and nonprofit and humanitarian stuff sorry not wasn't interested in the for-profit pulp fiction industry or something wasn't interested in the side of the publishing where money can be made um if I'd had parents or girlfriends parents you know who supported that and again you can imagine the long-term effects might be very negative if I had well it's easy to imagine what if I'd had a girlfriend whose parents were wealthy and really supported the direction I took on when I was passionate about First Nations peoples and First Nations languages that means languages like crea GOI Mohawk Inuit languages that are native to indigenous to Canada in the United States and I was interested again in politics and history not just linguistics or not just you know not just culture or something but you know education and language obviously that would have taken my whole life you know in a very different direction again so you know whether you think of these things with humility or with egoism like I mean some people will just see this any of this this really is part of the the asymmetrical gender binary in Western culture in a recent video talking about kal-el I drew attach to the fact that many of the things about this woman kal-el many things about her would be judged very harshly if they were true of a man in terms of how she lives her life the choices she's made given the opportunities that she dad what she's done with her life this would be judged this you've judged is evil for a man to do but you know for a woman to do the same things in our culture at this time it's sort of sort of grudgingly accepted I mean it's not quite normal but it's certainly not condemned as evil and you know by the same token this story that this anti vegan activist is telling I think that would be accepted as as normal or inevitable if it were a young woman telling the same story and yet it's somehow still jarring and and disconcerting you know for a young man any serious relationship is gonna involve money even if it doesn't involve kids doesn't involve owning a home any relationship of any depth or durability is gonna involve money and it's of no benefit to anyone to be dishonest with yourself or others about what your socio-economic expectations are what your socio-economic aspirations are and what your socio-economic limitations are you've got to be honest with yourself you got to be honest the people you're dating the people you're sleeping with the people you're getting married to whatever it may be and yeah in this case in this surreal scenario I can commend this guy for his honesty I want to be clear that when I criticized kal-el in the earlier video it's not really that she openly aspires to marry a wealthy man that I despise it's not that she wants a man who will buy her a house by buyer were held home and provide her with a certain quality of life that I despise that in itself in absolute isolation I think is not so despicable the problem really is the indirect knock-on effect on your aspirations here and now very very few people have the self-discipline to pursue meaningful aspirations and whether that's learning Chinese or reading Aristotle or but you know doing some kind of research or charity work something positive to improve who you are as a person to make the world a better place very few people had the self-discipline to pursue those positive aspirations when they don't have a job forcing them to do it or a very clear career path tied doing it when they don't have someone like a professor or even a military instructor standing over them cross examine and forces them to do it and the problem is exactly that with someone like Hallel or many people like a little once they get into their minds that this is in effect their career path or their destiny perhaps then the sense of responsibility for being all you can be for developing yourself intellectually morally and yeah I mean you know again not all ambitions have to do with money not all ambitions have to do with career but the the discipline of really pursuing your own ambitions for yourself for others to make the world a better place in general where that is eroded because of the presumption that your purpose in life is merely to enchant and ensnare someone who's going to take care of you now there's nothing inevitable about these two things there's no reason why one will inexorably lead to or be linked to the other but you do not have to be a student of human nature for very long to see that for both men and women this is a trap that that so many of us can fall into and you know the opposite character type really is Melissa's character so my current girlfriend Melissa she's very much the opposite when she doesn't have to work when she doesn't have a job when she doesn't have a deadline she's red she's Restless she's antsy she's uncomfortable she's gotta be doing something worthwhile and you know she demands to know from me and from the world right she's like okay what what should I be working on now you know she can come up with that answer herself if I wasn't here she would come up with sign but it's great that in a collaborative way she could sit down and talk to me and say okay should she be studying Chinese should she be learning French should she be reading Aristotle should she be spending her time just focusing on baking or dealing with other economic and pragmatic elements of the life we have that's unfolding but you know in our culture that's not regarded positively to be a nancy character to be a restless character to be someone who wants to to be someone who can't just settle down and enjoy the lassitude that this life affords them that's regarded very negatively but actually I think it's a tremendously positive instinct it's an instinct will lead you down the road to a meaningful life and will lead you down the road away from a meaningless death a virus yen