Some Musings from Reed

It’s been a while since I’ve written an article. As I’m sure many of you know, I effectively went offline back in September. With this being the only large outlet I intend to use for the foreseeable future, I figured I’d write down some musings for you to consider.

First off, I am doing well. Probably the best I’ve ever been in my adult life. I am a land owner, with over 70 acres in the New Hampshire woods. In the last couple years, I have started traveling abroad a little, and I’ve started investing in passions that I never made time for in the past: I bought a motorcycle, a boat, and picked up slalom water skiing.

Most importantly of all, I found a woman who matches my energy, and my vision for the future. We’ve been together for about a year and a half, and we are getting married on my property in May.

Throughout this time offline and investing energy into my own life and the people around me, I realized how truly futile political activism had been. The most important thing I took away from it was meeting my future wife, and leaving impacts on the people around me. But in the grand scheme of the political landscape, things had only returned to square one, or arguably gotten worse.

I feel that we are seeing this in broad daylight with the Trump administration. Less than a year after “totally obliterating” Iran’s nuclear program, for some reason the United States needed to commit regime change to remove the supreme leader in order to keep them from possessing a nuclear weapon.

I listened to Donald Trump’s speech on Saturday morning, and it struck me how similar it was to George W Bush’s axis of evil speech in 2002.

How little we have learned! I must admit, that even I am amazed that the playbook has changed so little. It is still the WMD scare, just with Iran instead of Iraq.

Anyway, I’m not going to blabber on endlessly about this, I have plenty of videos on my YouTube discussing this very subject. And that right there is what’s so sad about this. Once you see plainly how these things work, you realize it’s all cyclical. Nothing new really happens. A crisis takes place, the government tries to gain more executive power, a foreign country becomes a scapegoat, a regime is toppled, chaos ensues. Refugees then flood Europe and the US, more domestic controls are enacted to combat this problem, more civil liberties are crushed, rinse, repeat. It’s all part of the plan.

I have come to the conclusion the only thing I’m willing to pour my heart and soul into is starting my family. In the months that I have spent offline, my new research of passion has been that of marriage. Such a beautiful thing, that has become so corrupted and bastardized in this country.

What has amazed me is the lack of care we as a society put into whom we sleep next to, create life with, build a home with, and promise to love and cherish ‘til death do us part. That really is an insanely solemn thing to do, and we often put more thought into what type of car we want to buy. Marriage is usually lucky to make the top three list of our priorities, if we’re honest. It often comes after prioritizing extended family, hobbies, employment, our own feelings, our lustful desires, our anger impulses, our dreams and hopes for the future.

Now, I know I’m just wading into this, so my opinion is probably less important than it will be in a decade, but I think I’ve got an idea of why the marriage failure rate is so high: your marriage needs to come first. And in order for your marriage to come first, your spouse has to be the most important person in your life. And therein lies the hard part: finding someone who shares your hopes, dreams, hobbies, likes your family, who wants to live the life you envision.

We have somehow decided as a culture that you should “have your fun” and then settle down and get married. Bullshit! The word “settle” should have nothing to do with marriage. The person you marry should only add to your life. Of course there will be struggles, frustration, unmet expectations with ANYONE you marry. But your one night stand or your fever dream sex romp with your lover in your 20’s is always going to be seared into your memory if you don’t put the diligence into finding someone you can be committed to, intimate with, and ultimately, passionate with.

It took me years to find my person, and I’ll be getting married at age 32. But I’m glad I didn’t “settle” with women in the past, and I look forward to the next chapter of my life with excitement.