The Wages of Sin...

[jurann]

     So I've moved to California, to the bay area, Silicon Valley to be exact. This is "Furry Mecca" so to speak, ground-zero as the global population center for furry fans. There are somewhere in the 1,000+ range number of furs around the bay, primarily concentrated in Berkley, Fremont and the "Silicon Valley" (South Bay) area which is comprised

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[jurann]

I've spent some significant time in the LA area doing work for IBM about 6 years ago, and there was a pronounced LACK of furries and furry groups down there. Yes there were a lot of furs, but they were not really very findable and the only mailing lists I could find for the region were fairly dead at the time. I found maybe 3 or 4 people to hang out with down there, all of whom were pretty much in agreement that the Bay Area was the place to be for furs and LA was an overall deadzone due to the distance between furs and the difficulty in traversing the LA basin. I honestly couldn't name you a single fur in the LA area these days.

And sure, "shallow aspirations" leave you feeling empty in and of themselves, but the PURPOSE of those achievements is to build comfort and security and happiness from them. They are not the end, they are the means. You need resources to build a household, unless you're a forest dryad or something akin to that. ;D As for feeling down on myself, it was just a temporary setback, now I see I just need to work harder and take things up to a new level - I enjoy challenges and while they may seem daunting at first, I find a way to aspire and rise above what drags me down or holds me back.

Worth in oneself is a deceptively complex conundrum - life's not as simple as seeing worth in oneself. No man is an island, so they say. We certainly individually assign value in different ways to different things, that's part of what makes us each unique, but there are measures of worth far more important to nature and to reality than individual value. My "utility" as a human being, for instance, is realistically and quantifiably measurable by how successful I am at: providing for myself (and others), fabricating practical items (tools and the like), creating culture (art, music, craft, nuance, etc.) and advancing human understanding of the universe (education; scientific and logical understanding). These are the ways in which I typically measure my own value and quality as a member of a modern self-aware society - my individuality is just one very tiny part of a larger species and tribe, and is therefore not particularly important except for how the rest of that society reckons it. If I am not achieving, then I am not contributing to my society and culture as I should be. That's my perspective.