The Stupid Ideology of a Twenty-Four-Year-Old Stoner

By Brent M. Fisher

This book isn't a collection of lofty language or inflated claims. Instead, it's an honest and humor-filled chronicle of my life's ups and downs. From my misguided adventures as a wannabe entrepreneur to the life-changing wisdom gleaned from unexpected friendships, every chapter offers a new perspective on life. If you're ready for an entertaining, thought-provoking read that may just resonate with your own life experiences, then join me as we dive into my remarkable journey of self-discovery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350938845

Book preview

Chapter One: Childhood

As a child during the first years of my life I lived with my mother, father, sister and two half-brothers. We lived in a simple home in a small town called Joshua Tree. Of course, living with siblings can be absolute torture at times, and it was for me, considering my brothers were older than me by a significant margin and my sister was 3 years younger. I was tortured and I also did the torturing, but we all did it out of love. I learned a lot from my siblings growing up. Since we were in different stages of life, we were able to take bits and pieces of learnings from our older siblings and apply it to our life. When in these first few years of life we tended to move a lot. We didn’t ever move far, oftentimes it was just a city over, or even just a few streets over, but my mom loved change and she couldn’t ever stay put. This made it especially difficult to make friends, but it did show me different ways of living, and moving so much showed me many things I never would have experienced otherwise. In living in Joshua Tree, there was a lot to explore as a child with such a strong imagination. The desert was our paradise, and we would beg my mom to let us just go off and play in the middle of the desert. We would find old pieces of plywood, two by fours, and rusty nails to build forts and other fun items that we were able to create with our imagination. The sky was the limit when it came to our creativity. We would make weapons, tools, forts, games and even developed some very helpful survival techniques that could help us if we were ever in a situation where we got lost in the desert. We weren’t afraid to get dirty as kids, and this opened up a large wonderland of adventure. I was born in a time that was in the middle of a transition from everything mechanical to everything digital and I was one of the lucky ones that was able to grow up without much technology but had a phone going into my teenage years. I was able to experience what it was like to be a kid back in the day without a care in the world. Nowadays kids’ faces are all stuck in technology and its forcing impossible standards of beauty and low forms of self-worth throughout an entire generation. Technology is an amazing and truly beautiful thing, but anything in the wrong hands isn’t a good thing, and when kids are given smartphones and tablets at the age of nine years old, I truly believe it destroys the proper development of a child. 

I stated earlier that I grew up in a Christian household. I spent a lot of my early childhood years in Sunday school and church events that encased my life in religion. Eventually after my grandmother had passed away, we stopped going to church and we were free to choose whichever path we wanted out of life. At that point in my life, I was a fully devout Christian, as you would be, considering the circumstances. I would always question things though. I remember asking my father so many questions about religion, science and the universe. I just wanted to understand the world around me and where we all came from. This is a very strange endeavor for a child if you think about it, but I wasn’t a particularly normal child to begin with. During this questioning of life itself, I started moving further and further from the Christian faith due to inconsistencies.

I remember running into situations that just did not seem fair. I would get blamed for stuff I didn’t do, I had family members pass away, I had a really hard time with bullying in school and this developed later into extreme depression. I couldn’t understand why God would be putting me through all this pain and misery. Does he even care about me at all? All this was running through my head when I was literally just ten years old. I remember having breakdowns, now I know them as meltdowns, in front of my sister because I just couldn’t get a grasp on why God treated me the way he did if he loved me. Why is it that I get treated so unfairly on a regular and it seems like the bad times always weigh out the good. I remember being so furious, not just with God, but also with my mother. I couldn’t understand why, if she’s been through so much herself in this life, why would she bring another life into this world just to suffer. I remember telling myself that I would never do what my mom did to me, I would never force a life to be in this world where it’s just going to be tortured by this so called ‘loving God.’ I eventually turned away from my faith in God and the Christian religion entirely and became agnostic. I was much calmer after that, just put my bets in science and figured that everyone that believes in an all-powerful God, were just morons. Of course, this isn’t the case. There isn’t anything wrong with religion, and as a matter of fact, it’s very healthy for a person to practice a faith. It gives a person purpose, a reason to go on and be a good person. I just didn’t see it, nor could anyone have told me at the time and actually convinced me. I spent some time on agnosticism, but this eventually turned to atheism throughout the rest of my childhood and even into my adult years until I had an enlightening experience that I will explain in further detail later in the book.

Not having faith in anything but science really opened my mind to wanting to learn more and more about mathematics and science. I figured that if everything was based on science, and I really wanted to understand how the world worked, then I would just have to study and learn the basics of mathematics and the sciences. I couldn’t just focus on one subject in science or math either, if I wanted to understand the world in full, I would have to have at least a somewhat firm grasp on all aspects of science and math. I got really into this and started spending my lunches with my science and math teachers. I had no friends to begin with, so where else do I go during lunch? The teachers’ classroom, just to do more work. I was most definitely a strange child. My teachers enjoyed it though, because they were able to explain the subject to me in a very thorough way; the way they wanted to teach it in the first place. The school system really suspends teachers from reaching their full potential when it comes to teaching students. If each and every teacher was given full reign to just teach the curriculum in a way they saw fit, we would have a lot happier teachers and students alike.

Besides all that, I got a very good learning experience from being in the classrooms with them and just learning about why they loved the subjects they taught, and that made me love the sciences even more. They explained to me how basic formulas could explain all kinds of different aspects of life, and I was so fascinated that I would go home, measure stuff and do math to figure out the area, surface area and volume of different objects just to get good at it. I absolutely loved it all, and I still do to this day. Science and math eventually became the two things my life revolved around for a while. I also started delving into video games more and more. I came across this game one day called Minecraft. I’m sure you’ve heard of this game, it’s been around for roughly 12 years or so, don’t quote me on that. I’ve been playing since the very early beta days. When I discovered this game, it was like a whole world of imagination that had yet to be tapped by my mind. If you aren’t familiar with the game, I’ll give you a quick breakdown. The game is based around being a lone human on earth that has had very little touched by the hand of man. The entire world is just made up of blocks and items that are of very low quality. What I found so amazing about this game was just the sheer endless number of things you could do and build. Your imagination was literally the limit of what you could do in this game, and I was invested the moment I laid my hand down on the mouse to play. I got very good at the game and started creating amazing machines within the game using a component called redstone. You can think of redstone as electricity, or wire that the electricity runs through, rather. With this, you can make endless inventions, and there was a point I was able to make a fully operational calculator that would allow you to type in any two-digit multiplication, division, addition or subtraction problem and it would solve it. Although it would take roughly two to three minutes to complete the calculation, it would still do it, and that was a win for me. This game allowed me to test my knowledge in mathematics and the sciences. I was able to replicate pieces of technology and learn more and more about the world around me. My entire world changed when I discovered modded Minecraft especially. This was a game changer. Suddenly you were able to download a mod that could change the game into anything you could dream of. If you didn’t have an item in the game that you really wanted to be there, all you had to do was just download a mod and bam! It was truly amazing, so after delving into this a bit, creating my own mods, downloading mods etc. I eventually got to the point where I discovered this modpack, a collection of mods that allowed for some complicated machinery. I loved the idea of this, so I downloaded it straight away. I discovered very quickly that I had a lot to learn about this modpack. It had so many aspects to it that I had no idea about. You could make everything from a nuclear reactor to a factory to produce different items. I was blown away by how many things you could do, and it didn’t take me long before I was spending every waking hour on this game getting better and better with each time I played. I played online a lot and eventually discovered this server that had embodied a true, full economy. I found this to be the perfect opportunity to have a little fun and try to become the richest person on this server. I built factories, sold them, did work for people, opened a shop and many other things to make money and this taught me a lot about being a salesman and intercommunication in general. Like I said before, I’ve always been the shy kid that doesn’t talk much, so to have me talking to all these different people online and giving them sales pitches about a factory I made, was a big step. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is one of the few things that really pushed me into