We are visitors on this earth for only a few years. Some are born into generational wealth, others struggle every day to survive, but in the end all of us are forced to pay for this „Hotel Earth“ usually by having to work in a job. Emil Cioran once wrote in Degradation through Work that work is not a virtue but a degradation of life, a way of dulling and enslaving the spirit:
Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work’s sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor — all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man’s center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one’s inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work’s tendency to dull the spirit. Man sees work as beneficial to his being, but his fervor reveals his penchant for evil. In work, man forgets himself; yet his forgetfulness is not simple and naive, but rather akin to stupidity. Through work, man has moved from subject to object; in other words, he has become a deficient animal who has betrayed his origins. Instead of living for himself — not selfishly but growing spiritually — man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality. Where have they all gone; ecstasy, vision, exaltation? Where is the supreme madness or the genuine pleasure of evil? The negative pleasure one finds in work partakes of the poverty and banality of daily life, its pettiness. Why not abandon this futile work and begin anew without repeating the same wasteful mistake? Is subjective consciousness of eternity not enough? It is the feeling for eternity that the frenetic activity and trepidation of work has destroyed in us. Work is the negation of eternity. The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions. I am not contrasting work to either passive contemplation or vague dreaminess, but to an unrealizable transfiguration; nevertheless, I prefer an intelligent and observant laziness to intolerable, terrorizing activity. To awaken the modern world, one must praise laziness. The lazy man has an infinitely keener perception of metaphysical reality than the active one.
I am lured by faraway distances, the immense void I project upon the world. A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like a light and impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by both pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies. I am so cheerful and yet so sad that my tears reflect at once both heaven and earth. If only for the joy of my sadness, I wish there were no death on this earth.
This might be one of the main reasons people are so frustrated: they are forced to work just to survive. I agree, because if the basics are denied, our short visit on this planet cannot be in totality a beautiful one.
Osho expressed a similar critique when he said that priests and politicians form a mafia of the soul, working together to control and exploit people. Instead of being respected as free and original visitors, we are caught in systems designed to keep us dependent and obedient.
We pay taxes on the salaries we earn. We pay again on the land we “own”. We pay on the house built on that land, on the car we drive, on the food we eat. We pay for the water we drink and the water we shower in. We pay for gas, for electricity, for rent. Even when we finally think we own something, that ownership lasts only as long as we keep paying. Stop paying and it can be taken away.
Comedian George Carlin captured this feeling in his famous “owners” routine: “You have no choice. You have owners. They own you”. His words resonate because they strip away the illusion of freedom. Ownership begins to feel like slavery.
This frustration shows up not only in daily life but also in the digital world. When you subscribe to Netflix or Disney, you feel like you have access, but the moment they remove a show you lose it. When you buy a video game, you may still need servers or subscriptions to play. Even “buying” becomes just renting under another name. That is why one YouTube comment on the video below about piracy resonated so deeply: “If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft”.
Many people already act on this logic. Torrent sites like YTS.MX and 1337x.to provide permanence and reliability where streaming platforms fail. You can always find what you are looking for, while the legal services take content away.
In science the same story repeats. Paywalled journals tell us that publishing is about sharing knowledge, but in practice they restrict it. And while journals charge $30-$50 for a single article, they do not offer individuals a realistic subscription option to access papers affordably. There is no “Netflix for science” where a researcher outside of academia could pay $10 or $20 per month to read broadly. Some platforms try: JSTOR offers “JPASS” at $19.50/month but with limited titles, Elsevier sells personal subscriptions to individual journals for hundreds of dollars per year, and Annual Reviews experiments with “Subscribe to Open”. But none give comprehensive access. The business model of big publishers depends on expensive institutional deals that exclude the masses. This subscription gap is exactly why services like Sci-Hub became indispensable.
Alexandra Elbakyan created Sci-Hub in 2011 to bypass these barriers. By 2017 it provided access to about 69 percent of all Crossref indexed articles and 85 percent of paywalled ones . A Science article covering its logs carried the headline: “Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone”. Elsevier won a 15 million USD judgment against Sci-Hub in 2017 and in 2025 the Delhi High Court ordered it blocked in India, but researchers continue to use it because it works. If publishing is not truly sharing, then reclaiming knowledge through Sci-Hub does not feel like theft. It feels like survival. Empirical studies reinforce this perception. Correa et al. found in Scientometrics that papers downloaded through Sci-Hub were cited about 1.7 times more often than similar papers not downloaded. A preprint is on arXiv. The Scholarly Kitchen raised valid concerns about correlation versus causation, but the overall picture is clear: Sci-Hub expands access and likely boosts impact.
And beyond journals, even science itself is often locked behind patents or secrecy. Medicines, energy technologies, and innovations are sold back to the public at high cost, while those in higher positions still enjoy access. The masses are the ones excluded. History shows this clearly: after Nikola Tesla’s death in 1943, the FBI seized his papers, and many of his files ended up in the hands of the U.S. Office of Alien Property and later the CIA.
The same dynamic drove the rise of Python, as seen in the video below.
For years Java was dominant, but in 2019 Oracle shifted Java SE to a paid subscription for many commercial uses. That licensing change created confusion and costs that alienated developers. Python, in contrast, was always free and open source under the Python Software Foundation License. Its simplicity and openness allowed it to spread across industries, education, and research, becoming one of the world’s most popular programming languages. Just as torrents and Sci-Hub filled gaps left by closed systems, Python filled the gap left by Java’s restrictions. Openness won. Later Edit: Python is Nr. 1 also on IEEE Spectrum’s Top Programming Languages 2025.
And beyond code, science, or entertainment, the same frustration shapes daily life. As mentioned earlier, we are taxed and billed for food, shelter, energy, and water. Ownership feels conditional, never final. If buying is not owning, then what are we really paying for? Osho once said that the meaning of life is celebration (creative challenge), yet it is hard to celebrate when existence itself becomes a recurring payment. People turn to torrents, open source, and Sci-Hub not just out of rebellion but to reclaim the joy of sharing stories, knowledge, and creativity.
This also connects to education in the age of AI. In the video below, Po-Shen Loh warns that while AI can already solve Olympiad-level problems, students risk outsourcing their thinking.
His call is to cultivate thoughtfulness, empathy, and communities of kind, clever people who can sustain civilization. As David Silver and Richard S. Sutton wrote in Welcome to the Era of Experience, AI itself grows not from rigid rules but from experience. Education too must shift toward lived experience, reflection, and community rather than outsourcing thought to machines.
Demand for access never disappears. If systems are slow, incomplete, overpriced, or unfair, shadow channels or new communities will fill the gap. For science, that means tools like Unpaywall and preprint servers. For software, it means open languages like Python. For daily life, it means questioning the endless rent and tax cycle. For education, it means fostering empathy as well as intelligence. And for freedom of movement, it means remembering that demand for access is true also for traveling visa-free. People will always dream of crossing borders without bureaucratic chains, just as they dream of accessing knowledge and culture without walls.
We might learn something from the Shaolin/Zen monks, who are fed and sheltered by their community, who train their bodies and minds with discipline, who laugh hard together, and some of whom reach enlightenment. They are not trapped in endless payments but are free to live as true visitors on this earth, celebrating life instead of surviving it. Jacque Fresco, through The Venus Project envisioned a similar world at scale: a resource-based economy where food, water, shelter, and knowledge are guaranteed for all, and where technology is used to remove scarcity rather than reinforce it. His vision, like the practice of the monks, points to the same truth: freedom begins when survival is no longer commodified. Until then, people will keep acting on the logic of that comment: if access is denied, reclaiming it is not theft, it is necessity. And in Osho’s words, it is also celebration.
PS. An interesting read: ETH Zürich leads Open Access.
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