Jeanetta Loubser

[Robert Duigan @uMarhobane]

The digital economy is one where nothing is anyone's problem, but everything is a problem

[Niall Harbison @NiallHarbison]

When she was taking her last breaths I promised her legacy would never be forgotten.

Tina’s hospital for sick street dogs is flying up ❤️

[Jeanetta Loubser @Ongetiteld]

@CryptoP1ankton @Selene_Mariposa Same in South Africa. The best part is that should you ever get rid of TV/ cancel your "TV Licence", you still get hounded year after to pay with late fees and interest added on.

[Jeanetta Loubser @Ongetiteld]

@TwoPaddocks Thanks @ChrisHatt11 . Sweet tribute.

[Antidepressant Content @depressionlesss]

I recently heard someone say.

"The amount of good things in your life depends on your ability to notice them."

I can't see it any other way now.

[Jeanetta Loubser @Ongetiteld]

@1825Todd @LilyTemmer @newstart_2024 I always wonder why medical fields like nursing and physio is not considered a stem field but being a medical doctor is?

[Pookie's Polls & Opinions @pookiepolls]

Saw this on FB. Good job.

I would like to thank Officer Diedre Thomas and her team for their heartfelt assistance this afternoon.

My baby was sobbing in the back seat as I was driving down Stellenbosch Arterial.

I was tempted to locate a spot and stop, but knowing that Wesbank is not one of the safest townships, I was reluctant to stop and check on my baby.

Closer to Engen M12 Motors filling station, I saw a team of law enforcement officers, and I parked in front of them to check on my baby.

My baby was screaming very loudly, and an officer came to assist.

She called her team to come and escort me. She sat in the back seat to comfort my baby, singing 'Twinkle twinkle little star⭐️'.

On arrival at home, they wanted to make sure that my baby was fine.

Please help make this woman trend for the right reasons. Respect to you, Officer Diedre Thomas.

Verbal consent to take a picture and post was granted.

[Jeanetta Loubser @Ongetiteld]

@Nicole_Barlow1 @jsteenhuisen Makes one wonder about foot and mouth disease allowed to go rampant...

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

Good people make you feel terrible about yourself when you first meet them.

I spent years thinking I could spot authentic kindness from across a room. Warm smile, eager to help, quick to compliment, always available when you need them. All the social signals we associate with "nice."

Then I started paying attention to who actually showed up during the worst moments of my life.

The person who drove three hours in silence to sit with me in a hospital waiting room wasn't someone I'd ever describe as "friendly." She barely speaks in group settings. Never posts about her volunteer work. Has resting face that looks perpetually annoyed. But when crisis hit, she appeared without being asked and stayed without keeping score.

Meanwhile, the people with inspirational quote collections and hearts in their Instagram bios were suddenly busy when I needed them most.

Real goodness operates below the frequency of social performance.

Genuinely good people have mastered something most of us resist: they've separated their worth from external validation. They don't need you to witness their kindness for it to feel real to them. This creates a strange paradox. The people most capable of genuine care often appear the most emotionally unavailable on the surface.

They listen to understand, not to respond. Most conversations are elaborate turn taking. Person A talks, Person B waits for their opening to talk about themselves. Good people actually absorb what you're saying. They remember details you mentioned months ago. They ask followup questions about things you assumed nobody cared about.

They disagree with you without trying to destroy you. Bad people treat disagreement as warfare. Every conversation becomes a battle for dominance. Good people can think you're completely wrong while still treating you like a human being worth engaging with.

They keep promises to people who can't do anything for them. Watch how someone treats a waiter, a janitor, a customer service representative. Watch how they behave when there's nothing to gain and no audience to impress. Character reveals itself in asymmetric relationships.

They've learned to be comfortable with other people's discomfort. Most of us rush to fix, solve, or cheer up anyone experiencing negative emotions. Good people can sit with someone's pain without making it about their own anxiety. They don't need you to feel better to validate their helpfulness.

They have boundaries that actually protect something valuable. Bad people either have no boundaries or boundaries designed to make them look important. Good people have boundaries because they understand that saying yes to everything means saying yes to nothing that matters.

The strangest sign: "they make you want to become better without ever suggesting you need improvement." Something about their presence elevates your own behavior. You find yourself being more honest, more patient, more thoughtful when they're around. Not because they demand it, but because they demonstrate what's possible.

We mistake performance for character because performance is visible and character is mostly invisible until tested.

Good people are almost never who you expect them to be.

[smv @slimvnsn]

There was a woman who sold rice and stew outside my office building on Broad Street. Every day for 4 years. Big pot. Blue plastic chairs. She knew everyone's order before they reached her table.

Her name was Mama Chidi.

Mine was the last plate before she packed up. 1:45pm. Every day without fail she'd see me coming and start dishing before I even sat down. Extra meat. Never charged me for it. I asked her once why.

She said I looked like someone who skipped breakfast.

She was right every time.

2019 she stopped showing up. No warning. Just gone. I asked around. Nobody knew anything. I switched to a restaurant down the road. More expensive. Smaller portions. Spent 4 years just quietly missing a plate of rice I never properly appreciated.

Last month my colleague forwarded a Twitter post into our work group.

A young guy. Maybe 25. Saying his mother used to sell food on Broad Street before she had a stroke in 2019 that took her left side. That she was recovering but kept asking about her regulars. That she cried one day saying she never got to say goodbye to any of them.

I DM'd him immediately.

He called me 10 minutes later.

She was sitting right next to him.

I heard her voice through the phone. Slower than I remembered. But she laughed when he told her who it was.

She said she always saved my plate last because quiet people need someone looking out for them.

I visited her in Mushin on Saturday. She can't stand long anymore. But she sat up straight in that chair and watched me eat everything she'd made.

Didn't let me leave without packing food for the road.

Some people just decide to take care of you. Before you even know you need it.

[сняis сндмеLеои @chrischameleon]

here where i farm my cattle in the eastern free state highlands, they share their grazing with zebra, springbok, blesbok, black wildebeest, ribbok, duiker, caracal, anteater, porcupine, aardvark, aardwolf and a great variety of small mammals, birds and reptiles. i use absolutely no poison, hormones, antibiotics or vaccines. ever.
conversely, every vegetarian food production lot is a deadly, sterile hellscape of monoculture.
tell me again, how are we going to save the world by eating strictly vegetarian?

[Jeanetta Loubser @Ongetiteld]

@EastsideChic721 @DeltaSassy Hi! What show is this? Looks thoroughly enjoyable.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Gary Oldman as Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg in The Fifth Element (1997) is pure chaos and charisma. Oldman took the role as a favor to his friend Luc Besson, never even reading the script and still stole every scene he was in.
https://t.co/LMy6RNw0jX

[Mara. 🇵🇸 🇿🇦 @KhanyaSimzz]

@uKilla_K OMG, they are NOT black people.

[Bebé @NoozBebe_]

The audacity to advertise a service to cover the gap they caused.
You can't tell me this scam isn't run by the same people who run the country right now. 😭

[Sherry @SchrodingrsBrat]

One morning in January, I woke up and it was like a spell had been broken the way I looked around my room and saw how dull everything was, not because it was lacking but because of how full it was of stuff.

Stuff I didn’t particularly love. Stuff with no serious meaning to it. Stuff I didn’t care about. Stuff that, if you had secretly tossed, I wouldn’t even realize went missing. Stuff I bought because it was trendy at the time, because my friend had it, because I had seen attractive influencers my age brag about it on Instagram, and it made me think that I could be her.

So, I did a bit of Marie Kondo-ing and produced a few large bags of clothes and trinkets and stuff for donation. Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time. I was standing in front of the metabolic waste of my existence, materialized. I was looking at the amount of my time, therefore my life, that had been turned into garbage. And the worst part is that I could’ve prevented it.

A movie scene that has stuck with me for years comes from Spirited Away, where Chihiro finds her parents turned into pigs. It’s comical to describe, but when you put yourself in her shoes, it’s terrifying: it’s every child’s nightmare to lose their parents to a force they can’t control. The panic she feels in that scene speaks to me deeply, the feeling of watching your loved ones do something that you know is wrong but being called “silly” when you try to stop them.

Materialism isn’t evil; it can be gorgeous through the frames of abundance or art. Miranda Priestly’s “stuff” monologue from The Devil Wears Prada, for example, shows how material creates jobs, fuels culture, and shapes history. Miyazaki’s plates of food are dramatically overblown and colorful and delicious, but Chihiro’s parents don’t think about what they consume, only about how much. When she confronts them, her father shrugs: “It’s okay. I have my credit card and some cash.”

This is the mindset that will make you waste your life away into bags of garbage: the idea that shopping is a material issue, and overconsumption is a budgeting problem, rather than a spiritual problem. It’s easy to be Spirited Away, whisked into another world operated by desires that come from ads and friends and fleeting trends. Your appetite for novelty and your fear of missing out sucks the joy out of you—the more you eat, the hungrier you are. The more you spend, the more vapid you feel. You lack spirit, not another fashion identity. You don’t need another aesthetic, you need stronger values.

The title Spirited Away in Japanese is Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, and kamikakushi means “hidden by the gods,” a folk belief where people mysteriously vanish into another realm. This film is about magical abduction and losing your identity. Chihiro loses her name and becomes “Sen”: to be spirited away is like being stolen from yourself, forgetting who you are under the influence of forces like greed, fear, anger—and who’s to say that emotions aren’t magical? That desires aren’t demonic possessions of the mind (“demonic” meaning “godlike divisive superfactor” in Greek)? Who’s to say that feeling horny isn’t its own kind of spell? We literally use “mania” and “craze” to describe the way people desire something: Beatlemania, the craze with Labubus, matcha being ‘all the rage’.

Lust, for example, is the feeling of wanting something really badly. It doesn’t have to be a carnal desire but it’s about a possessive craving that ends in a feeling of collapse, an appetite that, once appeased, reveals its emptiness:

"Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted, we discover that it is all an illusion and nothing is there. Lust is a voyage to nowhere, to an empty land, but some men just love such voyages and never care about the destination." —Bernard Cornwell

Shopping has this effect on me, the voyage is more satisfying than the destination. There is such thing as post-purchase clarity: the moment when you buy something trendy and you suddenly sober up to how much you don’t care about it (let alone like it); you just want to be seen having it.

Spirited Away is most known for the character with the least lines: a masked ghost who can conjure gold. He has no backstory, we only know that he is banned from entering the bathhouse. Chihiro, out of kindness, lets him in. No-Face is refused service at first, but the staff quickly compromise their values upon seeing his gold. They serenade him, “Welcome the rich man. He’s hard for you to miss. His butt keeps getting bigger, so there’s plenty to kiss!” while they fight for the gold nuggets that plop out of his fat hands. Then, he devours the workers in despair when he realizes their kindness is bought, and only Chihiro is genuine.

The painful part of loneliness is the realization that most people are ass-kissers and friendship is rare. Likewise, people feel the most alienated when they suddenly sober up to the fact that most of their desires are herd-driven, that most of them are no where close to the truth, if they even have a clear enough sense of what that is that matters to them. It’s like waking up from a trance state and realizing, What have I done to myself? I certainly felt this way standing in front of my garbage bags. Loneliness, alienation, addictions and self-defeating loops—these are not material problems, but ‘desire’ problems.

I’m finally coming to understand what Girard meant by, “All desire is a desire for being.” We think we want things, but every desire points to a way of life, a kind of person we long to become. Objects seduce us not with their utility but with their promise of transcendence—status, attention, belonging. That’s why No-Face has no face: he is desire itself, the appetite to become, the emptiness that consumes while wishing it were someone else.

Money reveals this: In Roman mythology, the temple of Juno Moneta was both sanctuary and mint (it’s where we get the words “money” and “monetary”). To strike a coin was to sanctify it with divine authority, so it circulated as both economic and spiritual power. It still does: money organizes meaning. Fiat currency works because we collectively believe it means something—fiat literally “let it be” in Latin—its meaning assigned by our shared narrative. And because money is tethered to desire, it doesn’t just reflect value; it follows it. It’s the pull of eyes when a sports car glides down a street. It’s Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH, saying “when you create desire, profits are a consequence.” Shopping is not independent from the spiritual realm that strips away our names, and it’s a very literal form of kamikakushi.

When we feel the weight of our limits, we start reaching toward idols to imitate, goals to chase, places to explore, people to meet. What we’re really chasing is a sense of immortality or infinity, something that lives longer than we ever will. We want to be remembered long after we’ve left a conversation, the company, the world.

Desire is never about the object itself. If it were, once you acquired it, the desire would vanish. Yet, your wardrobe keeps getting stuffier while you still find yourself with nothing to wear. Desire is about what the object seems to promise us: a fuller, richer existence. This is why Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” test is great: it reframes consumption as discernment. It asks whether an object raises your spirit or weighs it down. Left unchecked, your possessions take away your freedom to be who you are. As Fight Club says, “The things you own end up owning you.”

Every now and then, I feel my value system collapsing under the seduction of Alo’s knitwear sets through their windows. Overall, none of this is about “how to spend less”, it’s about the freedom to just be… you.

"You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis." —Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

Stronger values make you spend more mindfully because they shift the axis of desire. When you know what you worship—what you actually stand for and who you want to become—everything gets tested against that vision. Values act like a sieve: they filter out the empty cravings that come from comparison and they let through only the things that genuinely serve your spirit. Without values, desires lead you astray by following ads and algorithms and the envy of friends—a state commonly known as “being distracted”.

The scariest part of Chihiro watching her parents turn into pigs is that they could’ve simply walked away. The unattended food stalls feel like a test of whether one can resist charming distractions. Like the family in Spirited Away, you’re rarely forced to follow one desire over another (until you choose wrongly, and only later realize what you’ve done, if you realize it at all). But if you aim at your highest value—placing no other gods above it, coveting nothing of your neighbor’s—you free yourself from the distractions that split your soul and can refocus your being on becoming who you want to be.

[Direct Democracy Gregory @DirectDemToday]

Living in The Truman Show: How Digital IDs Could Curate Our Reality

📽️In 1998, The Truman Show gave audiences an unsettling glimpse into a world where one man’s entire life is a carefully controlled illusion. Truman Burbank believes he is living freely, making his own choices. But in reality, every person he meets, every place he visits, and every event that unfolds has been scripted by unseen producers. The genius of the film lies in its subtlety: Truman isn’t in a prison, he’s in a set. His “freedom” is just part of the illusion.

Fast forward to today, and that curated world feels less like fiction and more like a quiet blueprint. With the global push toward digital identification 🆔systems, we may be inching closer to a modern Truman Show — not on a movie set, but within our digital lives.

Digital IDs: A Convenient Gatekeeper
Digital IDs are being promoted around the world as a way to streamline access to services: banking, healthcare, education, government benefits, social media, even travel. The concept is simple: one verified identity, used everywhere. It’s billed as secure, convenient, and inevitable.

But beneath the surface, digital IDs represent something much more powerful — and potentially much more dangerous: a unified control point for access to the modern world.

When your identity, financial activity, social behaviour, and medical records are all linked to a centralized ID, whoever controls that system doesn’t just verify who you are, they determine what you’re allowed to do.

The Illusion of Freedom
Like Truman, we may feel like we’re living freely in a digital world, unaware that the boundaries around us are being subtly defined by someone else. The news we see, the transactions we’re allowed to make, the content we can access — all of it can be quietly filtered, denied, or approved based on rules we didn’t create.

In such a system, your access to services could be tied to your behaviour. For example, a low “trust score” might limit your ability to travel or questioning government policies online could affect your financial access, or exceeding your carbon quota might restrict your purchases.

This isn’t hypothetical. Some governments are already experimenting with social credit systems,
programmable currencies, and digital IDs — combining them into frameworks that could easily become tools of surveillance and enforcement. 🔐

Make No Mistake Centralization Is Control
At the heart of this is centralization. The more systems are linked through a single ID, the easier it becomes to curate — or control — the individual’s experience. Just as The Truman Show needed one set and one director, a centralized ID system creates a single point through which all permissions and restrictions can be funnelled.

You don’t need bars or walls when you can curate someone’s environment so completely that they never even realize they’re not free.

The Exit Door
In The Truman Show, Truman begins to sense something is off. He notices patterns. He starts asking questions. Eventually, he seeks the edge of his world — and finds it. That moment is powerful because it reminds us: the illusion only works as long as people don’t question it.

Similarly, as digital systems grow more integrated, now is the time to ask the hard questions, like who controls our digital identity, what rights do we have over our own data, can access be denied based on our beliefs or behaviour, what safeguards are in place to prevent abuse?

Technological convenience should not come at the cost of individual autonomy. Transparency, decentralization, and voluntary participation must be non-negotiable pillars of any digital ID system — otherwise, we risk becoming willing actors in someone else’s scripted reality.

Freedom in a Curated World
The Truman Show ends with a simple, radical act: Truman walks through the door. He chooses the unknown over a comfortable illusion.

As we head deeper into a world of digital identities and integrated systems, we too face a choice, not necessarily to reject technology, but to insist it serves us rather than contains us.

Because the scariest thing about The Truman Show wasn’t the set.

It was that he didn’t know he was in one.
#NoToDigitalID

[Koshiek Karan @iamkoshiek]

it’s heartbreaking seeing so many stories of financial ruin from gambling 💔

MILLIONS are spent glamourising the addiction with relentless ads

there is no jet set lifestyle, luxury cars & champagne

the profit comes from selling poor folks a dream

the house ALWAYS wins 🎰🎰

[Brent Lindeque @BrentLindeque]

Surround yourself with people who light up when you speak about your dreams.

The ones who don’t just nod politely but actually lean in... encouraging your wild ideas, fuelling your ambitions and reminding you of your own brilliance when you forget.

And for flips sakes… believe in yourself too.

Believe in your own magic. Believe in the messy, beautiful, imperfect parts of yourself that still deserve to win. Don’t let that inner critic hold you hostage. Some days the bravest thing you’ll do is choose to love yourself louder, even when the voice of doubt tries to drown you out. That voice can be a dick.

Teach it to be kinder to you!

And remember (maybe say these words out loud): You are worthy. Of every dream. Of every shot. Of every moment of joy that you sometimes think belongs to “other people.”

It belongs to you too.

So here’s my wish for you today (and every day). May you stand taller in your own story, may you keep company with people who bring out the best in you and may you never forget this... the world needs you. Exactly as you are. All of you. It needs exactly what you’ve got.

I am rooting for you.

Wishing you only good things, always.

Okay. Love you. Bye.

[@luphumlongcayisa @luphumlongcayis]

HOLLYWOOD BETS and BETWAY are funding and sponsoring everything in sight. Our children are once again being set up to sink. As if alcohol is not excelling in this regard.

When government finally chooses to wake up to the devastation and erosion caused by online gambling, we will be told curtailing its visibility or banning it will “come at a cost to the country because jobs will be lost.” The same recycled bull dust they use to justify every piece of nonsense.

Meanwhile, families are being gutted, paychecks disappear into apps, domestic violence owing to financial mismanagement is on the rise and the social cost is mounting by the day.

This country’s lackadaisical posture towards things that actively harm society is exhausting. As a country, we truly are a child headed household.