I have discovered that giving up on the world can set you free
I am tired. Exhausted from struggling and imagining a better world. I have given up, in a way. Yet I am cheery.
Things are getting worse.
Every day, they are getting worse. It’s not just me or ‘my negative attitude.’ It’s not a subjective assessment — no, things are most definitely, on the whole, getting worse every day.
Every day.
I am renting of course, as is almost everyone else I know. Rents are increasing; they are increasing much faster than wages which, even here in Austria, have mostly stagnated since the 1980s when adjusted for inflation. No one can afford shit. My sister is a doctor, and her boyfriend — soon-to-be husband — too. They can’t afford a house right now. Two doctors for fuck’s sake. Who, then, can afford a house? Why even fucking work?
I will never be able to afford a real home in this godforsaken country. Homes are an asset on company sheets. Every seventh home is empty, a recent study here revealed — held as collateral or for speculation.
Austria. You may think things are better here. Western Europe; a rich nation, right? Banish that thought, son. Austria is a cesspool of hate and far-right proto-fascism right now. Everyone hates everybody else. Politics is an absolute, disgusting, corruption-riddled mess from which there is no way out. Nothing changes, people resist change at every point. Climate protestors are being driven over by people in SUVs and no one gives a shit. “Serves them right,” they say. “Serves them right for making me late to work.”
Fuck you and your work.
Everyone is a conservative here. Even those calling themselves ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ are fucking conservatives when it comes down to it. Preserve our wasteful, consumerist, comfortable life at any price. Thousands of desperate people are drowning in the Mediterranean. Let them die. They deserve it for thinking they could have what we have.
How dare they seek a better life? How dare they try to escape the collapsing nations that we have exploited for centuries and helped collapse in the first place?
Not to speak of the coldness and the so obviously fake niceness one encounters here in the West. But maybe that’s just my Balkan heritage speaking.
I have struggled with my purpose in this life they force upon us; have a master’s degree in business administration and a bachelor’s in teacher education (math and physics). I hated every white-collar job I ever had with a burning passion. It either drained my very soul making me depressed and sick (HR) or, else, I felt like a prison guard forcing children to sit still and learn shit they’ll never need just so their parents can both work full-time. They never see their child anyway; what is the fucking sense of having one?
Please don’t tell me about the purpose of schools and all your noble bullshit. I have spent years in the system, I have seen the purpose they serve. Conditioning. Servitude. Obey, obey, obey, or else.
Well, right now I’m a gig worker with a few personal, creative projects (such as Beneath the Pavement) people will hopefully deem worthwhile. It will never be enough, of course, and at some point, I’ll have to relent my soul to full-time work again. I’m thinking of just working in a warehouse or as a barkeeper or something. It’s better than any white-collar bullshit job. If I have to attend another meeting on company values, if I have to hear “we are all like a family here” once more, if I receive another angry email about the most irrelevant, unimportant, utter nonsense ever again I’m afraid I’ll shoot someone.
So many people are walking around like zombies. Not the strong, fast ones from The Last of Us, no, the lethargic, slow, almost-but-not-quite braindead ones from The Walking Dead. The pandemic of loneliness and apathy is a quiet one. It shows up in obscure statistics such as drug and opiate use, sleeping pills, anti-depressants, suicides. We are like cattle being walked to the slaughterhouse of the climate catastrophe, and it’s our parents who are leading us there, joyfully proclaiming, “No one wants to work anymore.” The stupor will not be broken by anything. How else to explain the anger most people exhibit upon being confronted by the harsh realities? Live in your cognitive dissonance, then, until it tears you apart.
Who can afford hobbies? Real ones, I mean. Not watching TV shows and movies or staring at your phone. You’re either too tired and mentally exhausted from work or you can’t afford it. Enjoy the comfort of the screen and just shut the fuck up.
The planet — no, not the planet; just we, us — is dying as we speak. No one wants to realize that we have passed our peak and are on the decline now. It’s a good thing, actually. Just… the wrong ones will die first, and those who would deserve it may even survive. Life is unjust like that. There is no higher power to correct or punish the evil. It all falls to us, the invisible masses, and we will do nothing until it is too late. I can say that with sincere certainty, for it is already too late.
Morality is all relative, anyway. A human invention. “What is the morality of stealing from corporations?” I asked in my last essay. Who knows? A hundred people, a hundred different answers.
COVID-19 could have been a wake-up call, but it just made things worse. Inequality is higher than ever before in human history. Every war could have been a wake-up call, for that matter, but we seem to crave the wars and the violence they bring. A sort of cleansing? A sort of collective, unconscious desire to kill as many of us as possible? A desperate, last call for purpose? — for there is a sort of curious purpose in waging war, especially for men. Camaraderie and the higher calling of suffering and killing for your tribe. It’s better than nothing for them. It’s better than sitting in front of your computer and reading greentexts and memes with frogs.
I am tired, I admit. I have all but given up on the world, seeking refuge in the philosophies of stoicism, nihilism, hedonism. I’ve begun smoking, which I’ve never done in my life, because why the fuck not? It momentarily calms my unrelenting brain. There’s plastic in our blood and in unborn fetuses. Why the hell should I not smoke?
I am exhausted from imagining a better world, a Utopia, that cannot and will not come to pass. I’ve never chosen to live in this system, in this cage they call society. Read Henry David Thoreau and you will know how I think. Read The Parable of the Sower and you will know how this world feels to me. All this toxic positivity you see on social media and here on Substack. What purpose does it serve? Copium, hopium, solace, pacification whatever. It just prevents anyone from doing anything. I’d rather face the harsh reality than live in the gaslighted dream world of the liberals and tech-bros. But that’s a matter of personal philosophy, I guess.
I’m not depressed. Honestly, I’m not! I’m kind of cheery, actually. I’ve suffered from depression some time ago, adding to crippling ADHD and social anxiety because, hey, why the fuck not, but not anymore. I have accepted. The one thing you are not supposed to do if you want to fight this system, I have done now. And I feel much better for it. My anarcho-nihilism has not caused me despair, but, truthfully, makes me feel more powerful. More in control, actually. Nothing truly matters, in the end. We will all end up as worm food. There is true solace in that, at least for me. The universe is vast and unreal. It doesn’t give a shit about any of us.
Do not get me wrong, please. I still very much despise this system — capitalism and its fascist offspring. I will gladly join the war against it once it begins. I will build guillotines if necessary. Once it begins… if it ever begins.
Make the best of it, be kind, try to change what you can, relish the chaos when it comes, for you cannot stop it anyway and at least it will make you feel alive. Things can always get worse and they will, but you can choose the fight if you want. You will need to sell your time, your labor, your life to avoid homelessness and starvation for many years to come, but, at least, be angry about that, for it prevents you from enjoying this very short and unimportant life you have.
Rage in your cage. Perhaps the bars will bend one day. I’ll be there for it.
I share in these raw feelings you have expressed. I never consented to existing and especially didn't consent to participating in the systems responsible for unfathomable levels of pain, suffering, and injustice. I experience murderous rage born from tender feelings of compassion and love. Until the time for guillotines comes, I will dance and sing and fuck and cuddle my dogs and drink too much cheap, but delicious Portuguese wine and share the joys of companionship as much as I can while navigating my way through poverty traps, barely dodging homelessness, and staring into the abyss of nihilism that sometimes has me thinking perhaps I'd unhesitatingly push the big red button if it was in front of me, but that's too easy... better to bide my time until the guillotines are rolled out. Like a longed for vacation, I wait.
I gave up for a while - just accepted hedonism, nihilism, apathy - accepted being an addict, fat, just consuming whatever shit vaguely amused me on Netflix.
I've decided against all that, now. I see finding a way to be healthy and well and to find a way to have enough energy to rage against the machine as a middle finger to capitalism and the neoliberal death-cult. They want people like us to give up, to shut up, to take our sedatives and stare at our shiny screens. Well FUCK them. I'm going to do my best to live a good life, to get fit again, to start bouldering again, to make my corner of the world a marginally better place for those I share it with, to keep my mind sharp and not clouded by my daily tonic of cannabis so that I at least have the energy to tell the system to go fuck itself, to enjoy life as much as possible despite the horror-show everywhere around us.
Is it going to make a difference to the outcome (collapse)? Is capitalism going to give a single solitary shit about whatever I do or create? Very unlikely and not even the point. The point, to me, is to carve out a niche to live life as much as possible according to my values in a world where money IS the only value.
It reminds of the poem "Do not go gentle into that good night" by Dlyan Thomas, about raging against death despite its inevitability. It's about who you want to be as a person in the face of the end of history. I find myself in a place of acceptance, but an acceptance that doesn't lead to despondency but to a steely determination to exist as far as posssible on my own terms.
I want to make the most of whatever time we have left, with whatever tools I have. I may be trapped in a gilded cage but I won't let that stop me spreading my wings as far as they will go. I will not succumb.