You're not allowed to live quietly and without ambition in America. Everyone must be Up and Doing, all day, every day, to preserve an instrumentalist delusion. That your circumstances not only may be changed for the better but that You are the agent of that change. Also, it should be changed for the better, no matter how satisfied you are now.
This is the pathology at the root of the American dream. Alexis de Tocqueville saw it some two centuries ago, how Americans of every class were perpetually buying and selling. No sooner did some Ohio Valley burgher purchase a horse or a butter churn then he was trying to sell it again at a profit. One nation under the side hustle.
Even if you think you're getting into a profession - or at least a day job - that will afford you some peace and quiet, you will soon find this not to be the case. As the economy moves more and more away from actual production and into the exponential bureaucracy of managerial feudalism, even the most innocuous activities become charged with a production for production's sake mania. You have to crush that PowerPoint, demonstrate enough can-do spirit to single-handedly build a pyramid, or you run the risk of appearing as a layabout. Not a doer. An un-person, unworthy of friendship or love or your middling office job - where a dozen others also compete in who can best present the simulacrum of productivity.
Because without that job, you're nothing. Without any job, you're worse than nothing. The less America spends on welfare, the more it resents those dependent on such public assistance. Poverty is the one unforgivable sin, so better look busy.
Maybe you are right. But I want to visit USA one day. I might meet you one day.
ReplyDeleteYou really have no idea, friend. I've decided that I'd rather die than subject myself and my autism to the humiliating, brutal American workplace. This makes me the property of my two clueless, racist boomer parents, but so be it. They allowed Ronald Reagan to ensure that their children would be poor, as the great John Dolan once said. They owe me. In a just world, at LEAST half of the wealth of everyone born before 1970 would be expropriated to the EPA, for the Hell that is coming soon.
ReplyDeleteI've decided to stake everything on a stand against Stan Kroenke: https://truthout.org/articles/expropriate-stan-kroenke/
The only solace to all of this is that it is going to die soon. Whether or not the beast of neoliberalsm takes us with it via climate change is the only question.
You're one of the best writers I've ever seen. In a socialist world, you'd be one of the main influences in American literature, Journalism, etcetera.
Wish me luck. Inflict and endure.
sdvsdv
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