the murky waters

long time no see blog. i know there has to be at least one real soul out there reading my posts and to whomever that is, thank you and sorry for being gone for so long.

the last month plus to me has felt like i’ve been stuck in the eye of a storm and everytime i venture outside of the eye, i’m reminded there’s no point trying to figure out what’s past the storm. okay, that sounds like a silly metaphor, but i guess one could say i’ve been a little stressed. and truthfully, the only reason i haven’t written in so long is because my brain feels like the refried beans you just heated up from mexican the other night (reheated refried beans?). anyway, i’m trying again and that’s all that matters to me.

i’m still unemployed, still anxious, and still a little bit cynical, with a healthy sprinkle of nihilism, toward this whole ~job~ thing. what has grown to bother me increasingly over the last couple months is not that i have to find a job but merely the specificity of skill development needed for one to fit their specialised role. i guess for me it’s more so the fact that we all have to adopt these orchestrated personas in which we have to ensure everyone around us that we love our niche. and if you don’t love your niche then you have to play the part of the hopeless job searcher struggling to find the next good thing for you. or maybe you do find it and your persona then becomes how you used to do this super specialised role that has absolutely nothing to do with your now equally specialised role and how happy you are that you made the change. fuck that. i get it; i’m beating a dead horse and probably starting to fringe on the inane ideas of philosophical anarchists, ‘specialised labor is society’s way of keeping you docile like the domesticated animal that you are!’ okay, i won’t lie, i do sort of agree with the notion but it’s a meaningless statement to make. what are you gonna do? dismantle centuries of development that have created the civilisations we have today? good luck with that.

stick with me for a second on this one. i’m only complaining here with hopes of providing comfort to someone else who has thought these things. no solutions here. only observations and thoughts, really. continuing… doesn’t it ever bother any of you that you don’t have a choice? that you have to adopt this persona wherein you either truly convince yourself or throw a thick blanket over your true thoughts to blend in with everyone else that you love and only love spending 40+ hours a week doing that ONE specific job (except for when you get to do your ‘passion hobby’ for a whopping 2 hours every week). as for me, i get kind of sick thinking about it. i’m comforted by the idea that in theory, if ‘you really push yourself…’ i could find out that i hate one thing and over time transition into a completely different field, sector, etc. but you’re still only really allowed to be good at that ONE thing. sure, you still probably have the skills to go back to the other role pretty easily, but you’ll forget over time and the gears will rust. this interdependence upon each other to live is sweet. yes, it let’s me not have to worry about how i’m going to fuel my car or how i’m going to get the proper nutrition for my dog, and i don’t know what i would do without it. but therein lies my complaint, i couldn’t exit stage right from this VR experience of The Truman Show if I wanted to. why should i be forced to suck it up and force myself to become an expert in XYZ so i’m allowed to continue living? my viewpoint is privileged, i get that. i’ve only ever live in a developed country and it’s a blessing that i don’t have to worry about how i’m going to drink water everyday, but maybe sometimes i wish i could get just a little taste of that life. for the bulk of human existence that is how we lived afterall,+60% of the American working population before the middle of the 19th century were farmers. now less than 2% of us are farmers. do you see my point? there’s benefits to that change in statistic, yes, now we have more wealth as a civilisation and as the average person than we did almost 200 years ago, but our focus and meaning for life has drastically changed. and that’s what bothers me. life isn’t so much about living anymore as much as it is a race to get the biggest buck so you can have the newest sound system in your house or fly first class instead of economy. i’ll concede that the american dream has always been present in different forms. those farmers in 1850 wanted just as bad to have a high amount of wealth as do the millennials of modern day, but it would be a gross oversight to liken the two ideological mindsets to each other. life is increasingly and overwhelmingly more complex now. our worries and stressors are no longer based in a simple innate fear of hunger, cold, or thirst. now you get to worry about whether or not you remembered to sign up for spin class next monday at 9pm or 9am.

i don’t know. maybe i’m being an ass by trying to pretend that an alternate lifestyle to our modernity would be better. all in all, i guess i just wish things were less complicated. maybe my baby boomer teacher had a point about our generation getting dumber and needing to use google to know how to change a car tire. he was wrong about us getting dumber. now we just get to worry about ever-growing abstract ideas that are deeply rooted in our evolving technological landscape. so sure, we can’t change car tires on our own anymore and maybe its better that we don’t because now we can focus on the ideas that actually progress society ‘forward.’ but maybe we need to take said baby boomer’s statement into more consideration. maybe we need to better understand what we’re really moving forward toward and what that truly entails for our society. is it all worth it if in turn we continue to create new problems that drive our anxiety and depression to the point where you can’t really be sure what of the 13 stressful things you had happen in the last week is causing it anymore? who knows, but maybe we’ll figure that out with time.

go count how many stars you can see from outside your house, camper van or whatever tonight. write down what you see.

peace,

D