Weltschmerz: All Bad Things
It is comforting to think that all things can come to some conclusion or an ending eventually. All good things, after all, must come to an end. Is it true for bad things? On the grand scale, certainly. All life on earth will end one day. But I don’t really care, because the end of the world isn’t here and now, at least not today. To suggest that the suffering will burn itself out, and that time will do the work for us is to ignore that entropy requires energy input to end. The energy of suffering is currently baked in, turned on, and being given a massive pipeline of fuel by our conditions.
All bad things don’t come to an end unless we collectively make a choice to bring the bad things to that end.
Bad things simply just become normalized if left festering long enough; they continue on and on after all. They settle in, becoming routines we all live with as we let our minds go numb, and our eyes glaze over with each new sensationalized social ill story sucking away our attention. Most of the harm we live with today is not a traditional sudden disaster. It is just there. Mundane. It shows up every day when we come to consciousness, and it asks us for our time – damn near polite as well in that ask – which hides its true nature. It becomes unbearable only when you realize it for what it is.
Going to work day in and day out seems only natural, and yet here it is as one of the big harms we all face. We are told to treat work like some kind of relationship, but that implies a fair trade like a relationship. A good relationship is one of cooperation, of amicable gives and takes, of a constant care for one another. Work and care do not go together when you don’t have any say in how or what you work on. Maybe you are lucky in that you work for yourself, so you can determine some of the relationship you have with your work… but even then you’re still under the thumb of how your suppliers treat you, how the market can crush you, and how your safety net is just yourself with no one to lend a helping hand if you need it.
For the most part our jobs ask us to care about them, to have loyalty to a company that would replace you at an instant, to give your best years to this company toiling away… and for what? What does it give you or I in return? Just enough to survive until the next day, and then it demands gratitude for a pittance of what you and I are actually worth as human beings. My self-worth is honestly not very much, I know I am just a hairless ape living in a world that is not natural, but even then, I also know I am worth more than what meager allowance for survival I am “gifted” after a long week’s work. So are you. You might be in a better fiscal situation, or a worse one, but no matter where you are, as a worker today you are being exploited far more than you realize.
Work cannot love us. It is not made to love you or me, or anyone. It is made to love capital, and to enrich the owners of the machines, the technologies, and the trades. Work is built to extract every red drop of your salty ichor and then replace you the moment your output falls below an ever increasing productivity metric that measures you not in your value as a human being but in your value as a cog in the great machines of progress (i.e. the bullshit machines that take money and give it to just a few thousand assholes at the top of the chain).
They encourage us to find meaning in work. To find meaning in it, to identify ourselves by it, and to feel ashamed when we break down from exhaustion. I say fuck that. I am not defined by my job, my career, nor am I defined by the shame I am supposed to feel when I can no longer continue after grinding on and on until my body hits exit/end task/shutdown. I still feel shame of course, and that old Catholic Guilt that was beaten into me as a child, but I have come to recognize where it is from, and if you recognize it too? Well, it can’t have all that much power over you now can it.
The meaning of our lives cannot be in what we do for other people to make them rich. The meaning of our lives cannot be the careers we work at for fifty years before our bodies crumble to dust from stress, anxiety, and pain. The messages of the bosses and the corporate jackoffs that keep us forcefully going onward and onward are wearisome now. When you recognize that corpo-speak, it becomes all too easy to detect. In fact, it becomes annoyingly prevalent once your braincase cracks the corpo code.
Exhaustion is treated as a personal failure instead of a planned and predictable outcome of burning up your labor pools. Burnout itself is seen as some kind of weakness, that you weren’t strong enough to keep working, that you weren’t strong enough to keep going so your boss can get another property or Lambo or whatever the fuck they’re going to waste your valuable labor on. Burnout itself is evidence of the results of inhumane conditions on the body, mind, and spirit of the workers. When someone beats you and I every day with messages, demands, requests (they never really are requests) and then blows your phone up when you’re trying to just have a MOMENT of peace? That is the recipe for burnout. (Bullshit + Time)/Mental Capacity = Burnout. When the fraction ratio becomes 1:1, you’ve reached burnout. Anything above 1:1 is just adding to the burnout to effort ratio, and eventually you and I will break.
The time they steal from us is given a cope, that it is professionalism. Then any time they stole from us given back from us is another cope, and called a reward, as if our time was always theirs to control and theirs to do with what they will – and they’re right. As long as food, healthcare, and housing is tied to your worth as a cog in their machine, they do control you. You and I are controlled just as much as any servile domesticated animal, because we were given an education in blinders in a frame of reference we could never break out of unless we saw, read, or experienced something outside that box. We’re all in the cave until we break our chains and see what’s actually beyond the shadows on the wall.
The system itself, for the most part, does not even hate us. It is far worse than that. It just doesn’t care. It doesn’t care if children starve, if the elderly die in destitution, if you or I break a bone and can’t afford to fix it. The system cares nothing for the people that hold it up or keep it working. The system is worse than evil. The system is indifferent. The system consumes you not because it wants to, but because it needs to. It is propped up by our very existence being quashed by its ever-gnashing teeth, squeezing our lifeblood out until we’re just chewed up husks spat out on a plate of broken dream, denied hopes, and damaged people.
When the damage becomes obvious, we are then told by our dear leaders to wait it out. Waiting is presented to us as some kind of grand wisdom; that patience is a virtuous thing we should all have, and that with patience will come (the lie of) a greater reward! Urgency is treated as if it were immature, and we are told that change takes time, that now just isn’t the right time, that pushing too hard will only make things worse. Don’t worry about the starving people, the dying people, those who could not make ends meet and will be on the streets – just have that virtue, patience, and all shall be fine. When that became normalized, so did persistent hunger, houselessness, and horror.
Life itself is deferred until it becomes unable to be life, rest is postponed until rest becomes death, and stability is always just that little bit out of reach. Gotta stay hungry! You hate that like me? Being told I need to stay hungry? That’s such a bullshit theory that no one succeeds because they are hungry. You know what hunger does? It distracts you from better solutions and pushes you to short term thinking and short term goals and gives you the outcomes of those short-term mechanisms. What a beautiful short-term world we live in, what a sweet and romantic place, no? It’s not like long-term thinking by people who care about what happens in 100 years would’ve avoided the… well yeah. It would have.
Waiting only works for those not being crushed under the weight of that wait. It works for those who can defer and delay the future because in so doing they increase their accumulations of wealth from our exploitation during the waiting period. For you and I, well, waiting just means more mundane harm. It means adding another year on to the end of the last living a life burned out at both ends of a candle that has no wick left to burn. It means another year of added debts, whether it’s sleep debt, monetary debt, or life debt. It is another year of accumulated damages that cannot be undone because there is no time to undo the damage we accumulate. That ol’ virtue of patience is praised from the mountaintops to the valleys while our suffering continues on unabated.
To make it bearable, we must be distracted. It is imperative that you do not think about how badly you’re getting exploited and used. Quick! Stop thinking about it! Or do. I’m not your dad. The distractions of an ever-present news cycle, gossip, short form video, long form slop, and oh there’s just too many things to list! Let us just refer to the distraction cycle as the slop feed. Like pigs we are fed our slop and expected to be satisfied, anyways. Always something new to look at, new horror to think about pushing the old horror further back, new anxiety, new toy to buy or a new service to bet our meager income on.
Distraction itself as a tool as replaced force, why force people when you can just occupy their minds with slop? The good little piggies you and I are will slurp that slop up and go to bed satiated anyways… or well, that is their hope. I feel a hole inside of me. Do you? Do you feel that empty center hiding under layers and layers of dissonance you created to survive the world of today? Do you lie to yourself like I do? Like I did. Do you feel the uncomfortable truth shifting from that void, like the tendrils of an eldritch beast reaching out and begging to be addressed? Do you keep it pacified, distracted, because you know that addressing it without the protection or preparation of a mind shielded in the knowledge of why things are the way they are might drive you mad?
Over time, the distraction, and the harm, becomes normalized even further. We’re great at adjusting to conditions; we are creatures of adaptation after all. That is why we are what we are. We lower our expectations even further down than they were before, and we call this resilience. It’s just coping though. We’re excellent at adaptation, and that makes us the best coping creatures to ever walk on the planet. We find praise in survival when flourishing is no longer imaginable or possible. You and I tell ourselves (or perhaps now, told ourselves in the past tense) that this is just how things are. The crisis’s become background noise like snow on the old TV. The extraordinary conditions of our times become ordinary, and the subroutines of cope start to dredge up the past in nostalgia. TVs don’t even blast the comfort of snow and white noise anymore.
Staying does not mean we believe that things will get better, it just means we have to continue through it, or we find ourselves despondent and worse off. We must do what must be done for ourselves without pretending it has meaning when it does not. Endurance is not a virtue in this case; it is a sign of silent and ever-oppressive suffering that you and I must face. Perhaps it is noble to face this fact and continue in spite of it. Perhaps the virtue is not in the work, not in the grind, not in what you do for a company that seeks your utter obliteration because you matter in so much as what you can produce and not an iota more… but rather in that you continue on for yourself, and for those who rely upon you.
Maybe you and I are the virtue in this hell. Because we’re still here, and we’re still trying our damnedest to survive it. But it cannot be a virtue unless maybe we push at the edges until something tips over and breaks.
There is a cost to all of this, you know? It’s numbness. It’s a withdrawal of feeling things. It’s the flatness of indifference. The system wants us to be as indifferent as it is. It isn’t because I don’t care, or you don’t care, or other people you know don’t care though. It is because caring without relief is exhausting, and you learned how to endure and some of that meant sacrificing what you can care about, who you can care about, and how you care. You had to, to survive. You had to, to be functional. You and I had to learn how to keep on going without believing in the reasons we were given and taught.
I don’t have the solutions, or the answers, nor do I have any kind of grand call to action or clean ending. This world has left me weary, tired, broken, sad, and worse things I will not write out, but I assume you’ve got the intelligence to infer. Nothing is going to resolve this right now, and these conditions will continue to persist. All bad things continue; all good things end.
All I will say is that, in defiance, in absolute revolutionary defiance… don’t stop caring. Caring is an act of sabotage, an act of human defiance, and caring is a poison to this system.