Weltschmerz: The Meta‑System’s Funeral
The world in which we all grew up in died years ago, but no one wants to speak something like that out loud, I do believe. To do so is to admit it, and no one wants to admit that their worldviews, their world, their perceptions… are all wrong. What is wrong with the world is that we are trying to live in it as if it were the old world, and from that the old world is grasping to survive while the new world is struggling to be born.
The meta-system, like some great lumbering beast, continues to plod forward to a graveyard it cannot comprehend, but it feels the fear of the destination while it travels. However, it cannot stop, it cannot change, and it must consume all in its path forward, ever forward. It knows what is coming will be cold, harsh, and uncaring; but it will never stop. For what would an all-consuming beast care about except for its next meal? Its next victory over something weaker? Even as it is rotting and dying it will continue to consume.
The illusions of the past of a future that was for us, if we only worked hard, went to school, got ourselves an education, were always meant to do just one thing in the end. To keep us docile, placid, malleable, obedient… to keep us working as tools and as cogs in the beast. We are, after all, the parts that make up the beast itself. From the moment you are born, you serve the beast, you feed the beast, you care for the beast, and you are consumed by the beast that is the meta-system. There is no true escape from the beast, not for very long. Not until it dies.
You and I were told we had choices, to convince us that everything that happens is our fault directly, to guilt us. But the truth is that the meta-system made those choices for us before we were ever born, and continued to guide us to maximized consumption of our very souls to feed it throughout our lives. Even now it is eating parts of us. Little by little it will consume us: mind, body, and soul. Our curated lives are lives lived with the hole within ourselves that gapes constantly like a void seeking something to fill it. We try to placate our hole, we try to give it meaning… but meaning was robbed from us at the moment of our birth.
Do you remember being told that you would be independent as an adult? That you would have every opportunity to grow, to excel, and to surpass the adults who raised you? Do you remember being told you could be anything you wanted to be? I sure do. I remember I wanted to one day be a geneticist, a computer scientist, maybe even a president (I mean, we’re all curated and taught we could be president one day, even though the likelihood of that is so slim and so managed it is nil). I was taught that I would be free. Adulthood has been nothing but performance of compliance to a system that never cared beyond what I could do for it, and I am not but another cog in the great meta-system.
Another foot closer toward the graveyard, our beast lurches. Rotting. Putrid. Hungry. Its joints ache with the strain of its immense weight and mass, having consumed all that was once before it, leaving nothing but the rotting decay of a burned, polluted, scarred land behind it. It still doesn’t understand what it is slowly plodding toward, but it feels fear. Oh yes, fear is one thing the meta-system understands so very sharply.
I remember, perhaps so do you, that particular lie that hard work would save us all. Hard work? That was code for working until you collapsed, whether that was mental or physical. That work ethic was drilled into my head, beaten into me, encoded in my very subconscious DNA so that any time I take of leisure for myself is just wasted on anxiety that I am not DOING SOMETHING FOR SOMEONE ELSE! It is a maddening kind of programming that strips your enjoyment from tasks that you like to do, or makes you think about how you could monetize your hobbies in order to feed the beast! Our “hard work” is just more food for the putrefying beast that continues to consume more even as it dies.
All of these illusions we were fed die if you look at them directly. They always lived in the peripheral, not directly in our own vision, because if you focus on them you see them for what they are. It dies like a candle being snuffed, with just the twirling smoke and the stench of the extinguished flame. That grief you or I feel afterwards is not a personal failing on our part, even if they want us to think it is. It is the only sane response to the realization that your world is inside the beast, and the beast itself is dying. You do not grieve for what is ending, but for how long it is taking to die. It lives in an ever-constant state of misery and hunger, it never knew love or compassion, and the humane thing to do is to put it down.
I feel anger. Do you feel anger? I feel it. I am angry that I have been betrayed. I am angry that this betrayal started when I was a baby. Before that even. Before my parents were babies even. It goes back far in human time, but in the vastness of how long life on earth is, it’s barely a blink of an eyeball, perhaps even just the twitch before the blink. But to us it has always been, because that is how we grew up. I know I talk a lot about the cave-and I mean Plato’s cave. You only know what you were allowed to know growing up, and you only saw what you were allowed to see, so that became natural for you and I. Well, once you are able to see everything for what it is… there is a particularly sharp anger that rises in the bile of my guts that wants to retch itself out and burn my throat with every horrid expulsion of the lies. The betrayal isn’t new… it’s only visible now, and much like the vision of a maggot-infested wound you had ignored, it elicits a response of revulsion and anger.
I’ve become resigned to the fact we are living in the dying beast. It’s pushing forward, ever forward, consuming as much as it can to offset the rot. The stench it produces once you notice it? It makes you want to vomit. There was once a feeling of pride in the meta-system, it once had some semblance of glory and promise, but those were all lies as well. The hide of the beast is mottled with rot it refuses to acknowledge, while we must seemingly forever fester within the pustules of systemic decay.
The meta-system was never built to allow us to flourish as people; we are its food in the end after all. What point would there be in it? So here we all are, undead but alive, forced to go along with the very thing that is consuming our entire lives slowly. It was built to extract, and to optimize, and to expand, and to survive at any cost. It does not care if we suffer. It cannot comprehend it. It does not care if we want better. It doesn’t understand better. It doesn’t give a damn if we are sickened by it; it simply lacks any ability to feel empathy. All it knows, after hunger, is fear. Deviation is to be punished, because deviation threatens it, and it fears change to its core systems. It was more adaptable when it was younger, but now it is consolidating as much as it can in fear of its future irrelevance. It is inevitable that the beast of the meta-system will die. It is coming. Every step. Every heartbeat. Every breath inhaled in ragged gasps, and exhaled in black filth, is one less it will ever take. It is suffocating on itself, and yet it consumes with those ever-hungry rotten teeth and snapping jaws that unhinge to swallow anything it can to push itself forward just one footstep more.
From us it slowly extracts our attention, our identities, our judgment, our very spirit of being human. It doesn’t care what happens to us hollow people afterwards, and we become lesser for it all. If we refuse to give it our all, it will punish us for it. It punishes our competence in that competence requires us to have privacy, time, and the freedom to fail. It cannot grasp that it would have better sustenance if it allowed us our time, so it punishes free time. It cannot understand that privacy is necessary, and so it invades every ounce of our being. It does not understand failure as a necessity of growth, and so it beats us with fear of failure, or worse, consumes us wholesale and crushes what remains. The death of competence is a natural consequence in the meta-system. It infantilized our adulthoods, and punished us for being actualized adults because adulthood requires agency… but the meta-system is our agency now. It punishes our childhoods because childhood contains imagination… and imagination is a threat it fears, because you might imagine a better meta-system to replace it with.
This beast functions exactly as it intends to function; there are no mistakes and there are no unintended consequences beyond the very nature of its future self-destruction. It cannot see its end coming because it must also live in the illusion of what it has thought it has become-to snuff out that illusion is to die for the meta-system. The harm this system of systems inflicts is fully structural and never in error. It lurches ever closer, plods its course never ceasing, toward its ultimate failure and demise. Its eyes are swollen and darting, paranoid of threats, paranoid of what might come for it-but nothing does. It already ate all the threats to its existence. It is always searching for the external threat though, because those can be useful. An external threat can rally every part of its being to a focused purpose, and pauses the rot for a while. It cannot ever look inward without sacrificing part of itself, however. Once it does, and finds a threat within itself, it will kill part of itself to unify the rest-but at greater and greater costs of the whole.
Our exhaustion in this system is from the friction of being human beings made of flesh, blood, dreams, and tears… all trapped inside an uncaring mechanized system of systems in the ever-consuming meta-system. Some of us have begun to realize something essential was stolen from us, and a few of those who realize something is wrong are coming to a conclusion of what was stolen. The world we were promised as children never existed, and the world we were given instead is dying. The mighty meta-system is killing itself with the very tools it created; its logic cannot sustain as it is only able to extract. We’re husks of people wandering within a dying mechanical all-consuming cancer. We are living in a slow suicide of everything around us, and we are forced to watch from within as our world dies. We live within the collapse. We may die when it dies if we can find no way to escape.
The graveyard is getting closer for us, with every labored lumbering step of this beast. You can feel the fear and the anxiety of the beast, you can sense it trembling if you care to be still and really let the subconscious do the work. The meta-system itself trembles from a fear it cannot name, and a future it cannot escape. If we remain within as silent husks, watchers all, of the impending doom; if we only observe what is coming and we do not act? We too shall perish. Do not get me wrong, this is no call to action, no plea for hope, no big reveal of what we can do to stop it. This is my naming of the dead, this is my stripping of the delusion we live in, this is my eulogy and my funeral for the meta-beast. The system is dying, and we may survive if we help it die.
The end is always filled with fear, and to some extent relief. This terrible nightmare is coming to an end; it is inevitable. You and I can admit that nothing is going to be okay, that we must remember that all things must die. It is the nature of life. Of systems. Of men. Of you and I. As illusions burn away in the light of examination, and we become focused on that which is inevitable more and more, and as more of us wake up to become conscious of it, the outcome will shift. The meta-system does not want you to be awake. As more people do awaken, the beast has reached the threshold to the graveyard. It still does not realize it is dying. It still does not know why this dead land before it is barren with bleached bones of previous systems that found their way here and died in ages gone by.
It trembles in fear with a heart that races and lungs that fill with black oil and coughs that spew coal dust.
Welcome to the graveyard, where the illusion has given way to truth alone.