I Am Giving Up
/I am giving up.
Over the past several months I've posted about getting my writing published here and there, about landing an internship with KUER, about quitting a lucrative job, about graduating college. I've shared all this in hopes of inspiring people. For I believed there was a way out, and I thought if I could find it and document it then others would find a way out too.
Out of what was I hoping to find a way? This. This whole setup. This whole chase-money-acquire-debt-do-meaningless-work-or-go-broke game.
What? Not all work is meaningless? True. Education, agriculture, craftsmanship, art—these enterprises have real social value. But in general they pay very little, making it difficult if not impossible to support a family, or they are governed by inane bureaucracies and grubby capitalists. Our most humanistic endeavors, in other words, have been appropriated by this mechanistic, soul-sucking sham. (Btw, I’d say healthcare is a valuable enterprise, but it turned cancerous as soon as it glimpsed how much a person is willing to borrow or pay in order to postpone death and ease suffering.)
I have spent the last five years trying to escape industries which to me seem to offer no value to humanity—marketing, advertising, finance, insurance, real estate, transportation, investing, and all things speculative and manipulative. I have not found a way out. I don't know how and when we went wrong, but we did. Today people are paid extremely well if they can create the illusion of value, marginally well if they are willing to support the illusion. But if a person truly adds value to society, he or she is paid poorly, at least in many cases.
Why is this?
Seriously. Think about what and whom our illusions support. Do you benefit if you participate? Yes, to a degree. But also a part of you dies, because you recognize, whether faintly or clearly, this is all terribly fucked up. You feel something amiss. And if you don’t, it’s because the pleasures of the game have sedated you.
Perhaps it’s fortunate, perhaps unfortunate, but I’m fairly adept at creating the illusion of value. I know how to play the game. I could probably even “win” at it if I tried real hard. But I don’t crave power that much. Nor do I want to pacify myself with the things money can buy—entertainment, possessions—or the things it can’t buy yet promises to—security, safety, a guaranteed tomorrow.
What I want is autonomy. Alas, even this has to be purchased—with an indentured soul. The only way out, possibly, is to become the street prophet or mountain recluse or starving artist. Why do you think I beseech such folk, and solicit their wisdom?
Anyway, seeing as I bragged about my highs in the past, about my progress, I thought it appropriate to share this low, this potential regression. I am losing hope that there’s a way out of this game. It seems that I must sell one part of my soul in order to retain another, and I’m prepared to now, after nine months of trying to avoid doing so. I know most of you have already done this, several times, even do it daily. I’ve done it, too, a thousand times. “Get over it,” you might be thinking. If so, I partially admire your pragmatism. But I think there’s something else we should consider: Is it possible that such compromising of self, such repression of intuitions, indicates not simply that life is inconvenient, but that we're living it patently wrong, in this so-called civilization? Yes, to resist is to suffer, but so too is to acquiesce. And whose cause would you rather suffer for?
I don’t know. I haven’t fully given up yet, I guess, but I am mad—in both senses of the word.
