fuck this job.com

We poor, desperate fools that those higher on the chain call wage-slaves seem to have made the ultimate, poor life decision. All our lives the conditioning has been simple -- you trade your time for money, and that's how you live.

Except that it's not just our time we trade... it's our everything. Our very lives dedicated to being slow-turning little gears in a machine whose entire purpose is nebulous and not apparent. We're told that hard-work pays dividends, and yet those at the top didn't get their by hard work, they got there by dumb, stupid luck. By ass-kissing and lying and being born into it, by making the right friends.

And we poor fools continue to toil away.

We dedicate a third of our lives to sleep, and another third to work, and what we're left with is a tiny fraction of our time with which to actually live. This isn't life... it's a compromise, a sick and disgusting compromise that robs us all of our dreams, hopes, ambitions, everything. And even in that third, we take with us all the stress, the problems, the E-mails and the phone calls and the ass-covering.

We play petty games of politics to channel our neutered aggression on each other, and those above laugh all the way to the yacht club. They grow fat off our work, our ideas... they contribute nothing, and indeed often have nothing at all to contribute. And yet they grow rich, and we keep trading out most valuable commodity -- our time -- for a tiny little percentage of their money.

And one day, it dawns on us... just because we trade our time, it doesn't necessarily mean that we have to do much more than be physically present. And so we become apathetic, we stop caring completely, and then we are finally lost.

That apathy spreads outwards in our lives, taking the color and the definition out of everything... Once, our work defined us, when the tribe needed each member to survive. Now we are defined by our apathy, defined by undefinition. And so we drink, take drugs, drown ourselves in television and try to hide from the dark, the cold. Now we are truly lost.

I hate this situation. I hate it with all my being. And for all my genius-level IQ, my myriad of skills and my strange ability to step outside myself and see everything at once, I see no solution. The choice is to pursue money with such vigor that IT becomes all that there is to us, to remain an honest fool all our lives, or to give it all up, to throw up our hands and simply wait to die.

Work is suicide. It's not a quick, flashy, explosive suicide, but a slow and grinding one... a suicide of inches and nibbles. Death by consumption.

I come here and I rant, and it's fun. Sometimes my rants are amusing, but each one is a reframing -- I get angry so that I don't get sad. I fill myself with righteous rage and a tattered cloak of superior arrogance just to hide my inner, valuelessness. All we office-drones wear our smiles, sickly, weak little things. In much the same way, I wear my online-vitriol.

But there come days when not even that is sufficient... when that inner, existential self-loathing is just too big and too loud to argue with. When the full weight of your life lies, stretched out before you, and it is nothing more than a yawing gulf, an emptiness, a no-thing.

I have no solution, or at least no solution that does not require actions of insanity. That's the barb, the hook. Whatever small bit of wisdom I possess, whatever creativity, whatever adaptability that has allowed me to accomplish in my short years more than people twice my age runs into a brick wall when thrown up against this problem.

I have come to believe that there is no solution, and what is left, stretching out before me, is a long grind of mediocrity leading to inevitable oblivion. I can change jobs, I can change positions, I can change careers, and yet it all wears the same, a harsh, hemp rope around my neck.

Normally, a 'fuck this job' is sufficient, but today... no.

Today I have to say, 'fuck this life'. Fuck this world even. The more I look and learn and see and do, the more I believe that it holds nothing at all for me.

Salute.

~SL