The Day I Felt Discouraged With Society

Before I get into my rant, I should mention that I wrote this and I want to share.

I’m not quite accustomed to being alive. It’s a tricky thing, living. It’s a fascinating dance between being a human and being a person. An animal in the wild is born, whereas humans are basically produced after birth. Named, designed, instructed, and distributed into the economy, encouraged toward creating another child in our own image, to procreate for politics and consumer products. We have to. We’ve cornered our species in this society that invented war, slavery, celebrities and nuclear waste. We kill each other for fun. We’ve got mentally unstable humans blowing themselves up in tourist destinations to promote their belief in words we invented to try and explain where we came from (the answer is stardust, but it can’t just be that simple). We’re all fucking crazy, and we have no choice. Here we are. Welcome to the present, now deal with it.

Get a job. Get a car. No, get a bike. Get health insurance. Renter’s insurance. Dental insurance. Flood insurance. Insurance on your digital camera. Insurance at the casino. Get a wife, get a family, get a eulogy. Get a degree. Get another degree. Get another one while you’re at it. Get debt. Get a cold. Get cancer. Get buried.

More than any other on earth, our species has advanced to a truly amazing level of self-awareness and self-improvement. We’re living longer. Flying airplanes. Curing diseases. Writing poetry. Building robots. It’s very neat, what we’ve done, and no one can deny that humans are impressive. However, on a case by case basis there’s a lot of inequality, there’s a lot of resentment, and although as a species we continue to progress, as a society we have a lot of issues to resolve. This is a daunting topic to consider. I skim the headlines on Google News and it makes me sick. For as evolved as we are, we’re still pretty fucking horrible to each other.

Emotions have a lot to do with it. We’ve contained emotions within societal norms. Our entire life is a battle between doing what we want and doing what we should. Each day we awaken for work, we think: Do I really have to do this every day?

The answer is no, by the way, but it can’t be that simple.

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: We’re trapped. We’re totally trapped. We learned how to walk on two legs and use weapons, and since then we’ve just been a series of toppling dominoes, knocked forward through time and knocking forward the generations that follow. Will it end? Will there be a final domino? Probably. It might not be our fault. There’s always 2012. But what’s crazy is how little we think about what we’re doing it all for. Why does it just have to keep building up? Why can’t we all stop and agree, for just a minute or two, that we don’t need to be so fucking stupid. There’s obviously something wrong with the world. Can we talk about that for a minute?

And I figure if the whole world just stopped for a moment and stood still, looked at the people around them, looked at those floating heads on television looking back at them, and if we all just took a deep breath—maybe we’d be okay. 

Who is telling us to work? Who is telling us to elect Presidents? Who designed this?

We just do it. We just close our eyes and follow along.

I know it can’t happen. I know that if everyone stepped away from their responsibilities, the world would fucking explode. But that’s exactly the point. We’re trapped. We’re way past the point of no return. We’re screwed. We have to play along. Life is no more than a game of Frogger, only instead of crossing a road we have to maneuver social hierarchy.

Heavy sigh.

I want religion removed. I want agriculture to grow and people to be fed. I want to melt all the weapons. I want more trees. I want my endangered species back. I want greed out of my politics. I don’t really want politics, truthfully, but I do want good leadership. I want to barter for more than I buy. I don’t want millionaires.

Basically we’re in a long-term relationship with old habits.

Old feuds, old beliefs, old policies, old borders, old fears.

If there is a god watching us, then it’s probably not happy with what it sees. I wouldn’t be. We’re ridiculous. Which is why having a god is ridiculous. We don’t deserve a god. We’re obviously not holding up our end of the bargain. We’re designed by some god and taught all these good morals and instructed to spread love, and then we keep killing each other. Then we rationalize it by going to church. If I was a god, I’d be pissed.

I’d plague the shit out of this planet.

Heavy sigh.

I guess that’s all I feel like saying. It’s useless ranting, anyway. Feels good to let out a little angst, even if there is nothing you can do about it. I am happy. I am happy with the life that I’ve been granted here in Midtown, Sacramento. It’s neat. It’s really exciting to be alive and to watch the world fuck up around me. Hell, I’m part of it. I have a role to play and I can either pout in the corner and wish I had different lines, or I can claim that spotlight for what it is, my one-time chance to take the stage. We may never stop to rethink society. I’m okay with that. It’s out of my hands. I’ve got it luckier than many others in this world, however, and I need to appreciate that, remain humble, remain positive.

It’s not so bad, society. Not here in Sacramento. Not here at 24. I don’t feel any more pressure from the outside than I do from the inside, my own desires as prominent as society’s expectations. I’m paying my rent and buying groceries and recycling. In the meantime I might struggle to find value and meaning in the universe, but I’ll still clock in for work and read the local newspapers, and I’ll quietly support stereotypes, the grease that helps the social cogs spin, and I’ll follow laws even if I don’t agree with them. I have to, and sometimes I don’t mind.

So long as I can bitch about it.