Daily Archives: October 27, 2015

You have to produce

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It’s true. You have to produce something the world wants. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Or rather, there is, and it’s called welfare, and it sucks.

This is the major difference between childhood and adulthood. When you are a child, society and your parents support you without requiring anything of you except good grades. These grades do not have to compete in an open market. They do not have to be something someone will trade for money.

But once you are an adult, you have to produce. You need to produce something you can trade.

Note that I am not saying everyone needs to be an artist, an artisan, or a craftsperson. What most people produce is labour, broadly speaking. The point I am trying to make is that merely being a good person is no longer enough. You have to contribute to the society that has carried you this far.

Modern life in the consumerist democracies does an excellent job of disguising this fact. Every single one of us benefits ftom the labour of thousands of people evety moment of our lives, and yet we will never see these people, let alone know them. This quasi-magical existence leads to a potent and compelling illusion of autonomy and independence. Because the modern consumer/citizen cannot see the intricate web of interdependencies that support them, it is easy for them to believe what they are told, which is that none of it matters as long as they pay for what they get, either directly or through taxation.

Given this pseudo-autonomy and the atomistic individualism that accompanies it, it is easy to lose sight of the existence of society entirely, and fall into the trap of thinking oneself as self-generating and self-sustaining. From that egocentric point of view, both paying taxes AND contributing labour to a society one takes entirely for granted like it is a natural phenomenon like gravity, seems intolerable and insane. One might as well work hard and pay taxes for the turning of the tide.

Nobody set out to make a society which produces such shortsightedness. It was the result of the honest pursuit of individualism.

Because of this blocking of our collective vision, people reach adulthood, step off the escalator they have been on without knowing it for their whole lives, and have no idea what to do with themselves. We train people for jobs, and for citizenship, but not for life.

That’s always seemed like a rather larger oversight to me.

I think every high school should teach a course in basic life skills, maybe with a faux-apartment somewhere in the school so you can show people how to do things like mop a floor, cook spaghetti, and pay a bill.

But I digress.

So yeah. You have to produce. That’s another thing kids should be taught. Sooner or later, you are going to have to give the world something in return for what you get. The free ride ends. You end up on your own.

Now, I am not saying any of this in a punitive or cynical way. Having to work for a living is not a punishment. Acknowledging the truth that adulthood happens is not cynicism.

What I am saying is that you don’t just need a job to pay the bills. You need to contribute to society in order to be a happy and fulfilled. Deep within every human being is the need to contribute. It is as much a part of us as the need for romantic love and the desire for the recognition of our peers. We need meaningful labour.

A lot of people waste a lot of their youth trying to avoid this truth. It does not help matters that our culture is saturated with an immature “work sucks, school sucks” message. Everything in the culture makes it seem like anyone with any sense should hate work and long for the so-called “life of leisure”.

This sentiment is understandable. But it’s ultimately destructive to people’s life. They go into the world of work with this attitude that work sucks and it’s something you just have to endure, just like school, and it keeps people from making the best of their situation and find what pleasure and fun can be found no matter how low-status their job is.

Admit it… if you met someone who said they loved their job at McDonald’s, you would think there was something wrong with them,. wouldn’t you? Like maybe they’re mentally special, or crazy, or just plain the dullest person on planet Earth.

But why? They’re happy. Why is that so wrong? Why is it only permissible to enjoy a tiny, select percentage of jobs? And for the rest of us, it’s mandatory misery?

It’s because we view work as punishment, even imprisonment. The only jobs that we are allowed to enjoy are the ones that seem, at least from afar, like they would be so easy and/or fun that they are not even really work. More like getting paid to play.

But like I have said before, no such job exists. For anyone. No matter what job you get, even your dream job (like, for me, writer for TV), it will cease to be play the moment you have to do it when you don’t feel like it.

There is no such thing as mandatory fun.

Instead of letting the “work sucks” message go unchallenged, we should send kids the message that work can be fun and there’s nothing wrong with that. I am picturing something like the old Sesame Street bit about “who are the people in your neighborhood?” with an emphasis on people who enjoy their jobs.

That way, they can grow up to be adults who can be happy with their life even if they didn’t get to be a rock star, astronaut, or even the guy who works the crane on construction sites. Even if they never get to be on TV.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Not entirely well

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TMI and/or TRIGGER WARNING : Indirect reference to poop.

Waiting for the bus home. Not exactly well.

Not as bad as earlier, though. Earlier today, shortly after lunch, I felt this sudden wave of anxiety wash over me. It felt like I had built a wall around a lake of anxiety and that wall had suddenly collapsed. Along with that came some fairly bad bowel disturbance…. not painful but vety uncomfortable. And loud.

And…   something else.

Soon I realized I needed to use the toilet. As I got up, the need became more acute. At the same time, I felt this twisting sensation in my lower abdomen, like someone was wringing out my intestines with both hands.

Fearing the worst, I frantically looked all over the bed for signs of an accident. Nothing. Phew.

But after I was done in the bathroom, I discovered that the worst had, indeed, happened. It had just missed the bed and hit the floor.

Not an auspicious start to the day.

I thought about skipping class. But I was feeling somewhat better. So I went. Missed my bus by mere seconds, so
I was 20 mins late. Also not great.

But whatever. Class is over for the day. I will treat myself tenderly tonight and hope to get my system calmed down.

(—)

Back home now, and feeling a lot better since I got some solid zero-out time and a nice hearty meal into me. I still feel a little too squirmy inside, but it’s down to a nuisance level.

So, still on alert, but it’s a minimum alert.

Let’s tackle intellectualization again, shall we?

I understand what happens, and why. By reacting to things with analysis instead of emotion, I can get positive cold emotion (fascination, revelation, ego confirmation) instead of negative hot emotion (fear, helplessness, emotional damage) from any given situation. It’s a terribly clever way to hide from the world and not deal with my emotions at all because it does a very convincing job of convincing me I am dealing with things.

After all, I understand what has happened, I have examined it, filtered out the bullshit and gone straight for the truth at the heart of it, and fitted it into my highly detailed and insightful model of the world and how it works and such.

So much activity! But it’s like those Victorian gentlemen scientists who thought they really understood butterflies when all they had done is study dead ones preserved under glass. I understand so much, and I can congratulate myself on how perceptive and insightful I am, and how I see so much more of the big picture in both scope and detail than other people.

But my butterfly collection is still dead. Nothing in that process is warm or alive or life-affirming. None of it nurtures the soul. In fact, it doesn’t nurture anything at all except for a deep sense of being unreal, the world being unreal, and the nature of my existence being as fragile and temporary as a daydream.

Because the truth of it is, no matter how far my mind might roam, I am still living a very isolated and intellectual existence. School, for obvious reasons, has strict limits to how much it can change that. Especially given that I don’t do anything extracurricular at all. No clubs, no study groups, just class and home.

College is a very intellectual experience, at least for me. Still spending all day feeding my mind and very little else.

So I suppose it makes sense for it to be my first baby step out into the world. But at some point I am going to have to come in from the cold. I need to learn to live. Not how to exist…. how to truly be alive, in the world and in my heart.

Still waiting on Spring. But it’s coming.

So I know what I do and why. Intellectualism is a brilliant dodge for me. But it leaves me with a huge vault of frozen emotions from things I convinced myself I was dealing with, or convinced myself that I would deal with…. later.

You know…. in the Spring. That will be coming any day now. Or maybe it’s already here and I just haven’t felt it yet. I am deeply aware of my need for a stable and reliable source of renewal, but I haven’t found it yet.

But the fundamental cognitive question remains : how do I stop? Or rather, dial it back to a healthy level? It is such a deep and fundamental coping mechanism that I can’t even remember who I was before it was there.

Even before school trauma, I was a brilliant and curious child. Maybe a certain degree of intellectualization is natural for anyone of high IQ, I don’t know. For all I know, the opposite is also true.

But due to my total inability to socially integrate, I was left with no other path. No balancing influence. No foot in the world of healthy interaction. And by the time I could make friends (around grade 6), it was really evident that all the school damage, plus the intellectual gulf between me and my peers, had created a thick barrier between me and others. When I retreated into myself, I left a lot of people behind. My social antenna is broken. In a sea of signal, I receive nothing.

And I am still getting over that. I am all too aware of the barrier that still exists between me and others. I know that, despite how much I love my friends and my family, there are still miles of lunar surface (dark side, no less) that exist between me and them. And even though I know that this gulf is of my own designing, I feel helpless to cross it.

All I can do is continue this slow thaw of mine, and hope that maybe, someday, I won’t need to be numb any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.