Imagine to Remember

The world is burning. It is always burning for some people somewhere, some place but it feels like collectively we are witnessing multiple endings and beginnings unfolding. I feel silly writing this, my problems are small but it’s precisely because the world is burning that I write this. I hate my job, for many reasons. Not only because it’s boring, or because my coworkers are engaged in petty power-struggles or because my boss is petty and passive aggressive. That’s dishonest, I play these same games, succumb to these same smallnesses that weigh down my spirit. But more and more I find myself unable to care about any of it, because my job is bullshit, it’s useless. Sure we are busy, we produce all kinds of reports, organize meetings and use needlessly complicated terminology, and yet we do nothing of value. It is a bullshit job.

In his essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs the late sociologist David Graber explained that “The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it”. Technology was supposed to be our great liberator. But this dream was never realized. It is instead another means by which we are separated from one and other and from self. So while the world burns, I spend my days writing e-mails and attending meetings that seem to accomplish nothing all to serve some nameless, faceless corporate entity. I give it more and more pieces of me, of my life, and in return it gives me money.

I don’t know what the answer to this is. Many of us like to see ourselves as part of a righteous opposition to this shadowy enemy, the capitalist elite, the powers that be, and while all this is true it is too simple an explanation. It ignores a very obvious fact, I, we are all complicit. They cannot rule without our consent. What, if anything at all, would you be willing to give-up for a different kind of life? In “growing up” I abandoned parts of myself, the parts that knew that this way of doing and being is wholly unnatural. I did it anyway, denying more and more of myself in order to make myself small enough malleable enough to fit into this world. But it’s not working any longer, something in me is becoming more resistant, more angry. 

I find myself at times disguised by coworkers, their self-importance, their comfortable middle-class ignorance. I am aware enough to understand that it is a projection on my part, because I too have grown increasingly complacent, quite pleased with the trinkets my salary affords me. Actually I am probably worse than them. I can’t feign ignorance, I know and I know quite intimately. But still I was lured, and willingly I went. And it’s more than that, it’s our survival they hold in their hands. There will never be resolution to the homelessness crisis you see. Those poor souls serve a very important societal function. Their misery is a deterrent, a way to keep the rest of us inline, obedient and docile.