I’ve been having a lot of thoughts lately. Psychological hot flashes, we’ll call them.
Like most people, I’m not very smart so I tend to base most of my worldview on my GUT. I go to Imright.com and look up whatever statistics I need to prove my point, and that’s it.
My life is shitty, therefore, I have concluded, society is corrupt. The end. No more critical thinking beyond this point. Thank you.
I’ve been trying to be less lazy about my thinking lately, so while I have a lot of opinions about boomers who complain about “nobody wanting to work,” I want to be careful how I go about this.
Anyone with a liberal arts degree can write a scathing, one-sided manifesto and share it on their dog’s Facebook page. That’s basically all they teach you in college. If I’m gonna do opinion pieces, which are by definition awful, I don’t just wanna dick-ride one side of the argument and collect pity likes and shares from people in my ideological bubble. I want my opinions to annoy everyone equally.
Let’s begin.
On a micro level…
It feels like nobody has a good-paying job these days. Inflation’s through the roof. 61% of Americans can’t afford a house. We have more access to food, technology and information than ever before in human history, yet people have never been more miserable. What a fascinating time to be alive.
Locked in their cubicles, the peasants browse r/antiwork for hours, reading capitalism’s greatest horror stories. Vindictive landlords, sociopathic bosses, retaliatory firings, union busting, employees resigning, corporate theft, lawsuits— that place has it all.
I find myself going there often, mostly out of frustration at my own shitty situation. If you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly happy at my job. I mostly sit there all day and fantasize about catching a Chinese cruiser missile. I guess Xi Jinping read the Glassdoor reviews of my employer and was so appalled, he decided Waukesha, WI would be ground zero for World War 3. My natural reaction to being stuck in a shitty situation is to seek out other people who share my pain, mostly because I don’t want to feel alone. And I’m not. As of writing, that subreddit has over 2.6 million followers and counting.
As it turns out, people get pretty fed up during recessions. They start writing long Facebook posts and ranting on TikTok to their 65 followers. The word “socialism” starts getting thrown around. Uh oh. Time to fire up the propaganda machine.
Any time the S-word starts trending, they go into scramble mode. They try to reframe the entire debate. It’s not that wages haven’t been keeping up with inflation. It has nothing to do with corporations buying up entire neighborhoods of single-family homes, pricing people out of the market— no, no, no. Turns out, it’s actually your fault the economy sucks. You just don’t have the GRIT.
This is where politicians step in. These corporate shills are basically the customer service arm of the ruling class.
“Look, we get it. Times are tough, people are struggling… [takes sip of champagne] We’re gonna do everything in our power to make things right.”
If things get really bad, they might even sign a bill or two— as a symbolic gesture— an acknowledgment of our pain.
They’ll call it something convincing, like the “Reform Everything Act,” or the “OK, OK, We’ll Let You Have Healthcare Bill.” And then somehow, through some economic wizardry that I’m too stupid to understand, billionaires will find a way to double their wealth and force another 100 million people into poverty. Same shit, different crisis.
During COVID, we experienced the greatest wealth transfer ever, and then things just went back to normal. Well, normal-ish. It feels normal, but a little shittier than normal. The buildings don’t look the same. The sky is a different shade of blue. Something’s off, I just can’t put my finger on it.
Try as I might, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that this is a big fucking waste of my time, that the American Dream and rugged individualism are just propaganda smokescreens to cover up for the fact that we’re all basically wasting our lives to enrich billionaires. And the saddest part is, there’s really nothing you or I can do about it. I can get on here and wax poetic about how corporations need to be nicer, but that’s like telling a fish to drive a car. It’s just not in their DNA to do things for the collective good.
I don’t know how you fix the job market. Maybe you can’t. Maybe there’ll always be this tension between employers and employees. Anytime one group is dependent on another group for financial stability, the situation is ripe for exploitation and conflict.
You end up with a pendulum effect: Employees get fed up after a while and things get better... Then they get complacent and things go back to the norm in human history— which is one group ruling another. Back and forth. Back and forth.
I don’t think we’ll ever solve this. There will always be dickheads in positions of power. No amount of socialist policies are going to fix human greed and sadism.
Employers will always find a way to extract the most amount of productivity for the least amount of money and benefits. That’s the capitalist game. Cut waste. Optimize. Produce, produce, produce.
I’ve always hated the boss/employee dynamic. Walking on eggshells. Putting on a happy face. Trying not to step on anyone’s ego. Blech.
Why should some random jackass get to be my boss? Not that I’m so great, but like, who is this guy? Why does he get to be in charge? Just because he’s older than me? Just because he has more money than me? More skills? More connections?
What if he treats me like shit? What if he doesn’t pay me enough to survive? What if he doesn’t help me advance my career? What if he lacks the skills to be an effective leader? Am I just supposed to sit there and go along with the charade? Continue kissing his ass because he has the power to take away my healthcare? Who designed this system? Was it the Jews!?
Kidding, it’s a joke.
We have the wherewithal to design a better society, make no mistake. We just don’t make it a priority. The people at the very top put profit motive over empathy and the result is massive human carnage.
That’s true all the way down the ladder, too. Every step of the way, you have employers putting profit motive over what would actually help the person sitting right in front of them— the person whose labor they profit from. They pay you the lowest amount they can get away with because that’s good business. And what’s good for business is bad for humans.
Most humans would benefit from working less, getting paid more and having better access to healthcare and education. Instead, we have a society that prioritizes the exact opposite: More work, less pay and more debt. The whole system is inherently anti-human.
We should’ve listened to the Native Americans. But no, we just HAD to have the Industrial Revolution and now, instead of walking around picking berries in a loin cloth, I have to take Adderall and sit in a cubical for eight hours a day. Instead of having no boss, I have three: my employer, the bank and the government. I didn’t consent to any of this.
But to be fair, neither did the people in the trenches during World War I. Neither did the people born during the Great Depression or Black Plague. All things considered, I have it pretty good. Capitalism has done a lot for the world. I just feel like it lost its way at some point. When we needed it most, it turned its back on us. Like John Stewart.
Complaining about your stupid life is kinda disrespectful to all the people who came before you— all the humans throughout history who had to put up with way worse shit than you did. As you get older, you kinda learn to take your lumps like everybody else. Nobody likes a complainer. That’s why I don’t have any friends.
On a macro level…
Any time you make wild generalizations about entire groups of people— you’re wrong. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not accurate.
Whenever somebody makes a grand proclamation about boomers, millennials, or Gen Z— most of the time they’re just trying to universalize their own experience.
“Kids these days don’t know the meaning of hard work.”
How many kids do you know, man? Have you met all the kids? Most of the time, you’re not even talking about kids in the plural, you’re popping off on Facebook about one kid in particular. Some 16-year-old cart boy at Walmart gave you the finger and now you’re going scorched earth on everyone born after 1997. Doesn’t that feel like an overreaction?
Just be mad at the kid with the carts, stop extrapolating an entire worldview from a single encounter, you absolute ape.
Have more than one thought in a row. Try it, it’s fun. You can even string them together and create nuance. It’s wild.
The same goes for all those losers on TikTok and Reddit teeing off on boomers. Stop being mean to these elderly people. They’re clearly retarded.
You think you’re screaming at the president of Burger King when you’re actually screaming at the busboy.
Boomers were raised in the 60s and 70s. These people’s worldviews were formed during the Nixon administration. Most just did what they were told. They went to school, got a job and had a family. It worked for them, they can’t understand why it won’t work for you. They don’t try to understand young people because their parents didn’t try to understand them. And so on and so forth for all of eternity. We come from a long line of undiagnosed mental disorders, unchecked narcissism and unresolved childhood trauma. Now these broken people are living at a time when the acceleration of technology and culture leaves them feeling left behind and obsolete. Many of them are going to die alone. Like, that’s the next thing on their agenda, so I can understand where a lot of the Fox News and Karen meltdowns come from. If we try to empathize with these people, we might actually feel kind of sorry for them. The bullshit society they were force-fed convinced them to prioritize their jobs and mindless consumerism over doing the things they love and spending time with family, and I think a lot of them are regretting it now. Boomers are one of the most repressed generations ever and now we’re starting to see all that rage and resentment seep out.
Our generation likes to act all high and mighty, but quite frankly, I’m not convinced millennials and Gen Z won’t act the exact same way once they get money. As much as we want to think things would be different if we were in charge, I think people are really just products of their circumstances. We’re all bleeding-heart liberals until we get that promotion.
Put it this way, there’s a big difference in my attitude toward capitalism when I have $10,000 in my savings account versus when I don’t. Right now, I’m broke, and I’m about ready to join Project Mayhem and start making bombs in bathtubs. I allow myself to have these feelings. Sometimes, I write them down. My phone contains hundreds of such rants that will never see the light of day. Not because I’m embarrassed, but because I realize that all my feelings are based on a false premise— that an entire group of people is out to get me.
Seeing yourself as the victim can be a very toxic mindset. You’re clinging to a story while life passes you by. Every second you spend worrying about the Illuminati is another second with your loved ones lost. A moment you weren’t present. You were off in your head, fighting some imaginary war.
Imaginary is a bad word. It’s not imaginary. People have real-world problems. People are in debt. People are in pain, I get it. I don’t want to dismiss that pain. All I’m saying is, it’s possible we were raised during the best time to be alive in America and now everything’s going to shit and we’re just going to have to adjust our expectations if we want to survive.
Take it from me, someone who’s very stupid, it’s not a good idea to believe all of your feelings. Sometimes you gotta pump the brakes and be like whoa man, what the hell are we doing here? Put down the soap, Tyler Durden.
When you turn any group into a monolith, it really inhibits your ability to judge people accurately as individuals. The “I’m getting fucked over” story is a fun one to tell yourself, but ultimately, it just leads to resentment, doing shit out of spite and people thinking you’re insane. You might be right, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone else just thinks you’re a complainer.
On a Macro Macro Level…
BlackRock and Vanguard own everything anyways so who gives a shit? You are meant to suffer. This is all by design. Don’t blame me, blame the eight dudes who own half of all human wealth. At the end of the day, we’re all getting fucked in the ass by a big black rock.
The ruling class has a monopoly on America. They own all the money and property. We’re the little metal pieces just visiting. If your life sucks, don’t blame your boomer boss, he’s just the patsy they installed to deal with your sorry ass. Your boss has been tricked into thinking that he’s in the ruling class too, but in reality, he’s only slightly less fucked.
Make no mistake: You exist to be used as a resource. They will extract your time, money, attention and labor until there’s nothing left. You having a fulfilling and happy life has never once factored into the equation. You have to fight for that.
The crazy thing is, if we realized our power, we could band together and easily defeat them. Everybody withdraw your money tomorrow and watch all the banks fall like dominoes.
Most people aren’t willing to go that far, though, because their lives are just OK enough. They watch just enough Minions sequels and eat just enough Burger King Chicken Fries to not strap a bomb to their chest and walk into Bank of America. Every day, our rights and autonomy are slowly eroded and nobody has the balls to Allahu Akbar these lizard-brain sociopaths.
Jeff Bezos makes over 460 million dollars every DAY. If that motherfucker, even once, took a day off and donated that money to families in need, he could change an innumerable amount of lives. Every day he wakes up and doesn’t do that.
These people have the power to change the world and they don’t. If that’s not the root of all evil, I don’t know what is.
So until you’re ready for a violent overthrow of the government— I don’t wanna hear any more bitching. Not from the incels on r/antiwork or Bob from Bob’s Discount Landscaping and Refrigeration Services.
Everybody shut the fuck up and leave me alone.