Things need to change

love the boot on your back, think the knife to your throat a loving hand

you gently coax a tilde shaped fetus of toothpaste from its primordial crucible onto the prickly bed of a toothbrush: imagine your arrival to the world is to be greeted immediately by a bed of nails holding you up as a sacrifice for the protruding mouth bones of some disheveled giant. such is the fate of toothpaste. perhaps what exacerbates this nagging sense of shame washing over you like some tide governed by an unknown moon is the fact that the clock informs you that the time is 1:30 in the afternoon. however, this would not precipitate such negative emotions if this was second enactment of this ablution, removing the clingy particles of lunch, yet sadly this constitutes the first deployment of this ritual. after all, you didn’t awake until 9:30 this morning, which started with your phone presenting you with oblong boxes waiting to surprise with all sorts of depressing news and advertisements. a doctor gets abducted by federal police simply because she objected to a systemic slaughter of people. simply slap the adjective terrorist and you can do pretty much what you want to anybody. whatever, you have more important things to worry about, because you’re experiencing high speed entropy. you are quickly devolving into the monstrosity known as unemployed. you are the most terrifying thing in the world—jobless.

you sit in your office chair like you do most days. the left handle is looser than its compatriot, but you already tried to rectify this malediction of ontology, but alas planned obsolescence lurks in the atrophy of all your things. the curtains restrain the obtrusive rays of the sun, bestowing a cool shadow to the room like the kind one would find in a tent in an oasis, though you never been in a tent in a desert so that’ll be chalked up to another fantasy. your palms excrete small doses of sweat which is exactly how the tempos of anxiety contort the functions of your body. a foreboding text greets your eyes on your phone: are we fired? i don’t know but it’s not good. you join the google meet. there are the familiar faces that you have come to know over the fiber optics, transporting their visages across vast distances in seconds to your retinas. your stomach feels like a graveyard of hope, slowly dissolving any assurances you had about the situation. because one little square on your screen has an unfamiliar name. this name brings no gospel. instead, you are informed that your time at the company is over. you have been fired. you are just another business decision, which usually involve death, but at least they’re legal ones.

it becomes clear that you are devoid of any gravitational field. you do not have that invisible force constructing the aspects of your life. you become painfully aware how much labor guided your life. when you woke up, what you did, what you wore, how you acted, how you felt—a whole myriad of aspects to which you were beholden. however, the most important of these things was life. without labor you will starve. you will lose your shelter. you will become a parasite feeding on the glorious work of superior beings to you. that’s what they are, aren’t they? gods reclining in their towering pantheons, doling out judgments upon the rest of us. it seems that business decision has become synonymous with divine judgment. how free are we when our entire life must revolve around labor until our bodies become useless to our gods? you go to school, but you must follow their rules. you become an adult you must follow their rules. only after they had their fill, can you drag your husks to a beach in florida allow whatever is left of your soul to slowly evaporate like the alcohol in that fancy mimosa that dulls all the time missing in your memories.

they said we were a family. they said that this hurt them. they said that they would fight for us. they said they would help find you a new job. they would put their ear to the ground, listening for the rumbles of opportunity that so steadily stamped in the united states. the days went by, then the weeks, then the months. now, no postcards or how are you doing texts are sent to you, which honestly makes it seem like they understand family perfectly. they knew what words to say to get you to calm down. to make it seem as if everything was going to be ok, and it was—for them. for you, it was an understanding: coming to terms with the fact that you are the dying blood cell of their body. Ready to pissed out for the new, vibrant blood cells to come trickling through their body, their history, their reality. this is their planet. this is their history. this is their reality. we just live through it. as mark fisher said, “what caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no penitence can ameliorate.” we are just the small things that keep their history, their world, their reality working. we are not humans but statistics with our fates determined by the sacred numbers of quarterly reports. business decision, as if it were some arcane mystery. something that requires literacy in reading tea leaves and goat entrails to comprehend.

you understand now. the years of education, preparing you for the real world. there is no real world, only their world. your parents insisting that hard work pays off and that you would have the same life as them—actually, even better! that this is the natural order of the world: to be born, to be prepared to work, to work, and then die. that life is inherently meaningless without labor. you find yourself becoming a communist. you start reading more books and they resonate with you. you begin to see the history beyond the one they slide across our vision like some terrible play scenery. the companies tell you they need certificates that you must pay for. they tell you apply online, beseeching the faceless juggernaut for some mercy. that you are worthy to remain in your house, in your apartment, with food in your fridge. that you are worthy to remain human. you want to resist, but it all seems too late. like that scene in new vegas: it was all rigged from the start. you see friends, former co-workers, fighting for survival. One friend, Brandon, simply states on one of those popular job searching sites: doesn’t it feel like drowning in public while everyone simply watches? and you apologize for the spectacle.

you find out you need these virtual certifications if you want to remain attractive to employers. sort of like the concubine that wants to be picked by a king following his arbitrary whims. better to have your body ravaged by the kind than the worse fate that awaits outside the palace gates. the slow cancer of poverty. penury lurking behind every cubicle. the great weapon of fear keeps us in line. as fredric jameson said, it is the economy that keeps the citizens in check. the greatest tool every devised by hegemony: economic servitude disguised as freedom. so, we spend hours branding ourselves as if we are buildings in need of an applebee’s sign or amazon’s arrow. the only self is the list of achievements on my resume. we are presented with a mirage of freedom, calling our chains accessories. this passage by zizek needs to quoted in its full length:

At the level of our direct self-awareness, we are subjectivized (interpellated) as free agents permanently making decisions and choices, and thus responsible for our own fate. The ideology of free choice is everywhere, it is the air we breathe: we are bombarded by choices, freedom of choice appears as the basic form of freedom. Since, in our society, free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on the subject’s freedom—it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very self-experience of individuals as free. There is a multitude of forms of this un-freedom appearing in the guise of its opposite: when we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious position every couple of years, we are told that we are given the opportunity to re-invent ourselves and discover new unexpected creative potentials that lurked in our personality; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become “entrepreneurs of the self,” acting like capitalists who have to choose freely how we will invest the resources we possess (or have borrowed)… [W]e increasingly experience our freedom as what it effectively is—a burden that deprives us of the true choice of change. (zizek, Surplus Value p.33-34)

we have the freedom to choose the carefully selected options before us, but lack the true freedom to change our world. we are told that we chose to work somewhere, but is that true? rather, we are forced to work, forced to choose labor or die. we are presented with illusions, and we must work very hard to maintain them. it is our reality: how can we let it fall apart? the unknown is terrifying, especially since all the voices tell us that is where all the monsters live. we need to understand we are already living with the monsters. we need to learn that we are simply business decisions that can be tossed away at any moment. we play by rules that they do not have to follow, but rather enforce. it is time for a change. it is time to let the system die. and if it refuses, kill it. we must strive for our freedom; this is the only imperative left for us. before they kill the planet and take us all with them. they have simply changed how the chains look, my brother and sisters, but they are chains nonetheless. and chains, as marx said, are all we have to lose.