My point is that we don’t live in a free world, no matter how many people are convinced we are and will try to convince ME that we are. Exploitation is unavoidable under capitalism because business owners will ALWAYS take most of their employees’ labor. I don’t want to be part of that, nor do I want to change it. I just want to watch it all die from the outside. That’s why I don’t vote

Yes; and I believe that these unfortunate circumstances wouldn’t be present if it weren’t for the presence of money, authority, and all the social norms and ideas that have spawned about people who are regularly taken advantage of within the context of our current society. But my grievances extend way beyond just the destitute and those who don’t have jobs that can give them a “good quality of life.”

Dear Anita,

I’m sorry if I gave off that impression. I just got tired of talking/thinking in circles and decided to open up a little bit.  I just don’t wanna wait until I’m 65 or older to stop working  because that’s not fair.  This whole “retirement age“ thing is bull, and having people  work their entire lives away for a society that was not part of nature’s plan is inhumane in my opinion. Animal rights organizations may be a little on the crazy side, but they’re 134% right when they talk about the effects of domestication on non-human animals; and as I’ve said before, I think that domestic life has the same effect on humans, but I’m going back into that circular cycle.

Regardless of whether or not I can find a job I lime, at its very core, employment is slavery,  because like I’ve said before, we only have contextual freedom-  and in this context, it’s freedom on someone else’s terms; freedom to spend money… but that’s it. And for some odd reason, being required to do everything that a person is required to do with in our society, is considered freedom and I just don’t see how that’s true-  especially if you look at what happens to people who don’t have jobs and how they’re treated/regarded by people who do have jobs and money. Sure there are people out there who work to help those people, but the general populace does not give a sh*t about anybody who suffering at the hands of the system; and that’s partially because we believe that everyone’s fate is within their own hands; and while that may have some truth to it, it’s not entirely true…  The way I see it, every institution is bought, and is thus pursuaded to brainwash us into thinking the way that most of us do; that spending more time working a job than taking care of yourself/your family is a noble way to live. But I don’t see working a job as part of life, but rather as theft of life; regardless of how you wanna soften that. I get that all the things that work takes us away from- our families, our homes, our pets, eating, showering, etc., is all considered work, and that there’s no avoiding work and that we’d still have to do those things if work magically disappeared, but working a job by which we can make money just adds more work to our lives; and a lot of people end up neglecting themselves, their families so that they can “at least be alive,” but what’s the point of being alive if ALL you have to focus on is working/falling into trouble if you can’t get your stuff done? In addition to all my loneliness, and my inability to exercise, I don’t want to add something that’s gonna bring on an entirely new realm of stress, even if I like doing it. But… recently, I’ve been writing a lot- essays, letters, but mostly lyrics (to which I’ve received lots of good feedback) so we’ll see how far that gets me.

-RA

Okay here. I think that human beings have overlooked the potential effects that our domestication of each other is having on us. We have to answer to too many demands- demands that ONLY exist because of our  dependence on money/human productivity. However, I don’t believe that humans were meant to work as much as they do- 2/52 weeks to themselves d during those weeks only 2/7 days to themselves and their families, and out of those days ~7 hours to themseves and their families. Mental illness is on the rise and I think that having forced ourselves into domestication is the main contributing factor to this sense of dissatisfaction- I mean, 70% of people (in the US, at least) aren’t satisfied with their work- which is too big a number to overlook, but I don’t necessarily think that it’s only the TYPE of job that is the cause for dissatisfaction; I think it’s the having of a job itself; the sacrifice of one person’s time to another’s authority which ultimately decides whether you’re worthy of your pay (which one needs to survive). This is wrong; no person should be allowed to determine whether other people are allowed to survive; no one person should be considered above anybody else because at the end of the day, we’re all going to die and then decay; nobody looks at the skeleton of a former king and says “wow his bones are SOOOOO regal!” No; everyone’s bones are the same; everyone uses the bathroom and picks up after their dog. We are all the SAME and yet we allow accumulation of money- something that was never present in our nature to begin with- to distinguish ourselves over others. Which gives regular people feelings of inadequacy because  we’re never gonna be able to accumulate as much money as the super rich- who’ve achieved their goals thru the manipulation of numbers/peoples’ time while there are people who can barely afford to feed their families despite being on welfare and working multiple jobs. This is another potential contributing factor to the rise in mental illness- a sense of hopelessness; a sense of wonder as to where their next meal will come from- but hard work IS the answer (despite how hard they’re working already and how little time they get to spend with their families)- while rich warmongers, and resource thieves can spend barely any time working because their jobs require very little if any energy at all- we’re busy doing all their grunt work. They get to retire early and live comfortable lives while everyone else works their asses off and has to decide how “responsible” they want to be with their money- as though that was something that EVERYONE collectively agreed upon. But no, the majority of people HAVE to worry about the potential of going hungry because of a system that is drivin by greed; we HAVE to worry about allocating family/friend time because if we get too consumed in our jobs, we just end up tired and not wanting to do anything with anybody, and we have to deal with mental health disorders that I believe are caused by excess stress, minimal autonomy over one’s body, and lack of personal time/time spent in nature all of which are integral to the advancement of American capitalism because our society relies on the subversion/suppression of human nature in order to survive- which is mentally unhealthy.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by Ramsey.

If I became the CEO of Nike, I’d be exploiting all of my employees- especially the ones who get paid 10 cents a day to risk their lives working in sweat shops to make me some money, and you a pair of Jordans, but also the ones who have jobs in corpoarte offices, and in my shoe stores. And, yes, theoretically speaking, the people working in shoe stores should be young people with little experience- but that doesn’t account for the workers who couldn’t afford to go to college and have no choice but to rely on a part-time job such as working in a shoe store. “But there’s the opportunity to get promoted to manager.” Okay, but that’s likely a position given to one, maybe two people. The rest are left at the bottom. As for the people who have jobs working for Nike that have college degrees, what’s a bachelor’s degree gonna get them nowadays? From every job posting that I’ve seen, people need “minimum 2 years experience” to get jobs anywhere with a JUST a bachelor’s degree. Why can’t people just learn what to do? Because it’s cheaper to hire someone who doesn’t need training than it is to hire someone and then train them. What then? Should they apply to work in sweatshops, or something? This kinda crap suggests that a company’s main concern is what you can produce, and not anything else- not your needs, and most certainly not the truth (i.e. questions like “How can you be an asset to this company?, “Why do you want to work here?”- both of which are used to get a feel for how gee-willackers excited someone is to work at Nike, when the reality is most likely that they just need to survive. They’d replace you/fire you in a heartbeat if they felt like they needed to save money; to them it’s not personal; but to the worker it’s ALL personal; you played by their arbitrary set of rules, yet you still lost because they decided that saving money>loyalty to workers- but yayyy severance package. This is dragging, but work IS exploitation because without it we have no choice but to do it to survive- regardless of whether our bodies were meant to handle the stresses of a life of nonstop work within the context of capitalism.

As for living the hunter gatherer lifestyle, there is no way to figure out where that would’ve lead had the population not exploded the way it did with the advent of cities and industrialization, so I’m not sure if my utopia WOULD be people people living in the wild. I don’t even know if I’m looking for a utopia- having expectations that high is unrealistic, and will only result in disappointment. Also, if 1243 people were to be asked what their idea of utopia was, we’d get 1243 different answers- one of which answers is likely to be our capitalist utopia, and one of which is likely to be a communist utopia- which means that one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. I’m not sure where I stand in terms of how society should be organized, but I DO know that other people should NOT be able to play god with the livelihoods of others; they shouldn’t jail people for stealing if they HAVE TO; people shouldn’t be jailed for not being able to pay for their healthcare; peoples’ homes shouldn’t be left to burn down because their money was in their house and couldn’t pay the fire dept (this happened); people shouldn’t be forced out of their homes if they couldn’t pay the bank in time- but NOOOO; sh*t like that is allowed because issuing an eviction notice isn’t a bullet to the brain- no… it’s a cowardly way of hurting someone. But my main main main point is that all of the BS that humans (corporations and governments) do in the world is because of money; and they can get away with it because of money; and nobody wants to do anything about it because they have a job to go to because organizing is dangerous and can put their jobs in jeopardy… and they they need money! It’s a  vicious cycle.

I’m fully aware that injustice has always been around, but we- modern humans (humans with brains and empathy) know better than Hyenas and better than our ancestors. We outlawed killing sports and killing children becauze we realized that it’s inhumane to do those things because we have the ability to think deeply and feel empathy. However, the people who outlawed those things are the same people who think it’s okay to let those people who don’t have a source of income starve just because they can’t pay, and then imprison them when they steal so they can feed themselves and their families; as though money is- again- more important than a person’s ability to sustain themselves. How is a life where we either have to follow the rules to game that most of us had no hand in creating or starve, any  different from a life in which rich people just go around shooting regular working people point blank in the skull in front of their families because they refused to bow down to them? Personally, I’d rather someone shoot me than starve at the hands of a predatory system that now acts as a middleman between the predatory elite- who, in the past, would kill/imprison those who didn’t follow their rules- and the people who rely on playing THEIR game in order to survive; we might as well cut out the middleman- at least that way we’d all have SOME level of dignity. Progress IS important to me, but I don’t think that what we’ve achieved is progress if all we’ve done was created a system that INDIRECTLY harms people on behalf of those who used to do it directly when their followers didn’t obey them. As  organisms who are capable of rational thought, it shouldn’t be hard for us, as a collective, to see that the world isn’t OUR oysters- but rather that we’re being used as oysters ourselves. We create full pearls and are proud of said pearls, but in working for someone, those pearls are taken from us, and we can’t take full credit for being the one to create that whole pearl; we’re given small bits of each pearl we create for being an “asset to the company” we had no choice but to offer our pearls to; then we get back maybe a small fraction of each of our pearls and are expected to be happy with that and just accept that “life just isn’t fair” or that you should “make the best of what you have” when we can have more without being selfish. Why is it that when large companies fire groups of 20+ people to save money, or pay people sh*t wages they’re seen as economical, or smart business people, but when people complain that they don’t have enough to survive, they’re seen as selfish? I feel like enough people share these grievances, but are too afraid to put their voices out there in fear of being labeled too radical, or selfish, or entitled. But working class people shouldn’t be seen as selfish just because they want more than what they’re getting from this parasite we’ve created that is the economy. If we really WERE a progressive society, we’d see capitalism as the injustice that it is. Injustice may be part of nature, but humans have no problem subverting aspects of nature so that their lives can be easier, why not try and subvert this sh*tty notion of social darwinism?

My parents were never strict with me, so that’s not it. I just hate the idea that humans have to go thru life having to pay for anything and everything when we could have made things a lot easier and more fair for everyone. I also hate how people like me- who see what human life REALLY has become (a moneygrab) – are brushed off as depressed and never taken seriously. I also hate how the human world doesn’t care about anybody that can’t contribute to it. In addition to that, I think it’s ridiculous how people who spent tons of money on an undergraduate degree can’t get jobs right out of college anymore; unless they have 2 years experience right off the bat, and if they “were responsible and majored in something with a good return on investment” because that just reinforces the idea that we’re just pawns who are only good for furthering the agenda of the economic elite- who have ample free time and free will because they have money that they may or may not have worked hard to earn; and they want me to listen to THEM and help THEIR company or else I’ll be living on the sidewalk next to THEIR building begging for money because I didn’t want someone to own me for the time I’d be on this planet? I’ll pass. I want my time to be under MY control and nobody else’s. I also don’t want money. I just want to be able to craft my own life, and live it by my own terms. No IRS, no bills, no loans, NO EFFING BOSSES, nobody from the outside world there to bother me, nothing. I just want peace. But in the human world, peace is nonexistent and unattainable because we believe in a world where things HAVE to get done; I don’t. I hope everything falls apart so that humanity can f*ck off and stop shitting all over this beautiful place because we don’t deserve it. The way we exploit eachother and say that it’s not personal; the way we kill each other and say that it’s just business; the way we withold basic necessities from eachother and say that it’s moral because it’s being done for money, etc.  Humans disgust me and I don’t want to be one anymore.