From David Anthony Hohol…
The majority of us will work throughout our adult lives, consuming our days for years on end with the noble efforts of our chosen vocations. An unfortunate reality of living in today’s world is that many of us will spend our most alert hours and best years within the confines of whatever workspace has come to place a frame upon our lives. In turn, we forever long for more time to call our own and for the freedom to fill our lives with something other than our occupational endeavors.
Work supplies us with the obvious monetary income, but our jobs have come to represent so much more than fiscal sustenance. What we do for a living is a significant factor in defining our individualized, yet collective social existence. The standard of living a job supplies, the lifestyle that follows, and the values born as a result come to create the social experience that is living a human life.
When we meet someone for the first time, we nearly always ask, “So… what do you do?”
The answer to this near instinctual query works as a foundation point upon which we began to construct the very image of the person before us. Whether a teacher, a doctor, a police officer, or a farmer we immediately begin to categorize, evaluate, and assume.
These days service, retail, and manual labor jobs, along with most of those who work in education, human resources, office work, information technology and more, often receive salaries that, in reality, supply a means of sustenance and little else. Perhaps most telling, positions such as these can often leave those who work them with little purpose. Many within them find themselves searching for a sense of pride and importance in what they do, but find it difficult to do so. Anger, frustration and apathy are often the result. A feeling of solidarity often develops, creating a bond of commonality.
The riots we saw in the United Kingdom, the riots and protests we see across the globe, at times triggered by minor incidents, and even the Arab Spring, can all be traced back to the world’s money, opportunity, wealth and power being in the hands of so very few, while those who simply want to pay for the roof over their head struggle to survive.This fact is become more transparent, more difficult to hide than ever before; more and more people feel disenfranchised as a result.
“Why do I work so hard and have so little? Why do I never seem to get ahead?” are questions many of us ask ourselves.
It seems our maximum dream is to own a home worth a few hundred thousand dollars that takes most of us twenty years to pay off, and have a car or two in the driveway. A week’s vacation twice a year, a trip by car, or if we’re lucky a few hours away by plane is the height of extravagance. We buy products the media convinces we must have, consume and spend, live and work, and entertain ourselves with a twelve dollar movie ticket or a trip to the lake. We are supplied with alcohol and tobacco, with gimmicks and sales on everything from phones to TVs, all of which keeps us readily distracted from our humble plight, the plight of the masses of the world – that being we exist to serve those with power and wealth, we exist to sustain that power and wealth, to keep in it the hands of those who already have it. Meanwhile, there are those who make more in one day than we make in a year, those who spend more on a car than we will putting three children through college.
Of course, the masses are frustrated. The generation now moving towards middle age is the first to be worse off than the generation before in decades. There is a sense if hopelessness and anger that stirs deep within many, triggered by the smallest of sparks.
And you ask why people are so angry? Unfortunately, we are more Darwinian that we ever thought possible and Thomas Hobbes, the misanthropic man of letters, was right when he said, “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.”
Yes, indeed. It may very well be every man, women and child for himself. Is it possible to change things? Not likely… but one never knows. Where’s my fuckin’ torch?
I see the strongest and smartest men. I see all this potential squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables… Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history with no purpose or place. We have no great war. We have no great depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives.
-Tyler Durden
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