never underestimate the power of sitting around a dinner table with your family, at Christmas say, and having people ask you what you're doing with your life¹. the fear and feelings of inadequacy that this sort of treatment generates is the kind of shit that makes people marry the first person who'll tolerate them (actually sometimes the bar is lower) and hastily squeeze out a child: to make all of that dinner table talk just fuck off once and for all. i mean, to me, marriage and children aren't particularly interesting or great, they're just things people do out of hormonal obligation or to fill the void, but i'm also not the one passive aggressively making people feel inadequate for not having a job or working their lives out slowly. of course this dinner table degradation ritual is happening all over the place - not just domestically, but screaming at you from every evangelical billboard and pixelated pulpit - so it's hardly any wonder that people everywhere are working themselves to the bone, walking around living miserable, in-authentic lives. after all, this is capitalism and patriarchy conspiring together. this is the kyriarchy² at work.
¹ subversive answers you may want to try:
"yeah, i'm really enjoying it, thanks"
"i don't do, i just am"
"i've just signed up to fight the ongoing war against the global kyriarchy"
² i may use this term from time to time, but also, a bit like the word intersectional, i find it somewhat redundant in light of what i see as its being predated by anarchist analysis of power many decades/centuries prior. maybe it's a rebranding; an attempt to academify anarchist thought and make it more palatable, rather than going all out communist/anarcha-feminist on students with all the culty sub-cultural symbols and the flag-waving. maybe it's simply part of a formalisation, to provide some hard topology to loose concepts of privilege and power. i understand it to replace longer phrases like "systems of domination" or "oppressive hegemony of power" (although more colloquial terms such as "society", "the system" or "the man" work just as well). rather than a new revelatory innovation, the term seems kind of obvious to me as this was sort of my starting point into reading about anarchist and liberal thought in the first place, "all power corrupts" and all that. in any case, a bit of redundancy is ok with me. so is language.
is not being viewed as a total failure.
as a kid i was told a different story,
like i was gna be something:
an astronaut,
an inventor,
a goddamn hero.
and for a time i was satisfied
with the blind hope of callow unconsciousness;
the chaste syrup of juvenile dreams.
but then it set in:
the neuromarketing,
the cultivation theory,
the learnt helplessness,
the power of nightmares.
now i'm just terrified i might not keep up.
it's collateral damage,
it's occupational hazard,
it's external diseconomy,
it's none of my business,
it's bad apples,
it's old wives tales,
it's the rising tide,
it's the drop of a coin,
they say,
as my friend tallies up their hours
on the weekly time-sheet.
100hrs on
minimum
wage.
this is what we're fed.
it's hard not to puke,
with so many lies in the world;
so many viruses and untied shoes.
it's hard not to puke.
