I took yesterday off from writing. I was not well. I feel like I’ve been saying and writing that for a while now and it’s really starting to sink in.
On Monday, I went down to my parents house so I wouldn’t have to spend the day alone. I woke up feeling tired, irritable, and overwhelmed. I thought I would go down, play some boardgames with my dad, do laundry for free, and feel better. That is not at all what happened.
I did some laundry, although I messed up and didn’t turn the dryer on after the first load, so it took an extra 45 minutes longer than it needed to, on top of the fact that I didn’t check it for hours in the afternoon because I was crying and yelling at my parents.
I didn’t ask to be born, and I hate most human things. So many of our systems are designed to hurt us, and we’ve grown so used to it, to hear my parents try to tell me that spending money is good for human beings (I saw an article earlier this morning that provided scientific evidence of the opposite, which I’ve known for a while now) really hurts. My dad said it hurt him because his father told him that anything worth having is worth working for, which makes me tremendously sad that generations of human beings have believed that they have to work to be alive, which simply isn’t true anymore. I don’t know for how long it hasn’t been true, but long enough that we should’ve changed the system by now.
There are enough resources on earth to provide food, water, and shelter to literally every single human being. Our consumerist nature and the need for instant gratification (which leads to less happiness than delayed gratification) means that we create, I don’t know how much more than we actually need, and the side-effects is an insurmountable amount of waste.
At any rate, I’m the child who tells their parents they didn’t want to be born, and in addition to feeling so shitty that I feel that way in the first place, I get to feel extra shitty because I made my parents feel shitty. The worst part, is that they feel shitty because they don’t understand where I’m coming from at all. They think it’s okay to be forced into choices that aren’t really choices. You can work, or starve and die. It’s an illusion of choice, but according to them, because there are nearly infinite choices what to do with work, it “feels” like a choice to them.
That’s how they were raised. It’s how their parents were raised, and so on and so forth. I wonder when the last time someone was born, and their parents told them “I made you, I will care for you, you have value because I love you and you matter to me, no matter what.” Probably back when kings lived, and the only job of a prince was to learn to be like his father.
I was on track to learning how to be like my dad. I am in many ways. I went to college, I got a job, it all sucked, but I didn’t realize it because I was too close to see it. To be clear, I don’t want to not work. I just don’t want to wake up, and not have choice over what I do on a given day of my life. I shouldn’t have to work so many hours, so that I can “take time” off of work to be with my friends or family. Friends and family, family especially, should come first in all things, no matter what (at least to me, I know some people have awful abusive families, and for them I hope friends, or a new family of their choosing would be their priority).
I want to be able to wake up, and go for a walk in the woods. “Well just wake up early enough before work.” Do you know what liberty is? I talked about this in my last post, but I’ll mention it again. The definition of liberty, from the Oxford dictionary is: “The state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behaviour, or political views.” If a workplace is telling you what time you have to wake up, that’s not time management, that’s behavioral modification, which has been ruled as unethical for I don’t know how many decades.
Time management is the blanket term we use now for doing what other people tell you to do on time. Because, again, my choices are do what someone else wants, or starve and die. It’s an illusion of choice. There are plenty of books and research articles about illusion of choice that if psychology was taught in school maybe I wouldn’t be one of the few people thinking about this.
I took yesterday off to write for my fantasy world of Ados. I’ve found a really cool online platform called Notebook.ai which is a worldbuilding tool. I’m only using the free version (because my expected monthly income is $0 right now), so I can only add in up to two universes, and unlimited locations, characters, and items, which I can be grateful for and work within. I only have one universe anyway, but I’ve already got over 200 locations and over 60 characters (not all fleshed out yet). I’d like eventually to charge a fee (I wouldn’t ever want money, but I technically need it for now…) for access to the notebook, so that anyone can click through my world of Ados, and play their own tabletop rpgs in my world.
I found my second favorite quote last week, “A writer is a world trapped inside a person.” – Victor Hugo. I’ve got it written on a sticky note atop a stack of books on the coffee table I treat as a desk, and look at it every day. I identify with it so strongly, and writing really does help me feel better. My favorite quote is the gem from Albert Einstein, “Happiness and sanity are an impossible combination.” If you’ve got a world trapped inside you though, I’m not sure you qualify for sanity, although I also don’t think I’m too happy at the moment.
I took yesterday off, because I was too emotional to deal with the real world. Monday broke me down a lot. I had lots of reason to feel bad. My parents tried their best, within the confines of their understanding of the world as imposed upon them by their own upbringings. I know it isn’t their fault, but they don’t seem to.
I cried for hours, and not like someone died crying, like heaving and struggling to breathe and regulate myself crying. I was tremendously afraid of what I was saying and feeling. I was afraid of what my parents would think. I’m a 24, almost 25 year old “man” and it really sucks to have to cry in front of your parents, no matter how old you are.
They tried to help. They tried to find out what jobs I would want to do, or how I’d want to spend my life. The truth is, I have no idea. I want to spend my life like retired people do I guess. Many of them continue to work. Like I said, I don’t want to do nothing, but I don’t want to make some rich jackass more rich, we don’t need that much money to have an acceptable standard of life, but I’ll be damned if greed isn’t killing more people than cancer.
Did you know the suicide rate is so high, that someone kills themselves every 11 minutes? Someone in the world feels so awful that they end their life, probably at least one has while you’ve been reading this post. If that doesn’t make you feel anything, I’m not sure you deserve to live. You don’t have to intimately care about every single human being, you don’t have to give them the clothes off your back (although if that was all that came between them and death I’d hope you would), but we should at least care enough to not do things that support the systems and world that is influencing these people to end their lives. In a previous post I talk about Nature and Nurture, the two parts used to describe human behavior. I’ve heard plenty of people argue that people who commit suicide are just sick in the head, but chances are, there was something both internal and external that influenced that decision. We may not be able to change the internal, that’s whole ethical discussion on it’s own, but we for sure can change the external.
I told my parents I wanted to write, and here I am writing. I’m trying to make a living and earning zero money doing so, so what do I do? My choices are work doing something I don’t want to do, or starve and die. I’m trying to produce enough content so that someone says, “yeah I’ll give him a dollar a month to keep writing”. But it isn’t about the dollar a month. Like I said, if it was entirely up to me, money wouldn’t exist, and I would never need to deal with it. My work, and my LIFE, is not measurable with an imaginary number, and the fact that that is how the world perceives human beings is pretty harmful. It isn’t about the dollar. It’s about someone saying, “your life is worthwhile.” and demonstrating it the only way we possibly can in the current system.
My parent’s couldn’t understand my thinking, they wouldn’t say so, but they believed that their way was correct. That’s why they wake up every day and keep doing what they do, not effecting any change. They couldn’t do it alone. I don’t want my dad to quit his job because then they won’t survive, they can work or starve and die, and I don’t want them to starve and die anymore than I want to. The world must stop, before we can fix it.
If you’re running a marathon, and you break your leg, do you keep running? Or STOP and seek medical treatment? The world is broken, and it needs to stop to seek treatment. There are so many systems in play that it would need to be coordinated on a global scale, and I doubt that human beings are intelligent enough to understand that we should all matter, and that there is a place for everyone. If you don’t believe that, then perhaps there isn’t a place for you, but in the current system you’re allowed to continue to exist and continue to hurt others. For what reason, I don’t know.
Monday was awful. I felt bad, I made my parents feel bad, which made me feel worse. I was thinking very emotionally. I think my substances, especially weed made it much easier to not feel things quite so much. Maybe everyone should be smoking so that they aren’t so radical and irrational in their emotional thinking. Notice I said intelligence above when talking about the human race? It doesn’t take wisdom, or insight to know that another human being that think whatever they want as long as they don’t act in a way that directly harms another human being. That’s intelligence. The rational mind, the opposition to the emotional mind.
I’ve been in my emotional mind a lot since I went sober. It’s day 9, and it sucks. I feel bad everyday. I used to not have to feel bad, and I could go about my business, feeling less in general, but feeling less bad, which I think is the goal. A couple months back, I listened to the podcast In Our Time: Philosophy by the BBC. It was the episode from February 7, 2013 called “Epicureanism” which discussed the philosophy of the Greek man Epicurus, who defines pleasure, as the absence of pain.
I think in the modern world, we think of pleasure as happiness, or when we feel above feeling “normal”, but this is a mistake that encourages greed and over-consumption, because you always have to have more than you did before to feel “better”. I think not having anything that is hurting, is the epitome of human pleasure, and I don’t know that we’ve ever been there, even though we have the technology and resources available to achieve such a goal today.
As you can see, I’m back in my rational mind, and it feels much better than I did on Monday, although there is still the low ache in the pit of my chest, knowing that the world is a severely disturbed place, where suffering is imposed not by nature, but by human beings onto other human beings. We just aren’t smart enough, we’re too emotional. Maybe we’re too sober? That’s just me really wanting a beer and a toke…
It’s been a hell of a week, and it’s only Wednesday. No, that’s a stupid way of thinking. We only have days and times so that we can be managed and oppressed. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt very good, and I think I’ve got a long time left to go before I do. At least in November I’ll be able to delude myself into thinking I’m more okay, just like my parents do everyday with their thinking. Just like so, so many people do everyday. Thinking that everything that is wrong is okay, just because you don’t have the power to change it.
It’s been an emotional time for me recently, but I’ve got my ups and downs like anyone else, and if you can forgive me for taking the day to care for myself yesterday, I think we’ll get along just fine, and I’ll have something new and hopefully a little more up-beat for you to read tomorrow.
Thanks for reading if you’ve been following my Sober October stuff so far. I don’t know if just anyone can comment on wordpress stuff, but if you’d like to say hello, or whatever else, you can find me on Twitter @jmskoda5, that’s probably the social media I’m most likely to respond to, although this blog is certainly where I post the most.
Also, if you’re interested at all in fantasy short-stories, or tabletop gaming content (mostly character concepts), head over to the Red Hoodie Games blog and give one of those a read. I’m working on getting a Patreon or something up too in the coming weeks. I think I’ve got to start an LLC to get all my different endeavors under one parent company, so I’m unsure when exactly I’ll have that done (if I can afford to do so), but I’ll keep updating as I know more.
Cheers.
