Going Nowhere

Dreaming through the days …

This is the best time of year, blue skies, light winds, mid-twenties maximum temperatures. There is a danger of course, hidden in this endless sameness of days, in those azure blue skies of Perth that stretch on forever - that of a complacency that dissolves all thought and action. The great big yawn of a world that lumbers on through the weeks where every day is a Tuesday or a Friday or whatever. Time is on holiday, its feet are up on a deck chair, passed out from too many Long Island Iced Teas.

It’s nice though, to stretch across a cool morning and listen to the sounds of society. I usually resent the overhead buzz of light aircraft but today it seems apt. The sawing moan fading into the infinite, the neighbour’s enthusiastic utterances about things not quite able to be discerned, the gentle swish of far away traffic.

It feels right to eat bacon and eggs, have an hot shower and crawl back into bed today. Laying propped on pillows the mind lazily wanders to mild responsibilities. And they are mild, like everything else. I’m on the move again to a holiday village, to kill some time in a cabin before my next house sit. There’s nothing to do but pack up my computer, a couple of guitars and a backpack. Everything seems too easy.

Days like these make me wonder what would happen if everyone just failed to play along. If one day everyone just decided that they no longer were much interested in working, saving, exercising, believing, consuming, buying, climbing, trying … I guess we’d get all get kinda bored of that pretty quickly. Humans are such dynamos. I think, quite honestly, we just do stuff because it’s something to do. Like go to brunch or buy some glue to fix that thing … it’s all good I suppose. It would be better if everyone wasn’t on the hustle all the time. Living today has so many dead ends, maybe it has in the past as well.

Money has killed everything good. You can only do stuff if you have it, so I don’t do stuff, which is totally fine. The best things in life are free - true enough. Imagine if more things were free however? Everything could be free. But we’d need to get rid of the current model and that’s not going to happen.

Health

Most of us just play along, never thinking much about it because why? Most people are irrelevant (NPCs). It’s cradle to grave - going through the motions, never questioning, just complaining half the time about utterly pointless things and taking a keen interest in the things that everyone else is taking a keen interest in, getting cancer and then dying by iatrocide. Humans are so very small. The dynamos, the ones that are the “movers and shakers” generally do the most damage - often their actions are part of some grand plan to “make the world a better place” which almost never happens. These people are really keen on controlling other people and shaping the world according to their superior vision. Such folk are just as mindless as the NPCs with their blind acceptance and complete engagement in the system.

Me in 8 years

This article is going nowhere which is the point, if it had a point. If life is absurd as Camus would suggest and that we must make our own meaning, what does one do when one cannot manufacture such meaning? What is one to do when one sees all the dominant systems and rules as undesirable? How is one supposed to navigate through such systems?

Days like today and yesterday and tomorrow float on by and I feel like I’m dreaming it all but don’t misunderstand me. This is not a grievance post as such. It’s near impossible to be agitated in this current state, just more of an open question about the utility of engagement with a system that offers nothing of interest. Said more plainly - what’s the point in getting a job? I feel a great nation-wide clutching of the pearls by Boomers throughout the land at such a statement. Gasp! The sin of unemployment! Jobs and growth - the twin pillars of Australian society must never be questioned.

Of course many just fall into some line of work that is tolerable, do that forever and ultimately die leaving behind a house, hopefully grandkids and a caravan. At least that’s what many will do. With an aging population and declining standards of living this is fast becoming an impossibility. As such the desire to work is becoming even less incentivised.

As the vice-like hand of government closes around us, censors our speech, digitally tags, monitors and taxes us there seems to be less and less reasons not to drop out, in whatever form that may take. It seems inevitable as the fingers clench to form a tight totalitarian fist that some of us will pop out between the gaps, the oddly shaped, ill fitting ones, us individuals. What becomes of us is anyone’s guess. Maybe we will be hunted, maybe we will be forgotten?

Each passing day produces less enthusiasm for the human project. Once you have seen behind the curtain of lies you cannot unsee and from that day the distance between all the culture absorbing, gainfully employed participants of society and yourself grows. It’s harder to get back in.

Please enjoy my music: