The Purpose of (Modern, Western) Civilization is to Suck Out Your Soul and Sell it Back For Profit

Oops, did I reveal too much?

Let’s play a game.

It’s called get a new wage slavery contract, and move to a different city anywhere in North America. And see how long your mental health lasts.

No hanging yourself with your bootstraps. If you so much as catch a month’s worth of mental illness before a year is up, you lose.

I’ve played it four times.

On the fourth try I finally won — except it wasn’t even a city, and neither was it a career move, but to volunteer my labor in exchange for no monetary compensation. Living almost totally off grid along the coast of Nova Scotia.

The fact that I had to cheat to win really says something about the society we live in.

Like most millennials, I’m actively seeking to rage-quit anything that dehumanizes me to the point where I can’t sustain my involvement in it anymore.

Except the dehumanization is everywhere I look.

We’re literally staring into an inferno of civilizational decline. Yet most in any position to do something about it has their head in the sand!

Or perhaps I should say they’ve got their heads inside their golf course holes? That seems to fit the demographic I’m trying to conjure up.

The point I want to make, though, is that everything from our built environment to our social curtsies is a soul sucking insane asylum that just doesn’t evolve unless something like COVID-19 hits.

I’ll break it down for you.

• Urban planning has been dead since 1920.

When was the last time you saw a neighborhood or a walkable city that lit up the life in you, with how well it was engineered for human aesthetic appreciation? Probably never.

• We perform our identities at work in order to appear “professional.”

As if we’re some sort of barbarian monsters when not at work. Seriously, what’s with all the proprietary mask-wearing? Can’t people be real anymore?

• Passions are only “side hustles” if you can monetize the shit out of them.

Would you turn your grandmother into a “marketable product?” Given how things are going, I can guess how some of you would answer…

• The art world is a joke.

An idiot taping a banana to a wall makes millions, while artists don’t even make the minimum wage. The further you are from the artist in the economic food web, the more you make.

• “Leisure” has been dead ever since Ancient Greece.

Want to take up space somewhere in public, spend time with other humans? You need currency for that. You’re not allowed to just ~exist~ without paying tribute.

In the end, I really am grateful for my time in the Nova Scotian wilderness (I mean, just look at those untouched Cape Breton highlands!!).

It’s answered many questions.

In a way that Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa never could, the sheer vibrancy of the earth in that province hit me in a way that I’d probably only experience in a whole other country.

The earth hadn’t been over-exploited. This made the difference.

When we live in a place where every square inch hasn’t had its natural forests removed & replaced with Victorian lawns and scraggly, emaciated, dying tree saplings at regularly spaced intervals, we remember that we are alive too.

You know, because we’re from the animal kingdom. Because we carry DNA. Because we hold the instinctual ancestral memory that made our species intelligent in the first place.

When we lose that and pretend to be proto-cyborgs, the part of us that is still beautifully organic rebels with all its strength.

Our minds say we should keep our jay oh bee (J.O.B. Just Over Broke) but our hearts are saying to bitch-slap our boss and make a run for it.

There is no way to morally “change the world” or “make an impact.”

Just to get financially influential these days requires that you don a mask of false personality, perform opportunist dishonesty, and steal without stealing.

What to say of becoming philanthropically influential all on your own? Even Elon Musk inherited a f***ing EMERALD MINE from his parents.

Coping with the ethical & aesthetic degradation of the modern world itself will run you into scammers.

I don’t mean people trying to sell you Prada made in a Xinjiang concentration camp, I mean people trying to sell you a way out of the now falsified American Death Dream.

Make your talent your source of income, they say.

Without mentioning that whoring your talents out reduces their ability to heal & resurrect the world’s morals in the first place.

Express yourself and opportunities will come, they say.

Ignoring the fact that most creatives live below the poverty line, while hyped-up mediocre white teens are rapping their way into millionairehood. Obscure toddlers are monetizing themselves without fully formed braincells on TikTok.

It’s time to call bullshit. It’s time to call a spade a spade.

Modern ‘civilization’ is a soul-sucking death factory.

You won’t escape.

Unless, of course, you withdraw your consent to it. Although this would require some seriously radical honesty with ourselves.

Honesty is something they can’t con you into monetizing.

Or can they?