Junkies for Capitalism

(A CaffeiNation)

I don’t like how we have these cute little words and sayings that we use to talk about how miserable life is, like, adulting and TGIF or work hard/play hard. We need to stop patronizing ourselves. How about we just make life more fucking bearable and give people as much time to relax and enjoy being alive as we spend torturing ourselves to keep this fucked-up machine running. -From a previous social media post of mine, but I thought it applied nicely here.

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For all of this to work, a pretty good percentage of us have to wake up well before we’re naturally inclined to do so, and we have to go and do something we’d probably prefer not to do so that the wheels of our society keep slowly grinding on, despite our misery. And just how could anyone or anything possibly get most of us to do this without drugs and brainwashing? Well, you don’t do it without drugs and brainwashing. Those are precisely the tactics needed to give the masses some unity of direction. So we employ the two most powerful tools of motivation–a false sense of pride for enduring hardships and a Starbucks on every corner. You see, pride and caffeine addictions are the two most significant driving forces of our society. These aren’t the only tools. There are also nicotine, which plays a less crucial role now that we’ve been begrudgingly told how horrible it is for us, and alcohol, which in an odd way, keeps us just as productive as caffeine. We wake in the morning and supercharge our brains and bodies so we can go and do these things we’d prefer probably not to be doing. When we need to wind down from this false energy and forget about doing that thing we’d probably prefer to not be doing, we have a few drinks to unwind–unnaturally slowing our bodies and thoughts so that we can rest or, at least, feel some disconnection from the trials of our days. Meanwhile, this entire time, we’re injected with this rhetoric that convinces us that all of this is, somehow, impressive–something to boast about.

We start our day with uppers. We end our day with downers, and we’re so bamboozled by these things and the notion that we’ve done something important that we believe we love them, that we enjoy them, that they’re fun. We make silly jokes about them and have dumb sayings like, don’t talk to me before my coffee, or I could really use a drink. But what we really should be doing–what we could really use, is a grande go-the-fuck-back-to-bed-until-we’re-rested, with an extra pump of that-bullshit-can-wait. We don’t love coffee, we’re addicted to caffeine. We don’t like alcohol, we desperately need a quick and easy way to relax and distract our brains from the insane tension that this life creates. Of course, there are healthy alternatives… if we have more time, more energy, more money, and less of a need to do things we’d prefer not to do, but it’s a hell of a lot more convenient to fix our problems with magical elixirs. I’m not condemning anyone who enjoys or partakes in these things. I’m just as enamored with them as anyone else. We are all addicts. We are all damned.