alt. esc.

(ARTICLE)

When I look around me, all I see is decay – the planet, its seasons and oceans, trees, beaches, cities, its people, our morals, our humanity, our hopes and love, our languages, art, cultures, our minds, our bodies, our homes and credit scores, our healthcare systems, education programs, industries, our faith in progress, our aspirations, our futures, our dreams that things will get better, one day; they’d have to. We thought we had it all, once upon a time, or at least that is the lie neoliberalism peddled us, and now we left with nothing but scorched earth, rotting to its core. We work ourselves to the bone at jobs we hate, to hopefully buy houses and cars we will never own and to procreate families we will never love nor will be able to provide for.

We were sold a golden age that never happened. It is so tarnished, now, it is barely recognisable. We yearn for something different, but we don’t know what it is. Our government proliferates the lie that the other is at fault: the migrant, the foreigner, the refugee, the working class…they are the ones to blame for our troubles, they say. We are told that there is not enough for everyone, that if one wants something, then one has to take it from their neighbour, or pillage the earth that bore us, and we are pitted against each other like this, when there is plenty for every one. But our politicians, and their shareholder friends, would rather keep it all for themselves and maintain a punitive system that will keep on churning out broken shells of human beings to constellate the streets and crowd prisons with. Every attempt to make a step forward is met with a brutal repression that will only benefit those who never have to learn the cost of a loaf bread and a pint of milk, nor will they ever have to chose between either, because they can afford both. 

And you keep on working, with your head low and your eyes to the ground. Keep on slaving away on minimum wage for those unattainable goals and luxuries that will buy you an apparatus of status. Spend your best years breaking your back and your soul for the Man, feed the machine, do it for forty, fifty, sixty years. Christ, you can do it from the moment you can hold a pen steadily until the day you die – it won’t make a difference. So don’t stop to smell the roses – if you are lucky, your loved ones will buy expensive floral arrangements for your grave when they take out a loan to pay for your funeral. “They died doing what they loved” – is that what you want on your gravestone? That’ll be another thousand pounds, mate.

They make us live decades longer so they can milk us out, grinding our innards, extract our essence until the very end, get more bang for their buck. Work for pensions you will never get to enjoy. Take out credit cards to afford staying alive. Pass the burden on to your spawn, to the fruit of your putrefying loins; pass everything on to them, the debts, the hopelessness, the conformism, the pollen allergies, the genetics that have been repeatedly modified over generations of ingesting contaminated foods; bequeath them the whole lot. We are so immunised to the world around us, we have come to fear it, and because we don’t relate to it, we destroy it and ourselves in the process. Let your descendent deal with it all, sacrifice the innocent – they don’t know better, they didn’t even ask to be here in the first place – someone has to pay. Better them than you.

Fake it until you make it – if you make it.

Can you even make a statement these days without getting it printed out on organic cotton tote-bags that any pseudo-activist will proudly display when they go get their  daily £4 decaf oat latte? Everything has become a commodity. You don’t even have to want to sell yourself that you are already bought.

There comes a moment in one’s life where one just cannot take it anymore. The phoniness, the absurdly precarious balance of our society and our very existence within it becomes intolerable. There comes a moment where you are at a crucial junction, where you either become a serial killer or you break away, once and for all, from the shackles that have been holding you down. There comes a time in every person’s life when the ominous feeling that an irreversible choice needs to be made starts settling in. Sure, some will postpone that moment until the very day they die, open mouths to the skies, full of bitter regrets; they’ll ignore the feeling, the urgency, so they don’t have to make that decision, so they don’t have to think or to even consider deviating from the path they were raised to stay on. They choose not to wake up and they will sleep-walk through life.

The future that we have been force-fed since the second we could open our eyes, since the moment our retinas got blasted with bright, gigantic screens and polluted air came in our viscous lungs, this future is as elusive as it is delusional. The alternative that presents itself is to go astray and burn your bridges. Disobey. Revolt. Fuck it. Difference and otherness never sit well with people, never mind a complete rejection of the established order. So stop staring at the ground and look up. Take it all in: how insignificant you are, individually, in comparison to the world that surrounds you, and that was there long before you. Remember how much stronger you can be collectively and that you can make a difference, no matter how small. You can take action now, or you can keep on doing what you have been doing, never working or living for yourself, and will keep doing until you croak. The choice is yours.

I want out: out of the rat race, of the machine, out of the rigid mould I have been forced into. This is my declaration of independence. This is an act of cessation from the bullshit. Alea iacta est.