Every second you spend reading this is another second of your life you'll never get back. Step out of the haze of your existence and notice how you feel, is there a numbness, emptiness, an ember of existential angst waiting to ignite your struggle for a life that you own?
How many hours a day do you spend behind a computer screen? A television screen? An automobile screen? All three screens combined? What are you being screened from? How much of your existence comes filtered through a screen, vicariously? Who is telling you what to think, what to do? Do you follow what they tell you to do? Do you really believe that watching things is really exciting as doing things? Chances are, you have already recognised a mismatch between what you truly want and what you passively do. Actions speak louder than thoughts, and demonstrate what we believe in practice (e.g. by spending your time on your phone when you're not working or sleeping, you're demonstrating that you believe that being on your phone is a more positive choice than other options).
Do you have enough time to do all the things you want to do? Do you believe that you can do what you want to do right now? Do you believe that by reading this, you are doing what you want to be doing right now? Do you enough energy everyday?
How many hours do you sleep each night? Is the sleep you're having restful? How are you affected by standardised time, designed solely to synchronise your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours, the minutes that add up to your life? How much of your life is spent looking or listening to advertisements? (it's a fuckton more than you like to think, and you can never be forced to experience another YouTube or Spotify or web ad again by switching to a Firefox-based browser, installing the adblocker uBlockOrigin, which is the only one that works, and going to https://mobilism.me and downloading their latest patched version of Spotify or any other paywalled app; https://github.com/fmhy/FMHY for other ways to get free books, watch free movies etc through simple civil disobedience).
How many dollars would you sell an hour of your life for? How many dollars an hour does it take you to stay inside and do shit you hate so that some millionaire can continue getting richer? Do you give time, do you give money to some grifter who claims to know the secret to a fulfilling life when in truth, you can have it right now, if you let go of what you have been brainwashed into thinking you should want or what you should you think you are?
How do you feel when you are surrounded by other people, who are themselves preoccupied with themselves? What do you think they believe about you? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings? Do you have a yearning for connection but feel as though it's incorrect to fully express that to others?
What are we deprived of by 'labour-saving devices'? By thought-saving devices? What work or thoughts are they blocking you from experiencing? How are you affected by society's requirement of efficiency, which places value on the product instead of the process, on the future instead of the present, the present moment which is becoming shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards?
Are we 'saving' time? Saving it, for what?
Do you buy what you are told to buy? Is CocaCola really a high quality useful product or do you buy it because of ruthless marketing that has made you believe that what is little more than carbonated water, sugar and flavouring is something worth spending what is the equivalent of your labour for?
Do you ever think about how pharmaceutical companies and 'recovery clinics' are incentivised not to find cures for diseases but create drugs that can be no different from 'illicit' substances or have questionable efficacy? (meth is literally prescribed as 'Desoxyn' and yet one narrative is that it will make your teeth fall out and make you addicted whereas the other narrative is that
How are you affected by being moved around in prescribed paths, in elevators, buses, subways, escalators, on highways and sidewalks? By moving, working, and living in two- and three-dimensional grids? How are you affected by being organized, immobilized, and scheduled... instead of wandering, roaming freely and spontaneously? Scavenging? (Shoplifting?)
How much freedom of movement do you have, freedom to move through space, to move as far as you want, in new and unexplored directions?
And how are you affected by waiting? Waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to eat, waiting for the bus, waiting for the bathroom, learning to punish and ignore your spontaneous urges?
How are you affected by holding back your desires?
By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with the suppression of everything in you that is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your membership in the animal kingdom?
Is pleasure dangerous? Could danger be joyous?
Do you ever need to see the sky? (Can you see stars in it any more?) Do you ever need to see water, leaves, foliage, animals? Glinting, glimmering, moving?
Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, houseplants?
Or are television and video your glinting, glimmering, moving?
How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously?
Do videotapes of yourself and your friends fascinate you, as if you are somehow more real in image than in life?
If your life was made into a movie, would it be worth watching?
And how do you feel in situations of enforced passivity? How are you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication, audio, visual, print, billboard, computer, video, radio, robotic voices, as you wander through the forest of signs? What are they urging upon you?
Do you ever need solitude, quiet, contemplation? Do you remember it? Thinking on your own, rather than reacting to stimuli? Is it hard to look away?
Is looking away the very thing that is not permitted?
Where can you go to find silence and solitude? Not white noise, but pure silence? Not loneliness, but gentle solitude?
How often have you stopped to ask yourself questions like these?
Do you find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence?
Do you ever feel lonely in a way that words cannot even express?
Do you ever feel ready to LOSE CONTROL?
From the archive. Polemic · 27 December 2024 · docx carried verbatim.