Going round and round and round and round in my mind. You ever wake up one day and feel hopeless for no reason? That feeling has been with me this week. People have been suggesting it's SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and I suggest that's a dumb suggestion because I literally just woke up one day feeling like I had lost all hope. Along with the inexplicable depression, I can't shake the flashbacks of regrets in my mind, of people I knew and loved and drifted away from. Small mysteries ingrained in my mind leak out into my consciousness at random. Why did she smile that time? Did he move because of me? How much impact did my existence have in their lives?
It was disturbing for me, when I first found out that a relationship between two of my friends hit the rocks hard because of something I said one day, lying in the grass staring up at the clouds after baseball practice. I didn't mean shit by it; just stupid little words falling out of my mouth. As much as I try not to dwell on the past, memories in living colour are what come to me whenever I feel like I've lost sight of the future.
I have lost sight of the future. I'm inching closer to 30 and have almost got my identity all figured out except what I do in life. People are defined by their careers, but I don't want that to be me. I don't want to ever again be a part of the rat race, the corporate world, where I sign away my freedom to express myself in exchange for a salary. I always remember the monologue from the movie Network, with those haunting words: "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
I feel overwhelmed to live in a world, thirty seven years after that famous monologue was first heard, and look around to see that conditions are even worse than they were back then. Sure, our material standard of living has improved, but as someone who doesn't really give a fuck about the material world that shit doesn't mean a damn thing to me.
Spiritually, things have just gotten worse and worse. Even as the federal government announces they're getting close to balancing the budget, an astronomical feat in today's global economy, the average amount of non-mortgage household debt amongst Canadians is almost 30G. Year by year, that amount only seems to get higher and higher because people are taking on more debt before they've even paid their past debts in full.
Everyone I seem to meet these days has money on their minds. "Money will buy me freedom, money will buy my happiness". Even when people aren't using those words, it's obvious that's what people are thinking.
"If I win the lotto..." she said, with a sardonic laugh as she blew cigarette smoke out the window wistfully with her eyes unfocused. "I know," I said, "just make sure you give me a mill or two when you do so I can quit this shit job with you."
What happened to our sense of community? What happened to the idea that humans are the most precious commodity, and that we need to invest not money into material goods, but time and effort into fostering relationships with the people we surround ourselves with? You can invest all the money in the world in an idea, or an organization, or even just a cause, but it won't do a damned thing unless there are people there to use that money. So why do the recipients of invested money always use it in antisocial ways to line the pockets of shareholders at the cost of communities? We've grown cool with the fact that our souls live in ghost towns so our bodies can sleep under down covers in a half-a-million-dollar house somewhere in suburban oblivion.
I don't know. The only thing that seems important to me is not what I end up doing for a living in the next ten years, or the next twenty years, or for the rest of my life, but rather the communities I can be a part of and the people whose lives I can help build for the better. I've lived a pretty self-indulgent life so far, and I regret it. I regret all the money I've spent on drugs and material shit. I regret all the effort I put into a job to make me feel like I'm happy and productive and worth something, only to watch people I care about get laid off all around me and realize that, ultimately, I'm powerless and that we're all alone even though we struggle with the same realities. And I wonder; I wonder if we would still feel that profound quiet of loneliness if we replaced our endless desire to have more with a desire to be more.
It was disturbing for me, when I first found out that a relationship between two of my friends hit the rocks hard because of something I said one day, lying in the grass staring up at the clouds after baseball practice. I didn't mean shit by it; just stupid little words falling out of my mouth. As much as I try not to dwell on the past, memories in living colour are what come to me whenever I feel like I've lost sight of the future.
I have lost sight of the future. I'm inching closer to 30 and have almost got my identity all figured out except what I do in life. People are defined by their careers, but I don't want that to be me. I don't want to ever again be a part of the rat race, the corporate world, where I sign away my freedom to express myself in exchange for a salary. I always remember the monologue from the movie Network, with those haunting words: "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"
I feel overwhelmed to live in a world, thirty seven years after that famous monologue was first heard, and look around to see that conditions are even worse than they were back then. Sure, our material standard of living has improved, but as someone who doesn't really give a fuck about the material world that shit doesn't mean a damn thing to me.
Spiritually, things have just gotten worse and worse. Even as the federal government announces they're getting close to balancing the budget, an astronomical feat in today's global economy, the average amount of non-mortgage household debt amongst Canadians is almost 30G. Year by year, that amount only seems to get higher and higher because people are taking on more debt before they've even paid their past debts in full.
Everyone I seem to meet these days has money on their minds. "Money will buy me freedom, money will buy my happiness". Even when people aren't using those words, it's obvious that's what people are thinking.
"If I win the lotto..." she said, with a sardonic laugh as she blew cigarette smoke out the window wistfully with her eyes unfocused. "I know," I said, "just make sure you give me a mill or two when you do so I can quit this shit job with you."
What happened to our sense of community? What happened to the idea that humans are the most precious commodity, and that we need to invest not money into material goods, but time and effort into fostering relationships with the people we surround ourselves with? You can invest all the money in the world in an idea, or an organization, or even just a cause, but it won't do a damned thing unless there are people there to use that money. So why do the recipients of invested money always use it in antisocial ways to line the pockets of shareholders at the cost of communities? We've grown cool with the fact that our souls live in ghost towns so our bodies can sleep under down covers in a half-a-million-dollar house somewhere in suburban oblivion.
I don't know. The only thing that seems important to me is not what I end up doing for a living in the next ten years, or the next twenty years, or for the rest of my life, but rather the communities I can be a part of and the people whose lives I can help build for the better. I've lived a pretty self-indulgent life so far, and I regret it. I regret all the money I've spent on drugs and material shit. I regret all the effort I put into a job to make me feel like I'm happy and productive and worth something, only to watch people I care about get laid off all around me and realize that, ultimately, I'm powerless and that we're all alone even though we struggle with the same realities. And I wonder; I wonder if we would still feel that profound quiet of loneliness if we replaced our endless desire to have more with a desire to be more.
