Self vs.System vs.Self

Money! Dating! Fashion! OMG! OMFG roxor! Dazzle my eyes with false promises and seemingly endless variety of distractions presenting those things that I should be thinking about, and I will no doubt be unable to avoid thinking about them. My cell phone keeps me too busy to pay attention to domestic political and my Facebook commitments outweigh my personal free time. So many peripheral events and networked transactions occur everyday, throwing people in and out of social engagements, encouraging more and more dependence on and commitment to someone else's ideas. It's not very plausible, wanting to be recognized for achievement in a proactive, creative manner. Corporate success, being made economically viable through paying little attention to problems with free-market visions of high life, appears much easier. But ironically, it does feel good to go and spend money on something personal and unnecessary when life is getting you down. Why is that? Encouraged since birth, consuming is the lifestream of 'successful' existence. Despite recognizing the fallibility of this concept, it's strangely easy adhering to a system which cleverly replaces autonomy with 'stuff'.

The current 'spring' weather in the Southern Ontario region doesn't help to encourage that everything around you doesn't suck and isn't crap, which is arguably a difficult lie to continually tell oneself when your senses explain otherwise. As a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, I feel assured that my time is nigh, whether guised as a perfect job that falls into my lap, or the big lotto win, or perhaps the swift universal justice of heaven cleansing the Earth of fundamentalism and intolerance. Jaded, so jaded. Get a grip, man.

Settle for the job you have and the life you chose and live vicariously through the representation of others. Settle for your existing social climate. Get a degree in Arts, and then settle on becoming a teacher, even though you're not too keen on kids. Opposition is always a difficult route in the face of comfort and conformity, but freedom costs a buck o' five. That's, like, dramatic irony.

Please understand that I respect and admire this culture of consumption. And I honour it every bit as much as the next.....anarchist. Yet I am completely dependent on it for my continued existence. Kind of a weird paradox that I can't seem to be able to explain my way out of. Feeling meaty with cynicism.