Raison D’etre

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As I approach 40, I’m reckoning with my own mortality; no longer a young adult but not yet middle aged, I ponder the meaning of life.

Experience has shown me there is no grand plan, no reason for everything. We’re just bags full of chemicals rolling around the mud ball we call Earth.

That we were born or not was a dice roll thrown by the universe. Who we are, what we do, who we love? All meaningless in the end.

Just like life.

Everything that lives must die. It is the nature of the young to supplant the old. Everything eventually breaks, even us.

We might think we’re special, but on the cosmic scale we’re dust in the wind. One day soon we will die, one day we will be forgotten, one day the stars will burn out and the universe will cease expanding and collapse.

Next to that, what meaning does our fart of an existence have? I’ll tell you: none, except that which we give them.

Therein lies the great horror and the great joy. We can be slaves to this harsh reality or be the captains of our fate.

How we look at it is up to us.

The American Dream is Killing Us

Piggybacking off yesterday’s Daily Drabble, why do we allow others’ thoughts to affect us so much?

Why do we obsess over whether randoms online like or share our posts or what peeps irl think of us? It’s not like we’ll ever meet or see them again, so way so serious?

The answer, like most things in our modern hellscape ties into capitalism. Everyone is trying so hard to go viral in the hopes this might translate into dollars. 

Everywhere you look people are trying to sell us something(guilty as charged), because we’ve been conditioned to monetize everything we do.

So much so, people’s first instinct is to whip out their phones and start recording when an incident happens long before they consider helping out.

Why?

So they can become famous and live with some semblance of leisure outside their wage-slave jobs.

Repeatedly, we were told if you work hard and go to college you’ll get ahead. But the reality is most businesses couldn’t care less about their employees,and successful people are often products of dumb luck mixed with nepotism and sketchy ethics.

You can be the best in your field or craft and still fail commercially. And history has shown the opposite is true. Under capitalism everything is reduced to money and the more you have or something earns the more its perceived value.

This is no way to live. Yes, we all must pay the bills, but everything we do or are shouldn’t be monetized. We are not brands; we are people with hopes, loves, triumphs, and struggles.

What we are, what do shouldn’t be reduced to sound bites or tweets packaged for social media. My soul, my being isn’t for sale to the highest bidder. And neither should yours be.