It’s not about whether belevolence exists for me. I genuinely get upset whenever someone tells me that they want me to do something; professors who assign papers (regardless of the inocuity of their intentions), bosses, my friends, anybody. I guess that makes me a control freak, but why does it have to? All of these things (money, deadlines, work, bosses) aren’t inherently necessary for our survival; we made it so that they are and now they control EVERYTHING we do from eating, sleeping, healing ourselves; the only thing we control is how we handle being controlled by the corporate West’s obsession with corporate profiteering and prosperiy. I don’t want to be controlled by an ultimatum that people are forced to make- forced because the choice that we are expected to make is between survival and maintaining control over one’s own life, because NONE OF us told our parents to conceive us so why are we expected to be grateful for a life that  is only valuable if it can be exploited by people in positions of authority that they think they earned ?  I’m not a huge fan of the way that we organized society, and I know society is not going to change so I don’t really see a point in trying to “be the change I want to see in the world.”  Maybe if more people felt like me I’d be able to start some kind of movement,  but there aren’t enough people who do, so again, what’s the point?

• This reply was modified 5 years, 8 months ago by Ramsey.

My parents were never strict with me, so that’s not it. I just hate the idea that humans have to go thru life having to pay for anything and everything when we could have made things a lot easier and more fair for everyone. I also hate how people like me- who see what human life REALLY has become (a moneygrab) – are brushed off as depressed and never taken seriously. I also hate how the human world doesn’t care about anybody that can’t contribute to it. In addition to that, I think it’s ridiculous how people who spent tons of money on an undergraduate degree can’t get jobs right out of college anymore; unless they have 2 years experience right off the bat, and if they “were responsible and majored in something with a good return on investment” because that just reinforces the idea that we’re just pawns who are only good for furthering the agenda of the economic elite- who have ample free time and free will because they have money that they may or may not have worked hard to earn; and they want me to listen to THEM and help THEIR company or else I’ll be living on the sidewalk next to THEIR building begging for money because I didn’t want someone to own me for the time I’d be on this planet? I’ll pass. I want my time to be under MY control and nobody else’s. I also don’t want money. I just want to be able to craft my own life, and live it by my own terms. No IRS, no bills, no loans, NO EFFING BOSSES, nobody from the outside world there to bother me, nothing. I just want peace. But in the human world, peace is nonexistent and unattainable because we believe in a world where things HAVE to get done; I don’t. I hope everything falls apart so that humanity can f*ck off and stop shitting all over this beautiful place because we don’t deserve it. The way we exploit eachother and say that it’s not personal; the way we kill each other and say that it’s just business; the way we withold basic necessities from eachother and say that it’s moral because it’s being done for money, etc.  Humans disgust me and I don’t want to be one anymore.

Dear Brandi,

I’m glad that you’ve found success and satisfaction in your work, and I do not want to take that away from you because there are very few people who are satisfied with their work- ~30% last time I checked. As for the rest… well, they most likely had to settle for the sake of survival- given up on dreams they may have had, all because they probably weren’t “realistic” enough; all for the sake of survival; which, again, shouldn’t be a person’s main worry; not in today’s world at least. The idea alone that people have to sell their time and labor in order to survive- rather than simply leave their dwellings to pick vegetables and hunt for food (things that are -by nature- communal)- is counter to this idea that we’re “free.” How is it freedom if someone HAS to work for someone else so they can get express permission to survive (money)? I don’t necessarily care about how ONE person can improve their OWN worklife- if you did, that’s great; but what about everyone else? Say I end up getting promoted to CEO of Nike; that’s great! I’m now a billionaire and never have to work again! Now I am the very thing I hate about humanity- a bureaucrat; a “leader”; an “owner.” It’s idealism at it’s laziest to just cite hard work as the recipe to escape being exploited because upward mobility is the path to becoming the exploiter. And why would anybody wand to become what they hate? The rich are and have been stealing resources, calling them theirs, and using their money to exploit people who can no longer get those things without money so they can get money to get the things that they otherwise wouldn’t need money to get had we not created a system that uses human beings as fuel, and just farts them away after they’ve been burned out. I don’t think that it’s fair for me or anybody else to be afforded opportunities to work when there are people out there who “aren’t qualified” because that, as I said before, creates toxic ideas of self-worth.

If I became the CEO of Nike, I’d be exploiting all of my employees- especially the ones who get paid 10 cents a day to risk their lives working in sweat shops to make me some money, and you a pair of Jordans, but also the ones who have jobs in corpoarte offices, and in my shoe stores. And, yes, theoretically speaking, the people working in shoe stores should be young people with little experience- but that doesn’t account for the workers who couldn’t afford to go to college and have no choice but to rely on a part-time job such as working in a shoe store. “But there’s the opportunity to get promoted to manager.” Okay, but that’s likely a position given to one, maybe two people. The rest are left at the bottom. As for the people who have jobs working for Nike that have college degrees, what’s a bachelor’s degree gonna get them nowadays? From every job posting that I’ve seen, people need “minimum 2 years experience” to get jobs anywhere with a JUST a bachelor’s degree. Why can’t people just learn what to do? Because it’s cheaper to hire someone who doesn’t need training than it is to hire someone and then train them. What then? Should they apply to work in sweatshops, or something? This kinda crap suggests that a company’s main concern is what you can produce, and not anything else- not your needs, and most certainly not the truth (i.e. questions like “How can you be an asset to this company?, “Why do you want to work here?”- both of which are used to get a feel for how gee-willackers excited someone is to work at Nike, when the reality is most likely that they just need to survive. They’d replace you/fire you in a heartbeat if they felt like they needed to save money; to them it’s not personal; but to the worker it’s ALL personal; you played by their arbitrary set of rules, yet you still lost because they decided that saving money>loyalty to workers- but yayyy severance package. This is dragging, but work IS exploitation because without it we have no choice but to do it to survive- regardless of whether our bodies were meant to handle the stresses of a life of nonstop work within the context of capitalism.

As for living the hunter gatherer lifestyle, there is no way to figure out where that would’ve lead had the population not exploded the way it did with the advent of cities and industrialization, so I’m not sure if my utopia WOULD be people people living in the wild. I don’t even know if I’m looking for a utopia- having expectations that high is unrealistic, and will only result in disappointment. Also, if 1243 people were to be asked what their idea of utopia was, we’d get 1243 different answers- one of which answers is likely to be our capitalist utopia, and one of which is likely to be a communist utopia- which means that one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. I’m not sure where I stand in terms of how society should be organized, but I DO know that other people should NOT be able to play god with the livelihoods of others; they shouldn’t jail people for stealing if they HAVE TO; people shouldn’t be jailed for not being able to pay for their healthcare; peoples’ homes shouldn’t be left to burn down because their money was in their house and couldn’t pay the fire dept (this happened); people shouldn’t be forced out of their homes if they couldn’t pay the bank in time- but NOOOO; sh*t like that is allowed because issuing an eviction notice isn’t a bullet to the brain- no… it’s a cowardly way of hurting someone. But my main main main point is that all of the BS that humans (corporations and governments) do in the world is because of money; and they can get away with it because of money; and nobody wants to do anything about it because they have a job to go to because organizing is dangerous and can put their jobs in jeopardy… and they they need money! It’s a  vicious cycle.