Is it cheesy to say “the best things in life are free?”

Maybe. But in my experience, with a few decades under my belt, it’s definitely true. Unfortunately our society, under capitalism, forces the worship of endless consumption to keep the wheel turning. None of us are immune to it. Some of us are more resistant.

No job I’ve ever held or commodity I’ve ever owned will ever be worth more to me or make me feel more alive than time I spent with friends that I loved.

My parents (boomers) and grandparents, when they were alive, were completely incapable of ever understanding why I would work whatever minimal amount to survive and spend my other time basically “doing nothing” which just means not creating surplus value for some capitalist. Of course I was doing something though. Reading, going to concerts, just watching movies with friends, whatever. I work to live not live to work.

To me, it’s an absolutely bizarre and impossible to understand mindset that boomers have. Always work work work (maybe not harder but more hours) and then spend spend spend.

I just saw my dad spend his money on stuff and he never seemed to get a shred of joy from it. Just light money on fire basically, never smile, then get ready for Monday. Always angry, annoyed, in a hurry. Impossible to talk to. My mom wasn’t much better. She’s “retired” like 4 times now because she literally cannot just sit and read or, I dunno, come over and hang out with her son (me) and just chat about random shit in the world. It’s all a big rush; they’re always in a hurry to get their task done to move on to the next task. They aren’t living, really; they’re just distracting themselves from existence. Scared that if they stand still and think about things they might have a feeling for once, and it won’t be a good feeling.

When I was like 20 years old, I remember everything felt like it was on a track towards… Something that felt relatively positive. Better than where we were. I’d sit with my friends at the time, sometimes we’d drink, and when I was really drunk I could lay my head back and look straight up at the stars and find the constellations or invent new ones. We’d talk about what the future was going to be like. How it was almost our time to run things and to fix things.

I guess that’s the sad thing in the end. I can look back on every dollar I’ve ever earned and spent and it means shit compared to sitting outside on a chilly autumn or winter night, drunk, just staring up at the stars and “knowing” things would be better and different someday. One memory among hundreds that cost me very little or nothing.

We don’t need all this shit. It will never make us happy. We all know it. But we’re stuck in this giant fucking pit with everyone else who also know it. We’re all individually powerless to change anything, so we crush that part of us that just wants to stare at the stars and we replace it with overtime work. We buy the commodities anyway. We justify it however we must. We cope however we can.

The boomers had everything and were still depressed. My generation had (almost) everything and we’re even more depressed. Ever notice how the zombie apocalypse genre blew up in the like mid 2000s and is still kinda ongoing? I think that’s our depressed Simpson’s style humor or way of coping. People just LARP and hope the world ends so they can have a reason to not go to work on Monday. So they can be freed from the hamster wheel forever. How fucking sad is that…

Well, I don’t know wtf all this means, apologies to the zoomers for depression-posting.

imagine working on enriching projects your whole life that have lasting effects and better humankind and human progress at large and leave legacies that last for centuries or more

or whatever thing we have to do instead

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Have you considered that they all just had awful wives?

But those idiots still worship capitalism.

One of my least favorite kinds of media is the kind where boomers and Gen Xers whine about how terrible working their stable jobs is and how their lives feel aimless, I should go take a soul searching trip to Nepal, life is simpler there, maaaaaaan. I mean, it’s capitalism, of course the jobs are going to suck to some extent, but even at the time they should’ve had some perspective. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, which is where the term comes from, is the perfect example.

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Boomers in the 80s and 90s were fucking depressed. They described their lives as a boring, soul-crushing existence where they did the same hollow shit day in and day out. They hated their bosses, they hated their jobs, their kids, their wife/husband. People had “Mid-life crises” where they tried to fill the void with “a fast car and a young hot fling.” things capitalism told them would make them happy. It didn’t.

I think our perspectives are being skewed here a bit by media. Media is generally made by very introspective people who think about their lives a lot and therefore tend to have more existential malaise. Well that’s the sympathetic way of putting it, the less sympathetic way is saying they’re kinda narcissistic and up their own ass.

So they all hated it cuz it was soul sucking. The less creative Boomers and Gen Xers I’ve meet have pretty found memories of the 80s and early 90s, they had cash, music and movies were good, there was coke and cars and women with big hair. They fucking loved it.

If you were hedonistic and not really interested in things being much “deeper” than that, it was a good time.

Interesting. Has any serious research been done into the midlife crisis phenomenon and linked it to the postwar boom? I’ve always heard/thought of it as an inevitable thing related to aging in general, but Really Makes You Think™ if it’s actually another capitalist condition

Trapped them in a guilded cage

“gilded” = covered in gold

“guilded” = having a guild, i.e. a medieval artisanal institution and historical precursor to both cartels and craft unions.

“gilded cage” = a cage covered in gold, for the purposes of situational and dramatic irony

“Ah but you see, unlike under ebil Sovjet gommunism, they have many freedom and different brands of treats to choose from!”

I’d add that widespread media tends to be written by very privileged people, which magnifies this effect. This goes doubly for The Simpson’s, which is written largely by people with PhD’s in math and engineering, many of them Ivy League. There’s something about embracing privilege which involves denying one’s true self, which just isn’t good for you. I think it’s deeply tied to why no ruling class has ever willingly and peacefully surrendered their power. On a systemic level, class interest manifests as state apparatus. On an individual level, class interests manifest as denial of self.