“Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. [-] Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life.“
This is how Rent-boy (played by Ewan McGregor) introduces the cinematic drug-debacle called Trainspotting. And while his point rambles away from him in his rapid fire disregard of societal conceit, the poetry of it strikes a cord. Or, it should strike a cord. Because life has to be more important than to just be about which cellphone operating service you chose to subscribe to, or which insurance plan is “just right for you”.
I don’t know if there’s an objective point to existence. I’d like to think so, but I can’t for the life of me grasp one. We crawled out of mud, not wasting a cosmic second before we started beating our meat against each other in carnal rivalry. Now, we’re erecting phallic symbol after phallic symbol out of steel and glass, the next larger than the last, all the while our fertility rates plummet. Shit’s fucked up, and it can be difficult to see a point to it all if you don’t shove your head into a delusional mire of religion.
Some find meaning in perfecting an art; a craftsmanship. Some find it in raising a family. Some find meaning, like our dear Scottish Renton above, in industrial grade drugs that fry your neural pathways until they’re more similar to Spam than brains. I rightly don’t know if there’s any meaning to be found in any of these pursuits. But I can tell you where there’s no meaning to be had: Becoming another cog in the tax factory.
Which seems to be what politicians wants us to be. Almost to the point of taking it for granted. They openly proclaim that the pinnacle of the human condition is being a compliant tax payer. Someone that funds the administrative juggernaut, carving it’s way through history like a strip miner, without putting up any resistance or asking any questions. A person that obeys every law, not because it’s right but because it is ordained from on high. A person that goes to work, pays their bills and never ever wonders why. A person that is more concerned about the plumpness of their pay-check than what they have to do to get it. Your leaders want you to find meaning in being a “good citizen”. A loyal serf.
Which is fine. Kinda fine… Expecting politicians to be concerned with your personal fulfilment above that of the state is akin to expecting a butcher shop to provide vegan options. It could happen, but you’d be an absolute imbecile if you expected it. Their intent is to grind you into becoming another brick in the wall. One might even say that it’s their job to do so. You’re not electing them to office to keep your personality safe, but to keep your precious society rolling onward to mutually assured destruction. You can’t fault them for it.
So, what’s your excuse?
The meaning of your existence is not to uphold the state. It isn’t to fund a G-man’s extramarital affair. Not to make sure that cars are being sold and driven by government bailout. Not to sing the national anthem at every “special” holiday. It’s not even the meaning of your life to make sure the lights stay on and to provide care to every poor sod that rolled a magnum on the Russian roulette of personal health. If you only exist for the benefit of other people, then what’s the point? Are we all just the safety net for every other moron that was shat out of a cosmic cause-and-effect asshole? It can’t all be just a self-perpetuating circle-jerk. And I refuse to have the meaning of my life be defined by people eating unfertilized sturgeon-spawn for breakfast on a gilded throne.
Consider all the bills and taxes and other bullshit to be necessities of the current societal paradigm. But don’t let that be the reason you’re eating and pissing and fucking your way through life. It’s not worth it. Find something else that makes all that other bullshit worthwhile. Something which’s benefit to others is a consequence. Not the goal.
Your life must be about you, in one way or another. Anything else is a bloody waste.
/Sebastian Lindberg 30/5-2017
WastedWords 