HUMANS
Many of us can boil our problems down to not fitting in… Not having a place where we are happy to belong and contribute, thereby giving our life meaning. When you find yourself isolated or banished from the group, in this case the human race, bad things happen.
I went to college and majored in a specialized science, and during my education I got a co-op job with a firm that did military contracts. I was great at my job, made decent money while studying, had a future position lined up at the firm after I graduated, and I felt great about my life and my place in the world. One day I realized, what the fuck, I’m working for a company that designs bombs that incinerate people, trees and animals. I wasn’t personally designing bombs but I felt filthy all the same. So I quit and dropped out of school. Never found my footing, and here I am.
So let’s look at this objectively: I have a skill to offer the human race but I can’t find where I fit in. This applies to all the unemployed people in the world, or people working lousy jobs, or people who just can’t figure out what to do with their lives. We’re like a puzzle piece that doesn’t seem to fit so we end up discarded. Waste. The puzzle itself never gets finished.
ANTS
Have you ever watched ants? I mean really, sit and watch how efficiently, how musically they work together. You never see an ant with his thumb up his ass because he doesn’t have a place. Ants are the most ordered and organized species I’ve ever seen, no waste.
Ants have been on this planet for an estimated 140 million years. By comparison, primates have been around maybe 60 million, less than half. We’ve got a long fucking way to go before we’ve figured out how to exist as a species with ant-like efficiency. And considering humans have broken off from primates, we have to look at humans as their own new group which only sprouted a mere 300k years ago.
300k compared to 140 million years. Is it any wonder that we can’t pull our shit together as a species or as individuals? We’re infants. We haven’t even mastered the ability to work together to bring a scrap of food back to the hill. We’d kill ourselves fighting over the food. There’s no structure to our species because we’re infants.
ME
Back to me and my wasted skills. I guess I’m supposed to do what everyone else is supposed to do: scour job opportunities, apply, interview, take a shit job just to get my foot in the door, spend the next few decades working up the ladder until maybe I can find where I’m best needed, and hope it’s a company whose ethics and vision I agree with otherwise it’s right back to a bomb-building situation and quitting, start all over again. That’s the optimistic scenario! The realistic scenario is I work a job waiting tables or some disposable capacity like that just to pay the bills and survive without being thrown out on the street, all the while growing more disillusioned at life before getting drunk and jumping off a cliff. Somehow I doubt ants do this.
So here I am, a waste of a life, planning the ultimate waste of life: to end it. Death is the only place where I fit in. If I could, I’d check back in 80 million years. Til then, fuck it.
16 comments
Damn, you almost described my life, except I worked in a govt. research lab that didn’t make weapons. Best job I ever had, and although it was a temporary 2 year assignment, I could have gone back after grad school had I not fucked that up for reasons that had nothing to do with school. To this day (many years later), I don’t know what the hell my younger self was thinking. I’ve had a couple of decent but basically dead-end jobs since then, punctuated by many shitty jobs, because no one tales me seriously when it comes time for promotions or anything that could move me up. Maybe they sense I don’t give a damn about much of anything in the so-called “real world,” maybe it’s because I’m not socially adept at office politics, who knows. Hopefully you figure it all out better than I have!
Man so you know what it’s like to almost taste victory only to lose it all. Yeah in hindsight I didn’t have to fuck it up just because I didn’t like 1 company… Like you, I think my younger self just wasn’t thinking straight.
Dead end jobs, one after the other, really mess with your sense of self worth. Office politics make it even harder. I guess the result is inevitable, those who arent savvy at the game end up sidelined and rotting.
Right back atcha, I hope you can figure something out. I’m sure there could be a golden opportunity around the corner for both of us. But I’m just at the point that I wouldn’t recognize it if it drove up in a limo. I’m so far down the hole of worthless
I can relate, I think. I did my first year at community college then got hired at the hospital. I did one semester at university and burned out, but I was happy at the hospital. Then the hospital started to implode, I left, got the job surveying for the gas company, had a good year with them. Then I had my nervious breakdown.
Lost some time there. I think it was at least 8 months. Eventually when I was trying to put stuff back together I decided to go back to school. So I just did one course over the summer. Then I went back full time, and in a few years I finished it. I even had a few good jobs after that.
Now I’m down again. So this isn’t the first time for me to be in this position. What I’m saying is pulling yourself out of this sort of thing takes some patience, and you just keep throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks.
Reading your story, what is keeping you from going back to school? Those credits never expire. I had almost a decade between my first year and when I finished. Eventually I learned enough about what I wanted to go to school and get it. Sooner or later the same is going to be true of grad school.
It’s one of the few things I took out of my childhood; if you keep chipping away at stuff, keep making progress, eventually stuff gets done. I earned my Eagle Scout because I just kept showing up to meetings and earning badges. The same was true of all my academic success.
Yes, you and I are pretty much the same, we’re waiting to die. It’s going to be awhile, that’s the likely prognosis. Might as well make the best of it. That’s my take anyway.
That’s totally it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a dream job, but anything that gives us structure, a future, and the feeling of having a place in society can make a world of difference.
Going back to school is actually a great idea. It’s great to hear you finished up and now you got that under your belt. It’s something that can’t be taken away from you, so maybe it gives you sort of a safety net.
I suppose there’s nothing really stopping me, except my own fears and inertia. I guess it’s one of those things like playing in a rain puddle. Nothing’s stopping us except that inner voice that says “you’re too old for this shit”
Also my faith in American society has really taken a hit in recent years. Society, the workforce, the whole system just feels like a boat that sailed without me and won’t let me board, even if I wanted to. I guess what I’m saying is for me to take such a big step I’d have to believe in what I’m doing, but that’s just not there. Now, if I got an opportunity to study or work overseas that’s something that would invigorate me again, maybe even enough to beat depression.
Bottom line, it’s the old quicksand metaphor. Can’t get myself out. Need someone to throw me a vine or something because at this point I’m content to sink.
I wouldn’t want to be ant or ant-like. Robot-like. Perfect slaves of queen who herself is slave of system. System which works for the benefit of… who? Not a single individual. System for system.
“I wouldn’t want to be ant or ant-like. Robot-like.”
That’s not the point I’m making. obv the brain mass of an ant is a fraction of a gram so they probably lack the capacity of individual thought like lifeforms with larger brain mass and intricate neural networks that make it possible. Ants have total freedom, certainly more than humans, because there’s no police, no courts, no laws forcing them to stay in line. An ant chooses to be part of the system and can certainly wander off if it wanted, but it prefers the structure, the guarantees and the safety of the hill.
My point is that humans have no “hill”. Nothing provides that structure, the safety and the guarantees. In human society, like me, like Room101, like heartlessviking, we want to be part of the structure and we have skills to offer, but human society is so damaged and chaotic that we can’t find where to fit in. Just look at unemployment (to say nothing of disgruntled workers) and tell me that there are as many unemployed ants, criminal ants who steal because they can’t find their place?
These things like unemployment (disuse) and stealing (inter-species antagonism) do not exist in a structured society, and yet human society is riddled with it. So unless you’re going to tell me that human society is perfect and we are the problem, I don’t see your point?
I am not antagonistic to what you said in your main post. I understand what you mean regarding organization. I am completely with you regarding flaws in current human society. Like you I also obtained specialized education but left jobs because of the way office structure is structured. But ants are not the answer to that. Ants have taken organization to the extreme. Being a slave or robot-like is part and parcel of being completely organized. Which is what we see in ants. How can freedom and organization go hand in hand? Two free individuals will have disagreements eventually. Ants and bees are the two species in which individuals of a group don’t have inner clashes. A philosopher, PD Ouspensky, said similar thing as you, that ants and bees were human-like once upon a time in terms of social organization but they perfected their organization and became what they are today.
I am against labor of many for few, but labor of all for none? That’s even worse!
I agree that slavery and forced labor is horrible, but I think you’re missing the fact that nature’s order is voluntary, human order is forced. That’s what you appear to be conflating.
Like I said above, an ant or any animal is free to leave its hive/pack/community. So you see, ants or any other hive species has the perfect order: a sort of voluntary communism that is run without corruption.
Human government fail on all these levels. For one thing it is not voluntary. You can’t simply unplug from the human race because sooner or later they’ll jail you for failure to pay taxes, failure to mow your lawn, failure to register your property, etc. Human society is forced.
Nature’s society is, again I repeat to drive the point home, voluntary. The glue that holds the hive/pack/herd together is a symbiotic benefit. Like I said, protection, food, and the point of this thread: belonging.
Humans are millions of years away from that sort of unity, if ever it will happen. Because like I keep saying, humanity is in its absolute infancy compared to nearly every other species that has had millions of years more to iron out the kinks in its (voluntary) society.
It’s an assumption that natural order is voluntary. If anything, it’s more forced than human order. It’s forced on the level of genes, hard-wired. Animals have some level of this freedom to leave their group, which we see happening sometimes. That’s also why animal groups are not as well organized as ants and have clashes. Ants, on the other hand, have no freedom at all. We don’t see a single ant leaving its colony. They work themselves to death, literally.
Well this is going nowhere. You’re making all sorts of anthropocentric assumptions that are way outside the scope or intent of this thread. This isn’t a discussion of freewill vs perceived freewill vs genetic freewill, as that’s an irresoluble point.
Fact: ants have better order. Fact: ants have had 500x longer to evolve to this state of order. Fact: you won’t find a single sane person who thinks human society works.
That’s what everyone thinks. Have you read “Brave New World,” or even better but much less well-known, “This Perfect Day” by Ira Levin (the same author of The Stepford Wives, The Boys from Brazil, and Rosemary’s Baby?) If you were treated very well, had everything you wanted (including sex), and were genetically and socially programmed to be a “slave,” would you: 1) even care; 2) know what a slave even is; and 3) want it any other way even if you did know? I’d argue that you’d be as happy as as pig in the mud. I know plenty of humans (recently, most of my family) who rant about how they protect and love their personal freedom while blindly following every word of their pastor, some dumb-ass social media influencer, or some politician, no matter how absurd they act or what nonsense they spout. And these are just everyday people, not even counting cult followers, members of street gangs or terrorist groups, etc. People don’t want freedom, not really; they want to belong to something, and sometimes anything will do no matter how destructive. Those of us who don’t seem to belong anywhere end up on websites like this.
I have read brave new world but have also read notes from underground which counters it. In brave new world also the main character chooses self harm over soma, just to show that he is free. People pull towards slavery but also want freedom, gotta have it, can’t do without it. That’s paradoxical nature of human. He wants rules to follow but also loves breaking the rules. He wants purpose but hates anyone telling him what to do. People pull towards something only for the time being. Given long enough, they become disillusioned with everything.
Good point, and Notes from Underground is one of my favorite books. (Dostoevsky is actually one of my favorite authors ever). I was mainly focusing on happiness as a subjective state without taking personal liberty into account. From an existential point of view, we are forced to be free and must make our own meaning for our lives.
I just think most people (unconsciously, of course — most people know nothing about philosophy) find their meaning in some kind of group or institution. I’ve always had a problem with this personally.
People are not different fundamentally. What happens with one happens with all, only varies in time scale and quantity at a particular time. Some people are more sensitive or more intelligent and detect it quickly, others take time so it’s not as visible in them. It’s like in the game of chess. Grandmasters are not different from noobs, they only process moves more quickly, and this quicker processing is labelled as being more intelligent.
Everyone suffers from lack of meaning, everyone wants to belong and everyone mistrusts whatever they found their meaning or belonging from. So many build walls and defences to protect it. But no wall is immune to truth and breaks sooner or later.
Good to see a fellow notes from underground lover.
As long as the rich 1% control the 99% of poor people, humanity is fucked.
EXACTLY. Human society is fucked from the getgo because of selfish and malicious individuals. Plato ranked democracy as the 2nd worst form of government, only above tyranny, for this very reason. He said self-serving individuals would seize on the opportunity to control others and make profits. And we sure as hell see that, whether its from elected officials or …ahem… non elected billionaires who dictate government policy.
Again it’s because human society is in its infancy, compared to other species who have been in existence 500x longer than humans. Other species have worked out the kinks, and the proof is in the pudding because they’re still around whereas humankind is wiping itself out.
Who knows if humankind will work its shit out. I’m actually optimistic enough to think that it will. But I’m realistic enough to know that it won’t be for millions and millions of years. I don’t feel like waiting.