The hardest thing about life is knowing how things work.
For example, the stock market is not an institution that tracks how a company is performing and goes up or down based on that. That’s the idea, but the stock market is just vibes. Companies’ stocks go up when people invest in them, and the profit/loss is mostly secondary. It matters, but only if they decide it does. The top 1% own over 50% of the market, the top 10% own most of the rest, and then everyone else has what’s left.
That doesn’t stop big corporations and publicly traded companies from acting like they always act. The only rule is number go up. Whether that means constant expansion and growth, making the product slightly worse and more expensive, or laying off people to ensure the number go up. The people who work do not matter. The number must go up for the shareholders. Who are the shareholders? See above.
This is all by design. Can’t we do anything about it? Politicians, maybe? Sure, but they could also just profit from it. Why change it when you can be rich? Take money from these companies because money is people now, and listen to that money above everything else.
Subscribe to have the blog sent directly to your email:
But that’s just these politicians. We need to vote those ones out and elect the blue ones. Except the blue ones have no desire to change things, only to keep things the same. The pattern repeats itself over and over. It goes something like: red president makes everything worse, blue president mostly keeps it at the same new worse level, red president makes everything even worse, blue president changes nothing, red president makes everything far worse than previously imagined. Again, and again, and again.
The blue ones are trying their best, though! If only it weren’t for the few random ones in government that always vote with the other side for some reason. I don’t know how those ones keep getting elected; it’s almost like there is a rotating villain.
Meanwhile, the constant goalpost shifting has the red team becoming the Reich team, and the blue team closer to Richard Nixon than any sort of progressive movement that people actually want from them.
Tell me when I’m telling lies.
The people on the streets don’t want any of this, but unless you are chronically online and know where to look, you don’t know that. An overreliance on the news to know what’s going on means that the news doesn’t have to show you what’s really going on. Why would they? The people who own the news are the same people who own the corporations, and there is no profit in showing what people actually want. It’s much more profitable to brainwash and isolate people.
Protesting is okay, but only peaceful protesting. Preferably on a Saturday along a local government-approved route. You might even get on the news for five to ten seconds. Any violence, even violence being done against you, is your fault and disqualifies your cause from legitimacy.
At least we have movies and television to save us from this hell world. Especially movies that package our anger at the world, and sell it back to us. I don’t need to go to a protest, I watched The Menu last night and I am on the workers’ side! Yeah, I’m a leftist. Haven’t you seen my Letterboxd?
Maybe we can even get mad about movies that don’t portray our ideal revolution properly, or have our exact politics. I know One Battle After Another is saying that putting Mexican people in cages is bad, but they aren’t saying it in the right way. We need a step-by-step guide to a revolution, not a father-daughter story.
I wonder if, one day, our hatred of billionaires we see in movies and The White Lotus will expand beyond that. Commercials, maybe?
No, that’s ridiculous.
Then there’s the internet. A place where it once seemed like anything was possible, that now mostly serves as a constant stream of doom. Endless videos of people being unalived, endless details about PDF Files that go nowhere, a place where you have to use language like that to even be heard while racists thrive everywhere else, everyone is trying to scam you, and an algorithm that never stops serving you the thing that makes you the maddest. It is a brain-breaking machine that preys on the weak, turns the most insane thing you’ve ever heard into a position worth fighting for, and at the very least causes depression for everyone else.
Which brings me to the point of all this. I wanted to start blogging every week about things I’m interested in. To practice my writing and keep good habits, but mostly to escape all of this. To be my own safe space and create a world that is something like the one I want to live in. Then the government’s private army straight up murdered some people, and it all felt so small and stupid.
Imagine hearing that news, about the very best of us having their lives taken from them for no fucking reason, and someone walks up to you and says, “Man, that Predator: Badlands sure did suck.” You would hate that person, and I didn’t want to be that person by writing something like that.
At the same time, it never ends. It will never fucking end.
If it’s not people in Minnesota, it’s people in the Middle East dying for extremely racist reasons. Or Latin American countries being terrorized by your own government for no reason. It’s people everywhere, all the time, being punished for not being white and rich. It’s every powerful person who is making the world a worse place being named as part of the pedophile cabal, to no consequences.
I wrote about Avatar when this bad stuff was happening, but other bad stuff was just too much? Yeah, I’m a fucking hypocrite. It’s my fault that the world could be anything, but it chooses to be this. Or at least that’s how I’m meant to feel.
Don’t try to do anything, just sit there and eat shit every day for the rest of your life.
Well, I don’t want to. I’m going to keep trying to make something in this stupid world. Whether that be blogs, books, or tailgate parties. All I can do is my part to make the world a little bit better. If that’s too many thoughts on Avatar, that’s what it is. If I have to write about how broken everything is, so be it. I’ll do it because I believe in doing it, the only reason to ever do anything. They’re not gonna win.
Subscribe to have the blog sent directly to your email:
