Modern Slavery
An opening question to the reader: At what point in your life did you begin to get a feeling that something is wrong? You can’t quite put your finger on it, so you shrug it off and think nothing of it. But the nature of the feeling leaves an imprint on your mind, and over time, the feeling begins to demand your attention. It doesn’t make sense to you though, because you can’t see anything that is clearly wrong. So, you reason, it must be me, I’m young, I’m inexperienced, so what do I know. Stupid brain! So you put it away in your mind again, and the distractions of everyday life keep it out of sight, because you have more important things to worry about. But then it comes back, like an itch that never seems to get scratched. Then it gets stronger, and again you doubt what you feel. You start to think “What’s wrong with me?”, as you chase yourself in circles trying to figure out the source of your mind’s delusion. But you can’t find a cause. Still, it is unmistakeable that SOMETHING is off, and it bothers you because it feels so viscerally ingrained and meaningful. You have to solve it, somehow. The problem is, logic and reason can’t seem to do it. So your brain is left with but one choice: find a way to compensate. The method varies greatly person to person, but they all share the common link of attachment or dependence. The most common ones you’ll see are: overeating, constant entertainment, gaming, self-obsession, drugs, love for money and material objects, a strong need for others to like you, hyper-sexuality, tribalism, the list goes on. However these are all just “temporary” coping mechanisms to keep the conscious mind distracted from that feeling deep inside that you KNOW is real and desperately important, yet seemingly impossible to be realized. The brain realizes that the feeling is so deep and so certain that allowing full knowledge of it to the consciousness would produce such erratic and chaotic behavior changes to the extent that it would be dangerous to survival. Your brain knows this well before you do, so it begins to create an elaborate mask to keep you sane. This “mask” takes the form of structural and systemic changes to the way in which you think, feel, and interpret the world around you. The two most prominent manifestations of this are anxiety and depression. You might wonder, why would my mind do this to me? It’s simple: because it has to. Why does it have to? Because that feeling inside you, it’s more important, more special than anything else in this world. It desperately wants to be realized, it’s that thing we call a “soul”. This “soul” is simply just your intrinsic want for life. As a kid this force inside you was largely unrestricted, you wanted to learn, discover, explore, ask questions, and understand. You more readily developed emotional attachments, more open-minded, more empathetic, and you cared deeply and irrationally for many things and people. You wanted to do everything, you had unlimited desire and infinite energy. Then you look at the average adult today, and usually you see the opposite. And no, it’s not just a fact of growing up and maturing. The saddest, most brutal truth of life today is that the world we’ve created favors productivity and efficiency over humanity. The systems in place are designed to keep humans in competition and divided. Look at the education system, it forcefully robs countless generations of their time and replaces it with work. At an early age, children are forced into a competitive learning environment, are made to sit still and do work for 5+ hours a day 5 days a week, and essentially having their worth be determined by a number. Rinse and repeat for their entire youth…how could this have ever been a good idea? But the education system is more or less a result of the grand issue at play: the economic system. The system that most of the world runs on creates massive inequality and resource disparity. For fuck’s sake, there are people in this world who starve and also people who own thousands of cars but never drive them. The fact that this is true means we have collectively failed as a species to value human life. When the world doesn’t value life, is it no surprise that so many people grow up the same way? Alas, the systems in place have grown so large and it is impossible for any individual who reads this to do anything about it except sit and submit. But at least I know what is wrong, and what is right, and the best I can do is to live my life doing what is right even though the world is wrong. I hope you do too.
