Written May 28 – July 11 –written as private thoughts, but this morning I decide to make public.
I feel disposable. Irrelevant. I feel a fear, a danger - that I, like many others, will be disposed of down the line, not too far into the future.
Is this the ego talking? Is it ego death – a precursor to enlightenment? The sense of irrelevance of 'being disposed of' just the sense of the "I" that wish I be important?
Or maybe it is paranoia - the opposite end of the spectrum?
My observations are as follows:
The game of middle class living, in financial terms, is getting "too hard". Maybe this is my own perspective and biases about money. But I certainly see far more people struggling than I do succeeding. That is factually verifiable, - wealth distribution follows an extreme pareto principle: it is a very tall, thin pyramid.
On the other hand, some who are financially well maybe are not doing too well in other senses – having given up too much for riches. Too isolated, or lost, expecting money to solve all their problems.
But I certainly feel that if someone as motivated, cunning and ingenius as me is struggling to climb up the ladders of the game of life, then the game must be severely rigged against my interests. Call it the democracy of the dead, or legacy power structures – whatever you want to call it.
There are too many demands to pull everything off.
One side is paying rent to a landlord; I don't blame them, but the tax on just having a place to live, for me is nonsensical. This is not sustainable.
The algorithms run our lives increasingly; I can see most people addicted to Instagram, TikTok, even ChatGPT with its tendency to flatter like a villain's minion. The content recommendations I get on Instagram are eerily personalised enough to me that on some level I can say it knows which buttons to push. This isn't a fair game.
Instagram overcharged me around 200 EUR in the past month. They deny it, but a glitch in their UI means ads kept running that, as far as the app and advertising manager was concerned, were turned off. I write to their support; they send me off to a form. Someone, presumably in India, replies to that support query with a one-off statement about 'we don't see any fraud, and you agreed to our T&Cs'. The money is now theirs. I have a human repeating the script of a robot. And this is one of the most valuable companies in the planet.
Only because its used its algorithms against us to make us addicted. Not because they provide a good advertising product(?)
So, we have many addictive things around us – coffee, porn, food, social media – luring us in. The modern sirens of Oddyseus' journey.
What would I do in that situation?
Work extra hard and try and push a company to success? Unlikely to work, but possible. Certainly possible.
Play the stupid system against itself? More likely to work, based on past experience, but incurs some pain along the way.
Perhaps the real problem is the desire to avoid pain. Maybe I need more of it in my life. Otherwise I am just soft, timid, fearful. And nothing fearful can become anything, it seems, in this world, for practical purposes. It may be an interesting inner journey, but even that requires confrontation with fear.
But there is fearless in an enlightened sense, and fearless in an angry, revengeful sense. The latter it still arguably fearful, but just the other forces override it. Both probably are better than timid and scared. Which I fear (aptly) I have become.
Indisposable.
