When is it Enough?

I can’t even begin to tell you how discouraging this all is. 



And by “this all,” I mean…well…everything.

I know this is not like, recommended: airing your personal feelings in a “professional” setting or whatever, but I have always, always, ALWAYS cared far more about being true and authentic to myself, to the people around me, and to reality than conforming to whatever someone decided it “takes” to “fit in.”

 Related: LinkedIn is truly repulsive.

Like, alright, let’s start there. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube—all these social media monsters which are mostly heads of the same horrible hydra at this point, all of them run their algorithms off of engagement. The more likes/comments/views/whatever you get, the more the Content God promotes your work, gets more people to see it. But when you’re a content creator, it also depends on your own engagement. If you’re not some A-list celebrity or someone with name recognition who can just open an account and gain like two million followers instantly, then you have to be posting a ton of regular content in order for the Content God to deem you worthy of people seeing you. If you’re not using the Content God’s platform enough, you’re not worth its time or attention: you’re not generating clicks for it, i.e. potential monetization, i.e. ad revenue, i.e. their profit.

You could also pay to promote your content—but again, you have to pour a ton of money into that, consistently, regularly, for it to ever translate to notable engagement. 

And even after all that, those followers/likes/clicks/whatever you’re working so hard to gain—do not often translate to actual fans, or sales, or anything actually meaningful for content creators…just little fleeting endorphin boosts preying upon the human desire to be liked and accepted and “successful” in exchange for being another cog in the machine generating profit for the Content Gods.

 It’s not the Real World.

It’s a sick system that feeds on your time, attention, and happiness—and I do not have the time, attention, or patience to play that game. My life is not a game. My art, my writing, my “content” is not a means to feed some beast—it is a means of expression, of connection, of ordering chaos and extracting some scrap of meaning from this cataclysm we’re all involuntarily forced into called Life.

This sort of gamification has ruined journalism. It bankrupts creativity. It robs everything and everyone of recognizing intrinsic, inherent value by forcing them to exist or create through a lens which views everything as a means of generating profit or gauges worth based on productivity.



And this is just one thing…one tiny facet, one small, sharp tooth in the wide-open mouth of a huge, dark beast—one which will swallow us all, given enough time and opportunity. If you look closer, you can see that this one gleaming tooth mirrors other gleaming teeth couched side-by-side, all in a malevolent row. Closer still, and you can see that all of these fangs jut from the jaws of the same rabid animal, working its teeth in unison to chew us all up and extract every bit of worth from us all for its own survival, before shitting us out on the lawn to rot. Virulent, undeterred, unfettered capitalism.

It’s the employer which takes 40 hours of your life every single week and gives you barely enough compensation to live on in return, while the CEO of the company tries to figure out how to pay you even less so they can afford another vacation home.

It’s the health “care” industry which takes from your earnings every pay period, tethers and holds you hostage to an employer, then does everything possible to avoid paying for whatever treatments you may need when the time comes.

It’s the government which has deigned to leave us all to fend for ourselves during a deadly global pandemic, offering practically no relief, no care, no concern—just an insistence that it is safe for you continue to work, to continue to generate profit and convenience for the owner class, while also insisting that it’s not safe to do any of the things that make life work living.



All of it, every single feature of capitalism, is designed to take everything meaningful in your life…your time, your attention, your health, your creativity, your environment…and squeeze every last drop of it into a means of generating profit for the owner class. It’s a system where only money makes money, which only serves money, which only protects money, and cares absolutely nothing for living things. It is indifferent to all but profit, no matter the circumstances.

This is America. This is what it has always been. And we no longer have the time to be patient waiting for it to change.

I had hoped this pandemic would radicalize people enough to do something about this diseased way of life which puts profit above all living things’ well-being. I had hoped as people lost their jobs, and homes…as they lost loved ones whose funerals they couldn’t attend…as they lost their bread and circuses—their movies, their sporting events, their concerts…I had hoped after all of the veneer and distraction and most meager of comforts were stripped away, laying bare the violent basis of the economic system we allow ourselves to be trapped into, that we would finally see a mass movement toward abandoning capitalism for something that actually helps people.

And for months of this mess…nothing happened.

Then the George Floyd protests began, and I thought perhaps this would be it—perhaps this would be the spark that would finally light the fire: yet another soul violently, needlessly slain by the militarized arm of the white supremacist establishment for all to see. Perhaps, on top of all the desperation and anger and uncertainty generated by our government’s handling of the pandemic, this would finally be the last straw that would unite us all against our oppressors, and free us from our shackles.

But it ultimately wasn’t. We took down a few racist statues…passed a few meager police reforms…and continued right along the same violent trajectory.

Then came the election, and the following insurrection—rubes storming the Capitol under the pretense that our barely-democratic election was fraudulent, insistent that the con man in charge be allowed to continue as the con man in charge, in a total departure from reality. And I just thought…

All but the wealthy left to die by their government in a pandemic, but what gets the American people storming the Capitol? The desire to squash what pitiful semblance of democracy actually exists here. This place is so infuriatingly, purposely misguided.

It’s been the very same story since before America was even a country: keep the proles fighting amongst themselves, usually black against white, to keep them from realizing that their true enemy is a small, wealthy owner class, which can be overthrown if united against.



It’s always been a class war on this continent, from Jamestown on down through the centuries. And it’ll be not just our unending, worsening misery guaranteed if we don’t unite against our oppressors to win it—it’ll be the end of everything that lives on this planet.

We’ve got less than a decade to completely halt the capitalist systems and processes that are destroying our ecosystems before we guarantee the planet will be uninhabitable within the lifetime of people alive today. Full stop. We already cannot reverse the damage done—we’re in for some very uncomfortable decades ahead, to put it mildly. But we won’t even survive if we don’t stop the damage being done right now. The Earth will be a barren wasteland, fit only for our skeletons—the bones of those who could have prevented this while they were flesh.

So I look around at the leaders we’ve allowed to rule us…at the systems we’ve allowed to control and decimate our lives, and at the complete lack of appropriate measures to counteract and abolish those leaders and systems, even after a year of far-worse-than-usual violence toward us—of even greater disregard for human life, of an increased display of our lack of empathy, of an even further divide and detachment from reality among our people…and it’s all I can do to keep from giving in to total nihilistic despair, while I sit in my dumb little studio and write my silly little words and pictures on paper.

And the thing that kills me most of all, is the ever-present knowledge that it does not have to be like this.

Anyway…how are the rest of y’all coping?