My life, my few friends’ lives, my family members’ lives, shit just sucks all around. I can’t remember the last time I went somewhere for lunch and paid less than ten dollars. God, remember when fast food used to be the cheap option with somewhat of a reputation for being poor people food? I sure as hell do because that was like 10 years ago (in my experience at least). It’s so incredibly, incredibly fucking ominous to see that all the cashiers are gone and have been replaced by kiosks.
And part of me understands that this is just the natural progression of technology or whatever the fuck, but there are days where I go without talking to someone in real life. The same shit is happening at pharmacies, grocery stores, even Godamn doctors offices. Am I just being too glass half empty? Every part of this seems like a living nightmare and it just continues to get worse
Every time I go to one of the aforementioned establishments, they’ve added another camera or put another item behind a paywall. This just seems to me like brick and mortar stores are becoming high security centers in an effort to push everyone to purchase online.
I don’t think the downstream effects need to be mentioned here. Gee wonder why everyone is hyper-individualistic
All I do is kinda read vibes. I'm less educated than a lot of comrades here. What I do have is 2 solid decades of experience in the working world, and the life experiences one accumulates in that time. So while I might not be able to articulate it perfectly I do think I've gotten pretty good at reading the vibes.
And right now the vibes are very off. Like we're all in a boat that just scraped a rocky bottom and we're all frozen in place, waiting for the first sign of the ship sinking before we react, losing time we might not get back.
Yeah I've noticed the weird vibe since around the start of the year? I can't put it into words. Is this what hyper normalisation at the crumbling end of an empire feels like? Everyone's so, uh, cold? Is that the right word?
Vibes are absolutely fucked all over. Since a while there has been this large push to completely ignore the coming climate disasters (I want some fucking rain please). COVID (which happened for similar reasons, global travel and livestock, two key sources of the problems at hand) supercharged this and the response of "ignore it, get back to work and act like nothing happened" make everything even more fucked, we're all getting fucked over, the near future is terrifying, we're alienated to a crazy degree and we all know it, we can all feel it.
Now is the time of monsters.
(The positive side to this, they are running out of ideas and are panicking so they resort to violent repression and war. Keep pushing back)
Given a dichotomy between real-life experience and study, I tend to think real-life experience is at least a little more valuable, but you might find it really helpful to study at least a little bit. Some people resign themselves to just not ever engaging with theory directly (idk if you do) but it doesn't need to be that way for anyone, even if some people are going to be more involved in one that the other.
I love this analogy, it pretty perfectly describes how I’m feeling, however my experience also leads me to believe that a massive swath of people never even showed up to dock.