I am just sitting here, having dealt with multiple ridiculous situations this week all centered around one thing… Greed.  In one form or another it came from someone’s desire to increase efficiency of something.  And when you call that service that didn’t *actually* set up your auto pay, like they told you they were, to try to figure out how much you owe them and their automated robot tells you there’s a 1.5hr wait…. You’re feeling it too.  Money runs the world. As they say…

And when you order that expensive tool that arrives missing a piece or, possibly worse because of how close you are to completion, is just slightly off tolerance and won’t go together… Know where that came from.  That was a line somewhere, full of likely underpaid and overworked people, and that $750 you spent didn’t go to them individually so much as it went to some CEO’s pocket.  They probably welded it a little wrong because they were on their third shift of the day.

One day you decide to contact someone at that billion dollar company to try to give someone a piece of your mind.. or… you know…. get the damned thing you paid a tram-load of money for in a non-broken state.. You always have to remind yourself it’s those same struggling folks that we’re thinking about above.  Some person who is barely holding it together themselves.  Someone who, if they told you about their problems… sat next to you at a campfire and told you about the hell their day was, you’d sympathize and hear them out.  The thing is, they’re a shield.

Yeah, think about it.  You call up this company super angry because you spent $750 and your stuff showed up missing pieces and defective.  You are mad.  You are sick of companies doing this kind of thing.  You can’t go to your favorite food stop without having to check your order because they’ll have forgotten your sauce or something else you paid extra for.  You submit yourself to being checked multiple times just for “the right” to GO INTO the damn store.  They watch you on cameras the whole time, then they have automated cameras at the self checkouts that watch your every move.

I’ve been hit by one before, I had scanned everything correctly it just didn’t understand a movement I did and decided to start blinking and call over the same people we’re thinking about here.  The same folks who are just struggling to wake up every day because sometimes they can’t even fathom getting up and doing yet another day.  I wasn’t angry.  I was confused.  I was honestly kind of interested in this robot that deemed my movement incorrect and “sus.” I tried to find more information about them but didn’t do a great job.  I’m not sure if the store is secretive about it or if I just did a bad job searching.  Maybe I’ll do that again.. that could be a neat video..

My point is, it’s kind of creepy feeling.  Then, on your way out now, some person stops you at the door and asks for your receipt and stares at it and your cart for a while.  I’ve never had them dig through my bags or anything but it’s still pretty invasive feeling.  I don’t often buy things I wouldn’t want someone seeing but I don’t want to have to talk to someone.  Sometimes I don’t want someone to see my purchase.  That should be ok.  But you’re checked at every step.  All because you want to shop at that store.

The thing is, most places are like this now.  It’s honestly kind of spooky to think about what we live in now. Putting it bluntly: We are the dystopian future from the scifi films.  It’s just happened so gradually we didn’t really notice.  We’re wage slaves in a dystopian future.  We are tracked at every step by ads and cookies and, in person, with our phones and the trillion connections they’re making every day.  Those cameras watching your FACE at the checkout.. You don’t think that thing is running into some dataset somewhere and keeping track of you for marketing purposes?  They don’t even need it when they can just use the fact that we’re a human network..

We are cyborgs.  We are a collective.  We are a hive mind.  We are the Borg.  I don’t even really get that reference but I’m pretty sure it effectively was another hive mind.  Think about it.  When was the last time you answered a question you weren’t sure about without just googling it?  When was the last time you called someone on the phone or spoke to someone in person?  I am not intending to get preachy, my point is we’ve basically built a new brain.  On a grand scale, each person is a neuron all connected in a web of interactions. We’re kind of becoming one.  We’re ok with occasionally having our privacy violated for convenience.  For interaction.

Anyway, so yeah you are angry and you call that company.  This person picks up probably fearing that you’re going to be an ass to them just trying to get through the day and THIS is the person the company gave you as their “shield.”  I try as hard as I can to avoid getting to that point with most of these folks because I understand this.  I’m successful most of the time but that’s beside the point.

My point is we don’t have power with these companies.  They aren’t worried about losing customers anymore.  There are enough people in this world willing to buy something or willing to do something or willing to not research a purchase that it really doesn’t matter even if you managed to take away hundreds of their customers or thousands even.

The truth is most of them would be customers again pretty quickly again anyway.  At some point this year a bunch of idiots were breaking an appliance they owned as some sort of pathetic protest to the company that made them.  You know what company also had record sales that month? :shrug:  I only call them idiots  because the approach is ridiculous.  Yeah the cartridges made the company money but you’ve surely already paid the company back tenfold and half of the companies that make the carts weren’t affiliated with them anyway.

We’re given this world and told it’s some sort of paradise.  We’re given a path to follow.  Given only barely enough to keep us alive.  Overwhelmed with debts and responsibilities.  Trapped in a complex weave of spiraling desires and commitments… anxieties and deep dark depressions… life.  To some degree at least.  It’s what we’re told is life.  It’s what we’ve heard since birth is life.  What we’ve been trained to want.  A good career, a stable home, a wife, 2.74 children, and a white picket fence.  I don’t know where I’ve heard that but it’s reality.

Yeah we’re slowly seemingly starting to realize how shitty this deal is for everyone but the rich.  But it’s going to take such a massive shift for any real meaningful change.   And the reality is right now we need to be doing everything we can to not collapse.  That could mean we are doing something about this dichotomy but more than likely will mean focusing on more pressing matters.  Especially since the only ones not really making out in the deal is us.  Why would anyone change anything?

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The purpose of this writing is scientifically and factually loose.  Real information will be presented in this and following writings and perhaps in a way that you may or may not agree with but it is not here for debate.  It is here as a journal, to communicate feelings, to communicate a current state from the perspective of one person. If it bothers you, fine.  I’m not sure why you came to a URL that was a GUID anyway.

There was this restaurant in Istanbul called Katibim that Z and I went to the one night. It was a really nice restaurant more like “upscale” than most of the places we ate while we were there. It was fun sitting there chatting with her, drinking interesting drinks. She got some sort of tropical thing with popcorn flavoring iirc and I got some sort of more spicy red thing like a Bloody Mary or something. (I may have mentally swapped those it’s been years at this point and there has been hell in between)

The area around it was beautiful too. All of Istanbul is but this area was one that we hadn’t been before and we could see it out the windows and stuff. Walking up there was a guy selling these weird stringy candy things and some kids shooting each other with what amounts to Nerf guns or something. There were big steps leading up to this place and we were on the third floor, if I’m remembering correctly. This place was much bigger than a lot of the places that we had been as well.

The food was incredible too. I got fajitas because I love fajitas and they did a damned good job making a solid fajita. I can’t remember what she got but she loved it as well. We got some small desserts too and they were delicious.

I miss this.

I want life to be this again.

Now I can’t even go to a fucking restaurant without fear taking over. I order something I have to pick up with my hands to eat it (like a fajita) and I get grossed out and sanitize my hands before touching it. Even then I’m sitting there with my anxiety piqued because I can’t wear a mask while I’m eating, obviously. I’m tired of trips to walmart or other places feeling like some sort of mission that I have to survive. I’m tired of worrying about my family doing things because I’m worried they’re going to catch COVID. I’m tired of fearing more fights with people I care about over all of this.

I miss not feeling like I’m in a state of transition. I’m tired of feeling like “Ok, once this is over I can go on with life and be happy” but I just don’t have any motivation or energy to do anything right now. I get this feeling like I’m trapped because I don’t feel comfortable just going out and getting supplies or joining some MeetUp group or something.

Everything just feels so.. paused. Like someday life will continue but for now we sit in our holes. I never thought staying home would really bother me. I work from home. I live at home. All of my stuff is here. I used to say I didn’t know why I’d go anywhere else because this is where all of the stuff I care about is.

That all kind of changed last time I was in Atlanta. I realized how insanely I missed being around people. I spent most of the time just beside myself with joy. I got to, along with a good friend, meet another good friend who we have known online for years and he and his family were amazing. The whole trip was so incredible. I keep looking back at this picture of a large portion of the people who were on-sight for the event at the office toasting. We’ve all got massive smiles on our faces or we’re mid-wooooooop and we were all just happy to finally be in a situation like that again after so long. Years.

I just hope it comes back.  I hope we’re not in this Sci-fi level horror series for the rest of our lives.  Honestly it seems like it could get worse.  The virus isn’t the only problem.

People everywhere are realizing that the lives we’ve been told we want don’t actually stand up to the test of time.  That they don’t want to just continue to drone forward making someone else rich in the process while they struggle to even have the energy to wake up in the morning.

Similarly governments around the world are being questioned.  Prior to this event the world was moving in a direction that felt very dangerous and authoritarian.  Now the people who supported that notion still support that notion but believe that the people trying to help are actually trying to control them.  This may seem like something stupid you’d roll your eyes at or, perhaps, you can see where they’re coming from.  Regardless, this is not a small problem.

The reality is a lot of people in this world are unsettled.  Things will keep happening that makes the situation less and less stable and it seems like the only real end result is some sort of downfall.  Be it of a country, a form of government, a demographic, anything.  It just feels like something big is on the horizon.  And all I really want is to live my fucking life.  In peace.  To be able to continue my mediocre existence and get some occasional joy from buying a new toy or from traveling somewhere I’ve never been before.

On top of all of that we’re dealing with pretty grim outlooks for our environment.  You can see it in everything.  The driest year– the hottest year– the rainiest year– the most severe weather in centuries– the deepest snow– the coldest winter– etc etc.  Volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis.  These are all things that may be cyclical or may be man-made.

At one point I was reading about volcanoes and got to a part that mentioned that their eruptions are difficult to predict.  It is said one prevailing theory about why/when they erupt is pressure from above/the ocean.  Ice that causes pressure to be placed on the chamber, sealing in the magma.  When the ice melts, you start to see the magma slip through the cracks and it could lead to a release aka a volcanic eruption.  It’s not a distant leap to imagine that our melting ice around the planet could be the reason we’re seeing this apparent increase in volcanic activity and earthquakes.

I say all of this to say we’re in an interesting time.  Life is likely just going to continue to get more interesting and simultaneously more terrifying.  My hope here is to write about it in a way that records the present for the future but as it plays out in my head.  I’m not here to tell you what to think.  I’m here to tell you what I think.  Please enjoy but if you don’t, keep it to yourself.