I’m really pissed off right now, at both US political parties, at human nature, at a lot of things, so this may not be the best time for me to sound off on a question like this. This may go long. I get into some grizzly topics like Suicide, the Holocaust and how laziness is a fake thing invented by capitalists and Calvinists.

So I learned early on the fucked up nature of capitalism and the laziness rhetoric accompanied with the Protestant work ethic. My parents were glad to criticize my avolition (that’s the medical term for the symptom of not wanting to do anything), but then I was suffering from neglect on account that they both worked full work weeks and were too exhausted to parent.

This is to say, mental illness and family dysfunction often are intergenerational. They were also driven by their parents to work themselves to exhaustion, and they did, and I became a stereotypical gen-x latchkey kid. Anyway, Mom tried an experiment, of paying me by the chore rather than a weekly allowance while I’d have regular house-chore duties. She’d then not pay me if my work was not up to snuff, and I learned quickly that all my efforts couldn’t get it to snuff (I really tried, but I was a kid, and she wasn’t good at telling me what she wanted). Resigned to have no allowance, I stopped working, entirely, and that just wouldn’t do.

I wouldn’t be diagnosed with Major Depression until my adulthood, and I’d discover that at my most symptomatic, I could lay down in bed for months, barely able to get up to eat or poop and having the libido of a lump of granite and the inertia of a neutron star.

Contrast the people who lucked out in The Great Resignation of 2021. During the COVID-19 Lockdown, people defied their industrialist bosses and Calvinist ministers and found they could not couch potato out for more than a week or two without getting a severe case of cabin fever. (People who winter in high-snow areas already know this phenomenon, and Steven King’s The Shining is inspired by centuries of worst case scenarios.) Most people took up hobbies, turned their houses into lego parks, took up wood carving or cooking or something, and a lot of those things became marketable skills, hence a lot of Take this job and shove it and a sudden dearth of people willing to suffer abuse, toxic workspaces and a less-than-sustenance wage.

Laziness isn’t a thing. If someone is healthy and happy, they’ll do all the chores. Granted some chores are tedious or arduous or hazardous. In my pinko communist fantasies, I imagine we take some queues hfrom Power Wash Simulator until we figure out how to automate the process, and then automate the maintenance and repair of the machines that do that job, then automate maintenance of the bots that do the maintenance and repair until one guy keeps an eye on the one dial while writing poetry.

Speaking of communism, Marx predicted enshiffication of products and jobs in Das Kapital and our industrialist masters made it clear they liked it when the working class was living in Hoover towns (of cardboard boxes and paint cans) and eating flour paste (and dying of malnutrition). And they don’t mind at all that their employees need food stamps and are living in their car (and sleeping roughly).

There’s a cute bit in the John Scalzi short story Morning Announcements at the Lucas Interspecies School for Troubled Youth where the announcer (not the principal) is talking about the graduating class, and his well wishes and high hopes for them. And then he notes one species_who will, after graduation, be bussed to the downtown stadium to begin mating challenges that will leave nine out of ten of you dead…_

That’s us. Human beings, in capitalism. There’s never enough work. Allegations of meritocracy imply that the least of us will be unfit and will be disposed of like Spartans tossing their imperfect infants into the Kaiadas cave chasm to perish on the rocks. The beggars, widows and orphans we’re supposed to watch out for (and is why Sodom was firebombed in myth) we leave to languish in homelessness, or in prison for failing to fit in and work hard enough.

And here in the states that class of undesirables continues to expand.

Granted more than 10% of us persevere, but somewhere between 66% and 88% of US households live in precarity, which means they worry every night about whether the next week is their last. Most of us are not within the hunky-dory threshold, by far.

In my case, staring blankly at the recent US general election results, I know I don’t want to end up homeless, or arrested and in a detention center (whether stuck in a crowded cell, compelled to forced labor or awaiting my turn in the genocide machine). I’m far away from these outcomes for the moment, but the coming administration makes my fate a lot more unpredictable. So I’m looking for an L-pill or other functional exit strategy, in case I need to evade arrest once I am unpersoned.

And this has led me to an interesting discovery. Society doesn’t want to think about its casualties. I deal with suicidality every day. Usually it’s just considering it. But even professional therapists tend to freak out when I talk about it. Also, in the aughts, I went on a deep dive into the Holocaust, what steps were taken from the concentration camps started by Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst to the Pogroms along the eastern front to the massive extermination machine of Auschwitz. So I’m familiar that societies don’t mind deaths when they happen quietly in the cold, or in the systems. They mind them when they’re out front and messy and require a lot of cleanup. This is why self-immolation protests are terrifying, and even though there’s not enough of them to change hearts and minds, they are a wake up call that our autocratic masters fear.

In reality, the US is suffering from a suicide epidemic. Our rate (about 40K a year in the 2010s and climbing) is worse than Japan (who is much more okay with suicide, though they’re trying to change that) and worse than Russia (Russia’s having a no-good very bad…Putin). For every one dead body from suicide, another three or four end up in the emergency room for trying, but survive, or are stopped by a friend. Also we’re pretty sure some families will obfuscate the cause of death and attribute it to accident (or in David Carradine’s case, literal ninjas) so they don’t have to deal with the public questions about suicide.

But curiously life does suck for most of us, and we’re waiting our turn in the showers, or out in the cold, or ultimately for the water to run out so we can’t make enough food.

I’m not going to advocate harming yourself or others, but I will say playing by the rules is silly, and there’s no way they’ll let you into the cool kids club. Ever. You were never meant to win. Go arty. Go renegade. Go crazy. Go unpredictable.

I’m tired. I’ll give this a grammar pass later.