My life has become a full time job. 

With each passing year I become more disillusioned by the cyclical nature of capitalism. I don’t enjoy being a consumer. Well, I enjoy things. I like stuff. I engage in the accumulation of junk like I am a raccoon hoarding valuable shiny treasures in case the market turns and I find myself in a market that values the shiny junk at more than I had paid for it. 

Some of it, I fool myself into thinking it is part of my identity. That the memories the objects hold, or the ideals they represent of a better me have a power over me of which I cannot break free. 

I have moved once a year for the last several years, and every time I look at my things with a frustrated resignation to give it all up and live as a vagabond with nothing by the clothes on my back and the things tied in the sack on the stick over my shoulder. Yet a year later I find myself staring at boxes full of things I told myself I didn’t need and that I would be better off without. 

Family is a concept I struggled with. So these two people decided their love was so special it warranted yanking a consciousness from the void and subjecting them to the troubles of life in a day and age where you are obligated to pay someone money to exist. When you have a child, you are saddling them with an obligation to pay rent, insurance, taxes, and every monetary drain that has become mandatory to live a “comfortable” and/or “normal” life. 

I didn’t choose these bunch of crazy people, I didn’t ask them to be intimately involved in my affairs, to offer unsolicited advice about things I should do or how I could’ve done something different. I have come to accept that life is a “do it live” scenario where there’s no tests or trials and you have to learn to learn your lesson because life doesn’t do a after-episode wrap-up.

Alright kids, what did we learn? Death is inevitable, time keeps grinding on and you are going to owe people money until the day you die. Thats life, and there’s no better way! What? You want it to change? Don’t be silly, that’s unreasonable and you are out-of-touch for thinking there are any alternatives. 

There were several years where I wanted to change my family name. To rip it away from my identity, and exist solely as my first name. I was obsessed with carving my own path, being my own person, and removing any obligation I had to the expectations that had grown up with me. 

I have recently come around to the other side, that you don’t choose family but the universe puts you together. If you bring it all the way back to cave men, the family unit was probably the only thing you trusted to sleep near. How far we have come for familial issues to plague our modern day institution. Drama seems to grow like a fungus or attach itself inside the walls like termites, and if not actively safeguard against a family can be torn apart no because of some explosive event but because of years of neglect and a selfish mentality of being better than your neighbors.

Religion is something I will struggle with until the moment I draw my final breath, but currently I believe in something. Not a man in the sky with a big white beard who smites people with lightning, more like an energy that we can’t comprehend. I think a lot of my current belief rests on the “humans can’t comprehend” and that we have tried our best to define, explain, mystify, and destroy it. I want to believe love is something to do with it. It is my opinion that one of the greatest traits humans have is love, because it is a catalyst to a better future. I’ve tried to write out my beliefs as they currently stand in my brain several times, but each time I feel like the fail to convey the feeling I have by thinking them. It’s all a theory, and I feel like an archeologist dusting off a fossil wondering if it’s the bone of a big dinosaur or just different colored dirt. Writers often talk about struggling to write characters that are “the smartest in the room” because inevitably whatever nonsense you use to make it sound like they know what they are talking about, someone watching actually knows what they are talking about and it doesn’t make any sense. 

Ultimately I believe our consciousness is connected “behind the curtain”. That we are the universe, experiencing itself, and that the problems we experience are mostly superficial and man-made due to greed. That if we actually worked together for the good of humanity we could cure homelessness, world-hunger, find world-peace and life could truly become a long vacation before you inevitably cross over to rejoin the cosmic could of love. 

I lost my job in February. I was laid off with my entire department and about 1/3 of the company I work for, which I say in the format to reassure you it wasn’t because I was a bad employee. I had worked 10 years to achieve a place in career that I finally felt confident. Imposter syndrome, and some bad managers, had made the path through what would be a “dream-job”, a slog. 

I was excited, and happy with the results we were getting. The improvements I had seen we could make for years, I was finally in the seat to make the decisions to fix them. I had played the political game that corporations force employees to fight to get what you are worth. Under capitalism you are supposed to go out and make a living working for someone else in a job that doesn’t benefit you inherently, and in retail or sales you can see the money you are making the company to know that you are worth a certain percentage of that value. You can use those figures as part of the discussion to prove you are worth that amount. Unfortunately for me, I was in an industry that didn’t have a value tag attached. The value was whatever the CEO felt like it was worth and if you wanted more money to afford to live in the area of town the company was located, well that was ridiculous.

The pursuit of profits, and the neglect of employees is rotting our society to its core. My father retired and wishes his family would spend more time with him. Besides the fact that he lives three hours from any relatives, his family all are struggling to make ends meat let alone have enough to come visit. He is someone that fully supports the pursuits of profits, but doesn’t see the problems that mentality has put in front of him. 

Living with my dad has been tough, and honestly after the happiness and “in the right place” feeling I had with the job I lost it’s tough to be back to a place where I feel like a deadbeat. I am constantly frustrated by the way things are handled and as time goes on I realize that this is a test. If I were to believe in a divine being, who curates our experience through existence then this is the best challenge he could give to the happiness I thought I had found. The freedom I had found away from family, I now have to find with family. 

Maybe the divine deity doesn’t exist, but that framing on this situation has turned every encounter I have into one where I smile at the universe knowing it is testing my resolve and I try even harder to be at peace in whatever situation I’m in. 

So if my life is a full time job, why am I not getting paid.