The Human Condition (a poem about modern life by ks)

There was a old man from Devon
Who got run over and went up to heaven
He said to st. Pete:
"Well I lived on my feet,
but I never could count to eleven"

Tempus Fuckit

We shouldn't really say happy new year to each other. Hangovers notwithstanding, this year is exactly the same as the one just gone. To be honest the years pass me by so quickly in my old age i can barely see any use in even remembering what each one is called. Years are tools of oppression. That gradually but endlessly increasing number keeps linearity in everybody's mind, maintains the concept of one dimensional existence. Remember progress kids, today may be shit but tomorow will be better! Or maybe next tuesday will be good, maybe the weekend after that. What the fuck are you whining about anyway? We just gave you a whole 4 days off work and you get your week's holiday at the start of July. But only if you're good, so get back to work.

Quite why any young people are so eager to get on the career ladder is a mystery to me. With retirement age almost in sight my parent's generation have been abruptly told that their pensions have gone missing somewhere, and would they mind working for an extra 5 years please. And for my generation it's inevitably going to be worse, in fact according to my calculations I will be able to retire roughly 6 years after I'm dead. Woohoo! Where do i sign! That's what my generation is saying. I blame the careers advisors, they've tricked everyone into thinking that if they keep their heads down and do as they're told everyone in the country will be able to earn 30,000 a year doing a job they love. Err, hang on a minute, if its that simple how come so many people are working in call centres for minimum wage? Sending 50% of the country's youth into higher education is a particularly cruel joke, it means that 50% of the nation's youth will spend several thousand pounds they don't have and expect a graduate career and a graduate salary afterwards. At both ends of the working age range, the government is taking the royal piss out of us so it can keep the economy rolling along towards its mathematically guaranteed oblivion. How can it get away with this? a) by fooling us into thinking they're there for our benefit, and b) by repeating over and over again in every possible way that it'll be fine if everyone just hangs on a little bit longer. They've put the trains fares up to 'fund improvements to the network', well they've been saying that for years and the trains are still a bloody disgrace. Council tax has risen again and yet they're still closing social services departments left right and centre. This method of 'take more, give less' only works if people think its for their long-term benefit. They know better than us, and they say it'll be all right soon, we'd better let them get on with it. What if everyone thought: "But i'm paying now, I'm working now, why can't I have a good life now?" What if everyone forgot that malevolant number '2006', forgot all the economic forecasts and five-year election pledges and demanded their money's worth? In a word: trouble.

Waiting never made anything better (I should know, I've just spent an entire day on public transport). Life is not what happens while you're making other plans, it's what happens while someone else is planning what to do with you.

A christmas message

The deranged concept of 'trickle-down' economics aside, it should be blindingly obvious to most people that in order for someone to gain money someone else has to lose money. The most reason example of this that I experienced was last night, when I lent somebody I don't know very well £50. In retrospect, I am unlikely to see that money again. And it turns out that I don't really care. I consider all this very encouraging, it indicates that I am gradually freeing myself from the preoccupation with money that most people have from the age of around 5 until they buy the proverbial farm. But I'm not a wealthy man, I can't really afford to give £50 away, or at least I can't afford to make a habit of it (my own motto on the subject is you should only lend someone money if you're willing to not get it back). So basically I've given some bloke I've met once or twice 50 quid, what is that? A christmas present. And I wouldn't normally get this particular chap a christmas present, much less one worth 50 quid, that's not the way its done is it? You're supposed to get presents for family and close friends, the value of the present should increase proportionately with how much you love the recipient (or how much you want to sleep with them). In breaking this rule I think I have accidentally discovered the meaning of christmas.

Christmas is a time for communism! Why else would there be such a prevalence of red in santa's ensemble? Why else is Dickens' Christmas Carol so enduringly popular? Go to a christmas chruch service and you'll hear words like 'giving' and 'sharing' a great many times. Sadly the law of diminshing returns prevents the words from sinking in properly, and everyone goes home, hands out presents to their loved ones and forgets about the poor buggers out in the street and the family next door who couldn't afford their TV license and so have effectively been deprived of christmas this year. Why the selfishness? Because people can't afford to be charitable and buy the kids their new £300 xbox at the same time. Compassion and consumption are mortal enemies.

If I was any kind of believer in equality I wouldn't even get my mum a christmas present, after all she has a house, a car and a full time job; i've got some clothes, a couple of books and a harmonica. The trouble is I don't believe in equality, at least not financial equality. I don't want all the money in the world shared out equally, I want all the money in the world thrown in the sea. I am not indifferent to money, I hate it. Treating money with respect makes me sick- a penny saved is a penny earned is a penny stolen. So my christmas present to myself this year was giving away 50 quid, and like all subversive acts, it has rather cheered me up. What would be the best christmas present I could recieve from someone else this year? Well that bloke could give me my 50 quid back, that'd be a good start.

Welcome back

It amazes me how hearing something you already knew from an 'authoritative' source makes it seem so much more concrete. Are people so unsure of themselves that they only trust the people on TV and in the papers to state what is already obvious? I've known, for example, that the world is a fatally boring and lifeless place for several years, but it has taken Raoul Vaniegem's 'The revolution of everyday life' to actually confirm this knowledge. Vaniegem's thoughts confirm nothing, of course; after all he could be just as wrong as me. Getting a book published doesn't make you right.

But this is how we feel about everything, when we see a dilemma from our lives played out in a TV drama or by characters in a novel, we feel validated, as if the TV has told us that our problem is an acceptable one. Individual thoughts are hard to articulate retrospectively, but is the feeling you get not something along the lines of: "so I'm not crazy after all"? The problem, of course, comes when the TV doesn't think like you. For example, no billboard is ever going to agree that modern life is stiflingly dull and that most people have little choice about how the spend their time on this earth. So the people who feel this way are cut off from the comforting words of society, or rather, the institutions created to represent society.

But there are songs, paintings, books, TV shows that share the anguish of living in this grey urban world, and they do make me feel better somehow. And so I am drawn back in, and for a while it feels good. But I am back at the start, Vaniegem's book doesn't help me deal with my troubles, much less does it solve them, all it does is represent them. The fact that troubled youth have to search a little harder for their media methadone doesn't change the effect of the drug, the 'alternative culture' is the same culture packaged up differently especially for us. Not for us, for me. When the TV tells you that everything is going to be fine, the same TV that knows everything that's happening in the world and can tell you at the press of a button, the need for a person to tell you everything is going to be fine dissapears. Everyone knows TV is better than people, people don't bother to call you, or they borrow stuff and don't give it back; the TV on the other hand is always there for you and never asks anything in return. But the TV isn't there for you, it isn't listening and no matter how bad your life is the TV will do nothing to make it better.

In this way we are cut off from each other, so many people seem to have forgotten the arts of friendship and love because saccharin-sweetened, surgically enhanced versions of them are available anywhere you look. Look but don't touch, just like in an art gallery. This alienation may not have reached the mechanistic extremes Vaniegem describes (yet), but each generation is more rarefied than the one before. And each generation is bigger than the one before; the more we are packed together in cities the further our minds drift away from both other human minds and life itself. Consequences? Because of the selfish nature of mankind empathy and sympathy are close relatives, remove empathy from an individual and they will not care what happens to those around them, much less to people in far-flung warzones, or future generations for that matter. The evil men and women of this world now have their sine qua non, that good people should do nothing to stop them*. But regardless of what is to come, if it is clear that here and now your situation is unnacceptable to you, you should do something to change it. The revolution is not on the horizon (or at least, if it is, that is where it will remain), so go and do what you want to for the first time in ages and remember what it feels like. If everyone thought of the happiest time from their youth and compared it to their adult life, and then acted on the dichotomy they discovered, it'd all be fine again.

Just personally, I see beauty everywhere and I know that the world can be so much better than it is, that mankind can be so much happier. But beauty is seldom found in things you pay for, things you work to gain throughout your life, it has been carelessly left lying around waiting for a curious passer-by to stumble across it. My first reaction upon coming across something beautiful is to show it to someone else, to allow them to enjoy it too and to explain how it affects me. And no, there isn't always someone nearby, much less someone nearby who cares, but beauty makes me feel connected to others nevertheless. Beauty is revolutionary. Just like you don't care about money when you fall in love, a single beautiful moment can strip away all the other junk that surrounds us and make us truly happy for a moment or too. The trick is to hang on to the feeling, remember it and seek it out again. And remember how irrelevant so many things are in the face of that feeeling of happiness. This is all getting a little soppy so I think I'll shut up for now, but remember that I'm on the internet, I'm not a real person, don't take me too seriously (I say this with the rather preposterous assumption that you intended to take me seriously).

Peace
KS


*At this point you may note that I am constructing a weak and inherently emotive argument, which I have cleverly hidden within a relatively sensible and objective piece of writing. The papers do this all the time, watch out for it.