Welcome to February 2021 and congratulations on not dying to the super villains of the world..yet. They’re out there, they’re probably very horny for murder, and they’re specifically targeting you – yes, you, anxious reader – to finally crush your spine under the titanic weight of their evil nature and for you to be once again held down in utter helplessness for another year.
None of that is true, but I can very much imagine that many people can quite easily take my hyperbolic take of bullshit and connect it conceptually to an event or some kind of big bad that they perceive to have in their lives. And that’s today’s topic..most of your villains or big bads don’t exist!
It’s an interesting thing that I’ve been observing across a broad spectrum. Social media, real life encounters, the old school media….there’s a lot of finger pointing and jamming fingers into places where they ought not be (and now they’re going for your anus under the guise of “testing for COVID”). And for the most part, it’s usually used as a means to justify one’s own shitty circumstances. My life sucks, not because I generally just make it suck, but because <insert nefarious end boss> fucked my life up.
But no, that’s usually not the case. There are circumstances in which your life does get a bit messy because of outside, uncontrollable forces – an example being overtly authoritarian government lock-downs or someone who forcibly takes your stuff at gunpoint – within those contexts I think it is a perfectly valid claim to make that, indeed, those forces ARE part of the reason your life now sucks.
But again, it’s only a part of the reason. You’re still the decider and controller of your own life unless you’re bound and gagged – I’m assuming without consent here, fetishists go nuts. Outside forces are generally completely out of control, and while they can apply certain challenges to your life that make it more stressful, it does not necessarily make your life suck – it just depends on how you work with the circumstances and how you perceive it.
Let’s take for example the COVID lock down madness and utter mediocrity of most governments, that insist that locking you down because one guy wheezed in the general direction of a stiff wind is good, strong and “being proactive” or whatever. You’re locked down and stuck at home, and can’t do the usual things you do. You get bored and angry.
Okay, cool. But are you in control of the lock downs? If the answer is no, and you recognize that going out may lead you to getting spear tackled because you’re not wearing a tissue on your face, then life does not suck because of the lock downs – that’s out of your control.
Life sucks because you’re refusing to work with the hand that is dealt.
Things will inevitably go haywire and there will be nothing you can do about it. You’ll have tantrums, breakdowns, shitty moments, bad thoughts, break ups, material loss, deaths, etc. It’s chaos. Life IS chaos, it’s a wild fucking up and down roller coaster that will take you to depths you could not have imagined a year prior. And you will have assholes who ruin shit for you. There are times to resist and stand up, definitely; and it’s when people are actively suppressing your ability to do things you like – but there are also times where you go with the flow and do what you can to make life the best it can be.
There’s a consistent, desperate reaching for some big baddie at the end of the tunnel that needs to be vanquished before everything can be better. It’s another symptom of a clinging towards some kind of greater purpose beyond yourself and your brief existence as a flesh being. It’s again, the problem of deification. Feminists will focus on the big bad being the patriarchy and the reason for their oppression or whatever, which is asinine. Insane far right and lefty troglodytes will focus on each other, respectively, as the big bads. Poverty Princes who cannot manage money for the life of them will point the finger at wealthy people (and tweet about it with their new iPhones, I imagine) who sniff a lot of coke and legitimately don’t care, and academics will point to non-academics as being tard wranglers that need to be shown how to live – what a lovely bunch of shit heads.
But I digress. I’m an egalitarian in this area, where I point to and trash everyone evenly (FYI actual egalitarianism is shit). Everyone is pointing to some big bad beyond themselves and basically saying that “because of X, my life is Y, and we need to eliminate X so that life can be Z”.
Well, wrong. Catastrophically wrong. If you’re unhappy with your life, it’s because you refuse to work with what you’re dealt with. Some things are simply out of your control no matter how hard you wish it was as easy as wiping a raid boss in World of Warcraft. It’ll never be that way, and while working with others to find a better solution to social/political problems can be a good thing, most of the shit chucking nowadays is more just looking for some kind of purpose beyond ourselves and what matters to us, because people don’t like themselves.
Essentially, beyond these ideologies, people lack a coherent understanding as to what they give an actual shit about, sans what others think. They revert to ooga booga tribal mode and turn everything into us vs them. I’m not an enemy to humans – I’m an enemy to ideologies and deified crap, and part of my role in philosophy and my life is to trash that stuff and give people an understanding of their own individuality and values. There IS no big bad, there ARE no kings or Gods – it’s just you, the fragile God, a limited amount of time, and the things you give a shit about that you can either pursue, or not.
A lot of cards dealt to us are catastrophically shit – I can attest to this immensely with my own personal experiences too – but the difference between myself, other individually focused thinkers and the hoard of unwashed stupidity, is that individuals accept the deck of cards and play it as well as they can. Through shit times, you can create powerful foundations, because you need to rethink and restructure your life. You’re pushed into an element of creativity that is often lost on people when they get ultra comfortable.
The reality is that you can point all day and every day to other things being the reason for your misery – “oh it’s my estranged dad”, “oh it’s my ex”, “oh it’s the fat cats in corporate”, “oh it’s the illusive cult living in Mount Rushmore”. You can bullshit yourself all you want. You have that freedom.
But it won’t make your life better or happier. Your actions and working with what you’re dealt with, will.
Take the damn nihilism vaccine, sit and wallow in it, and get thinking about what matters. Again, you’ve only got so much time. There is no big boss, there’s just the void, your mind, your values, and a life that you can either squander or appreciate. Freedom is in recognizing that.
I strongly suggest the latter. Peace.
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Frog Machinery 