Sunday blogs – “existence is a prison”
July 25th, 2021
(tw: jokes about mental health, depression)
I've been told throughout my life that my tendency to be overly pessimistic is going to get in the way of my ability to enjoy the joys of life when they come my way. So let it be known (ahem, therapist, family, and the like) that I am really trying here. COVID is at risk of a fourth spike, some European nations are imposing restrictions again on American travelers, including those of us who have booked or planned tours, the climate crisis is paving an exponentially bleak path for millenials and younger, my broken fridge from my rent stabilized apartment is currently secured by a strip of packing tape, and my cat just dragged her butthole against my floor, leaving a nice dingleberry present in her wake. It's really giving “self improvement project”.
It's hard to bear the weight of all that is wrong with the world in your psyche when getting up in the morning is honestly, pretty excruciating on its own. Maybe I'm just speaking to some millennial-generation Z shared existential dread, but even in the cluelessness of some claims by my fellow generation (i.e. “we should become communists! - the irony is that the fact that they can state that indifference to government out loud at all indicates a major privilege of democracy, not communism”), there's one thing we can agree on. The motions of capitalism are so unbearable sometimes. We are all losing our minds slowly and surely. Placing economic value on our ideas, experiences, education, and well being, physical and mental, has depleted us in the most cunning (and unfortunately, successful ways).
Arguably, we have all reached this “existence is a prison” stage and normalized it to the point that we begrudgingly continue by virtue of thinking it is the extent of modern existence. The 8 month old french toast Eggo waffles in my freezer seem to concur.
It's 12:30pm and all I can manage for now is bugging my building management's office again to fix the fridge, cleaning poop off the floor, listening to Schoenberg, and smoking my favorite sativa so I don't think about unaliving myself. In an hour or two, once the distraction of the depressive state wanes, I contribute to the best life I could possibly choose amidst the utter madness of the world. might write one new little compositional cell, go over my fundamentals on the instrument, work on writing the charts, chipping away one little chunk at a time. It's ok to acknowledge – yeah, a lot of things really suck right now. So it is a treasure to continue to show up at all.