Not My Words, but I Share the Sentiment

“Consumerism is going to be the death rattle of this country. Not war. Not some foreign boogeyman. The shopping cart and the endless scroll.

“I keep seeing people say “why is nobody doing anything about what came out of the Epstein files?” and the answer is painfully obvious. Because the Super Bowl is this Sunday. Because your show just dropped a new episode. Because you can swipe your thumb and get another dopamine pellet like a lab rat that learned the trick too well.

“Back in Marx’s day, religion was the opium of the people. A soothing fog to dull the pain of exploitation and keep everyone compliant. Same function, different costume. Today it’s Amazon Prime, TikTok Shop, and Netflix. Monthly subscriptions instead of sermons. Next-day shipping instead of salvation. Infinite content instead of heaven. The promise is identical: don’t change the world, just endure it quietly while we keep you sedated.

“We are drowning in revelations and choosing distraction. Not because people are stupid, but because attention is terrifying. Paying attention means admitting the world is rotten in ways that can’t be fixed with a purchase, a binge, or a brand identity. Escapism is safer. Escapism doesn’t ask anything of you. Escapism lets you feel informed without acting and angry without risk.

“Consumer culture doesn’t just sell products. It sells anesthesia. It teaches us to process horror by changing the channel, to respond to abuse with vibes and reactions and content. Outrage becomes another consumable. Even disgust gets monetized, packaged between ads, then forgotten by the next refresh.

“So nothing happens. Not because nothing matters, but because we’ve been trained to treat everything as temporary content. Scroll past the monsters. Clap for the halftime show. Keep the fantasy running. Reality is bad for engagement metrics.

That’s the trap. A population too distracted to revolt, too entertained to organize, too exhausted to look directly at the truth for more than twelve seconds at a time. Consumerism doesn’t need to silence us. It just needs to keep us busy.”

A Treaty with the Abyss

I’ve only written two poems in my entire life. Well, that’s not entirely true. I used to write lyrics for a band my friends and I were forming that never got off the ground. I’ve been in a bad place as of late and jotted this down last night to kind of try to help me through what I’m going through. I don’t know if it makes sense or if it’s any good, but I thought I’d share it here. Maybe it can help someone else. Maybe I’m just screaming into the void as usual. Like I said, I’ve just been in a bad way and felt the need to write something and couldn’t come up with anything but these words. I didn’t do much thinking on it. I just wrote down what came to mind. Just my own discombobulated mind spilled out on paper and now here on the Internet.

I wake up each morning
as if returning to a mistake I didn’t make.
The sun rises out of habit,
and I rise out of spite.

Some days my mind is a broken cathedral,
echoing with sermons I never asked to hear.
Other days it’s a carnival mirror–
every reflection warped
every laugh track broken.

There is a rhythm to the collapse,
a pulse that insists I keep going
even when I want to negotiate my exit
with whatever god still bothers
to read the fine print of my thoughts.

Bipolar dawns come and go:
one morning I am incandescent,
a lighthouse for a ship that will never arrive;
the next I am the ocean floor,
quiet enough to make silence uneasy.

But existence refuses to end on cue.
It drags on with the stubbornness of a bad joke
that no one remembers telling.
And I still stay for the punchline,
not out of hope,
but because even futility has a texture
I’ve learned to hold without breaking.

If there’s any mercy in this world,
it’s that numbness, too, is a kind of shelter.
And on the days when the abyss leans in
as if to whisper a shortcut,
I answer the only way I know how:
Not today.
I’m busy watching the ruins glow.

Infinite Jest and the Test of Boredom

Infinite Jest is one of those books I re-visit a lot on this site. It’s in my top five favorite books of all time. When people ask what it’s about I tell them the surface level answer: It’s about a film so entertaining that people watch it without doing anything else until they die. Oh, and tennis. It’s more than that though. I talked to a friend of mine about it who introduced me to the book in the first place. I told him, “I think, at its core, Infinite Jest is a book about our inability to deal with boredom.” Not even our inability, our refusal. It’s about the sheer panic that rises in us when we’re left alone with our thoughts, without a screen or distraction to drown out the noise inside.

The author — David Foster Wallace — saw boredom as the truest test of freedom. Not freedom in the political sense, but the freedom to exist without the constant need to be entertained. The freedom to pay attention — to life, to others, to ourselves — without numbing out. The irony, of course, is that we’ve built a society where that kind of freedom feels unbearable.

The book also tackles addiction, and the addicts in Infinite Jest aren’t just addicted to substances, they’re addicted to escape. To anything that shields them from the crushing weight of unfiltered consciousness. But Wallace’s genius was showing that this isn’t limited to drug users. We all have our fix. Some people chase achievement. Some chase pleasure. Some chase attention. The forms change, but the hunger doesn’t.

At the center of the book is “the Entertainment,” a film so irresistibly pleasurable that viewers lose the will to do anything but watch it until they die. It sounds absurd, but it’s not that far off. Every endless scroll, every algorithmic loop, every dopamine hit of digital validation is a step toward that same self-erasure. Wallace wrote the book in the 1990s, but he saw where we were heading: a culture where overstimulation replaces meaning, and distraction becomes the dominant mode of existence.

What makes the book so overwhelming — so sprawling, so labyrinthine — is that it mirrors the chaos of modern consciousness. The fragmented attention, the tangled connections, the endless search for something that feels real. The structure itself resists our hunger for easy satisfaction. You can’t skim it; you have to wrestle with it. And maybe that’s the point. Reading it is an act of resistance against the same forces it warns about.

Wallace once said that “the real, profound boredom” we experience in everyday life is where freedom begins. But to get there, we have to stop running from it. We have to stop medicating every quiet moment with noise. Boredom is uncomfortable because it strips us bare. It forces us to confront who we are when we’re not performing, producing, or consuming.

That’s the real terror of the book. Not addiction, not death, not even despair, but the silence underneath it all. The realization that maybe we’ve built our entire lives around avoiding ourselves.

In that sense, the novel is both a warning and a mirror. It asks whether we can still be present in a world designed to keep us from ever being present. It asks whether we can stand the boredom long enough to rediscover what’s real.

Boredom, it turns out, isn’t the enemy. It’s the doorway back to awareness. It’s where meaning has been hiding all along: in the space we’re just too afraid to enter.

The Product

There’s a factory somewhere that manufactures meaning. Nobody knows where it is, but we all buy what it makes. You can’t survive without it. Every morning, I wake up to the same alarm sound — like a shriek filtered through cheap optimism — and I clock in at my terminal, typing things for other people who think they’re changing the world by moving numbers around. The boss says we’re “innovators.” I say we’re dream janitors, sweeping up what’s left of hope.

At night, I scroll through faces that look like me: sleep-deprived, smiling, sedated by purpose. They post about “grind culture” and “mindfulness,” like saints of a new religion where salvation costs $9.99 a month.

I used to believe I was different. I wrote poetry. I loved someone once. Then I started to feel the product wearing off. It began small. A crack in the script. I’d catch myself staring at my reflection in a window not recognizing the thing looking back. Like someone had replaced me with a cheaper copy, printed on recycled despair. My laugh started to sound overdubbed. The air smelled faintly of disinfectant and resignation.

I told my therapist. She smiled, a perfect mechanical crescent, and asked if I’d tried “meaning supplements.” She handed me a sample pack. They were glossy pills the color of television static. “Swallow one before sleep,” she instructed.

That night, I dreamed of the factory. Rows of bodies in chairs, their eyes wired open, pupils projected onto screens. Every time one blinked, a machine printed out a new slogan: Live. Laugh. Persist. The air was thick with burnt plastic and serotonin. I tried to run, but my legs dissolved into assembly lines.

When I woke up, my mouth tasted like melted silicon. The mirror showed me someone else entirely. It was the same face, but smoother. Cleaner. My pores had been edited out. My thoughts too.

I went back to work and everyone looked perfect. No one blinked anymore. The boss said we’d hit a new quarterly record. He clapped, but the sound was hollow, like hands slapping a coffin lid.

Now, sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can hear the factory humming under everything: under the city, under my heartbeat, under the polite noise of civilization.

We’re not employees. We’re inventory.

Every morning when I swallow the next pill, I understand a little more: the product is us.

Favorite Books #6-10

A while back, I gave you a list of my top 5 favorite books. It’s taken me some time and a lot of thinking to think of numbers 6-10, but I think I’ve got them. So, here they are:

6. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

Ligotti’s philosophical pessimism is a cold and meditative. It’s about the horrors of consciousness and human suffering. He argues that awareness itself is a curse, and it’s a theme that lingers in your brain long after you finish the book.

7. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The main character embodies self-loathing, resentment, and intellectual rebellion. His critique of optimism exposes the contradictions of human desire and freedom which reveals our capacity for irrationality and cruelty.

8. Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche

I know I’ve moved away from Nietzsche over the years, but this book was my introduction to philosophy. It helped me discover other philosophers and led me to my favorite (Albert Camus.) This book challenges traditional morality, urging the creation of new values. It’s sometimes difficult, but it’s also poetic and absurd which I love. It insists we confront the void with courage and creativity.

9. Pet Sematary by Stephen King

The author that made me a lover of reading and books in general. It’s still the most terrifying book I’ve ever read. It isn’t just about the supernatural. It’s a meditation on grief, denial, and the impossibility of reversing death. It confronts us with the inevitability of loss and the consequences of trying to cheat the natural order.

10. Blindness by Jose Saramago

A society stripped of sight which exposes the fragility and moral ambiguity of civilization. It’s a very grim reflection on human nature. Survival instincts clash with morality which can lead to brutality. It’s been a while since I read it, but it still lingers in the back of my mind so I had to put it on the list.

The Myth of Choice

**This is not my original work. I received it in an email from a group I joined called “Simplifying Socialism.”**

We’re told capitalism is freedom because it gives us choice. Thousands of products, dozens of brands, endless options. Pick your sneakers, your streaming service, your fast-food meal. The market is democracy in action, right?

But peek behind the curtain and you’ll see how “free” the choices we make actually are.

Abundance as Illusion

Walk into any grocery store and you’ll see aisle after aisle packed with competing brands. Twenty different cereals, fifty kinds of chips, hundreds of drink options. It feels like abundance. But behind the labels, the vast majority of those products are owned by the same handful of corporations. Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Kraft Heinz — a tiny cluster of companies control most of what fills the shelves.

What looks like competition is often monopoly in disguise. The “choice” isn’t between different visions of production or different systems of ownership. It’s just which logo you want stamped on the same profit-driven structure.

This isn’t just food. Tech is the same story. We’re told we have freedom because we can pick Apple or Samsung, Android or iPhone. But each comes with its own traps (proprietary software, built-in obsolescence, surveillance baked into the product). The decision is narrowed to surface-level differences while the real power remains untouched.

The illusion of abundance is shoved down our throats as we are relegated from humans to consumers.

Essentials Without Real Options

The illusion gets crueler when we look at the choices that actually matter for survival.

Healthcare: You can choose between insurance plans, but every option is unaffordable, confusing, and leaves you vulnerable. Millions still go bankrupt over medical bills. Your healthcare is often tied to your employment. Where’s the freedom in that?
Housing: You can pick your landlord, but the rent keeps climbing. You can choose between renting forever or drowning in mortgage debt. Owning a home isn’t a dream for most — it’s a chain and shackles.
Work: You can choose which boss to sell your labor to, but you can’t opt out of selling it entirely. Unless you’re independently wealthy, your “choice” is which workplace will exploit you. Fear not, you can make the choice to go into business for yourself (if you have good credit).

Capitalism calls this freedom, but it’s a false freedom. A choice within limits you didn’t set, with outcomes you can’t control. Real freedom lies not in the illusion of choice, but in the ability to live day-to-day without the worry of hospital bills or rising rent prices destroying our dignity.

Manufactured Desires

Even when options exist, they’re shaped by advertising and cultural pressure. “Choice” becomes less about what you want and more about what you’ve been convinced to want.

Do you really need a new phone every year, or has marketing manufactured that need? Do you choose fast fashion because it’s what you want, or because the industry deliberately conditions you to keep buying at the pace of their profits? Do you have any use whatsoever for Birkenstocks, or do you want them because they are trendy right now?

Capitalism sells us the story that we’re sovereign consumers making rational decisions. But in reality, our desires are engineered, our needs distorted, and our choices narrowed to what generates profit. Capitalism wins when companies succeed at turning our wants into needs, or at least by making us think that we need things we absolutely do not.

Freedom vs. Necessity

Here’s the Marxist insight: freedom isn’t about picking between products; it’s about control over the conditions of your life.

Choosing between Uber and Lyft is not real freedom.
Choosing between ten brands of sneakers is not real freedom.
Choosing between healthcare plans that all bankrupt you is not real freedom.

Freedom is having power over how your labor is used, how resources are distributed, and how your community is shaped. It’s the ability to decide not just between products, but between systems, to collectively govern the economy instead of being governed by it.

That kind of choice, democratic, collective, meaningful, is what socialism points toward. A society built on real collaboration instead of false competition is what we are missing out on by continuing to accept capitalism. Our labor keeps the machine going but instead of reward we are met with a whip to the back proclaiming that we must “work harder!” That is the reality of capitalism.

Conclusion

Capitalism hands us a menu full of small, shallow choices while stripping us of the big ones that matter. We can debate endlessly about which streaming service to pay for, but we have no say in whether housing is affordable, whether our cities are polluted, or whether our labor enriches us or someone else.

Socialism isn’t about taking away freedom. It’s about making real freedom possible. Because the ability to pick between fifty cereals means nothing if you can’t afford breakfast. We can, and we must, leave capitalism in the “museum of antiquities,” as Engels put it.

The future belongs to us, but it will not be handed to us.

Does Love Exist? A Cynic’s Reflection

Keep in mind that I’m writing this as a cynical, misanthropic pessimist, okay? But I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard people declare with a mix of bitterness and certainty that “love doesn’t exist.” As if it’s some grand revelation. As if anyone who believes otherwise is naive. Again, coming from a cynist, I think this particular claim misses the mark. Love is real and it’s one of the most undeniable forces in human life.

When someone insists love isn’t real, they’re usually speaking out of pain, disappointment, or distrust. Maybe they were betrayed by a partner, so now love seems like nothing more than a manipulation. Maybe they’ve embraced a biological reductionism: “love is just chemicals firing off in the brain so it doesn’t count.” Maybe they’ve taken their own misanthropy so far that they can’t imagine people acting out of genuine care for one another. I sympathize with all of that, but I don’t buy the conclusion.

If we deny love because it can be explained chemically, we’d have to deny everything else too such as joy, grief, awe, even the taste of a favorite meal. Reduction doesn’t mean negation. Love might be tied to hormones and neurons, but so is every other human experience. That doesn’t make it unreal. It makes it embodied.

If we deny love because people fail at it, because they betray or exploit in its name, then we’d have to deny courage, kindness, or justice too. Every virtue gets betrayed. That doesn’t erase the thing itself, it only proves how fragile and valuable it is.

Love shows up in too many undeniable forms to write it off. A parent staying awake with a sick child. Friends carrying each other through decades of hardship. Strangers risking something for people they’ll never see again. Protestors linking arms against police lines for the sake of those they’ll never meet. Even grief is a form of love. What else is mourning but love with nowhere to go?

Cynicism has its uses. It can cut through illusion and sentimentality. But cynicism that denies love altogether becomes just another illusion, one that pretends detachment will protect us from hurt. In reality, it only leaves us emptier.

Love exists. It’s not perfect, not eternal, not invulnerable. But it is as real as anything else that shapes our lives. Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t make us stronger; it only makes us lonelier.

Anti-Natalism Isn’t My Most Extreme Position

Most people recoil at the idea of anti-natalism. “But my legacy!” “I need the family name to live on!” “You’re not full until you’ve had a child!” Spare me your bullshit. There’s no altruistic reason to have children. Every reason anyone gives is selfish and self-absorbed. Most people feel like being an anti-natalist is a spit in the face of them and their progeny. Let them think that. I will not back down from this view. I don’t stop at anti-natalism though. My position goes further. I’m pro-omnicide. Yes, I mean that literally: I’m pro the end of all life. Not just humans. Not just animals. All of it.

Life is suffering. That’s not a metaphor. It’s biology. Every living being spends its existence avoiding pain, hunger, sickness, loneliness, decay, and finally death. Even joy is temporary, always shadowed by loss. The very structure of life is cruelty: to live is to feed off of other life.

The one and only true solution to suffering isn’t better medicine or fairer societies (although I wish for those to ease the suffering as well as ending capitalism before we go.) It’s ending life itself. Omnicide is the clean cut, the only guarantee that no more beings — animal or human — will be forced into pain.

There can be comedy in this as well though. It’s not all doom and gloom. Billions of years of evolution, countless wars and inventions, all the books and religions and empires, and it all ends with nothing. Lights out. Curtain call. The universe shrugs and deletes its own save file.

People keep searching for meaning, for some grand story about progress, destiny, or utopia. But the joke is that there is no meaning. The only punchline left is extinction; not tragedy, not triumph, just silence.

Why say this publicly though? Because most people won’t even look in this direction. They’re terrified of questioning the assumption that “life is good.” But if we really care about ethics, if we really care about suffering, then omnicide is the most compassionate conclusion. And if we really embrace the absurd, then there’s no need to dress it up as anything other than what it is: the end of the joke.

I don’t expect anyone to agree with me, but I also don’t think the can refute me, try as they might. They can’t deny that suffering defines life. And they can’t deny that omnicide would end it once and for all.

That’s why I’m pro-omnicide. Not because of a hatred for life, but because I see life for what it is.

I’m Sick of Living in a Country With a Price Tag on Survival

There’s something deeply wrong with a society that puts a dollar sign on everything: air, water, healthcare, housing, even hope.

In America, you don’t get to live, you get to rent existence. And the rent keeps going up.

Need to drink water? Better hope your tap isn’t poisoned, privatized, or shut off because you’re behind on the bill. Need to see a doctor? Hope you can navigate the insurance labyrinth, dodge bankruptcy, and survive long enough to get an appointment three months from now.

This isn’t a functioning society. It’s a hostile marketplace cosplaying as civilization.

We slap “In God We Trust” on the currency, but worship profit above all. Billionaires hoard resources like dragons while kids ration insulin. Corporations dump chemicals into rivers while charging us for clean water. Politicians talk about “personal responsibility” while handing corporate welfare to their donors.

Everything is for sale … except dignity.

This system wasn’t built to help us. It was built to extract from us. Your labor, your time, your energy, your life. All monetized. The only thing “essential” in this economy is your ability to generate profit for someone else.

And when you stop being profitable? You’re disposable. That’s the cold logic of capitalism. It doesn’t care if you suffer. It needs you to.

But here’s the thing: people are waking up. The cracks are visible. The rage is growing. The question now isn’t “Is this sustainable?”, it’s “What the hell are we going to do about it?”

We can’t shop our way out of this. We can’t vote our way out of it alone. This is going to take organizing. Disruption. Solidarity. Mutual aid. Refusing to play their game by their rules.

Because survival should not be for sale.

And I, for one, am done pretending this is normal.

Overthinking, Pandora’s Box, and the Mercy We Don’t Deserve

By someone who’s tired of dodging landmines in family group chats.

I posted a photo on Snapchat the other day—Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy. I didn’t think much of it. Just one of those small, nerdy flexes you throw into the void. But then my aunt replied:

“I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I guess everything has some sort of philosophy.”

Okay, fair. Not everyone grew up reading Plato or spiraling into existential dread during sophomore year. I responded:

“Western civilization’s been overthinking everything for like 2,500 years. They had to write it down eventually. Even things like math and science have deep philosophical roots.”

Her response? “Some things are just overthought, and need to be left alone I think. Just my opinion.”

That’s when I felt it: that itch to argue. To start listing how “overthinking” gave us medicine, civil rights, space exploration, critical thinking, and the ability to ask whether the status quo even should be left alone.

But instead, I replied calmly:

“Sometimes overthinking is how we uncover the stuff hiding under the surface.”

She came back with:

“That could be really bad and in the long run not helpful. Kinda like Pandora’s box. But I understand some things need to be known.” I went full myth nerd:

“Yeah, opening Pandora’s box definitely unleashed chaos—but also hope was in there too. Can’t forget that part.”

Then came the turn I knew was coming:

“Yep, you are right on that. And mercy, which we don’t deserve.”

Ah. There it was. The theological twist. The Southern Baptist worldview shining through. Mercy as something we’re lucky to get, not something we’re entitled to. A cosmic handout, not a human right.

And that’s where I bit my tongue. Because yeah, I could’ve said that if mercy is real, it shouldn’t be conditional. Or that maybe people don’t deserve suffering either. Or maybe we do deserve mercy because we’re born into a broken system we didn’t ask for and spend our lives trying to make sense of it.

But I didn’t say any of that. I kept the peace. Not because I agreed, but because sometimes family isn’t where the fight lives.

Still, it stuck with me. The way generations talk past each other. The way questioning becomes “overthinking,” and curiosity becomes a threat to tradition. The way a simple book post turns into a theological minefield.

So here I am. Overthinking it, of course.

Just like the philosophers taught me to.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s where hope still lives.