When I figured out that a lot of people are going to spend their better years, wasting away, working jobs they hate every 40 hours of the week and 8 hours a day or longer. That is unless they either have been born with that silver spoon in their mouth or had at least been born with the tools of ambition to develop careers out of it that isn’t just slaving away, making people who’re not them, richer.
And by the time we’re done, if ever we see retirement, we’re then told to ‘enjoy retirement’. Some at 65, some far older. When we’re too frail to even enjoy anything we once could when we were younger. It’s a very cruel joke of life, if you ask me. Born to play throughout your toddler to kid to teenage days, enslaved to work through your young adolescent and adulthood days, grow old and weak as you’re older until death.
And we’re not even fully enjoying it on our way through this path either because of this design.
If anybody calls you a ‘deadbeat’ for deciding to play games all day or even sitting on your couch binge watching things. You educate them about how “productive” it is working as a wage slave and how deep in the hole it has gotten us in society.
Never once did I say to ignore anything. On the contrary, I encouraged taking action, twice. But from a place of love and empowerment, not from a place of hate and futile demand for the world to bend to your will. That will only consume you from within.
But if you wish to bring privilege into this, let’s do so with honesty: the fact that you’re here, on Lemmy, discussing these things freely, already means you’re in a position of relative safety. Most of the world doesn’t have that luxury. MOST of the world is too busy surviving, too busy fighting for clean water, food, or a roof over their heads. If you have the time and space to worry about fascism or collapse online, you’re already doing better than BILLIONS of people who have the exact same capacity to experience suffering as you do. That’s not to dismiss your concerns, it’s just to say that perspective matters and you may want to be careful about how you wield the accusation of privilege.
And this device you’re using? There’s a good chance it was made possible by slave labor. That’s not your fault, but it’s worth sitting with. Because exploitative labor is also a function of capitalism. The system is what it is, and we’re all part of it in ways we don’t always see.
Guess what also addresses these inequalities though? Settling for less, refusing to play the game of endless wanting for more. Like I said.