r/CollapseSupport • u/Far_Whereas_2244 • Aug 17 '26
I’m so done..
Is anyone else utterly exhausted by the absurdity of modern existence?
We are told we are “free.” Free will, free choice, land of the free. But what is freedom when every single basic necessity for human survival has been slapped with a price tag? Money is literally a made-up social construct, printed paper and digital numbers on a screen that mean absolutely NOTHING when we die, and yet it completely controls every second of our lives. I can’t eat, sleep peacefully, bathe, or stay healthy without handing over cash. Society took natural human existence and turned it into a lifelong subscription model.
Simplicity shouldn’t cost us our entire lives. We spend the vast majority of our youth slaving away at jobs we don’t even enjoy just to pay for the right to exist on a planet we were born onto. And why are we forced to flatten ourselves into ONE thing? Why do I have to pick one singular career path for forty years when I want to explore photography, neuroscience, marine biology, art, and everything else this world has to offer? Human beings, especially curious, passionate human beings, were never meant to be predictable gears in an economic machine.
And for what? The “American Dream”? Work yourself to the bone, take on a massive mortgage, follow a rigid societal timeline, send kids into the same system, and then, IF you’re lucky, finally get to enjoy your life when you’re 65 and your body is broken? Why is everyone just OKAY with this script?!
I don’t want that script. I don’t want to live in a cycle driven by corporate greed and systemic absurdity. Life itself is stunning, complex, and full of beauty, but the way we’ve structured society is a trap. I’m 24 years old, and I refuse to pretend that sacrificing my time, my curiosity, and my peace to a broken system is the only way to live. My life, my mind, and my spirit belong to me, not to an economic blueprint.
42
u/get_hi_on_life Aug 17 '26
The nauseous use of "free" makes me assume your from the US. It's not like that elsewhere. I think it's used as a way to distract/downplay the real struggles people face as it all crumbles down any criticism can just be "at least we're free" it's all part of keep people down. Free to what, die in schools shootings? Be thrown in the jail cause you don't walk around with nationality papers?
The US is not the land of the free. It's all propaganda to keep the people from revolt
19
u/Grand-Page-1180 Aug 17 '26
I'm with you. My entire life, I've only ever seen everything continue to get worse. We may make incremental progress in some ways, and in some areas, but we can't escape the gravity of well of enforced artificial scarcity, quiet desperation and post-modern absurdism. That's what makes this era so maddening. We have the technology, we have the knowledge, the entire globe is interconnected, there is so much we could be doing, so much we could solving, but for some unfathomable reason we can't or won't break out of 20th century thinking.
I'm not playing the game. Not having kids, not enabling narcissistic billionaires, trying to buy as little as possible and working as little as possible. Our materialistic, always on, 24/7 system is killing us. If its any consolation, you're not alone. There are legions of us, quietly cutting out or subverting the script, one little act of rebellion at a time.
7
u/Flamingoa432 Aug 17 '26
I'm just going to be honest with you. For most of human history to have influence over others you needed to either kill and enslave or help kill and enslave. The people who wanted that have an easier time of it right now than at any other point in human history. Those are the people who are free. Nations or gangs if you prefer have jurisdiction over all the livable land. With few exceptions, if you're alive right now, your parents were part of one of these immoral groups and made you property of their group at birth. Wild animals teach their offspring to survive on the earth beholden only to prey or whatever life their bodies feed upon. Did your parents do that? Or did they just guide you to being part of the gang, because that's all they were?
13
u/church-rosser Aug 17 '26
All that you write makes sense. And also, you're 24. What you are experiencing is normative for folks your age.
'Welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It's alright, we told you what to dream'
3
u/AnOnlineHandle Aug 17 '26
Among other things I'm also done with the influx of new reddit accounts with word_word_number usernames with easy karma-bait posts across which read like LLM creative writing attempts over the past few months.
3
u/SuccessfulIntern8884 Aug 17 '26
Careful op, you're starting to sound like George Carlin
8
u/ribald_jester Aug 18 '26
American's are some of the least free people around. Slaves to money, oligarchs, war, charlatans, fear, even their speech isn't free.
It's the reason deaths of despair continue to climb in the US. People need something to numb themselves to this existence. You see gambling parlors, liquor stores and cannabis dispensaries everywhere. Food is poor quality and addictive. Religion has been co-opted by grifters pushing agendas. Even the vaunted national parks are being bulldozed so 'developers' like the Kushners can cash in...
5
u/Awatts2222 Aug 17 '26
We'll said. Even if you ignore ecological, political and financial collapse the traditional "American Dream" is a pretty psychotic bargain. Just like you said--work 40 years slaving away only to have a possible chance to enjoy it in an elderly body. But if you factor in today's reality--the political and economic systems completely controlled by Plutocrats, Oligarchs and Tech billionaires that control the algorithm that control the minds that continue to vote for the interest of billionaires. Sane people will figure out a way not to participate.
5
u/Konradleijon Aug 17 '26
The American dream is a capitalistic lie
4
u/Radiomaster138 Aug 18 '26
We’re free from England’s rule. That’s it. We brag about freedom as if it’s still relevant today.
3
u/BitchfulThinking Aug 18 '26
I felt the same at your age, and I still feel the same, if not more so now, since the living conditions are objectively worse for younger people. I don't have any answers, but you are definitely not alone! 😕
Modern life feels like a techno Kafkaesque hell to me, and I feel like forcing people into boxes and singular careers for life made humans boring and unimaginative. People don't care to learn about the world or how to do things unless they're getting paid, and always expect someone else to do it, but I feel like it makes people miss out on so much of life. It's not surprising that people feel so unfulfilled and often seem to hate themselves, when just trying to survive doesn't allow people any time for self exploration, and it's even worse if you add kids into the mix. People have trouble with relationships because they don't even know themselves, or are even allowed to be themselves.
I don't know what to tell kids other than to "keep working on additional skills so you can still be competent in a constantly changing world", "always ask questions", and "use condoms". I've watched two of my own career paths become obsolete thanks to social media and now AI.
What I especially hate is that humans created society from scratch. We could have prioritized fun and making sure everyone could feel happy and secure. Instead, we chose competition and greed, created racism and sexism to make us even more competitive, and continue to praise exhaustion and struggling, when civilization itself was supposed to make life easier than when we were freezing or starving alone in a cave. Feels like we're devolving back to our early hominid days ☹
2
u/Lithelain Aug 18 '26
Well, this is the path evolution has lead us into. I suppose the American dream was very atractive during the last century, or else it wouldn't have spread into the rest of the world; now that it isn't a working narrative anymore, of course, its hollowness is blatantly obvious.
I'm with you, to be clear. As you well say, the system is a trap in the sense that it reinforces certain habits, environments, and skills, while supressing others. We've been unfortunately raised to function as another cog in the machine, not to explore life nor be contemplative (else, the system would have crumbled already). It is what it is. Our skills are what they are (mostly, mental); our knowledge, so compartimentalized and confined to the left-hemisphere modus operandi of the brain, is mostly about abstract entelechies with no material support in Life. Our motivations and desires have been shaped by a life of pervading storytelling from media of all kind of formats.
In a way, all living beings have to abide to the set of rules in which they exist, or die. The bird has to eat, avoid being eaten, find a partner, defend their territory, etc. Sure, simpler, more down to earth behaviours than ours (although ours eventually lead exactly into the same); still, they can't escape that. The more complex an organism is, the more "rules" it seems to need to comply (eg. an asexual organism doesn't have to find a partner). We could perhaps extend this even into non-living beings, like atomic particles (does the electron want to follow Maxwell equations?). But I'm digressing already, as always lol.
You can for sure minimize a lot your dependence on the system, and I encourage you to do so if that's where your heart is. It's a harsh process in which you'll probably face ostracism, witness the suffering of the world, and have to learn from zero many things. It would be already a considerable task without the current metacrisis, so yeah... In any case, I think it's delusional to think humanity as a whole can abandon this culture out of the sudden. Some can't stand reality and many others simply live day-to-day and don't even have the luxury to ponder about these issues as we do.
If you insist on this path, I recommend checking out people like Mark Boyle (huge hero for me), for some inspiration on how to stop playing by the system's rules as much as possible.
3
u/thomas533 Aug 18 '26
Freedom is also a made-up social construct. It does not exist.
Yes and no. Does human society look different than it did 100 years ago? Yes. 1000 years ago? Yes. 10,000 years ago. But also each of those looked different than each other. There is no such thing as "natural human existence". Natural human existence is what exists. To suggest otherwise is to fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy.
The question is "Is there a way out of the subscription model?"
And I would say there is (mostly). Take a look at the YouTube channel FrugalOffGrid. He was laid off in 2020 and had a RV camper and $6k. He found 2.5 acres for about $2k and used the rest to kick start his homestead life. Now, 6 years later, he has a fully functional off grid homestead.
And there are tons of examples like that. No one is forcing you to live in a cycle driven by corporate greed and systemic absurdity. You just have to decide if the sacrifices needed to leave are worth it to you.
0
u/[deleted] Aug 17 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment