I want to start off my blog with some criticism. The topic today is a day in the life of the modern man. It’s written from the POV of “the system”, whatever that means, but in this case it’s mostly just the government and the management of the company you work for, as if they were a single entity (which they are obviously not, but it’s more fun this way and more descriptive of how many people feel nowadays).

I hope this rather depressing topic at least makes you laugh once or twice. It gets progressively more ironic.

A day in the life of the modern “man”

You know how this works. You start your day and you need to get ready to go to an office to do the exact same job that you did just as well when you worked fully remote. We missed you, and we got the impression that you opened your mind to other possibilities and we needed to correct the wrong impression.

But let’s think for a second. What is required for you to even reach the office?

See, it’s not the gas supply chain, the road infrastructure, and all that objective stuff. There are other, more human requirements to accomplish this monumental task. Your car needs to have insurance, which sure, you’ll agree makes sense. It also needs to have passed the annual exam to ensure that it’s safe to operate (questionable, you might think) and that it’s not producing too much pollution (actively questioned by pretty much everybody outside Brussels). Then, if you want to actually drive it in your own city it needs to have a sticker saying that the car is environmentally friendly or something like that. But don’t worry, you can get the sticker provided your car is not too old. If it is too old, well, you are a bad, bad boy who doesn’t think about the environment. Instead of buying a 2 ton vehicle that is environmentally friendly you choose to use a highly efficient diesel from the early 2000’s. Fool.

Okay, there’s a solution even for you, dirty bastard. You can do some paperwork so that the car is appropriately registered as “living” in your city. For which you need the other city to agree and give up the taxes they get from it (good luck). Problem solved, except if the city you work in is not the same as the one you live in, that is. Then you have to cross your fingers so that there’s a valid route from your house to the office. Assuming there is such a route, now you need to comply with speed limits that we pulled out of our asses. We need you to slow down to have time to regret your life choices. Plus, we have noticed that a lot of you insist on never breaking the speed limits, which brings us great joy because it reinforces your natural obedience. Good job, you only needed to distract your attention from the road into things that only matter to us, not to your safety.

And speaking of safety, we will be recording you while you drive to make sure you have your seatbelt on. Some people used to think that their own personal welfare was entirely their business but fortunately this view is on steady decline. We don’t want you to die and not pay taxes (though you would even then, to be honest).

As you can see there is a lot going on to bring your empty, soulless carcass to the office. But you made it! Congrats? Your reward will be a little bit more surveillance. A little to you, not for everybody, mind you. For worthy human beings it would be an unacceptable amount, but you weren’t born in the XIX century or something, right? You are more domesticated than that. So let’s jump right into your price.

More cameras are waiting for you when you enter the building (fair) and also inside (not so fair, some say). Oh, no, don’t worry, those cameras don’t point at you while you work, that would be illegal! They are there merely to, uh, monitor the hallways. It’s important to make sure that we monitor the hallways. What, you find it suspicious that we put 360-degree cameras to monitor a straight hallway? Come on now, don’t be silly, they are absolutely not recording you while you work. That would be illegal.

But wait, the laptop we gave you also has a camera, and a microphone. Silly me, almost forgot. This is a necessity, you see, having a microphone that you can plug or unplug would give you too much agency and with such a system you wouldn’t need to trust a worlwide supply chain, a closed-source operating system designed to spy on you, your employer, etc. Which society is better, would you say, one where there is more trust or less trust? The answer is obvious. You will trust and you will be happy.

Speaking of trust, we’ll be potentially reading your Microsoft Team’s messages as well. Potentially, remember, we don’t actually need to do it. We just need you to know we might be watching, like in the panopticon. If you don’t know what that is and how it was supposed to work, don’t worry, just keep working as normal, you don’t need to know. We might not be very good at spying on you but we don’t need to, so that’s great! No need to be competent to be effective.

But wait, we noticed that the laptop might not be enough, what if you can’t carry it somewhere at some particular point in your entire working life? Better to be safe than sorry, we’ll provide you with another, more portable spying device, which we call smartphone because, let’s face it, someone has to be smart and it’s not you.

You disagree? Then riddle me this. If you are so smart, how come you carry around another one of those that you even paid for? How come you made it so easy for us to justify putting another one on you? I don’t mean to be crass but your behind is by now such a gaping hole that you don’t notice things slipping in anymore. You don’t fucking care.

…

Okay, I’m sorry. I see that this is making you sad. That’s fair but make sure to not exteriorize it in any way, because remember: you are not the only one carrying the spying device, everyone is. Don’t make mistakes, you will absolutely be recorded. Everyone has been thoroughly conditioned to do so at the first sign of anything noteworthy happening. So even if you do remember a time where you were “free”, you better not act as if you still did because you’ll be screwed. Again, don’t make mistakes, buddy.

It’s pretty clear that surveillance should make you a good boy. But just in case you might act as if you had choices, we made sure that it’s not possible. We made sure to prevent the construction of new housing, while at the same time bringing in huge populations of immigrants. Yes, that drives up prices but think about it: we have several of these properties, and it’s good that we get a higher net worth. But the more important benefit is this: you are not having children, none of you do because you can’t afford it and an entire generation of women has been brainwashed into thinking that having kids is not unlike death itself. So how do we keep you motivated to work? Do you remember that “do it for her” (Maggie Simpson)? You don’t have anything like that and something must be done. Again, we need your taxes. Paying a huge rent or a huge mortgage will keep you from having weird thoughts of independence. So higher prices are required, simple as that.

Of course it’s not a conspiracy, we just drifted into this system, but we don’t feel too inclined to change things because, as you can see by now, it has a great many benefits. (“Benefits” here is a relative term that doesn’t necessarily include you. In fact it fucking doesn’t).

Ah but you have figured out a way of making more money than you spend and you are actually saving. Amazing feat, you must have spent a lot of thought and time into making yourself useful to us. Well, good luck with your financial independence fantasies, it’ll take you a while to buy your freedom. In the meantime we’ll continue harvesting your taxes and soon you’ll realize that, in order to keep that promise of a public pension during retirement, you’ll have to keep performing. Don’t even dream of taking a pay cut for something more enjoyable, it’ll hurt your track record. We’ll give you two years at best, those we can ignore. The other 27 years we expect you to pay.

What, you don’t understand why we would count years of work and not monetary amounts? You fool, that would be too individualistic and fair. You must understand that we don’t care only about the money we take from you, we also like seeing you stay in your place. The best we can offer you is to try to climb the corporate ladder, make yourself more useful to us. Make us proud!

Final thoughts

I’ve been feeling like this for a while and I guess I needed to get it out of my chest. I’m still trying to figure out how to live a more decent life but I’m putting up with it as much as possible in the meantime, hoping that my views on it will somehow improve or that at least I find more meaning in living like this. I’m trying to be that libertum since I’m among the lucky ones who can save. I do try to remind myself that I’m very fortunate in many ways but some days I just can’t.

Anyway if this resonated with you even a little bit I wish you all the best. Reach out if you want to comment on anything, it’d be fun.

Until the next time