Some people think I have lived a hard life.  In fact sometimes, it feels that way.  But it doesn’t feel hard like other peoples’ lives are hard.

Emotional pain has been my biggest teacher and adversary; it has showed up in many ways, for as long as I can remember.  I suppose happens when you realize you must make friends with the inevitable.  Ideally we would never suffer, however, we do and this is a periodic truth for everyone to some degree.  A period of suffering emotionally.

Now some people, they have hard lives because of physical things. Being dealt a raw deck.  Maybe their care taker(s) were mean, abusive or addicted.

Maybe they were left to the system.

Perhaps they fit the archetype of being from the wrong side of the tracks and not having money.

Maybe they grew up in a war zone.

Maybe they had everything and still felt empty, regardless.

I could think of a million situations a person could be borne into that are stylistically worse than any trauma I have ever had in my life.

Suffering is personal.  A personal misery is a strange and unique filter.

On both ends, there arel people dealt worse hands, even within my own town and county.  How and why, would I have such an amazing, yet at times absolutely mundane life, whilst feeling suffering or lack, or loss?

I can’t help but wonder…

There are certain things we realize must happen in basic survival.  Food and shelter.  That is the basic frame work of life.  If you are a pregnant mom, you basically embody that; but, to sustain that you must feed and shelter yourself.  So, that, is what we do; all through life, we survive on food and shelter.  We look for it; we work for it, we pay for it, we up grade it, we miss it when we don’t have it, crave it when it is unattainable, and customize the shit out of it.

Meanwhile, Society is programmed to accept this diatribe of;

” If you want to survive, you have to put a price on it, and you have to work like a pimp for it,and we are always going to make you crave more, bigger, better and extravagant… unless you are the type who wants, small; in which case we are going to make you feel very small, and it will reinforce your own insecurity of your own insignificance.  Yet at the end of the day, you will justify all of it by boasting about your tiny carbon footprint.  Meanwhile, you will continue to sell yourselves out; all for the ultimate feeling of security when it comes to the two things in life that shouldn’t cost you your actual life and livelihoods to maintain.”

Ouch.  Right?

Our consumption relies not only on demand, but also on curiosity.  We are in an age of curiosity, but mostly that curiosity is boiled down to “new, different, and extreme ways of making money.”

Remember when youtube was really kind of a crap shoot when it came to great, and well produced content?  Anybody can do that now.  Combine that with the ad revenue, you have several echo chambers, some real scabs, and the worlds first “In Real Time Soap Opera.”  There are youtubers who literally make their income by talking shit about other youtubers.  There are cliques and alliances, fall outs and bad moves.

Thank YOU, YouTube, for deleting me!  If I would have known then, what I know now… no way I would want to be on that platform today.  Lucky for me, I was in and out before monetization was really kicking into high gear.  Meaning, only really, really big channels had the option of ads.  Now anyone can start a channel and sell out, basically, almost immediately.

There are studies that talk about how all the “likes”, and “updates” trigger  dopamine receptors in the brain, and we are basically living like cyber drug addicts; only the drug is confirmation.  It is the confirmation that we exist.  A validation that what we have to say, is worth attention.  We live in a society that is telling us that We All have a story that we need to share… that there is some sort of urgent imperative to getting it all out there.

I notice all these stories are leaning toward “Entertainment.”  Note even on TV, many of the stories are rehashes of the lives of people in their 30-40’s.  The 70’s ,80’s and 90’s.   Not everyone gets the opportunity to write a sitcom, but anyone can be an actor, reporter, sketch artist, or musician on Youtube.

So here we are.

Couples pulling pranks on each other to make some views, laughs, and cash.  They need to feed the need to be seen.

We have kids with severe dis-morphia, dying before our eyes, as they slowly kill themselves for comments.

We have ranters, ravers, over consumers looking for likes as they un-box merchandise they will never use, and sometimes destroy.

You have the “internet recycle teams” that take this trash, and make more trash with it, putting it into the greater place where internet trash goes…. viral or just congestive.

Our cyber world is a bigger trash heap, than it is a resource tool for usefulness.  But this is to be expected.   When you have years worth of content uploaded and downloaded every second of every day… it’s going to get nasty when trying to sift through it all.

The” Bigger Plan” must be aimed to Absolutely Bog People Down- take them so deep that they have no way of digging themselves out, EVER.

My life has been magical, because I know what it feels like to be “bogged down.”  The image for me, is like being drenched in muddy water, fully clothed, in layers so soaked that it is hard to walk.  I know what it is to want to wish myself away, but it isn’t that easy.  Sometimes the options are to walk away slowly or completely strip down and run.

I’ve felt pretty stripped down recently and I don’t have anywhere to run to.  It’s like standing naked in the wind, and letting the Wind, run it’s course.  It is freeing in some different kind of way, but I am left with a crusty layer I have to deal with.

The act of survival; eating and having a place to rest and care for yourself, should be a non-issue at this point in history.  Where have we gotten so off course to make even more extreme jumps in the gap of the “have’s” and “have not’s”, except for now how easy it is to brand oneself and reap that paycheck. To fulfill the need of being wanted or worth something.

The weird thing is, we are each priceless, and yet we will be the first to put a price upon ourselves. This saddens me, because this is the New Way.  People are sick of working for others, so they work for themselves, selling their egos.  Sometimes products come with it.  And this is the New Commerce, this is how people figure out their worth, they redirect their work energy toward themselves,  hoping to reconcile on the outside, that which they inherently know to be true but are afraid to look at directly in the eye.

In this process they monetize it, and wait for reward.  But what are these real rewards we seek?   To, “not have a normal job”?   What happens when this too, becomes saturated, (as it seems to be) suffering it’s own crash because of demonetization and disinterest?  Will Self worth plummet?  Or will the real message prevail?  It’s hard to say.

I do think that the collective path we tread, presently, is using this desire to fulfill needs and wants in a most peculiar and inappropriate way.  At this point, it looks as if people will use the tool of technology to destroy themselves, before technology will get the opportunity to turn against the people.

We can be our own worst enemy.

It takes a certain death and destruction of oneself (some times a series of many), in order to get out of ones own way.