PerfectSociety

PerfectSociety wrote

Reply to comment by !deleted30 in Friday Free Talk by ThreadBot

My tentative plans are as follows: Join a commune, teach people basic medical skills and DIY stuff like alternatives to the Epi-Pen, grow food with permaculture and give away surplus, partake in Really Really Free Markets or something equivalent, etc...

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PerfectSociety wrote (edited )

I feel strange. A mixture of happiness and sadness. I feel happy with what's going on in my personal life - the occupation I've wanted and worked towards for past several years is now mine, an awesome girlfriend, and celebrating with my friends the past few weeks and continuing onward. I also feel sad in that I feel like I can't do anything on a macro scale to fix this world that I live in. There is so much suffering, anguish, betrayal, exploitation, death, conflict of interest, etc... And I just don't know what to do. I know that nothing anyone is proposing right now will work. The economic forces that dominate our world today are just too entrenched, too powerful, and too self-enforcing to be overthrown by conscious projects of directed action. I know that all of this will come to an end and Property, Capitalism, and the State will all die in the future. What comes afterwards will either be liberating or utter annihilation and extinction. I don't think I'll see this in my lifetime. I feel that my lifetime will be dominated by a Late Stage Capitalism that continually sucks the hopes, dreams, and fun out of people's lives. Cynicism and Narcissism will magnify. And I will have to watch all of this knowing that all the hopes and dreams people have every decade or so that they put into this or that political leader, revolution, strike, etc... will all be for nothing. I'll have to watch as people realize crushing disappointment and letdowns decade after decade after decade. New hopes being born and then dying. The spark in people's eyes disappearing as they grow older and wearier, due to assimilating into this disgusting system and then letting their cynicism run wild.

I just don't know what to do. I feel like there's a transhistorical chess match going on but without any players. It's a clusterfuck of emergent processes shaping one another and everything else. History unfolding in a particular way and here I am stuck in an era of nothing but utter disappointment. The late stage of capitalism. A stage where I will not see any hopes succeed but only shine brightly for an instant and then fade into the darkness once again. A stage most aptly described as "so close, yet so far from post-capitalism". I know what's going on, but I can't do anything to impact it on any meaningful scale.

Practicing medicine is my passion, but is playing a metaphorical game of wack-a-mole the only thing I'll ever be cut out for? Is that all there is to my life? Someone is suffering and I alleviate their suffering. In a best case scenario they then go out into the world functioning yet again but then become a victim of the system in other ways and assimilate into it only to perpetuate its horrors out of seeming necessity and desperation.

In theory it seems easy to just say "fuck it all, I'll just enjoy my personal life and stop giving a shit about all this other stuff", but I know that I just can't do that. I can't completely wall myself off from these insights I've gained over the big picture and the significance of them. I know all this stuff and I just can't make myself ignore it even if I wanted to.

So what should I do? What can I even do?

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