Killing ourselves to live

A new poll confirms what most working people already know: trying to get by in this country will literally make you sick. Apparently Ben Franklin was on to something when he said "Neither a borrower nor a lender be," but it's hard to do that in a predatory capitalist culture that's constantly manipulating you through mass advertising.

And it's not just owing money to the legal equivalent of "Big Tony" that can make you ill, both physically and emotionally. The very job that you rely on to pay your debts can increase your stress, too. And the more menial your job, the worse it is.

Why do we subject ourselves to such toxic conditions? I believe it's because we allow the wrong kind of people to rise to the top in our society, namely type-A personality, hyper-competitive types who then expect the rest of us to run as fast as they do. You know the ones: the "crisis every minute" office manager who treats the loss of a pencil like it was the bombing of Hiroshima; the glory-mad politician who drags his nation into unwinnable wars to "save the world"; the workaholic boss who's in the office 70 hours a week and expects you to be too. We could have a society based on friendly, collaborative relationships instead of vicious, heads-I-win, tails-you-lose ones, but not with this bunch in charge. Of course, the fact that the pharmaceutical industry makes huge profits off of medications to treat the symptoms of this sick society is unlikely to lead to change either. There's money to be made in misery.

So we go off to our soul-crushing jobs, medicate ourselves with substances legal or otherwise, and rush off to the mall to buy worthless crap with money we don't have at prices we can't afford, just to justify having the shitty job in the first place. Then again, maybe some people are happy with this state of affairs. But what about the ones of us who aren't? Don't we get any say in the matter? And how do you find the will to continue everyday when you feel completely out of place in this scenario, when the society you live in is like a foreign country with no exit visa? Do you resign yourself to going along with it, or do you seek alternatives? Do you try to change the system from within, or try to burn it down from without?