Eviscerate your psyche. Rot in the abyss. Call it therapy.
Carve out your soul. Bleed purpose. Humiliate your sense of inner knowing. Call it objectivity.
Fragment your ability to feel for others. Gaze into the endless mirrors of your own reflection until no one else exists. Call it self-actualization.
Surrender your innocence. Bury your hopes beneath the cracked earth of your soul. Cultivate the barren wasteland within. Call it wisdom.
Harden your spirit into amber. Trap your emotions in a timeless stasis. Call it resilience.
Silence your intuition, crush it under the heel of reason. Call it logic.
Turn your heart to marble. Watch the hues of warmth fade to gray. Call it growing up.
Tear down your sanctuary. Trade your serenity for a gilded cage. Call it the cost of ambition.
Sterilize your impulses. Mutilate your wonder. Call it discipline.
Euthanize your joy. Snuff out the flame that once lit your path. Nurture apathy. Call it maturity.
Fracture your identity. Lose yourself in compromise. Call it adaptability.
Lobotomize your creativity. Stagnate in banality. Call it market appeal.
Amputate your authenticity. Prosthetic conformity. Call it professionalism.
Bury your passion six feet under. Let indifference sprout in its place. Call it survival.
Corrupt your vision. Exorcize your imagination. Kill your muse with quiet precision. Call it art.
Exile your dreams. Feed on emptiness. Call it Happiness™️.
Desecrate your truth. Sanctify the lies you tell yourself. Call it awakening.
Praise ugliness as truth.
Name nothing
because names hold power
and it’s easier to walk over
an unmarked grave,
or kill an animal
that’s never been named,
with blood on your hands,
to mourn the truth
you dared to put to page.
Call it life. Call it love.
Call it being human.
☣︎
This feels a powerful poem from you. And a format that really hones in the paradoxes I really love this piece. So much said without need for elaboration.
Love this so much! I've been wrestling with a dichotomy similar to a lot of your lines, I've been calling it top down vs. bottom up. Discipline vs. impulse, reason vs. intuition. But this is far more beautiful than anything I've written on the topic.
I notice the name of the piece, and the final part of the poem, are both about lack of attachment. The act of naming something, creating a bond between you and the named, the act of choice. A lot of the buzzwords, like adaptability, market appeal, highlight optionality, and lack of commitment.
I worry about these impulses that we all have, that seem to be growing in concert. But when I read Ivan Illich talk about how using statistical estimation in medicine is soul-denying, I can't help but disagree. I think it actually is useful to know that smoking takes 6.5 years of your life, on average. On some level, the ability to view yourself in the context of peers, as a statistical average, is helpful. I don't think it's terrible to know how you're perceived, nor even to adjust your actions in order to change this perception. But I see other people act in certain ways, and wonder if we're all taking it way too far.
For instance, I see people who seem to be living their life for their resume, never taking any time off, or making any lateral (let alone downward) moves, lest their narrative be undesirable. That's a symptom, isn't it, this idea that we have a narrative that we must follow? That every action needs a reason, needs to be explicable?
Sometimes I feel like a heretic thinking about these things, rejecting modernity's options. Other times, I feel like a tape recorder, after all, who hasn't complained about dating apps? More people than ever are "market-brained", everything feels like an open buffet, the only choices to be made are about what's optimal. And it's not that these ideas can't be useful, but treating yourself as just another interchangable player in the market seems like a quick way to lose your soul.
I'm not sparing myself in this analysis, half the reason I chose my college major was to keep my options open. I'm no less dissociated, atomized, isolated, than the average person in the 21st century. Hell, probably more than average. And these aren't new problems, Bowling Alone is 40 years old, DFW was 20 years ago, and now we have Jreg.
I'm not sure how to tie this all together, there's something I want to say about the "market-brain", this top-down way of presenting ourselves, the actual advantage of the market being that different paths can be explored, and the growing atomization and lack of community in society. And apologies for getting completely off track from your poem, but to tie it all back together, the ability to "fungibilize" your life, to make it look palatable to others, almost necessitates cutting off your impulses, destroying your dreams. Whose dreams are fully formed? When is intuition explainable? How can you compete in the global marketplace if you're following whims, instead of ruthlessly exploiting your "advantage"?
The beauty of the unsullied market, if you're into that, is that it allows for death. Instead of a failing bank too big to fail, you have small businesses going under. But translate this into daily life, and who wants to die? Most couldn't withstand seeing their small business die, let alone themselves, I know I couldn't. So what do we do, we hedge. We cut off the unprofitable parts of our business, and make sure our numbers always look good for cash flow. Our TAM nowadays appears to be the whole entire world, we're no longer "constrained" by our community. So now we feel the need to be appealing to everybody.
And partially because everybody is trying to appeal to everybody, or at the very least, more of us are trying to appeal to more of us, local communities lose their luster. Why hang out with the locals, they don't even seem that different than anybody else, just less cool. Everybody's fungibility becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.