Coming to Terms With Personal Failure

The will to survive is truly amazing. People are, in some ways, stronger than they realise.
Psychological scars don't go away, but unlike physical scars, we can at least try and rise above them.

The bottom line is you're here. And one day you won't be. And all that really matters, is what you do with that. That really is up to you.

So you may not like the road that got you to the point you're at, but you're here.
Regret isn't going to get you anywhere.

The last couple of years have been in hard for me, in very real ways. I guess this blog has provided very real catharsis for me, and in some ways enabled me to deal with the realities of my actual existence.

I'm not yet thirty, but to all intents and purposes, I've effectively written my life off, and that's been hard to deal with. Knowing that you were once considered bright enough to have a shot at Oxbridge, and now, even if you won the Nobel Peace Prize, the headline would read 'Controversy as former Ecstasy dealer wins Nobel Peace Prize'.

That's hard enough. Then there's the life I saw. I can't explain, and there's no point in trying, except by saying, watch The Shawshank Redemption.

I mean, it's gone. Long gone. To see little me now, with my curls just as sculpted as they were at twenty, in my suit and tie, I'm just another wide boy, a foot soldier of the capitalist system.

I don't have a bad life. But in a huge sense, it can never satisfy. In life terms, you're a eunuch. So many pathways now, are closed.
But from the day that judge said 'Take him down.', there was no point in crying about it.

But it was certainly worth contemplating. I mean, there's no point in presenting me as otherwise than as the author of my own misfortune. The thing is, that DOES pose wider questions. And the one that perhaps most affects my worldview.

The simplest proof of the failure of our society, is me.

What do I mean by that?
Well, very simple. No, I don't blame anyone but me for my misfortunes. BUT. Looked at in a wider sense, it's not just me that loses out.

I have to come to terms with the fact that I will never make the social contribution maybe I could have done. But that's the point.

However many times, I go through everything, one still comes to the same conclusion; it would panned much the same however. If I'd done all those things differently, it wouldn't have been ME any more doing them differently.

The root of the problem, you might say, is a huge hatred of authority from an early age. Completely undisciplinable, confrontational, headstrong, over confident, unpredictable. These would be my key failings from the point of view of the processing machine that is our educational system. I'm just not a 'team player'.

I guess my graduation to a pure pleasure seeking existence, was almost guaranteed. A waste of a life, true, but more from society's point of view than mine.

This basically, is the point. People are going to find the ways of life that please them most. Society has managed to structure itself in such way, that my finding the best available of the paths to happiness on offer, meant me putting myself in a position where society declared me its enemy.

Why? Because the thing is, I was never going to get excited about buying a big house, putting a barbecue in the garden, all that 'keeping up with the Jones's' stuff, which FORCES everyone else to serve the system.
I needed more. I needed a sense of real purpose, and I only ever found that on the dancefloor, tight black jeans showing off my tight little bum, black T-shirt, showing off my girly white arms, a hint of eyeliner showing off my eyes.

That really was life. Up on the podium with a bottle of water in your hand, making sure all eyes are on you.

Innocence. It was. Youthful innocence. Sex and Drugs, yes, loads, but it was pure innocence. I was still a child in so many ways. After graduation I just moved from woman to woman, never really having to look after myself.

But wasn't I a triumph of capitalism and consumer choice? I, the consumer, working hard, to play hard?
Free Market Economics?

Well, you get time to think about these things.



The more one looks at all with unprejudiced eyes, the more one can see a society where systematic failure, increases by the day. We know it, because there's only one way you can measure a system, by the level of satisfaction people have with their lives.
Are we happier than our grandparents, as opposed to materially better off?
No. Because the gap between conceptual possibility and reality, is now huge, whereas in our grandparents day, the two were close. The system was still working.

Time was, when society would not have let me throw my life away. It would not have allowed a contribution to be wasted. It's human energy lost.

How much HUMAN energy do we waste? THAT is the question that matters.

Imagine if we used it all. Think of all those who we don't use, here in the West. Think of the labour wasted in the third world, simply by not providing proper technology.
And think of what a waste our employment system is. I sell you a phone system, so you can sell me back a photocopier. Most of us sell stuff to eachother, just we can sell stuff back. Eighty percent of the total labour of western humanity, simply serves to move assets around.

WE ARE WASTING OUR TIME.

The economic and political system is basically, too archaic to suit modern requirements.
All it needs to do, is extract resources, process and manufacture goods, distribute them, feed people and transport people.
That REALLY IS all we need to be doing.

And that really, wouldn't take as much labour as we think.
And the rest of time?

We could run this planet, to European standards, assuming an equal infrastructure across the globe, on the basis of around fifteen hours labour contribution a week, each. True.

Imagine if we all did twenty.

Half as much work (Less, in most cases), everyone enjoying a middle class European living standard, 33% more productive as well, in terms of expanding the infrastructure.
Because that's the point of the putting in the extra. Extra Labour, extra resources put in building our dreams, habitats beyond our frontiers, place for humans of the future to live.

Let us pass 10 Billion, 100 Billion, a Trillion people, we will have the confidence to know that the mind of man will always feed and find homes, for her chidren.

It's doable. Once this phase, shackling us all, comes to an end.

Do I live for that?

YES, YES, I do.
That is all I have. That hope, that dream, that vision, is all I have left, and I will not lose it.

My own happiness is long gone. I'm finished, in terms of my real life identity. I live day to day, longing for the weekends, and when they come, I miss work. Life streches ahead of me, grey, lifeless. It's bleak. Soon I'll be too old to party. Settling down is a pipedream, I couldn't deal with it, it will never happen. I don't trust my grandmother with my phone number, so the idea that I could ever allow someone else to have access to a bank account my money is paid into, is completely unthinkable. And anyway, who wants to live with someone who will never really let them in? Who will only push them away if they truly try to share their life?

It's a bugger, because I'd love to have children, I just couldn't deal with the rest of it.
Of course I want children. Flawed as I might be, it's up to Darwinian laws to decide whether my genes are as junk as my life turned out to be.
Another pipedream.

And so, I find myself in a reverse situation to the rest of humanity, feathering their nest eggs and their pension funds, yet seeing the future as a nuclear holocaust, or an environmental disaster, or the current trend towards a global police state continuing forever.

You see, I don't really care too much what the future holds for me. Nothing to aim for, nothing to fear either.
The worst? AIDs? Overdose? Am I fussed?
Not really, no.

But I do care about the future any descendants of mine might have.

A united Earth, where a peaceful global confederacy rules over unarmed states, where the infrastructure is run to process and distribute in the most efficient manner possible, where the entire populace is the legislature, where voters can change their minds on the executive as often as is technologically posible, where the landscape is sculpted to maximum aesthetic standards, where the annual exponential population rise is matched by the triumphant abilities of humanity to expand it's habitat.



Where our technology supersedes the need for us to live this miserable existence.

Where people live together in vast communal households, where labour is divided to maximum efficiency.

We don't ALL need to wash our OWN clothes in our OWN washing machines.

And GOODBYE to people telling other people what should and shouldn't make them happy.

And this is why, I guess, I continue. After the ordeal I went through of late, you might wonder why I bother, why I continued in a situation which was driving me to nervous breakdown.

Because this is where I have the chance to redeem just a part of that rubble that is my life. It's worth fighting for. Nothing else I ever do, will be.

If my existence aids the future I pray for in coming about, then, no, I won't actually have lived in vain. I can't do a lot, but I can blog on the overlieing theory whilst I have breath in my body. That, actually has the capacity, to give me moments of satisfaction.

I still have something to live for.
I have something at least, worth the fight.