Wake up. It’s 5:20 am. You’re still tired from the night because your daughter is sick and you spend half an hour cleaning vomit off a Pikachu plush. You hear the sound of Lease by Takeshi Abo, a familiar song if you circle niche aesthetic forums. It brings a slight bit of comfort in the otherwise existential dread of the routine you stumbled into. The rut.

You didn’t make a rut, you stumbled into one that was premade for most people like you. The rut was already made by people who existed long before you.

Loving wife, beautiful daughter, a comfy desk job with full benefits, and a salary that’s just big enough for said wife to be able to stay home and raise your daughter.

You feel this dichotomy. By seemingly most measures of societal success, you’ve won the game. It’s all side-quests from here. So why does it feel hollow? Is it because a significant part of your life is taken up by the mundane and exploitative nature of corporate America? The fact you spend most of your life either asleep or working for a group of people so out-of-touch with the needs of the people they deem beneath them? You’ve gone through this thought pattern before you’ve even brushed your teeth.

You get dressed in attire that you hope screams “I refuse to participate in this masquerade”, kiss your sleeping wife, and walk to the garage. You get into your boring car, turn it on, look for what album you want to listen to for your hour long drive to your cognitive labor camp while the car warms up.

There’s almost a dissociation that occurs between the half hour mark and the near-end of you commute. Lapses in consciousness that make you wonder how you even got there if you look it in the eyes. Only ever seemingly disrupted by cars with headlights that were engineered to make even Stevie Wonder think it’s too bright. I am Jack’s burning retinas.

You arrive at your office. You take a light puff of your THC vape pen, a jingle from a Serj Tankian song plays in your head:

anti-depressants controlling tools of your system. Making life more tolerable, making life more tol-er-a-ble.

You walk out into the city, it’s quiet. No surprise, it’s not even 7am yet. It feels almost like a liminal space to your liminal space between home and home. You get inside and walk to the kitchen…

(Continues in the blog)