Matthew Prill
Contributing Writer
Your phone buzzes angrily—it’s the fire alarm option that you picked last night in order to give you that extra oomph to boost you out of your slumber. It’s Tuesday morning, early. Or is it Wednesday? It doesn’t matter, because to you every day feels the same—the same muted shade of gray that blends one day into the next with the stroke of a paintbrush. It is the same for everyone. Whether your time is spent in a uniform office cubicle, subject to the ugly haze of fluorescent lights suspended overhead, or in the classroom, whose four walls envelop you in an abyss of homogeneity, you are overwhelmed by the drabness that life has bestowed upon you. To combat this repetitive nature and daily minutiae, you look forward to the coming weeks when you will sip mimosas on the glistening sands of the beach, purging yourself of the desolation that has come to characterize your life. Or perhaps you are anxious for the weekend, when the stress of classes and homework is resolved, and offset by the blaring sound emanating from speakers underneath an ocean of vibrancy. You think to yourself that all of your problems will whisper away once you are embraced by the sea breeze and the pulsating mass of the party.
And for a minute they do—you become enchanted with life again through the very act of escaping it, devoid of the drudgery that plagued you. That is, until you return from your place in the clouds, grounded by the reality that you once again must frequent your shackling routine. When you cannot wait for the next weekend, the next vacation, the next break in the succession, you turn to more rapid methods of accelerated freedom to release you from your prison of nothingness. You are liberated by the glinting luminescence of your phone, whose constant presence burns a hole in your pocket, the icons of its applications tempting you to lose yourself in a swirl of fabrication. Or maybe instead you are freed by immersion through a screen that comforts you with a reality more appealing than your own, spinning fantastical tales that pacify your emptiness. Even if you are aware of your slavery to fiction, there is nothing that you are able to do in order to end it. You have become addicted to this fantasy, delirious with the glee of evading daily life’s repetition, and you utilize any format—media, respite, substances—to satisfy your craving. Perhaps if our reality were different you would not be reliant on the warmth of delusion. But it is not. Since the beginning of your existence, you have been viewed as an extension of capital. You have been reared to become another student, teacher, lawyer, janitor, accountant, nurse, truck driver, another worker that is grasped by commercialization. Instead of living for what life itself is, you view it through the lens of what it could be, what it needs to be. You have never lived solely to live, or existed merely to exist. You have only existed as a singular facet of an irrevocable society that objectifies you, that molds you into something external from yourself. You are no longer yourself, but rather what society has constructed you to be: another speck of an ant slaving itself away for a queen that gives you nothing in return.
You wish that you could enjoy life, but the perpetual alienation that defines it does not allow you. So you wait for the coming weeks when you will sip mimosas on the glistening sands of the beach, purging yourself of the desolation that has come to characterize your life.