Enough is Enough.

Here’s our way out of this economy’s hyperactive consumer death spiral.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I’ve had enough.

I’m a promising young American and I’ve hated every job I’ve ever had. I don’t like fast fashion, fast food or Marvel sequels. I don’t like Target. I don’t like expensive clubs or expensive cafés or expensive remodeled gentrifier apartments. I don’t like what socializing is like these days, what options I have if I want to enjoy my life with other human beings.

Even if I liked the options, it costs too much money to have fun. It is prohibitively expensive for ordinary people to live in a way that’s really comfortable and every lucrative job description reads like a jail sentence. Not to mention, we criminalize poverty so much that being poor is practically a jail sentence all on its own.

I have two words for American capitalism: fuck this.

The problem is, of course, that walking away from it is not allowed.

Every time I think I’ve found a way to live a good life without running the ol’ rat race, it’s replete with complications. If it’s even legal, there are so many logistical hoops to jump through, so many extra fees to pay or difficult arrangements to make that it’s just not viable anymore. If, by some miracle, it might be viable, it’s immediately overrun with a gold rush of disillusioned young people desperate for a shot at a decent life. In comes the money, with it comes the commodification, and out goes everything that made that alternative worth trying.

Mine is not the first or only voice to say this, of course, but I find it important to join the chorus. Let’s say it louder for the folks in the back: Enough is enough.

In case you have any judgments left about young Americans, let me make this abundantly clear: we want to live. We’re not idealistic rebels because we think it’s cool. We’re rebels because our economy is a miserable death cult, and we’re idealistic because we have to come up with an alternative to this miserable death cult before it swallows us all whole.

We want to live good lives while the world still lasts. We don’t even know if we’re going to survive into middle-age on this planet, so the least we can do is make our last days…