Just hanging on in there

I am searching for a job.

“You will operate with focus, agility, and an obsession with impact.”

It is depressing.

“You will have a passion for supply chains.”

Who has a passion for fucking supply chains?

“Together, we will relentlessly work toward one common goal - making supply chains better.”

When I was younger I had other ideas in mind about common goals we should all relentlessly work towards and reader, let me tell you, it wasn’t making supply chains better.

“Cheerful and motivated, you can build relationships, win people over and are confident meeting new people face to face.”

Cheerful? Motivated? Confident? Fucking hell. Well that rules me well out then.

“Strategically plan and implement high-impact brand activations in key urban centers to enhance visibility, generate buzz, and foster meaningful consumer connections.”

Brand activations? Meaningful consumer connections? Jesus Christ kill me now. Actually just kill me now.

“The ideal candidate thrives at the intersection of marketing and storytelling, leveraging tools like webinars, interviews, social media, and event activations to build momentum and align corporate messaging with business goals.”

I tried to understand how to leverage a tool and I threw up. Vomit everywhere. Now tell me I’m dead. Please tell me you killed me.

The language of capitalism is horrifically deadening, as if purposefully seeking to strip all joy from words themselves.

The jobs on offer in capitalism are deadening, as if purposefully seeking to strip all joy from the human experience itself.

Nevertheless I have spammed my CV and cover letter out to at least a dozen of these soulless entities, these miserable fake-happy corporate husks, hoping they’ll give me some money. Because, as a fellow traveller within capitalism, you will understand that people need money.

You will understand that the revolution, while desirable, has not yet arrived.

You will understand.

Yet despite all this common understanding, despite this unhappiness, despite the oppressive daily toil we trudge through in unison, we can’t get it together for that revolution, can we? So we spin off, split apart, atomise. We are forced by necessity to push our energy into the system rather than outwards and against it.

Most people don’t want to think too deeply about this existence. They don’t want to hold a scathing critique of their job in their mind at the same time as, well, having that job. A job which they rely on to survive. Because that would be paralysing. People need to disassociate to function within capitalism, a system that demands that when you write ‘relentlessly working towards the common goal of making supply chains better’ you are truly convinced this is your highest calling in life. Capitalism will convince you that you are truly passionate about the need for better supply chains. And you will be passionate about supply chains until you leave the supply chain job to write more banal words in the service of another merciless industry, at which point that new thing you’re selling or pushing, that new turd you’re polishing, will become your highest calling in life.

To function, capitalism requires us all to be expertly practiced in the art of cognitive dissonance.

There are some funny old jobs out there in the world of late capitalism.

In my search to find a turd to polish for money I found out there are companies that exist solely to scour social media for emerging influencers who they then market and fine-tune to help sell product to their followers. This is what has driven the explosion of reality TV programming in the last decade or so. Get on TV, even for a few episodes, and you’re pretty much guaranteed tens of thousands of Instagram followers. Followers secure, you can get on the roster of an influencer management company, get salaried and start receiving product.

It’s all entirely transactional, fake and meaningless.

“Have you seen Marina is showing her Coachella look.”

Who? What?

Brain rot.

But yet, still, who could blame a young person for wanting to be an influencer?

No one cares any more about anything. The pretence that a job should also, on some level, help create a better world is dead. Companies are dropping their DEI initiatives and scrapping their ESG pledges. Sustainability is passé. Woke is over. Bring on the sleep of the dead.

It feels as if something has shifted since the pandemic, like we’ve all been given a cultural license to consume our way to obliteration. Like we’re in a new cultural phase, the accelerated death drive. I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t overstate the case or speak for the feelings of others. Maybe nothing changed. Maybe it’s just me.

That’s what I was thinking.

Until I came across a job offering subsidised egg freezing. And it made me think something really is changing. Woke is dead, long live woke. I can well imagine a corporate culture under New Woke that professes concern and support for women’s choices but which is actually designed to control women’s choices.

What else can subsidised egg freezing really be other than a subtle attempt to pressure women into not having children at peak fertility age? To ensure they keep hustling for the company, to enable them to progress smoothly along a career trajectory without the ‘troublesome’ child gap. It looks to me like a fake progressive policy with very sinister undertones. I expect we’ll see more and more employee packages come with subsidised egg freezing benefits.

New Woke. You heard it here first.

Then there’s AI. So much AI. A significant and worrying trend I spotted were the companies in various sectors hiring people to train their generative AI models.

These jobs will be taken by humans who, in doing so, will be training AIs to put many more humans out of work in the future. (I suspect that’s what happened to me. A job I was expecting this summer writing a report for a client I’d worked for previously fell through, and I strongly suspect it’s because they got AI to do the bulk of the writing).

Anyway.

People need money and they need it now. So people will willingly train AI models while disassociating from the impact. They will train AI and tell themselves a fairy-tale about the utility and value of AI to future human existence. These AI models will then take the jobs of millions of people.

If countries don’t get it together and introduce universal basic incomes, we’re all fucked. How are we not? How is AI not going to result in massive unemployment? I’ve never seen a good answer to this question.

I don’t expect governments will give us free money. The logic of the market and the lie of a meritocracy will grind on and on and on, the managers of the system unable to betray the system. The AIs will be processing our taxes, filling out the spreadsheets, writing the reports and running the factories while our leaders will still be telling us about the wonderful opportunities on offer if only we weren’t all such lay-abouts.

The march of a deadening ideology that strips the joy from life and the meaning from words will continue apace.

Is anybody truly happy?

I went to see a doctor the other week and when I asked how he was, he told me he was “hanging on in there.” It was a good summation of the situation. Globally. Aren’t we all?

A good friend I spent a couple of days with last week and who is objectively successful in his career told me he doesn’t feel satisfied or content with life.

I imagine he’s experiencing constant post-purchase dissonance, the disappointment of realising your latest purchase, your new job, your bigger salary, your new partner, doesn’t fulfil its promise. The new thing just doesn’t fill that yawning chasm inside.

This feeling of dissatisfaction is not just integral to consumer capitalism, it is the structural basis for it.

But if in the new phase of capitalism all the pretence has been stripped away and there’s only consumerism, and if we can’t consume our way to happiness, then what’s left?

A retreat into nation.

Into ethno-nationalism.

Fascism I suppose.

It all tracks, doesn’t it?

That’s the road we’re on. And we’ve passed some waymarkers now.

I’ll resist it how I can, but then my other thought: if capitalism leads inexorably to fascism but I’m forced to participate in capitalism, am I also not just helping pave the road to fascism?

And if this is late capitalism (and it appears it is) then how close before the transition is fully made?

The thoughts pile up, the doom-loop spins, genocide advances, nuclear war looms, the exit points shrink.

I get back to the job search.