We have been taught through years and generations of guilt-ridden rhetoric and patterns of somehow being constructive through self-hatred by religion, capitalism, and so much more.
And we have each of us grown up with it.
We have each of us an inheritance of a complex of loathing the self for not being something that is impossible to attain.
Magnate. Übermensch. Someone’s one and only love.
And then the realization comes: we are not taught to be productive to construct ourselves, but to construct a machine. We are chumped into being paid $10/hour to produce $100 worth of capital for someone above us. And when we fail, we are ashamed. We are ashamed of not being a business owner, a CEO, etc.
The tool of self-loathing is a powerful one in the exploitation of all of humanity. We may never learn when we loathe the self. We may apologise profusely, but the apology will always be about the self, when it must be about the other — and it is among the fundamental lies of this machine in which we live that everything is about the self. Our comfort may not be another’s. Our realities can never be shared. And a world in which we fight for the construction of a fictitious, materialist haven for ourselves is not constructive in the least. We may be apologists through the illusion that life is about individual pursuits for capital and building pretty nests alongside one another in the journey to becoming an empathetic fellow human to rise alongside others, which is the true struggle of our time, and in loathing the self as we’ve so learned we continue the structure that is a society based on people torturing themselves through work, failed romances, and addictions. We become complicit in the complexes of power that exist: the patriarchy, capitalism, and an implicitly racist society. No, we must rely on the nests we build within ourselves for our hearts to rest their weary selves on, comfortably, and sustainably.
So I call upon my fellow generation members to the greatest work we can ever do for humanity and for those ahead of us: to heal. To stop the self-hatred. We are facing a fever pitch of the greatest illness of all of human history, and it is time for us to come down from it all.
Stop the self-hatred. We can build something new. But we cannot continue to hate ourselves when comparing our lives to the guidelines of old as to what an ‘adult’ is to do with their life.
We didn’t choose to learn to hate ourselves, but alas, we did. The illness is a symptom of a dying machine. Let us not die with it, because we are not OF that machine.
It is not ours, and it is not doing us a single service. Not all of the technology, the social systems, the deft ability of medical care are a gift to us, as we are told, from the toiling of our prior generations.
It is not a gift, because it is not available. The wealth is stacked at the top, in the prior generations and their offspring, and the aforementioned ‘gifts’ do not exist to the vast majority of human beings. To disadvantage a single person is to do a disservice to all.
Let us build anew, and let us get well.