The ‘I am fine’ society.


Seek status, seek pleasure. Rub as many people’s noses in tokens of your pleasure and status. Run towards the next dopamine hit. Get a ‘good’ job, meaning a well-paying one where your finger nails won’t break. Call jobs you secretly look down on, ‘important’ jobs. Jobs that need doing, but would make you feel like an utter failure if it were your job. Nurses, trash collectors, kindergarten teachers, cleaners, highschool teachers, cashiers, couriers, warehouse workers, factory workers, construction workers. Anything hard, anything vital, but underpaid and underrespected is an ‘important’ job. Important jobs will make you the least important person in the room at public events or in any other room. Strive to be an entrepreneur, at least as a side hustle. Oh, and find your passion. Work for a company that calls its staff ‘a family’, a dysfunctional one, but surely a family. Smile at team buildings. Nod in online meetings organized by someone who wanted to feel important. Get excited about mass spectacles. Officially organized to honor and celebrate praise worthy values, but really to let some marketing savvy folks turn a profit via your excitement over non-essential gimmicks. Shop. Buy more stuff. Get a pet. Buy more stuff, for the pet. Get kids. Prepare them for 25 years for a ‘good’ job and help them avoid having an ‘important’ job at all costs.

If disasters strike in places far away, go ‘tragic, but there’s nothing I can do about that.’

Spend so much energy on being unique that your carefully groomed uniqueness makes you look just like everyone else.

Sum up complex issues in one-liners you’ve picked up from sources long forgotten.

Sedate yourself.

It’s hard to stop doing something that almost fulfils you, but not quite.

Do yoga, meditate, journal, exercise, take cold showers, join the 5 am club for two days, go to seminars, buy self-help books, also buy some rebellious anti-self-help books, which are also self-help books, just a little more acidic, practice mindfulness, get a therapist specialized in cognitive behaviour therapy and get your dog a dog trainer, avoid sugar, but not on cheat days, of which there are many, like pictures of nature from air-cooled office rooms and bedrooms turned into home office spaces.

Go on a holiday that will require another holiday to recover from it.

Keep your options open at all times. Never commit to anyone or anything. A rolling stone never gathers moss (it also never forms the foundation for anything).

Consume, be milked, stand in a meadow chewing, staring at trains passing by, vote for those who, with their small club of friends, do the milking.

Swallow pills for inexplicable existential angst. Put your oddly restless, oddly unfocused, must be genetic, kids on ritalin.  

Never tell the truth to ‘How are you doing?’

Say fine:

Freaked out, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.

Choose short term pleasure, or at least the momentary absence of pain, over long term growth. Use any excuse to avoid confronting your own demons.

Live vicariously through actors, athletes, politicians, famous chefs, influencers, singers, tik tok stars…

Buy a box on wheels to go to work in a box to pay for a box to live in and be buried in a box.

Call anyone who rejects this model a loser.