The lack of direction and real grip is most apparent in the conversations I have. With few exceptions these are not even conversations, but people regulating their own nervous system by talking in the direction of where my face is. 

Monologues about a drunken night in a cramped place with the decidedly not edgy name ‘joy’ where the person delighting me with his amazing experiences was asked for XTC by a young girl. Repeatedly. The unique sadness of seeing a middle aged man go have a ‘wild’ night after decades of domestication, neutered family, with a woman whose enormous disrespect he seems oblivious too, calmly, blundered into, as if life is a little joke. Something one does by copying scripts one doesn’t really respect, but is there an alternative? 

I find myself unable and unwilling to respond anymore, beyond what the most basic politeness requires, unless am being paid to listen to this and find something meaningful in the omnipresent drift. 

They end up as copies of copies of coffee stained copies. 

Boring job. Uneventful office parties and a hangover the next day. The occasional escape into a night life one is too old and too de-erotized for to get anything like real aliveness out of it. It can only be done as a joke. But who is then the butt of the joke? 

The effects of alcohol visible in the redness of their faces, their pear shaped bodies and perpetually tired look. Yet they will all claim they eat healthily. 

It wouldn’t bother me so much if I had clearer things to put my energy into, things that would for sure pay off, but in my current setup I don’t find anything like that, there’s just maintenance and some optimization. There is nothing that scales or has the potential to scale. 

They embrace the drift, I hate the drift. They may not see the waste, the lack of real direction, to them it’s just life. 

Where it gets irritating is seeing my own focus going into condemning the rot around me, instead of using all my energy to escape the rot. 

What immobilizes me is the fear that the rot is already everywhere and that my surest best to avoid most of it, is by living life as if am on a small island in a sea of disgusting creatures and finding some solace in reading books about high stakes, about strategizing to win big, and not comfort chasing smallness and asking the human brain to become masterful at selecting furniture that goes well with the wallpaper or calculating how many daily steps can undo binge eating (answer: no amount of steps will save you from the toxic structures that make you binge eat). 

If I don’t find more things and people who ignite me I will fade away entirely.