I just feel like: if my life isn’t where I wanted it to be by this point, why should I be courteous to others. There’s no reciprocity from them anyways. All I do is live this rut of go work, home and sleep. I know nobody nearby who I can relate to. It drives me crazy how I haven’t met any of these milestones for career, family, or friends. I’m just by myself, screaming explitives into a digital void.
I just don’t like anybody because of that. I don’t like my coworkers and their simple Maga brains, I don’t like my rural locality and it’s dependency on service work for the elderly. I don’t like any of the workers in those services because of how cowed they are and how short they sell themselves. Part of me thinks they deserve their misery for putting up with it all the time. I don’t like the conservative culture of my area and how it limits who I can relate to on a personal level. All this just makes me not like people in general and I feel myself becoming more embittered these days. And even if was more amenable like I used to be, experience has told me that people still wouldn’t want to bother with me anyways. Idk, these days I have such a jaded view of everyone around me.
you have to organize, and you have to move somewhere that it’s possible. join a party, get a job in a real working class unionized sector, and do community work. you’re dying on the vine and you have so much more life and joy to bring to the world than getting it out on the internet!
you will be so much happier, even if it’s hard you have to try. it’ll take time but it’ll be worth it i promise you
What unionized sector, there are none here. This ain’t New York, this is where New York sends all its lower class failsons. They all think they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires and don’t need anyone to help them out.
Look at teamsters unionized warehouses, package delivery sectors, bus driving, and worst comes to worst find a craft trade sector. I know plenty of floridians that are building real revolutionary organization, you definitely will need to move to an area thats less petty bourgeois though it seems that aligns with what you want in your life anyways.
I can tell you want working class connections, and youre gonna have to leave petty b areas if you dont want to slowly lose your mind with them. You might have to sacrifice a bit, but it will be worth it i promise. Ive known plenty of people in your exact situation and all of them even the ones that work rough jobs are much much happier in their lives and all their loved ones can tell too.
I don’t want to associate with anyone, really. I despise the professional fields because they think they’re better than me because they’re educated and have a job corresponding to their degree and I don’t. I hate the management and petite bourgeois because of their conservative politics and their faux country suburban aesthetic. EVERYTHING has to be deer camo, F150s, and Kid Rock to these people who make up 40 percent of the population. Hell, Kid Rock even came through my area in the boiling sun. The way they preen themselves at their churches like a bunch of local notables on pagan times would.
And I especially despise the working class for several reasons which I can summarize as it’s ignorance, undignified cowardice, and it’s confident embrace of a lumpenized aesthetics and attitudes that my father (a long time factory worker) taught me to reject. The working class in this country is constituted of a bunch of broken families who drive broken cars and live in morose and broken communities. They have no perspective beyond their own immediate concerns and the ones that do are often religious conservatives. The constant state of precarity they live in leaves them unable to do nothing more than work and care for their children. The god they ask to ameliorate their conditions will sooner bring about paradise on earth than these people will ever take it amongst themselves to resist their oppression.
Some of them engage in every habit I keep away from, from excessive indulgence in alcohol, to an unhealthy consumption of the most unhealthy of foods, to the smoking of all substances both licit and illicit and even further use of drugs. My father has always chastised them in general for never being able to match his work ethic. And I feel if I associate with such people, their misfortunes will become my weight to bear.
Experience has shown me there is little reciprocity from people who constantly are in a state of their own crisis. This is not the constituency to build any sort of counter systemic force, frankly the constant state of crisis they’re in probably just conservatizes them more and reinforces capitalist maxims. You can’t save these people, and neither can the Teamsters or milquetoast public sector union that represents the school bus drivers in my county. Capital has won. That is the reality we will always live with.
You despise the petty bourgeois rightfully, but you carry their ideology around with you with your resentment towards the working class. You need stronger class analysis which i dont blame you for not having cuz the left in this country has incredibly weak class analysis in comparison to international groups. You make a lot of correct analyses but youre blinded by the lack of clarity in the relationship between strata.
Youre correctly analyzing that the lower strata of the working class is too immiserated by the conditions of existence to effectively organize, while the upper strata and petty bourgeois have too much disdain for the working class and too much self importance to make a difference. The reason why i point towards unionized working class sectors is because the unions provide stability and an extra working class association to organize in.
Unions can only ever prevent losses to the working class, and yet every win in a union both provides real benefits to people and teaches working class people how to struggle against the enemy. However unions only staving off immiseration is why we need a real communist party, and we need to build one in this generation so next generations dont get handed down the same problem.
Ultimately imo it all boils down to you being an individual. You will not be revolutionary and you will not be a communist if youre not in a party that can effectively facilitate your transformation into a revolutionary. You can either contribute to the cause of revolution in this country - the heart of empire where we can deliver the most possible damage to imperialism - or give up on being a communist, which to be clear is fine. Our subjective life experiences determine how much we can contribute to the struggle in our lives. From what ive heard, i would love to have you in my party and your class background and upbringing would make you an incredible fighter, but its ultimately up to you whether your personal life trajectory lines up with this cause or not.
The first part you said checks out, my dad tried to run his own restaurant after cooking in his brother’s for 15 years. Almost failed a year into it and cut his losses. Then it was thirty years of factory production and janitorial work at minimum wage. He despises idleness to a great extent with a petite bourgeois eye for efficiency.
Now, let me make something very clear: Capital won, there will be no revolution, no union is going to save you and certainly no communist party will either. The historical context that made all those things possible does not exist anymore and won’t come back. People in America think communists will come to pillage their
farmsteadsfront lawns and shit because that’s what a century of propaganda and propertarian settler brain does to a society. There will never again be a functioning communist party in America that has more than idk, 2000 members (I can’t remember the exact figure from Varn’s analysis of the history of communist parties in America exactly). For God’s sake, workers aren’t even the revolutionary subject for communists to recruit from anymore, university students are and have been since the post war period.Frankly, can the state just put the American labor movement out of its misery already by mass decertifying all the labor unions with a Supreme Court decision? It’s not like they need them to be a counter weight against a strong communist movement anymore. Then we can all just get on with our lives because we will finally have all the delusions of labor’s emerging relevance dissipated in one fell swoop. I won’t have to hear anymore about how a couple of baristas at Starbucks are the reincarnation of the Bolsheviks.
This is gonna be my last reply cuz theres not really anywhere else for this conversation to go. Its either through the experience of your life that the ideology of the working class - communism and marxism leninism - makes sense to you or you smash together a hundred ideologies like the petty b.
Your ideology is petty b, and not close to marxist leninist, or even communist. To believe students are the revolutionary force in this country is literally the ideology of the intelligentsia and petty b. I dont know how much more apparent that can be.
You cant claim to know the fate of the working class in this country without having even struggled against the enemy. People learn through struggle, and you cant call the shots of history from the caboose without even participating.
The issue with the left in this country is that its largely a movement from the upper middle strata to the petty bourgeois, meaning the socialist movement and the working class movement are entirely separate entities making both extremely weak and easy to push aside. If we can succeed at fusion of these two movements we can have the type of communist movement youre imagining. As marxists we start from our objective conditions and unless you want the next generation to suffer the exact same struggle as you with previous generations suffering from petty b ideology and skipping out on struggle, we have to build a real communist party thats representative of the working class. You either participate, or let others do it for you.
I’m not saying that I personally believe students are the revolutionary subject of communism, I’m just stating what the situation for organizing has looked like in this country since the 60s. You can’t call a sober observation petite bourgeois for stating that. Ideally, the whole damn movement should come from the workers who run the whole damn economy by coming together to plan their common goals for the whole of the society that they belong to. I don’t really know what the revolutionary subject is or if there’s still even one because again, material conditions have changed raidcally from the last century.
We could potentially even be on the brink of mass swaths of the population further having being made redundant depending on whether the AI thing is a serious game changer for the capitalist or just another money hole the shovel QE funds into. Imagine the wrench that will throw into the thesis of the worker as revolutionary subject when even more of them are separated from participating in production. What then? Good Marxist theory has to be a living tradition that studies and analyzes the evolving paradigm of political economy that we live under. Frankly, it’s that aversion to that and the dogmatic reverence for dead Leninist movements that makes me so averse to joining any organization. People like that aren’t living in reality.
I personally take the opposite approach. If everyone else is as miserable as I am then I should go out of my way to be kind to them and make them less miserable.
I’m not going to do that, I’ve always been a third wheel in these situations and I’m not going to make a fool of myself trying to help these ungrateful people.
I think that’s probably why you’re feeling the way you are though. It sucks to be the first to reach out a hand every time but once in a while someone worthwhile takes it and that makes it all mean something. To me anyway. If community will not magically appear at your doorstep then you have to build it yourself
I’ve never really had long term friends. Frankly I just feel it’s easier to accept the capitalist paradigm that all the people around me are self interested little units that don’t live beyond their own self gratification. The workers don’t want solidarity and community, they want Popeyes, they want Disney cruises, or at least they want their next cigarette break They want treats and will burn down the world to get them. They don’t give a damn about me beyond what I can provide for them (probably free pizza). They have no time to think beyond that and are being conditioned to only think in those terms.
You are answering every question with ‘no’ or ‘but’, and you’re clearly starting with those words before you’ve even thought about people’s answers properly. Either you can try your hardest to do something about it, or stay miserable forever.
You get one life. Sometimes you have to take the hard road. I live in a tiny flat with two 50 year old men, one evangelical and one drunk, because I moved to a new place and had to just take something - anything - to get me started. One day I’ll move into a better spot, but even now, I’m happier than I ever could be in my home town.
I would prefer the latter. There is security in the familiar, as soul crushing as it is.
So your options are A. the crushing of thy soul or B. the scary and unfamiliar.
Maybe there’s a compromise.
Is there anyone you like in this world? Anyone you feel understands you? Go visit them. Experience what it’s like to have an actual support system even if it’s just for a weekend.
I’ve been in a similar situation as you. I ended up moving back to my home town purely for the friends that still lived there and honestly it was one of the best decisions of my life. Had to live through the covid crisis at my moms house but at this point I’m so glad I decided to move back over struggling to keep my head above water completely isolated from the people I care about.
I don’t know anyone. I don’t really have any friends that have support systems either. And compared to them, I live in a somewhat less sexist, less homophobic society.
Idk, at this point I just feel empty knowing so much of what I believe in was foolish to hope for to begin with. I feel nothing thinking about these other people. Their lives are so similar and meaningless to me, like some sort of blur. And the worst part is that every day, I have to see the end of that process, where people are reduced to the most base form of consumer. Where you spend the last years of your life just eating and being moved around and kept alive to be an input for a whole hierarchy of health care administrators to leech off your pension.
Maybe a change of scenery is in order? There are lots of really affirming, affordable, and politically malleable places close by the edge of the prairie.
What, like Payne’s Prairie?
That’s not what I had in mind- I was thinking of the edge of the contiguous great american prairie that includes Chicago, Madison, Louisville, and many other worthy places for organizing and self-development.
But as it turns out, there is an entry point into the destituent nexus, less than 30 miles from what you suggested.
Yeah, I went to college there. Won’t matter, transient student population and domineering state government. The working class in Florida couldn’t even organize a hurricane party, nevermind a union. They’re just a bunch of seashells in a bag, they don’t constitute anything that could stand up against power.
I wasn’t referring to anything connected to that university. Just something that happens to be within a county or so, and not something that’s mainly based there.
There are lots of things to vent about in our imperial core late-capitalist hellhole, but ultimately we are going to need to cultivate more than just disdain in ourselves. Nobody is on the cusp of toppling or even openly challenging the empire from within; if they were, they would have done it already. Everything takes a buildup. You seem to be expressing your frustration at not having a path to such a buildup, and I am trying to point you towards a few of them.
Do you want to end up somewhere that’s not “where you wanted to be” but is divergently satisfying, and feel affinity, shared purpose, and righteous rage with a bunch of flawed yet remarkable and ardent people? Or do you just want to chill in metro Disney and feel contempt for the liberal subjects around you?
divergently satisfying, and feel affinity, shared purpose, and righteous rage with a bunch of flawed yet remarkable and ardent people
Honestly, to me that is a beautiful dream worth striving for.
Happiness is a bullshit concept that probably doesn’t exist and if it does is impossible to achieve, so I don’t refer to it. But I’ll be darned if meaning, connection, continuity, and a little bit of material security aren’t as close as one can get.
At this point I have contempt for everyone. I have contempt for all the treat brained liberal subjects in central Florida, and I have contempt for all The “flawed yet remarkable and ardent people” who are trying to build community and counter systemic politics.
I especially feel anger at the latter because I feel like they’re lying to me when they say so confidently that they can change things. They can’t. At this point, I am beginning to feel a sense of catharsis watching those people fail and get pulled further and further into the grinding maw of the capitalist system. Serves them right for spending years raising people’s hopes with false promises.
It seems you are experiencing something that is to socialist organizing the way male incels are to women. You’ve struggled to get into it, you’ve had a long deadening drought of personal connections, and part of the way your brain is responding to this is with a kind of “blackpill” reasoning. But that’s not going to help you. It’s just a dead end that will slightly reduce your cognitive/emotional dissonance, at the expense of your ability to make real human connection.
There’s a perfectionist aspect of this as well. “It’s not going to go from zero to Union or zero to Party in 3.5 years, so why try?” But I guarantee you, trying something and reaching something that’s way short of the goal, or ends up in a different place from what you were aiming for, is way more satisfying than trying nothing and then giving yourself the empty assurance that it was inevitable that nothing would ever happen anyways.
Politics is not what your opinion is; politics is what you do with other people. If you let yourself stop trying, your smugness and dismissiveness will start to turn inward on yourself, if it hasn’t already. And it will be accurate in doing so, because if you don’t work on something that’s larger than yourself, you are just another liberal subject, with the only difference being that you’re poorly calibrated to your reality.
You have to get over the fear of shortcoming. If that means moving, then move. There are lots of lonely people on this site whom I would gladly just buy a train ticket for to get to my area, I just need the space for accommodation first.
The leftist equivalent of “work out and get a hobby.” How well has that really done anyone? Do we see any less alienated people here because of that?
Just move and quit wallowing in your own shit. I was from there and i was miserable and I got the fuck out and now I have a life. It’s actually quite simple.
It goes one of two two ways. Either you’ll come up with 600 excuses why that isn’t possible because you have no intention of actually having any kind of future, or you will leave.
Just move and quit wallowing in your own shit. I was from there and i was miserable and I got the fuck out and now I have a life. It’s actually quite simple.
“just”
fuck sake
It really isn’t though. If you can save up a month’s rent deposit (which you should be able to do if you have a job), you can just move elsewhere. It’s not going to be easy, but it is doable, and people do it all the time.
I’ll stick with the former.
Hey friend. It really does help to have like minded people to vent with even if it’s online
I’m sorry you’re feeling depressed and for whatever it’s worth I had a similar sounding mental break when I was about 20.
That being said are you trying to convince others to be depressed or just trying to justify your growing misanthropy? You’re acting like you’re in a debate on the side of “everyone else give up with me”
That does appear to be what it looks like. I’m really screaming into a void right there. Maybe it’s my anger at the whole culture of “revolutionary optimism” that I see online. It seems like a mockery when I read about stuff like the continuation of the genocide in Gaza or the beginnings of the ICE kidnappings and the conditions the people they kidnap are kept in. How can anyone be optimistic when vast swaths of the country support this?! How the hell can anyone see the good in people as a whole?! At this point I just see either bumbling and naively optimistic people on the left (as much as I still respect their good intentions, I must criticize this) and literal cold blooded killers on the right who want to slowly pick us all off. And we just go about our lives, going through the motions until it’s our turn on the future. And we’re re supposed to be optimistic about the outcome of this just because a socdem won a primary in New York for a municipal race?!
I’m not about to tell you the left is winning or that the future looks bright.
Revolutionary optimism is revolutionary because it’s hard to be optimistic in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.
I understand the urge to give up. I personally won’t judge someone who can’t take losing over and over again but it would be nice if you didn’t try to drag everyone else down with you
Thank you for your understanding. I appreciate it a bit.
Though I will voice my opinion to give a voice to this feeling in what otherwise would be an echo chamber.
“revolutionary optimism” that I see online
If it makes you angry, maybe don’t participate in it? I also don’t particularly like the online left, which is why I limit my interactions a lot. Being active in an org also helps bc people there are often more pragmatic.
I don’t trust orgs. Fear or group project energy tbh.
I felt like you in my twenties. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but things will start to click into place if you just keep at it.
I agree with others here that say you should consider moving. If nothing is holding you down, get out for a while. You can always go back home. Moving to a bigger city can give you some perspective and open your options up.
I hope things turn around for you though. I really didn’t like myself when I was feeling that way, and it made me examine my cycles and relationships.
“the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.” - Che Guevara
Why are you posting this? What do you want?
Nobody here can make you care. We can’t open your heart for you. I find this talk inspiring, but I’m sure you’ll find reasons not to like it. Don’t bother telling me them, I don’t care.
If you don’t like people, then people won’t like you. Frankly, your post makes me not like you. I assume that you’re posting because you’re looking for help, though, and I want to help you, but I see you batting away help and I don’t really want to put in effort if you won’t.
You wanna wallow in sadness? Fine, but don’t expect others to drag you out. In the future, I’d ask that you clearly indicate that you’re not looking for advice.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I’m posting this because I’m sad and angry at society and my peers. I’m angry at the selfishness, cowardice, and incompetence shown by both sides of the issues we all care about, but especially our side because we just keep losing and it keeps getting worse because of that.
I had a great feeling of love that made me think in revolutionary terms and it died inside of me after learning how selfish, stupid, cowardly, and evil people really are and realizing that nothing we can do can stop that.
I’ll give you that people are stupid, but only if it applies to you and me as well.
I see the flaws in humanity and I still love us. I hope one day you’ll find it in yourself to love us too.
I’m stupid and I feel myself declining every day. Sometimes I wonder if I’m getting a touch demented, given how shot my short term memory is these days.
But on the other hand, my reading comprehension is at least well above that of the average worker, which usually hovers at a 7th grade reading level. Remember the most challenging literature most of these folks in America will ever read is Animal Farm./s
If I love humanity, I am very disappointed in it. I’m disappointed in everyone, including myself.
I’ll take one idiot that’s trying their hardest over a dozen smug geniuses that won’t lift a finger to help.
Nobody will ever make you proud of yourself. You are the only person that can do that. If you’re not willing to try, please let me know and I’ll stop wasting my time.
We need a revolution. We need help. It’s time to put up or shut up.
I’d probably feel the same way if I lived in florida. Start living, as in contextually in your own head, “day by day”. Then, maybe, some day you’ll be able to get out of there and make things work for you. The cliches are called such for a reason. All you can do is to strive towards what you believe in, what you want, and hope that luck catches you working.
All my beliefs have been crushed. I don’t know what I want to do with my life. My interest in being an educator was born out of a liberal interest in helping nurture informed citizens and that belief carried over as my politics shifted well to the left. Now I realize most of the public are ignorant drones that can easily be fooled with appeals to prejudice and scape goating. Got a systemic societal problem caused by capitalism, well I can guarantee you that at least forty percent of the American population will think it’s the
Jewscriminal illegal immigrants./s For every one student you help, at least 25 more grow up to be apathetic or supporters of the fascist regime.
Are you on Bluesky? Find me on there @butlersghost.bsky.com I wanna connect w/ you
Why? I’m just a sardonic alligator thumbnail.
Don’t wanna say too much but I would like to help if I can
Not OP and not trying to pry since you said you “don’t wanna say too much” but I can’t help but be curious why connecting on Bluesky would be any better than just talking or DM’ing here, or better yet on something actually end to end encrypted like matrix. (Also just a heads up, your handle on bsky ends with a .social not a .com)
I am computer stupid and don’t have element
I just feel like: if my life isn’t where I wanted it to be by this point, why should I be courteous to others.
They promise everyone their personal wishes will be fulfilled, and then when they’re not they take that as license to act like psychopaths.
What a fucked up culture. #arethewoidsok
Yes, it’s so selfish to want to belong in this society instead of just putting all your interpersonal needs aside and just subsuming yourself into a bumbling sectarian cult because of a meme quoting some theorist who died a century ago.
