Finding Meaning In A Loyalty Rewards Program World

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“If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the “higher ups” so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

You crave it. You’d almost kill for it to prove yourself right. It lurks in the back of your mind nearly every hour of everyday while you wear it on your sleeve at the same time. The routine that naively once gave you purpose has now become a feedback loop of stagnant sameness, the one that now gives you anxiety just thinking about oscillating the merry-go-round again. It has all but proven your worst deep recessed fears of being a living, breathing human-being in the world of today. The world of the chaotic unknown. The very same unknown chaos that festers in your head and in your heart. You’re addicted to the feeling when it shines through and vividly presents itself yet you feel sick from the withdrawal effects after it burns out like a wicker flame into that cold, confusing nothingness that surrounds you for most of your waking hours. It’s as if your subconscious is always shivering in its own privately self-constructed February hellscape. The one that could easily be destroyed by meer action yet the invisible mental weight sits on your chest and suffocates you like the elephant in the room, the same elephant in every man-made room ever constructed, everywhere.

Some people in high places were able to discover this feeling of sheer vulnerability early on and exploit it along with everyone else that they could access on a basis of relational empathy. They acted as if they had all the answers to the deep secrets. The great, mystical wonders of existence. They then turned it into a branded loyalty rewards program with a curriculum for transactions except the transactions were paid for in deep seeded feelings and defensive belief and the product was aided salvation and oneness. When the finances started to be followed and called into question, some people would find that the pioneers had gold covered ceilings and cryptic symbols with an elaborate wardrobe to boot while the followers remained destitute, toiling away each day to “get theirs” while in competition with one another at the same time within an intelligently crafted economic system that idiotically didn’t offer much to be had for them from the start except “pure” extraction and manipulated dependency.

In a system that requires constant growth, how can anyone expect that if the one’s propping it up no longer have the means to perpetuate it? This is where we find ourselves today. They cleverly masked division behind the guise of unity and demanded adherence in the form of doled out freedom with reliance subtly written in the disclaimer. When your main product for sale is a story with an operating principle, the story flies off the shelves and it has limitless inventory when you consider the ever expanding real estate of people’s own minds and the depth of human imagination companioned with desperation. Once they pry into that, which they are trying to do now, that’s the final frontier before the well of individualism runs dry.

If you think I’m talking only about religion or economics or consumerism, you’re not completely wrong but you’re also not completely right either. What I’m trying to reference is something more meaningful. Something all encompassing from multiple facets. Meaningful in every sense of it’s own word. What I’m really getting at is meaning itself. Purpose. Finding that purpose in what we do every day. The things that take up most of our daily finite time here on this planet that have seemingly become devoid of it when looking in from a far off vantage point. The kind of view that you can’t find for a discount on Travelocity. The kind that can’t even be fully realized from the ionosphere as if you were studying us as a species from a clandestine mothership or a self funded spacecraft escape pod. You can’t fully realize it until you’ve lived it for a long period of time. It’s the perspective from that same relational empathy that has formed the very system we operate within that was created by people who lived it and saw an opportunity to capitalize on it for themselves, only generations in the making. We didn’t choose this life outright, well, most of us didn’t anyway but there are plenty of terrifying subtle reminders for us in case we think about deviating from this preexisting condition that will scare us back into maintaining the status quo.

The reminders are everywhere. It’s the same fear mongering news headlines you hear on a constant recurring basis. It’s the unemployment office. It’s that junkie with that deadpan stare and empty cup in his hand, tapping your driver side window during a red light on your commute to an unstable job that doesn’t stimulate you in the least. It’s the debt collector calls and the moving field goal post of inflation and interest.

The search for meaning begins and ends with the search itself. Physically, mentally, spiritually. As long as the navigation traces the circumference, it envelopes back into itself endlessly. Only until you cut to the epicenter via the radius, you can rest and observe this happening. Being centered is the end goal but in a society so focused on the outer fringes, it goes against the interests of the architects so they make it more and more difficult to reach. It’s planned obsolescence in the form of man-made inverted gravity.

What if I were to tell you that there is no meaning? Surely, I’m wrong. Half wrong. There is meaning and it’s purely subjective. In a place that strips itself of meaning or injects a false purpose on a treadmill quest, it’s hard to see but I promise you that it’s out there. You create your own meaning and once you’ve built a solid enough foundation with the ones that help make up that meaning, no one else can pull the veil over your eyes and try to sway you toward their toxic one. Don’t be lured by the matador. We’ve been secretly getting stabbed in the back for too long. Everyone is in this together so eliminating ourselves only creates another void in the system. A void that’s less secure than the one before it. We’re more in demand than the ones making the said demands.

After all, life is all about angles and geometry. It’s mostly made up of circles and triangles. Everywhere.

– Nived.

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Nived_Neirbo

Optimistic pessimist, Profoundly unimportant