As bad as things are right now, something very important to remember is that these dark times we’re currently in are only the beginning. I try to be aware of this whenever I find myself feeling depressed or in some kind of funk where I’m not fully appreciating what I’ve currently got. Even though times are kind of bad right now due to the covid situation, I force myself to be mindful that it is currently the best it’s ever gonna get, and it’s going to get worse each year. 2017 was better than 2018. 2018 was better than 2019. And 2019 was obviously better than 2020. You get the idea. It doesn’t even feel like 2021 or 2022 even happened, every year just feels like an addition to 2020 now; last year was 2020.1, and this one is 2020.2.
We’re witnessing and experiencing a slow but sure downfall of a broken system that was never meant to last this long, and we’re lucky we got this far. I am the perfect age to be growing into this collapse as it happens. I will mature over time, each year I will become slower and more useless, and then I will die eventually as capitalism and all the institutions tied to it go out as well. And that’s if I don’t die a young age from something shitty first. On some level, I am somewhat excited to see what will happen. It’s certainly dark, but I can’t deny that it’ll be exciting. As I wrote at the end of my last novel, The Lost Generation, “I wouldn’t miss the end of the world for the world.”
I know I might sound like some crazy full of shit doomer just ranting on the internet that no one should listen to. And I won’t argue with that, perhaps you are right. If you’re unaware of what’s going on, I envy you. I wish I was still in the same state of blissful ignorance I was as recently as 3 years ago. But times have clearly changed, and it is so absurdly obvious to anyone with even half a brain that these are the last days of “normalcy,” which wasn’t fair or okay to begin with for many people, by the way, but that’s another discussion for another time.
First of all, we still have inflation to worry about. Let’s say we were able to get rid of covid completely right this second, and there were no more variants, vaccines to take, masks to wear, and things of that nature to worry about. We would still be living in a world where it’s incredibly hard to get by for most people, and it’s going to get even more so. At this point, for most people it’s now not really a matter of achieving upward mobility. That has become a pipe dream, and life is now all about maintenance. There is no climbing a corporate ladder anymore. There is no working your way up a mailroom. There is no retirement with a pension. There are no jobs with benefits that matter. There is only a “take what you can get” and save it economy now. Whatever you were born into is what you will now have to work hard to maintain (or you’ll lose it all if you’re unlucky). Your job isn’t “become rich” anymore, your job is to “preserve what’s left.”
Prices for everything are rising. The most important among these things: food, gasoline, and energy/electricity. That’s not even the worst part of it. The scary thing about food prices skyrocketing is one of the reasons why they are doing so: food scarcity. Prices for food are not rising for no reason, things are getting more expensive because they’re getting harder to come by, and it’s taking places a lot longer to restock things. It’s not out of the ordinary to see “Out of Stock” for certain things on Amazon now, and the wait time is usually like 2-3 months at most.
Stores being out of stock of items that used to be considered commonplace are simply the norm now, and we are depleting resources at a crazily high rate when they are in stock. So fast that prices are now up to reflect their worth. And if we’re being perfectly honest here, it’s also because there seems to be a sentiment of, “fuck you, we own the stores and we can charge however much we want, you can’t do anything about it.” Strawberries at the store used to be like $3.99, now they’re like $6.99. The other day I saw a guy somewhere in America post a photo on Twitter of a burger on some app that used to cost $10 that now costs like $30. Prices for everything are insane now, and again: it’s not because the quality of shit has gotten any better, which would at least be somewhat understandable. You’re not paying more for shit because it’s premium quality beef or whatever, you’re paying more because there’s less of it available, everyone’s getting fucked, and they’ve got to charge more to fuck you back.
As prices for everything continue to increase, the average person’s income (if they have one) doesn’t seem to be getting any higher. Most people are having to cut back in some way, or if they’re not cutting back they might have to figure out a way of making additional income. Personally, I haven’t been doing much spending these days. Not that we can go out that much anyway, but even when theatres were open recently I did not go very often because the prices for everything are too absurd to justify it. (As I mentioned in the Returning to Civilization piece, I only went to see the new PTA and Wes Anderson movies like I planned).
What higher costs and low wages mean is that the world is slowly becoming a competitive shithole in which it is feeling more and more like it’s one person versus another. Your survival is directly related to another person’s suffering now; people are slowly being pitted against each another in order to survive and make it in this world as living conditions get increasingly worse. On a low level, it’s currently kind of a kill or be killed society, figuratively speaking. It’s not so bad that it’s a full on Mad Max world of straight up apocalypse, violence, and doom all over just yet, but that doesn’t seem too far off when you think of how we are currently handling things. It seems that we are pretty much going to let things spiral and head that way eventually. One has to wonder: at what point are these conditions going to get so bad they are completely unliveable?
They are already unliveable for some people unfortunately. The media doesn’t like to address it too much, but we are failing our homeless population downtown Toronto right now, for example. They are being treated absolutely awfully despite the fact that the pandemic is still ongoing and could use help now more than ever. We like to think of ourselves as a developed nation superior to some third world shithole, but we aren’t all that different when you look at how things work and how we treat homeless people. Even with a system in place to help out, a lot of them are just being left behind to fend for themselves and falling through the cracks, and that doesn’t seem to be changing for the better anytime soon.
The main thing we have learned from all of this is that the richest people in our societies simply do not care about anyone doing less well than they are. Some have described the covid situation as a “class war,” and that is an accurate way of putting it, but I would go further than that. What is happening regarding everything is an attack on people in the so-called lower classes: as things get more difficult for the average person, the rich can afford to turn a blind eye to it, and keep perpetuating this system for as long as it lasts because it’s working well for them, poorly for everyone else, and they’re okay with that. It’s really quite a sickening world we’re in if you think about it too clearly.
But the whole reason for me to write this, funnily enough, was not to drive the point home that we’re living in a hell on earth at the moment, with a window of time to do anything about it getting narrower by the second, akin to the garbage compactor scene in Star Wars (and we definitely are, no doubt about that). My point in writing this was to remind you that things are currently the best they are ever going to be. It will never be like how it is right now ever again, and every year following this one will continue to get worse and worse. Similar to how a person will never be as young as the current day of their lives ever again; our society is on a downward slope that will continue to get worse.
You can see this very easily by looking up news stories of the previous decade. Sometimes I read something published in 2015, or any of the Obama years in general, and I laugh at how naive we all were. I’m not giving him any credit or saying he was any better at doing anything, because I believe all politicians are evil and not to be trusted, but the compartmentalization of all the darkness seemed to be much more effective back then. We all had it so well in the so-called “First World” and those days seem like a fairy tale now in retrospect. Even when I read something as recent as 2019, it’s funny to me how much bullshit people made up to complain about that didn’t even matter. Things like Shane Gillis getting cancelled, for example, were taken so seriously by news outlets everywhere as if it actually mattered and was worth talking about in any way. That whole time we were complaining about absolutely nothing of value whatsoever like comics telling risky jokes, we could have been doing something to solve the problems that bloomed into what we are currently living in today (like conditions in wet markets that could lead to a virus like covid happening, to name one example).
I know it sounds funny or somehow inaccurate to say, but what we are living in right now can be described as, “the good times.” Even though they’re bad, these ARE the good times. This is the best it’s ever gonna get: it’s like we’re sitting on a rollercoaster, we’re all the way at the top, and it’s about to go down any second now. Brace yourselves, take care of your health, and try to live in the present I guess.