10. Massive segments of your society spend their time pretending very hard that other segments don’t exist. And it’s not people who live incredibly disparate lives; in fact, the more similar they are to each other, the more vehement each side is that the other isn’t real at all.
9. You have cheap and easy access to more music than any other society in the history of ever, while musicians themselves probably find it harder to make a living now than at any other time, and that includes the Stone Age.
8. Misery is a status symbol.
7. Technology is advanced to a level beyond the wildest dreams of wide-eyed futurists of the past, and it’s still seen as deficient, destructive, and frustrating.
6. Oh, and that technology makes it much easier for you to run your life, which would be helpful, except the people who own, sell, market and/or mandate that technology have decided that they should be the ones in charge of your life. And they insist that they’re empowering you, and that you should be happy about it.
5. Whereas other PEOPLE tell you that the World is a bad place, and if you’re not actively unhappy, it’s because you don’t care about all the bad things. You are somehow expected to be seriously hurt by the horribleness of all things, yet also have the energy to fix them. And that’s the EASY path, from the people who think things CAN be fixed.
4. You’re urged to be happy about all the good things that are happening, but only relatively happy, because the awful things predominate. It’s your job to make a better future; but you’re possibly a traitor if you want to fix things. Because possibly, you’re supposed to believe that things are NOT fixable, and the only way to make the awful things better is to increase the awful until everything is destroyed, and only then can we make good things. But we still won’t deserve them, of course.
3. Point #4 is not a weird, fringe view. We are continually assured by our mainstream information sources that things are essentially infinitely terrible.
2. Also, those technologies which run your life are considered “smart”, which is to say, they know a whole lot about you, and can attend to your needs with great convenience, and are also openly engineered to CREATE more things for you to need and more reasons for you to be unhappy, and again, this is not a conspiracy theory; this is something they advertise as a feature.
- Finally, we’re also trying to destroy our language, and so we’re giving new meanings to words, or even giving opposite meanings to words. Did you know that “Utopia” is just another word for “Dystopia” now? It isn’t…at the time of this writing. So if it’s any comfort, 1 of these 10 things is a lie. And if it’s any discomfort: 9 of them are quite true. But hey – if you’re reading something on the Internet and only ten per cent of it is a lie, you’re pretty fortunate. So all in all, if you made it this far, you win! Also, “Win” is another word for “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH”; but I imagine you knew that already.
