Artificial Idiocy posted:

People say this kind of poo poo all the time, sometimes after gloating about their outward bound excursion where they carried toilet paper in a tupperware for a week, sometimes when defending their parasitic unemployed drifter lifestyles, sometimes just when sharing meaningless image macros to convey their co-opted pseudo-individuality on Facebook.

And yeah obviously no one goes to their grave wishing they had spent more time working a boring job for some rich fucker with a place in the Hamptons.

But what are you going to do? 7 billion poor fucks on this big dirty planet, at least 2/3 of whom would fight to the death on a dystopian future gameshow for the chance to sit in a drat cubicle. This ecosystem, economic and otherwise, can't support a population exclusively of ski instructors and scuba archaeologists as much as we may romanticise any life but our own.

So you do what everyone else does. Take your meagre holidays and weekends and enjoy a slightly more expensive bottle of wine or a new restaurant, a sunny week on a beach somewhere, a ski trip highlight rather than lifestyle, a new couch and TV. Enjoy the relative freedom and wealth that a life in a cubicle affords over foraging for junk electronics in Agbogbloshie while your children inhale mercury fumes and fend off stray dogs for scraps.

Existential malaise and navel-gazing is a western luxury, a grass is always greener fallacy in which we somehow ignore the fact that the alternative to our post-modern ailments are literal ailments, losing your teeth and contracting dysentery and dying in a ditch somewhere after having never traveled farther than 20 miles from your cottage, never having eaten anything but what was available on land you STILL didn't own. Life was never better and probably never will be better, beyond incremental increases in creature comforts and more entertaining distractions.