A melancholic post

Everything disappointments me. Why? The world as I experience it is largely based on a transactional approach to social relationships. This applies to ordinary social relationships as well as relationships with organizations and other entities. But sadly, it can also apply to family relationships. Most things have turned out to be ultimately transactional in spirit. Even kinship is not a safety net in this world permeated by the ideology of money and skilful coping with a heartless society.

There is so much hypocrisy everywhere. People who make nice-sounding proclamations nonetheless don't offer any help when it is needed. Sessions of sociability do not translate into material forms of assistance in times of desperation. Friendships are always easily performed when one is soaring. Convenient excuses from friends and institutions are always ready on hand to deflect sincere requests for a little kindness, making the excuses seem innocent enough. Words of thanks are cheap compared to the actual concessions that could really have been given to make life easier for one. Routines invented are premised upon hyper-fit bodies that can work endlessly like machines. An idealistic focus on ultimately personal goals dressed in rhetorics of lofty ideals make this myopia seem unintentional and not malicious. Ambitious motives are hidden behind a calibrated performance of nonchalance. Contradictions between words and actions cannot be blatantly confronted, in order to maintain a facade of cordiality of social relationships.

Experience of too much nastiness in life makes one tired. What more do they want? Just tell me. And yet in that very questioning one gives him licence to say that the fault lies with the questioner alone. Problems are thus always individualized. Words of frustration appear as expressions of 'whining' to outsiders who think with economic models. Harsh words from one or two thoughtless young minds appear like weeds in a corner. There comes a time when even the truly frustrated refuses to speak, for his anger prevents words from coming out of his mouth: he can't physically speak anymore, even though he has so much anger and jadedness in him. Every night is a night of pondering; a thorough audit of all the things right and wrong which one has done in life. Yet dissonance is intensified every time as one reconfirms that he hasn't in fact done that many things wrong. And yet the rhetorical discourses go on - across diverse sites of utterance and vehemently defended by self-appointed moral guardians - justifying and naturalizing a system deemed as 'fine', and once again condemning the social actor that cannot succeed.