too scared to find a different job, one that you might like.
too far into your mortgage to consider moving.
too busy to take a holiday.
too tired to go out after work.
too jaded to learn new things.
too old to rebel.

We have some of the smallest vacation periods in the civilized world. We take pride in having so much, in being privileged, yet all the things we have amassed are the things we have been given. Little toys to keep our minds preoccupied. Everybody knows what is best for us, and if one tries to step aside, society will do its best to pull them in, or leave them hanging. The social norm does not help pioneers succeed; it restricts them (as if envious) and it tries to keep them from reaching their potential. From the water-cooler gossip on how some lady married a gent 10 years her junior, to the job you did not get because you were fully qualified—but had a piercing—we imprison one another in the same cages we have grown up in. We want those that follow us to be as scared and entrenched in the system as we have been. We wear them down with every chance we get.

So we lie to our kids. We tell them “go to school, get a job, get married, have kids, make us proud”. There is risk in the alternative, but there is bliss at the end of that road. We under-appreciate life because we let one another forget that life goes beyond the stupid mortgage, beyond the gas-guzzling sports car, beyond the person you will fuck tonight, beyond living up to other people’s standards. We clutch onto the hope that following this simple road will give us happiness. And we slowly start to believe that these roads are the right ones. We think it is “good enough” to have a slave’s life, because others have less than us. We get paid for our work, as if that was the yardstick with which happiness and success are measured. We isolate ourselves from humanity so that we, too, can be part of society. We perpetuate the myth so that our children, too, can own things.

Those that control the things we want to own, control us.