Slave to the System

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

I wake up between 6:15 and 6:35 every week day, without fail. I take a shower, get dressed, and scarf down a bowl of cereal before I am driven to school, arriving between 7:10 and 7:25 AM, every week day, without fail. I go to my eight classes throughout the day, knowing exactly where I'll be going next each period, and expecting lunch not at a particular time, but at a particular point during my schedule. Usually I eat at 10:45 and am not "hungry" until about 10:00--the last few minutes of my third period class. Even today, a day in which the schedule is shifted due to an assembly, I became hungry in the last few minutes of my third period class, and despite it being 9:45, feel that it's time to eat, right now. I know that I'm going to probably go to whatever club I have each day afterschool, then proceed home and do homework. I know that I'll probably have to do homework until 11 or 12 each night because I watch an hour or two of TV depending what's on, and talk on AIM or some such thing like that before/during I do homework.

Does that sound monotonous? Well, it is.

I'm not posting this for the sake of posting meaningless drivel about my life like someone would write on Xanga, most blogs, or their diary, I'm merely providing a real example of what society does to a person. We're all scheduled and perfect, especially in high school. It really turns into a Pavlov's Dog type situation to the MAX when a given person has had the same schedule for a semester or even a full year.

Being a slave to the system doesn't just entail near-perfection in scheduling of your immediate life, it includes other things such as a certain set of goals or beliefs. I know that pretty much everyone in my high school has a goal to go to college and then get a job after college. (Whether their parents are pressing that issue or if it is their own accord, it is no matter.) A majority of people will just end up majoring in something idiotic, then becoming a member of School Monotony 2.0 = Low-Level Corporate America. Not to stray too far, but, whatever happened to "Daddy, I want to be an astronaught when I grow up!"?

Looking around the hallways of high school, I see fellow slaves to the system. The typical student is an upper middle class, white kid with an element of preppiness to his character or apparel. (Not to say that African-Americans or Asians don't experience this as well.) This typical kid has a working level of insomnia and probably gets no more than 7 hours of sleep per night on average.

And look at the typical businessperson (political correctness is for shit, by the way), a middle to upper middle class person, who works to buy shit they don't need, and gets maybe 7-9 hours of sleep per night, just because there is nothign to do other than work and "relax after work." Potential similarity there? Just maybe.

I guess this is a plea for people who have the strength to break the chains of slavery, please do it. Become an astronaught, become a school administrator and change the rules so schedules fluctuate (just don't be a tool), or whatever. Just don't fall into the trend of working to consume. Working to consume. We are human beings, not animals. The sole purpose of our life is not to grow older, breed, nurture our young, and then die. There is a more to it than that and people who try to simplify life into terms like that are doing nothing but destructing humanity and turning us into the monkeys we watch in the zoo.