Work and Life in Total Depravity
2025-10-13
Last night was a weird one. I was having a hard time falling asleep as usual, so I decided to take a little cocktail of prescription medications that have historically calmed me down in the past. The cocktail worked after two hours of failed sleep. And of course, it was another night of fractured and liminal sleep. It's always difficult oscillating between dream-space and reality so often. To me, it feels like it's all the same place now—classic derealization.
But here I am, writing another entry yet again. I've gotten into an established rhythm with posting entries here. The workflow feels solid and I think I'm finally over that hurdle of performance versus personal expression. To me, this space is more confessional than it is sentimental. I grapple with my feelings so that there's always something to get off my chest, but still attempt to glean some sort of value from it. Every entry here is like a mini essay, but under the guise of personal confession.
So what would today's thesis be? Perhaps the best thesis I can think of is this: I want to be good, but have come to accept the true nature of total depravity. To me, humans are evil but still capable of doing good things. People love to obfuscate truth and justice for personal gain and will do whatever mental contortions they must in order to soundly sleep at night. Many people who do so will often feel good about their lives, blissfully unaware of the horrible and torturous realities that lie beneath their glass houses.
In these sleepless nights, these justifications tend to ring even louder.
I watched a piece of a Jeff Bezos interview yesterday just to get mad. Bezos likes to insulate himself with believing that his work produces some kind of harmony. He'll say that he disagrees with the notion of 'work/life balance' because he believes that if one thrives at the office, they'll do so at home and vice versa. He believes that these things feed on each other. But here's the thing: tell that to anyone who works in customer service and they'll laugh at your face. Tell that to someone who works for pennies on the dollar and breaks their back to build the things that keep the world spinning. It's easy to be a bourgeois person, possessed by assets, and say that work and personal life are complementary. The system is built for them, so of course they would promote that kind of insidious ideology.
I've seen what it's like for proletariat people after living as one for a few years. I've seen what it takes to keep going in spite of a political and economic system that doesn't give a shit about you and only sees you as a number on a balance sheet. My coworkers and I used to destroy our bodies at work—breaking bones and risking our lives—for fucking peanuts. The petit bourgeois will use the services provided by the proletariat and spit at their faces while they do so. I remember working in customer service with those types who would try to abuse me and my coworkers; it was commonplace to keep our heads down and take it for risk of getting fired. I grew resentful of this and got into many altercations with customers.
Resentments are something that fuel the evil in me, but I know that despite my black heart, I still have the opportunity to do something good. If total depravity is the rule, then I'll live in the exceptions.