post #14 - a living death

November 25, 2025 - 10:38 AM

Today, I'd like to talk about all the different ways you can die, without dying. I was reading a bit about a few of the "great films" of the late 90s, mainly "The Matrix" and "Fight Club". In both of these movies, the inciting incident is the realization of this living death in the form of white-collar employment. The stifling, boring, and truly evil corporate America. That's the real villain. It's what turns Ed Norton into a terrorist. In 30 years since the 90s, you'd think that the pressure would have built to some sort of explosion, some catharsis like we get at the end of "Fight Club", but it hasn't. We got 9/11, I guess, but that wasn't really an all-American sort of terrorism. I don't think we learned from it in the way we should have.

I guess, in some ways, 9/11 has had a bit of a death (living or otherwise, it's unclear). I didn't even really think about it this year. It's a day of rememberance, but I don't remember it. I wasn't alive then. I can't understand it in the way a lot of people can. But eventually most people will be in my shoes, or even further. Did Osama think about that? Before he died, did he think he was successful? I wonder. If that idea of people having two deaths, one when we breathe for the last time, and one when we're thought about for the last time, if that holds, then its sort of sad. "Things that happened" only get one.

I feel like I used to think about that more. The idea that I'll be forgotten someday. Thinking about it now, it still scares me. Much scarier than death, being forgotten.

Maybe that's part of why I feel a need to post here, to make things. It's like spreading horcruxes, leaving bits of myself that might be discovered long after I die. I could be thought about. Seen. That's all anyone wants, right?

I feel like we're digging a bit too deep into my sense of self and what makes me me. That might be why you're here, but I think that's enough of that for now. The living death: maybe not being forgotten, but not being needed. In a corporate system, it's being a cog in the meat grinder. It's better to be the cog than the meat, right? That's why we (the middle class) keep doing this. Going to college. Getting a cute little career. Exploiting others just to be exploited ourselves. It's silly, but what can we do?

Stop being cogs?

All be meat?

But then what happens? The meat grider won't run.

No. It has to.

The meat tastes better, in my opinion.

In other news, I refuse to have a living death. And if I have anything to say about it, I'm only gonna die once.

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