Wilhelm II

I have a friend, and I don’t want to use his name here, but I do want to talk about him. We used to be close, but years have passed since we last spoke. We parted on no particular terms, we just drifted off in different directions as we transitioned into what is called adulthood, a certain accumulation and confrontation of life’s responsibilities.

He always struck me as an unhappy person, he had a certain gloom about him even in times of relative joy. This was never a major cause for concern though, and I guess this was because for him, unhappiness was not so much a passing mood as it was an integral part of his identity. I say this because, if you watch him smile, if you look at his eyes, you can tell he is smiling only on the outside, fulfilling a request from inside to placate some other. He sometimes hints at this in passing, without any real hope that someone is listening and understanding. In our five years of close friendship, I never saw him once give himself completely to a smile, and I never heard him express joy in his words. He was, in some way, secretly immune to the joy the rest of us felt.

One tends to form unspoken conclusions about a person like this, and how could you not? It’s very natural to seek to explain something that seems out of the ordinary to you. Some people are simply born with a melancholy disposition, a burden they very often carry to their grave. Many of them spend life in a constant state of stagnation and suffocation from which they find solace only briefly and sporadically.

He has been doing poorly since the transition into adulthood. He did what he was told, he went and got a well paying job and he worked hard at it. He became good at his job. Happiness was nowhere to be found, and the harder he squinted to see it, the more assured he was of its absence. He was told to develop a “work-life balance”, but he was more interested in working than in living at that time. He has never been one to willingly follow the advice of others, and sometimes this serves him well. Not in this case. He really did fail to understand the difference between life and work. In tears, he assures me that he never asked for either of these things and he doesn’t much care to do the work of distinguishing them in order to live.

How long can someone spend in this kind of confusion? There is no such thing as an unbearable moment in time. To exist is to bear each moment and let it wash over you as it will.

He experiences a constant physical pain without a discernable physical origin. There is a certain cosmic irony in this. For as long as I’ve known him, he has possessed an unusual existential bent. With a characteristically grave facial expression, he tells me how he, as a freshman in highschool, made a concerted inner effort to excise his own sense of empathy. He tells me he’s neither proud nor ashamed of this attempt to self-convert into sociopathy. He sees his desire to be rid of empathy at such a young age as something that fell on his head from outside, not something that rose to his mind from inside. He does not consider this desire to really have ever belonged to him, he considers this a misuse of his intuition. When I asked him why he thinks he adopted this desire, regardless of its true origin, he tells me that pain is the answer. He wanted to protect himself from the pain that comes with the depth of feeling he feels himself capable of having for others. This I can understand.

I asked him what other things he believes arise from something other than conscious choice, and without thinking he replied: faith. He tells me the same empathy-excision pattern manifests itself in relation to religion. As much as he’d rather not vicariously feel the sufferings of others, he does feel them, and to refuse to feel them is to refuse himself a real existence on this earth. As much as he’d rather have faith, and the security of feeling like someone is watching and protecting him, he doesn’t have this. Why not pretend to be callous and faithful, I ask? He answers: pretend for who?

He is alone in his life, astonishingly alone. He has withdrawn from all human contact, all community. He finds the world odious, along with the vast majority of the people in it. He is bored to tears with life and with pain. He no longer remembers who he may have been before. He wakes up in a low-grade pain, exists all day in low-grade pain, and goes to sleep in low-grade pain. He is halfway buried underneath the idea of the pain. The pain hurts, and the idea of the pain insults him personally every waking hour.

The idea of the pain is insulting, why? What is the object of derision? Where does the insult come from, and who is its terminal recipient? He heard me ask him these questions, I got the impression he vaguely expexted me to ask them, but he had no answer prepared. We sat in silence for a couple mintes while he racked his brain. When the silence was broken, he told me he just can’t even guess at the source of the insult, unless it is coming straight out of his unconcious mind and slipping the barrier of conciousness. Maybe the insult was granted special passage in the realm of unconciousness, for reasons that are evidently crucially important but as of yet utterly unknown to me. As for the destination of the insult, he told me with confidence that, nowadays, the insult almost always passes through him. That is to say: the insult is launched from its origin, and he is one of the intermediaries between origin and destination. Since he is not the destination, and his perception is limited, he cannot say with certainty where the insult sticks its malicious landing. He does not know the destination, but he can feel his own proximity to the destination based on the sound of the insult’s impact with its landing surface. Since he left his job and spent years wallowing in his miserable confusion, he has gotten farther away from the insult’s destination - he is less strongly associated with the thing which is being relentlessly insulted. His ideas have changed significantly since the insult was at peak impact, and based on this he thinks the insult is being levied at a certain bundle of ideas.

His face twists in frustration, he can see that I’m completely lost at this point. He raises his voice to utter his belief: much of his education was a poisonous joke, one he had no choice but to fall for, just like everyone around him. He is really getting upset now. He tells me that the human being is a dualistic creature, it has two stomachs, and we have built a civilization on the gorging of the left stomach and the starving of the right one. The mechanization and tabulation of your existence happens behind a curtain. Like so many of our words and phrases, “going through the motions” is starting to lose its meaning for a lack of contrast, a catastrophic lack of meaning in every sense of the word which threatens to swallow us. Our hope of escaping this lack of meaning is inspired by almost none of the pitiful excuses I see for an “occupation”. It has been a long, long time since the workday was organized around the work. Today, it is organized around keeping the worker “working” for at least 40 hours each week.

He asks me, what is the purpose of technological innovation? How does it help the individual? He answers his own question before I can speak: it doesn’t “help” the average individual very much at all anymore. That’s not what it’s for. What is “help”? What would an average worker consider “helpful”? I feel pretty confident that owning more hours of their own life each week would be helpful in some way or another. So surely we can use technological innovation to help these people?

For the sake of example, imagine Bob, he writes 8 memos per workday, and this takes him one hour per memo on his typewriter. Suddenly there is a more efficient way for Bob to type memos, thank the lord for technological innovation! Right?

Oops, actually that’s wrong. Nothing changed for Bob, but maybe his boss is happier, because now Bob can type 64 memos per day instead of 8. Bob can now be 8x more effective with his time, and we could, if we wanted to, make a pretty strong case for Bob getting paid more or getting to spend less of his week writing memos. But… why would we want to do that? Bob is a resource from which we extract value for the company, and we reserve the right to go on extracting and extracting and extracting at the same rate no matter what else happens. What would Bo do with all that free time anyways? Write poetry? Stare at a river? These things generate no value! Bob is wasting valuable company time with these things! You accuse us of owning Bob? Preposterous! We only own the vast majority of the time that constitutes his waking life!