Discreet apocalypse: no surprises

“No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises (let me out of here)
No alarms and no surprises please (let me out of here)”
Radiohead

Magritte’s Golconde, 1953 (detail)

So you wonder who you are. You wake up in the morning at 7:15 AM. You need to have breakfast at 7:30 AM, you shower at 7:45 AM and get prepared until 8:20 AM, fortunately you don’t live too far from your office plus you can be 5 or 10 minutes late, don’t overdo it no don’t do it again not too often or else, or else you’ll get some nasty comment about coming in late or be talked down to, or at worse get yelled at, because even if you work for a company that can manage its human capital, everything has to be in its own place and everyone needs to have their limits anyway (otherwise it’s a mess).

So you start asking yourself questions. You produce and you consume, in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening. You forge your identity, you need to exist and work makes it possible. You live through work, you think about work, you dream about work, work makes you feel fulfilled because work makes you feel free even though work sometimes wears you down and you've stopped dreaming, you are only having nightmares. You are scared of losing your job because you know very well that if you were unemployed you would go through a major identity crisis, you would feel lost. You tell yourself you build things, and maybe yourself, you tell yourself you build your own well-being and the well-being of your children, you like it when people owe you. You don’t like suffering and you don’t like making other people suffer, you often understand how your productivity is a contribution to the greater good of the collectivity and you know how collectivity defines your functionality.

So you are afraid of the day after. You don’t like being noticed as much as you don’t like noticing others, you like to fit in and you’re lucky because this year, these days, it’s fashionable, well grey is fashionable, you stumble along you reel along and you wag along the wet asphalt it is so slippery especially when you wear crepe sole shoes.

So you have so much to say. Things that are no heard, things that are not said, the things that can’t be said but there you go you don’t care you really don’t give a fuck and you want it all to blow up once and for all so you can start all over again, from scratch. All this violence and all this disgust for the other, all this individualism and this materialism, and all this indifference and all this pressure.

Your life is a whole lot like your youthful dreams.