Missing the Point

Last week, I was walking to class and saw a squirrel jump out of a trash can. I stopped and watched it for a bit, trying to see what it was hauling out without scaring it away. I was late for class. That was the best decision I made all week. I’m just going to come right out and open with it: Americans need to do more pointless shit in our lives, if only to counteract how bogged down most of us are with work and chores and projects and stress.

So, you might be asking why a squirrel made me think about the human condition under capitalism. You might also be asking what the squirrel was hauling. Well, the squirrel isn’t asking anything. The squirrel is eating what it needs from where it can get it, and storing what it can, and it doesn’t know what money is (oh, what a life, to not have to deal with money). The squirrel does what it needs to when it needs to, and does whatever the hell it wants the rest of the time. I don’t know if the trip to the trash can was for work or pleasure for the squirrel, and it doesn’t matter. The point is that we should take notes.

Imagine if you will, a generic, stock-photo office worker. Fill in some details. He’s got an Anglo-European name that’s probably one to three syllables, a dress shirt and tie with varying levels of jacket or glasses, a cubicle or if you want to be really fancy with this exercise, his very own corner office, and maybe some kind of pocket protector. Now let’s stack this guy up against our squirrel from before. Office Guy, as he will be henceforth known, goes into the office at nine in the morning, works for eight hours with a thirty-minute lunch break and regular trips to converse with coworkers at the water cooler, and goes home at five. This is assuming no big accounts need closing, whatever that means, and he has a nice dinner at home or out, and goes to bed, then starts over. The squirrel starts its day by… your guess is as good as mine. All we know about the squirrel’s day is that at 10:02 that morning, the squirrel was at a garbage can by a creek in York, Pennsylvania, digging around for something. Like two ships in the mist, we sailed right on by one another, the trajectories of our vastly different lives deflecting off one another, only fated to meet for that brief instant. That squirrel has never worked a day in its life, and yet, it has more to do in regards to feeding itself than Office Guy. All Office Guy needs to do is sit at his desk and press some keys, then pop down to a restaurant or the office cafeteria for a bite to eat when it becomes socially acceptable to- or to really rub it in to the squirrel, he could just order delivery. Meanwhile, the squirrel has to play hunter/gatherer, scrounging for whatever it can.

I’m not saying humans should go back to universally hunting and gathering, that’s dumb. Agriculture rules. We got bell peppers out of agriculture, and all we have to do is give the ground actual cow poop. I just think we’re locked into a structured cycle of ‘the next thing.’ How many of us just sit and wait and count the seconds into the minutes into the hours into the days of the all-important Next Thing? It could be the start of a break, the end of a class or a shift, the opening of a store or restaurant- we are constantly waiting for a specific number of ticks to pass by on the clock we’ve all agreed on. Why don’t we enjoy that time more?

If there is a god above, I would like her to know that I am in no way telling you to just suck it up and find the good in your dismal corporate slog. I work in a gas station in semi rural Pennsylvania, so I get that there’s no helping it sometimes. But we’ve got this idea in our head that everything we do needs to be for something. As the ever-elegant Neil Cicierega stated on his 2016 Lemon Demon album Spirit Phone, ‘what have I done to earn this life?’ And I suppose that the easy answer is the depressing one. Nothing. You’ve done nothing to earn this except contribute to the economy and breathe carbon dioxide for trees every now and then. But the hard answer is much more worth pursuing, and that’s because the hard answer is also nothing. You’ve done nothing to earn this life, but… you don’t need to do anything.

I know, I know. It’s in vogue to be depressive and edgy right now, but I’m telling you that’s the easy way out. Consider me the last optimist at the end of the world, but I think we’ve earned our place on this earth just for the sake of being alive on it. But a lot of us have that good old Debt Culture Poisoning (name pending, I’m working on it), so we naturally feel we owe something for this fact. Not to be that person who points the finger at companies and corporations, but companies and corporations aren’t your friends. Every single minor interaction with one is going to be them trying to get something out of you, and trying to get you to remember them for the next time you want a nice juicy double cheese burrito. That’s just how they operate. I mean, look at the language in this very article- I mentioned that the Office Guy needs to go to a water cooler to get a drink to speak with his coworkers. He’s not even comfortable enough to talk with his coworkers unless they all mask it behind fulfilling a basic need they need to fill to keep working efficiently for the company. And I’ll bet you didn’t even question that.

So let’s talk about solutions, then. Now I am not the kind of person you come to for sweeping societal policy reform, or anything, but I can do my best to lighten the load. It comes back around to what I said up top- just do more pointless stuff. Keep a toy in your pocket to mess around with when you’ve got time. Air drum to a song you half-remember. Take your mind off it. Watch your surroundings for occurrences you might have missed otherwise, like a squirrel climbing out of a garbage can with a nice haul. Just do stuff that isn’t prescribed, isn’t structured, isn’t anything. Do less, more.

To be honest with you, I totally missed what the squirrel grabbed out of the can. I guess that part wasn’t all too important.