The Machinery

At one point in your life you hit the wall, the wall of reality, and you hit it hard. And you’re faced with no choice but to “get real”. You can’t follow your dreams, especially if you can hardly pin them out anymore, and you lead the kind of life you have always dreaded… Because it’s simple, you need bread on the table…(actually you need more than bread) .. you need a husband because otherwise something is wrong with you, you need a job because else you’re a failure…. But the most important thing that nobody seems to care that you lack is a “purpose in life”, a reason, and if you ask others do you have purpose in life, and they say yes, its money, career, or family…the same stupid circle.

“without really wanting at all, they [the majority of men] pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. And they are right, right a thousand times to live as they do, playing their games and pursuing their business , instead of resisting the dreary machine and staring into the void as I do who have left the track.” – Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse