Imagine creating a world where kids are so fucking upset by a simple relationship breakup and loss of place on a track team that they feel driven to suicide. That these things are given such incredibly high importance in their lives speaks to the complete and total lack of anything else within their lives and communities as emotional rocks to build their lives around.
This is literally all this kid felt he had in his life. These two things. His girlfriend and his spot on the track team. Losing them was the complete loss of everything in his life. He clearly didn’t feel like his parents were in his life, nor anything else, nor anyone in his community… And that it was impossible to get back what he lost or build a life of anything else.
This is what neoliberalism is doing to children. This is what mass individualist culture creates. This is what incredible emphasis on nearly meaningless bullshit has built and extreme competition with their peers.
It’s awful.
An upbear wasn’t sufficient, so I must say: well said.
Another harrowing alternative to being overwhelmed by alienation, loneliness, and loss of purpose is that we are hollowed out inside and become automatons, which becomes a fate little better than death. You can see this empty, meaningless, and pitiful state of despair in fucking protests to open up stores and shops during the early days of Covid-19. To be free is to consume shit. A lack of social purpose makes for a broken people heading into a moral oblivion through hedonism. Fucking WALL-E as a vision of Utopia.
It has gotten to the point that if I wasn’t so angry at the triumph of injustice and death worship, I might just fall into that same despair.
I feel such incredible sorry imagining this kid, with a handgun, going into his school and crying out that nobody can help him. That mental state is so terribly difficult and such a mess. Like… Really? Losing a girlfriend and your spot on a track team is enough to do that? Something is deeply TERRIBLY wrong if these are the only two things in someone’s life, that their whole life has been built up around only those things and that they feel absolutely nothing else is worth living for, that they don’t even have any connection with their family.
It’s really disgusting and awful. Neoliberalism is what does this. I remember it myself, the upbringing, the focus on rather meaningless goals rather than human being and human relationships and our connections in our communities. Just an endless series of aspirational goals to slot into the capitalist system as a worker, nothing else matters.
It’s so fucking easy for kids to just not learn anything other than “the system” and end up in this state.
Smash it all.
