Between a fairly bleak financial outlook and the absolutely horrific political situation we've been dealing with of late, my mental health has not been in the best of shape. Writing has thus been delayed, and while I have a bunch of half-finished drafts that I want to get into shape, it's been hard to actually push them out. My sincere apologies for the somewhat delayed rate at which I've been publishing lately.
I've been at this whole "writing a blog" thing for a full year now. It's been an interesting year, and one that took a rather dark turn around four months in: it really does feel as though, since last November, everything has been getting immeasurably worse. Some of the baseline reasons are obvious: fascism everywhere, the crushing pressure of capitalism, all those fun things. Still, this ain't new: we've been dealing with this shit for a while now. So while we can explain why we're particularly miserable now (there are, I think, a lot of proximate causes for our misery), there is still something to explain in the melancholic, frustrated core of why we feel like shit all the time, even when things change.
A core reason why almost everyone is miserable, I think, is that we as a society (mostly the most powerful among us, but certainly not exclusively) have fairly comprehensively shut off most options we had for improving our lives without having to ask for permission. Almost all options that we currently have for improving our lives are based on someone in a position of power giving it to us, as a sign of their power over us. Most of us cannot, however we try, decide to make a change and just do it without relying on someone letting us.
Serious life changes require resources, usually in the form of money. For most people, this means a job on the labour market. It turns out that the labour market, however, is very much not free: there are all kinds of barriers to entry these days. Doing things the usual way, you start off by having to push your way through thousands upon thousands of AI slop CVs, many of which, being tuned to the particular stupidity of the hiring manager and being aimed at nothing but persuasion, are going to outcompete yours. If by some miracle you make it through the screening, you have to ritually abase yourself before the hiring manager, proving that you can flatter their prejudices and make them feel good in exactly the right way. And even taking all that out of the equation, taking a job means, in essence, picking from the jobs available. Even if everything else is fine, creating a new role as a worker is almost impossible, and if all the jobs that the people with money think are necessary are shitty and soul-destroying, well, you've no option but to pick one of them.
As much as I'd like to say that starting one's own business or consultancy is a way out of this trap, it just isn't. First off, you usually need capital of some kind to start a consumer-facing business: that, of course, is only made available to you if you have wealthy parents or are able to persuade a bank or some investors to put up the money. At the very first stage, then, the task already shifts from "do something and do it well" to "persuade someone with wealth, likely unearned, to share some of it with you because it means they'll make more money". That being done, you need to promote your product or service, which means marketing (persuasion again), persuading shops to stock your products (ditto) and making partnerships with outher businesses in your space (once again). Basically all of this relies on people giving you permission to earn money in the first place: apart from marketing, all of these things are about gaining market access in the first instance, not competing in the market.
So (you say), maybe marketing directly to the consumer is a bad way to go. But I could start a consultancy and market to other businesses instead. This helps a bit: start-up costs for a consultancy are significantly smaller than for most B2C businesses. But then you run into another problem, one just as hard to overcome. In short, the kinds of businesses that can pay your rates and keep you afloat... well, the people in them who decide whether or not to hire a consultant tend to be few in number, wealthy, and in need of persuasion that they need your services. So, once again, you're stuck in a situation where you need to be given market access in the first instance more than trying to compete in the market as a baseline.
And this is all in the context of smart, capable and cunning people (OK, perhaps I flatter myself a little, but the point is that this all applies even when you have a lot going for you). Someone who's a bit less capable, a bit less of a hardass, less socially aware or that simply has skills that don't lie in the information sphere: there's really no chance that they can force the issue. They have to rely on being given a position, a salary or a favourable contract by people who have the money and power to do so. Mostly, these days, the people in power don't think it's favourable, so people are stuck languishing in situations that they really, really hate. I don't think I need to explain to you why this is a bad thing.
... well, alright.
When the first and most important skill for survival in a society is persuading some very wealthy, very stupid people, it completely fucks the whole incentive structure of the global economy. Certainly, it starts off fine: you just have to tune your communications to the people you're targeting a bit more, pander a little more, be a little more corporate. But that, of course, has a reinforcing effect. The people in power huff their own farts more and more, become increasingly convinced of their own moral goodness and intellectual smarts and demand increasing levels of brown-nosing from the plebs. And before you know it, you're where we are: essentially the only things that the people in power will give you money for are scams, things that make them feel good but that are useless, and occasionally things that are just outright evil.
The only way out of this that I can see other than this is, essentially, to force the issue. Sooner or later, all of these enterprises crash into reality, and hard. When they do, there's an opportunity to take something without begging: people need someone who knows their shit, who's efficient and who can fix the problems that they got into by being massive dumbasses. At that point, it becomes politically untenable to work with anyone other than an expert that hasn't been discredited by involvement with the current wave of bullshit. This isn't an easy tactic: you have to do a lot of ground work and back-briefing to make sure that people think of you when this happens and to establish yourself as an expert. You also need to wait until things break beyond repair for people to start looking. Still, it's what I'm doing, and given how things are going at the moment, I'm a little hopeful. In the interim, the occasional bit of contract work and some writing income plugs the gap.
But this raises the question: how, exactly, do you get into a position to be able to do this? How do you gain the skills to force the issue and be able to make people give you the resources that you need to live the life you want?
The education gap
There's precisely one avenue still available to us that we can simply take no matter who might try and stop us, and it's the same one as the one that's been true since Gutenberg: education. Once you've learned to read, it becomes very, very hard to stop you from learning more. At a minimum you can read a newspaper and find out what they're telling you: even if you're reading something like Bild or the Daily Mail, reading things on paper will still leave you more informed than watching the same content on TV, and definitely more than you'd get from watching shorts on TikTok. You can go to the library and learn a hell of a lot about what the world is like and what your options are for making it better. You can learn a skill from a book, at least to an extent. And it means that you can read and understand all the documents that our lives are mediated by.
If you've access to the internet and a good academic library, your options expand massively. You can learn most anything you want: mathematics, physics, writing skills and especially anything to do with technology and software engineering. You can learn how to, at minimal cost, build your own website, put it on the internet and write what you want on it. You can build tools that work for you, not the people who want to exploit you. Once you're able to read and write, you can talk to and make yourself known to people all around the world, no matter how lonely you might be where you are. Importantly, a sufficiently literate and educated girl can get her writing in front of people who actually make decisions. Literacy is freedom, education is freedom and both of them are influence.
We know that this works, and we know it precisely because so many powerful people, who care about their ability to dole out success and failure on a whim, are trying to undermine it. Constant, brutal cuts to public education can only be read in this fashion: the plebs don't need to know how to think, so we'll just give them the bare minimum that they need to do work. The incessant stream of video slop that we get through social media has a similar effect: who has time to read or write when we're all watching or recording shit for Instagram, after all? And then, of course, there are the LLMs. The LLM is a technology precisely tuned to destroy the value that education brings to the table and make people, in the end, just not bother. Why bother to read a complex text when you can summarise? Why bother to write when you can get the machine to spit something out for you? Why bother to learn to do anything hard?
The effects have been devastating: functional illiteracy is currently prevalent in most developed countries. Even people who can read and write treat competence in hard fields with contempt. It's all denial, of course: we rely on a lot of people who know how to do a lot of difficult things in order to survive in our society. But pretending that these things don't exist so that you can maintain your system of patronage... well, until everything crashes down, that's easy.
So, how do you become free in 2025? Fight that shit with every fibre of your being. Read. Write. Learn how to do the things you do as well as you possibly can, and keep learning new things. Write. Get to know people who are doing the same things as you. And position yourself, when things eventually wear down, to come down like a tonne of bricks on the people who brought us to this pass.