WARNING: Anxieties
I don’t know why I write anymore. I don’t know why, if I can’t save the world by doing it; I don’t want to save the world. I don’t want to be Greta Thunberg, bless the work she does, but I was taking a career quiz, and it recommended humanitarian. And all I could think was: this is just because I care about people. They never tell you, but caring about people is the worst thing you can enter a line of work for. You don’t want to die emotionally because someone died physically, you can’t do that to your health. You should never enter a line of work because you care. You’ll just end up wishing you were dead.
But that made me think, am I just too picky? Am I supposed to save the world, or am I supposed to just do my part by recycling? That’s another thing they don’t tell you: recycling is a myth. Big Plastic emphasized the wrong part of the cycle on purpose because it disturbed the market the least. They won’t tell you to reduce, to reuse, but recycle… They can market that.
They don’t tell you how necessary it is to market. Recycling is just another mass marketing, and I wonder if I didn’t grow up in 2006-Now would I care about half of this? Would I be happier? Am I looking at a generation who’s given up because everyone told them “You’re supposed to save the world” and when they tried nobody…cared? Give me my money back, I didn’t vote for him, I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t ask for that
YOU’RE UNGRATEFUL.
That’s it. I’m ungrateful. I wanted to be a screenwriter. A screenwriter.
Not everyone wants to be one of those guys, but I did. I’d love to be a screenwriter, if I’m honest. But I can’t say with certainty it’s even a career in the future. It’s no more valuable than a McDonald’s or an Arby’s and those jobs are fine, but you can’t live off of them, and I would like to live. It’s depressing to look at an industry I would love, a ten-year plan that I could easily visualize…if it was feasible. But I don’t want to be a doordasher, and I guess I don’t want to be a screenwriter.
And eventually you just start thinking, does it matter? The world’s burning, and here I am. Wishing I could be a screenwriter? I’m supposed to be Greta Thunberg, you’re supposed to be Greta Thunberg, we’re all supposed to be Greta Thunberg, and aren’t you tired of looking out that window? Waiting for something to change? But every change that happens is something you didn’t ask for?
What are we doing here? Waiting for something to change?
Are you sitting there waiting for someone to call you special? Are you waiting to be entertained?
Funny thing is, right after I got through three hundred words of this, Hank Green released a video talking about how stupid guilt over the environment is. And he’s got a point. Maybe I’m just some lucky art kid from Mississippi. Maybe all my anxieties would just wash away if I took some prozac. (Can I say that?)
Look, he’s right. We can’t just sit here bellyaching about how doomed we are and how the world is gonna explode, and how we’re all gonna die. But man. Twenty thousand years of this, seven more to go. (Or maybe technically four or three, because Bo sang that in 2021 and now it’s almost 2025. Have you thought about that? It’s almost 2025.) And I hope, like Hank Green says, I don’t have to worry about the next hundred years. Maybe I can worry about the next ten.
I don’t know.
It sounds so easy to say it’s the next generation’s responsibility to save the world. To put the weight of the world on someone else’s shoulders.
As a Prozac taker I can confidently say that it doesn’t wash away anxiety its more like the experience of hearing someone scream into a pillow. You’re like “Did I hear that? Ehh Maybe not.” y’know. Or like how you can kind of taste the fruit that a sparkling water is flavored with but the carbonation burns a little too much for you to pay attention to it directly.
Being a victim of situation is something I feel like has became way too much of an anxiety for me than it needs to be lately.