Mediocre musings from Generation ME

Then, even if growing up were real, the question is really about what you’re going to BE. Oh god. So now we have to plan to BE something? What exactly?

Judging by the most common responses to the sin of a question in question, we’re talking professions. “I wanna be a fireman!” cries the five year old. Or something to that effect.

We’ve taken what we busy our hands with to put food on our tables into states of being. Because if you buy and sell equity for strangers, you’d have to BE a broker, right? Duh. You really have to admire our ability to perversely confuse the details of our lives in a desperate attempt to simplify. It seems so much easier.

In a nation where we’re told if you just buckle down, work hard, and with a sprinkle of love from the big-man upstairs can take you into the White House or better yet onto the red-carpet. Implicit in this fantasy is that you work your ass off to BECOME something. This isn’t just a task you occupy your time with subsequent pay for services rendered. It’s who you are. How you identify yourself.

In the free-market, who you are has become what you sell. You clean up a high school corridor for minimum wage, you’re selling your cleaning abilities. You must be a janitor. You dress up in some cookie-cutter outfit and carry steaming plates of eats to strangers, you’re selling your food-busing talents. You must be a waiter.

And what, you may ask, is my point? I am after the slime oozing out from behind this mechanism. Because after calling each other what we do, we break out the scale. Judgment day has come early and the Messiah’s looking to roll with the super-stars and the bank-breakers.

If Steve is a lawyer and Henry is a porn-star, all else held constant, who do we invite to our dinner party? Without looking, who’s the smart one? Who’s sleazier? Because in the land of the free and the home of the brave who you are is what you do.