You Did It Their Way

Congratulations! You’ve Lived Someone Else’s Life!

You were born and raised in an alien world, not built for human habitation. Your society came to you as an immense accumulation of commodities, which you were forced to produce, at work, and then consume, at leisure. You grew up in an entirely mediated environment, with no direct experience of the unfiltered wild, either wild nature without, or your own wild spirit, within. Everything around you was made by the same unhappy, inhuman minds as yours, minds formed in worldly homes pervaded with anxiety, irritation, restlessness, overexcitement or indifference. If you were lucky there was love in your home, but this did not stop the misery of the world from penetrating into your inner being, forcing you to retreat within yourself, into a simulacrum of the real world.

At school you were told that participation in social life depended on ‘being good’, which meant being like everyone else, docile, obedient, unquestioning, unhappy and either forever worrying about how ‘good’ you are, or contemptuously rejecting the ‘good’ — and thereby turning your back on the possibility of real happiness. At school, being ‘good’ meant competing for a few scarce slots in the social machine, a few places at prestigious universities, a few decent career openings and a few glamorous prizes. And as with all competitions, the tiny minority of winners became arrogant — and anxious they would lose their position — while the vast majority of losers became frustrated and angry, or just gave up and crawled into a corner to spend their lives sleeping.

You grew up in a world which rewards and encourages restless desire, extreme self-assertion and alienated, solipsistic passivity before an entirely self-enclosed spectacle. As a result, you are habitually discontent, fearful of criticism and addicted to narcotics such as dope, booze, porn, shopping, video games and social media. Your attempts to free yourself from these surrogates and crutches are rather pathetic and, when they do succeed, further refine your addictions, attaching you to fame, or to travel, or to esoteric knowledge, or to health and wellness, or to political protest; activities which, in their place, might be good for you, but which become, as you cling to them, just as corrupting as heroin.

Because you learnt your culture from a society which doesn’t need — and in fact actively punishes — competence, excellence and real beauty, you were never taught any useful skills to a very high level. You were rewarded for your rather pathetic efforts and never seriously criticised for doing badly. Consequently, you are an incompetent mediocrity — with no grasp of tradition, craft or hard work — which makes you feel even more worthless, useless and bored. You atone for this with more consumption, and excuse it with theories which justify incompetence, as necessary, and mediocrity, as aesthetically valid.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.— De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

You may have been raised in a wealthy middle-class home, or you may have made a lot of money from business, or, more commonly today, you might have lived your whole life between the same four walls; but the poverty of your soul will always haunt you, no matter how many boutique crafts you learn, no matter how many appalling poems you write, no matter how many alienated subscribers follow your youtube channels, and no matter how many ‘spiritual’ experiences you have. You can have your own farm, full-body orgasms by the hour, ten-thousand modernist classics and an Oscar on your bookshelf, but you remain, in your core, ordinary, fearful and spiritually stunted. And you know it.

Talking of being ordinary, your love life is a mess, isn’t it? Either you live alone, having never really ventured forth, or you are trapped in a relationship which does not bring you joy, or you hop from one bed to another, thirsting for sexual-emotional experience which never brings the happiness you crave. You are not much of a man, not much of a woman, you fear the mystery of (gendered) love, and so you take the safe, unmysterious, path of self-pleasuring celibacy, or self-reinforcing homosexuality, or dull, sexless, self-comforting compromise, or you play the old self-assertive game of sado-masochistic cruelty and submission.

You don’t really know who you are, or what your life is about. Instead of character you have attitudes, instead of convictions, beliefs, and instead of wisdom, opinions; all picked up elsewhere, from other people, nothing vivid or solid that comes directly from your own experience, and so, sensing this, you work very hard to dress up your stale ideas in fresh packaging. You don’t really have your own experience, you are a foreigner to your own consciousness, and so you have to assemble your character entirely from given principles—a bit of science from school, a bit of philosophy from books, a bit of religion from your parents and a bit of identity from your peers—all of which unrooted fragments are, consequently, superficial, self-serving, and entirely predictable.

Holiness is not The Price of Entrance into Heaven. Those who are cast out are
All Those who [have] no Passions of their own.
Vision of the Last Judgement—William Blake

In fact, everything about you is predictable. It is so very easy to press your buttons, to make you emotional, or to turn your brightness down to cold, unempathic indifference. And if your response to a little trouble, a little criticism, or an unexpected emotion is tragically predictable, how much more so your response to life itself. You fiddle with the details, bolting on new beliefs, ticking off achievements, and filling your days with whatever ‘experiences’ you can buy, but we all know how it will go; a little youthful enthusiasm, a three-decade rut, and a few final years of bitterness and regret, papered over with strained optimism, self-indulgent nostalgia and good, old-fashioned denial.

And all this is as they want, ‘they’ being the mass, the management, the masters and the machine itself. They demand that you remain an ordinary, predictable, timid, fungible, characterless, incompetent, spiritless nonentity. You can protest a little, rebel a little, have a few eccentric hobbies or bizarre beliefs, take trips down the Amazon, or flirt with madness; and you can pretend that none of this really applies to you, but you must live, fundamentally, exactly as everyone does, and be, essentially, the same kind of bland, milk-and-water, sponge-cake half-man as everyone else. Then, when you die, you can know, for certain, that…

You Did It Their Way

And now, the end is near
And so you face the final curtain
My friend, I’ll say it clear
I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain
You’ve lived an empty life
You trod the path and never strayed
And less, much less than this,
You did it their way

Regrets, you have so many
All those years you didn’t venture
The same old thing, year in, year out
A sad and tragic lack of adventure
You had big dreams when you were young
But all of these just fell away
And less, much less than this,
You did it their way

Yes, there were times, of fear and strife
When you saw the horror of your hollow life
But you swept all this aside and then
You just went back to sleep again.
You lived upon a little screen, every day,
And did it their way

Now that you’re old, you can see
How sad, and sordid, it’s all been
So much less than you thought
All for nothing, all for naught.
Sure, you squeezed out a pup or two,
But they’ll just exist in the same way
As you. You, the coward, who
Did it their way.

You did not rise, you did not fall
You were hardly here at all.
Trapped within your little heart, your little head,
All along, you were already dead.
You sang Sinatra’s song, but you were wrong.
Like him, you did it their way.

_{(karaoke version Leonard Giroux)}

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I have a crooning collaborator working on a homemade recording of this (chords here), but if you’re a bedcore musician, feel free to try your hand at a version; or get in touch if you fancy recording a part, or doing a remix or summink.

Just don’t do it their way.