Let it happen, if it wants, to whatever it can happen to. And what's affected can complain about it if it wants. I doesn't hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
You are a part of the society in which you live, in which you were born. The culture in which you were educated has left its mark on you, but that does not mean you cannot choose another path. We don't have to remain the captives of a decadent culture. It is possible to look at the world and see it for what it is, and recognize the emptiness of consumer capitalism. You can blindly participate in the constant desire for objects and experiences or you can step back and try to understand your own desires.
You can choose to fully participate in this selling of emptiness or you can understand you are already full, that everything you need is already there for you, within you. Western society functions as a massive making and selling machine that wants to grow like a cancer until it has consumed the very body that gave birth to it. The cancer can't exist on it's own, just as capitalism needs us to keep it going. Left unchecked, capitalism will kill its host. We individuals that have been programmed by consumer capitalism have, unknowingly, become part of the cancer, while those that have removed themselves are the cure. A cancer is made up of cells of the body, and the body nurtures the cancer, even protects it. When we are blind, we protect the very thing destroying us.
Life is already so short, but how much shorter does it become when we devote our lives to distraction, when we allow the world to prevent us from leading meaningful lives. It is impossible to lead a meaningful life if we are captured by the capitalist cancer that only sees us as consumers. Every action we take or fail to take is an opportunity for the world to grind more money out of us. Our sole purpose in the eyes of capitalism is to turn everything we can possibly do into a product and thus into profit, money. Illness and death are the most profitable of all. This alone tells you what capitalism is capable of doing.
Marcus Aurelius is telling me that the world can only hurt me if I interpret it's actions as harmful to me. Is capitalism hurting me? Only if I let it. Only if I choose to call out it's harm and invest my limited energy into defeating it. I choose not to. I choose to remove myself as far as possible from the grinder that is capitalism, the grinder that wants to turn my very bones into profit. You don't have to be a part of the cancer, you can choose to live differently. Be well.
