The Ties That Bind Us

I can buy anything I want.

I can buy a ticket across the world. Buy a nice skyline view, and some maids to clean my room while I’m out roaming.

I can buy endless amounts of food. Of comforts. New processors and 8k TVs. And I can buy resources for anything I’d ever want to learn, to read, learn a language and I can buy some reservations, date night, where we talk about her new jewelry with the bottle lights. Looking down my New York rendezvous; a venue filled with sparkled wine.

If I bring enough money to the party I’ll buy some drunken laughs, some wild story collateral — regaled for the next group. And while I shuffle past the groupies for my backstage pass I’ll cash in a conversation from those who produce the soundtracks, the great soundtracks, of my everyday living. Free to do anything, and the world’s streamlined enough to provide whatever aesthetic needed.

But I cannot buy meaning.

I cannot buy things to work on that’d make me happy. I can’t dig out of this hole where everything, at least it seems, has been done already, and I only need to share my credit card. But credit cards can’t give those longstanding rituals to muster through some days, anticipate in others. Moments to share. Credit cards can’t buy the relationships which make the world so colorful and lively even in the most mundane. Endearing, enduring, in the silent mornings, or maybe watching that skyline sunset.

We can buy anything we want, be the most free we ever been, but have lost the ties that bind us. It made sense at the time: it was suffocating. It was difficult, sometimes frustrating. But it seems human existence always requires some sort of bind. Binds found in the daily acts of living, little jobs and other things; gets you up in the morning. Collecting the coop eggs or making jam. Whipping breakfast for the Sunday games: ready to play something LAN?

Or I can just walk around the lunch meet destination, hope the GPS was right. Stand around awkwardly before we hug and talk about the news of nothing and depart. Keep lurking online forums to ignore my redundancies.

The most free we’ve ever been, and yet our annual fetters of harvest, tilling, planting, tending, have been replaced by some spiritual chain indescribable. But it fills the hallways, and the eyes of subway passengers or any other eye that flickers between the neon.

I can buy anything. But, in the process, I have sold my soul.

Because it’s almost automatic: to buy into the idea that everything was already done. That I just need to cycle through the days exchanging entertainment and quips or schedules until funerals. To be an exchangeable body for any relationship or job preordained. Maybe so.

But it’s not done.

The world is waiting to see your answer.

Waiting for you to carve out your own system, however binding it may be.