Hello friends. For a change of pace – and an acceptance that it’s impossible to ever write under a Real Name – so it seems like an amusing jump to write about Real Life things. Things actively avoided in prior seasons.
The rule stepping forward is a simple one indeed: if it doesn’t take up a good chunk of day, then it’s likely a string of neurosis, and following those strings rarely do much good of anything.
Instead so one shall wait for Serendipity to suggest a more esoteric or ethereal prodding around. In the meantime, why not write about things one has kept silent upon for so long?
Silent for so long – and it feels contradictory, because often those who Start Their Own Business make it their persona, – so marketing may demand – and frankly there’s an uneasiness writing anything too close, hard to say if this would be a full page. But at least so comes a New Topic instead of circling around, spare stick as instrument.
The first thing to know about having your own business is isolation, ironically enough. You certainly talk to customers and you certainly take their feedback and you certainly have some others working with you, but for the most part, most of the work is done in silence and alone. It’s not practical to own an office because of exuberant pricing and because it’s a teetering market waiting to collapse (cue the Return To Office scattering along the socials, now you know, to save a global default from occurring, though inevitable). Even if you had an office, you’re going to be there alone because it’s a global economy now and you can live wherever you want while forgoing everything else in ashes.
The isolation isn’t just because of the number of workers and the amount of work, but it’s also because you’re Weird for having a business when you either come from a family of White Collar inclinations or have an ancestry tracing through Steel Mill federations. Because your life is rather different than the usual – where at times one may be almost envious of having some pointless coworker talk – so it creates distance from friends. Because it’s an uncomfortable change within reality’s schematic, and there’s a lot more uncomfortableness in store.
See, you’d think there’d be a celebratory air around making a business. But most businesses are calculated bets, odds possibly stacked, and what you’re betting with isn’t numbers-on-a-screen but sections of your life. You can feel the knife cut into your torso, maybe snag a pinky-toe too. All for collateral.
So what are you going to do with someone who is missing a torso and a pinky toe to boot? Time is ever evaporating, and yet you set your own schedules, and ultimately however much of you remaining so the business swallows the rest. Whether in failure or success it’ll steal all any hours remaining.
Time, time, time, no matter the track. You can go fast-track and get investors and play the YCombinator game, but you could also drive your sanity off the wall trading the servitude of a simple white collar job for a more sickly one with the venture capitalists cutting into your stomach too. The bootstrapped track keeps a regular cadence, and however it goes, wherever it does, no matter what you still are without Value.
By quitting a big corp tech job and starting your own venture, your social status craters. Let’s not even talk about how useless it is to meet with others – not only is your way of life a lot more foreign, but it’s also living as the leper does, however it turns out. Maybe you could hope to find others in the Same Lifestyle, but it’s all so slimy all around – you may try to exist beyond the regime, yet they come in with an Entrepreneur nametag and the nausea sets in.
It’s okay, it’s not like you have the time to do such things anyway.
So the days blend together, and it’s not disagreeable, accepting the fact you can no longer have conversations nor friends and little interests and, with the business, whatever wind it takes, you’ll become the automaton. And as the automaton lives, so the automaton may be privy to the power and economic structures by which their fiction’d Person and Trademarked Name exists in, convoluted strewn laws hiding the lawlessness.
So ultimately what started as a venture also turns into watching a spectacle unfold, one that started before you were born, body moving on its own, information flowing without control, because you have no more life to attend to other than transferring your coins of living into the bottomless pit and procrastinate while swallowing all the psyops around. Where you’re wondering what it even means to have money or success, or whether you will survive the upcoming economic apocalypse, and that you will have enough time to try out different milestones, or maybe instead it’s best to get isekai’d and ignore it all because you won’t bring your wealth with you to the grave. But you’ll work yourself to the grave to get isekai’d quicker anyway, because we don’t live for being but rather to become our own taskmasters, and rightfully so, because everyone is insane anyway. When you start a business you get first-row seat of abyssal staring and so here are the collectibles and stray bats, demon’s clippings.
Ultimately, in this vortex’d existence, isolated and scurrying around as the rat does, the way you view the world feels as though watching a play – where the leader is, of course, already selected, and that, of course, none of these issues matter seeing as the Let-There-Be-Economy is what ultimately rules people as how dogs are ruled through food, and that, well yeah, the power games and the blood sacrifice to get here toiling toward a nothingness, a less bounty, eating poison all around and bathing in pig’s blood for a Publix sub while most of the sideline talking is about their new mental illness – how could you bemoan anything at all when the big picture creeps in?
Now, let’s say you want to start. It’s tough to get a good idea going. But, as popularly paraphrased, it’s the execution which means everything, though it could mean nothing nowadays too. It seems better to wait for the new financial system and just chug along until we’re buying bread with the shovels of cash.
See, working previously at a Big Tech Corp so one may quit because the US Dollar is going to default, so why save any money? In five years time we’re not going to continue to use this fiction’d green paper, why bother with the 401k and on-call incidents eating the little left of your sovereignty?
If you look at world currencies, so every hundred years they exchange another owner. And of course there’s no inherent value, but also of course one could wonder, even with a cool ten million in the bank, what are you going to purchase anyway? Dread bubbles again, if you’re familiar enough with the salt water Schopenhauer suggests.
One is best off starting a business if and only if every other way of life seems unbearable. Though having a Big Job and the comfort of everyone around you saying you Made The Right Choice sure seems sweet in the darkest hours, but these hours are only candlelight compared to the graveyard waiting. May as well live as you like, however shameful and isolated it’ll be. To spite everyone and these sick twisted games which you’ll make a reverie out of.
In any case, in the (tongue-in-cheek) inevitable Billionaire class you become through your profiteering, so the only thing that seems slightly delightful is spending money on those you love. If that’s even possible. But by the time you reach such heights, the damage is done and there is no one left to call. So often a trope that, it’s not the money which mattered, but the time together – a rarity well regarded, as visits now take thirty minutes or more and the conversation is evaporating. When you live isolated and neurotic enough spending time together excavates your insides.
Yes indeed, post-school life takes one by the reigns and so it’s either work or death. But the true scary bit isn’t in the dichotomy, but that if you could NEET instead, well, there’s an even deeper abyss we can talk about another day.
Real Topics can be morose, but at least it’s a different lens, and maybe writing these things so one becomes less of the spectre and more of the cult attendant, but even with a cult all one may learn to want is a peaceful day, a bountiful harvest, a plentiful health, and a resting spot to dream another world.