Unjustified

After working about so many consecutive years and how we hop along in the common exchange, “what do you do for a living” and other things: you learn to, however close you are to your extinction, you learn to justify your existence.

I must justify my existence, you begin to think. Here are my credentials, and a business card, and a set of hobbies, knowledge cemented. Here’s what’s being worked on. Here is why I’m allowed to live.

No time for meandering, no time for living, need to inflate my identity! Padded resume and line of expertise, recommendations and their cells… with a consulting fee we can move forward. Come join us every Friday night at our members only club and close the deal! Here is why I am valuable.

One inevitably tires of justifying their existence. You’ll never check it off. It’s endless. You will always maintain for more, justify more, and the blood pressure rises, the headaches don’t go away. Performance acts, dancing as a monkey for each interaction.

If you’re asked what you’ve been up to, it’s best to laugh. If you’re asked how you’re doing, why not ask the question back? If you’re asked how are you, how about holding your tongue on this humiliation ritual masqueraded as care.

Obviously if you eject from the value add games you can only dig a pit deeper. But one could, maybe, be a little less attached. And if you wonder how to sustain any relationship, friendship or otherwise with the value add charades, one can only reflect and ask you what does that do for any party at all other than start the Justifications Wheels yet again?

All of this justification robs each day.

Maybe we can continue this game, but learn to comfortably sit forever unjustified as dusk enters.

Let the radiation of billboards and conglomerates light a nightwalk alley and fentanyl rocking. Some coupon book to kick aside, some voting flyer to submerge into the mud — a community gathering poster between the weeds. Only the slow riverside concrete with the rhythmic movement of one’s silhouette beneath the lamps in flicker, amber.

Maybe one is not here to seize a day, but lifetimes. A whole pie, instead of a slice of life.

Look upon such useless existence, and despair!