Oncle

One thing that has fascinated me as I have learned theory is just how much it applies to my childhood. I could not express or understand the complexity given the knowledge I had, but I could understand that something was wrong. My experience was unfulfilling. I was searching for something that meant something to me. Given so few outlets to do something meaningful, depression, boredom, and loneliness defined my experience. As I have grown and found my love for learning and reading about cities, self-help, and the political economy, many of the problems have become clear. Here I will address one aspect of the world that drives me the most insane: the sanitation of everything. No one can do anything interesting, and everyone is discontent with whatever bland existence they have.

Cheated From Childhood: Sanitation of Young People's Lives

Helicopter Parents

When I was in high school, my parents were fairly generous with what I could do. If I was invited to a party, I could drink with no worry. If I drove and later decided I wanted to drink, I could text my parents, say I would sleep there, and they would say sounds good. All they needed to know was I wasn’t driving drunk. I could smoke in my backyard because it meant we wouldn’t get harassed by police when we went to the park. While that meant the places I would be were often more limited, there was something to it: I could do what I wanted when I wanted to do it, and had my space to do it where my parents would not interrupt unless something serious was happening.

I noticed my experience was very unlike many of my friends. This was what introduced me to helicopter parenting. While I could have some freedom to do things and have some places for myself, I know many people who couldn’t. Any alcohol or weed was too dangerous. When we went out at night, we would have to hide because their parents would come searching for us to make sure we weren’t smoking. They had to have other people smuggle their alcohol to them, and there were areas to avoid because other parents created a network of adults dedicated to snitching on kids. These are kids trying to just get away from their parents for a few hours.

This never resulted well. As I have grown, I have seen a general trend around me where those who had the strictest helicopter parenting have grown differently from those with more freedom. I see a lot of resentment toward their parents. They remember their parents not as people who helped guide them, but as people who penalized them for any fun they tried to have. Most of them also have a distinct lack of experience and ability to just do things in the larger world. They have missed out on some of the core experiences of learning independence, and making serious decisions seems to be much more stressful for them. I hear often from my friends that there is extreme anxiety around transitional periods, like leaving school or having to rely less on parents as they grow. Taking care of themselves is not a point of pride, but a looming stressor that is approaching. The inability for them to form their own experiences as a child has grown into difficulty in forming their own life as an adult.

The worst part about this to me is that as someone who is close friends with many of my friends’ parents, I hear their stories from when they were young. All of them did all the things that they punish their kids for, and those are often some of their favourite memories. They were all out drinking, smoking, having sex, and loving it all. They laugh about it with each other while their kids are grounded right inside the house. They sanitize their kids’ lives, and they seem completely disassociated from their own experience. The parents have ensured the kids have had no fun, and in doing so, hurt them in the long run too.

Social Media

Another major factor that I think contributes to the sanitation of everything for young people is social media. In this chapter, I’m kind of the old man yelling at the clouds, saying that kids these days are always on their phones and never go outside. I just have to embrace it. I don’t think social media will go away soon. It isn’t all bad, but I think it has been a contributing factor to the issue at hand.

Social media, by the definition of its existence, requires less in-person activity. People can communicate and hang out purely online. There are also multiple types: social media where you post something and it sticks around for anyone to see (think Facebook), group chats where conversations can come and go (think Signal), and more on-the-fly social media where you usually drop in and out, hanging out in a more specific time than the others (think Discord). Since it has these types of interactions covered, it means there is less necessity to see people in person. Games are great, but when used as the primary method of interaction, you lose out on some of the reality of face-to-face interaction and real physical adventure.

Another aspect of social media is people doing something specifically for social media. Instead of trying things for themselves, it is a cycle of either creating something purely for it to be rewarded by the algorithm. Often, people are copying something that the algorithm has already rewarded, just to post it back to get the algorithm to reward them too. Both sides of this interaction with an abstract algorithm more than experiences with other real people. The nature of this appeal to algorithms designed to increase engagement for a company is incredibly inhuman. It takes away from adventure and discovery which is a major part of just having fun. This is especially devastating for people who have an addiction to social media. The Skinner box of content is very overstimulating, and we know it is just awful for the brain.

Social media even comes with outside risks for people who do go out and do stuff. Some things happen in life which you don’t want to be shared. It is part of growing up. With so many cameras and so many people constantly on social media looking for more engagement, more and more get posted, and the content never disappears. This can add anxiety to experimenting and trying new things because of the fear of being an idiot on camera. If you do something terrible, there is also a culture, especially in progressive spaces which demands moral purity to exist as a figurehead (dare I call it cancel culture). Things can follow you not only for your personal life but extend into negative repercussions for your career if someone uploaded the wrong thing. There is an argument to be made that people should not do terrible things, and it’s a fair argument. The main issue arises if a person does something terrible when they are young and regrets it now. The internet will be slow to find the regret if it does at all. To demand purity is just naïve and ignores what happens as people grow up.

Social media creates an environment for children not for experimentation and discovery, but a more isolated environment with less new thought alongside a crippling fear of doing the wrong thing. Instead of pushing people to become more social and do more things more often (one of the early perceptions of it), it has sterilized much of the social bedrock of growing up. This makes the experience much more bland. People see others’ lives as exciting but find themselves constantly bored in their own life. Instead of doing something about it, their brain goes back to the same social media that causes the issues.

School

They sleep for longer than adults because that’s just how it works. They get tired later than adults and sleep in later than adults because that’s just how it works. Somehow, despite this, we all collectively demand that they go to a building first thing every morning and spend the next eternity learning so many subjects per day there is no way they can meaningfully retain anything. Luckily, we have strategies to help them learn, such as bringing back a bunch of homework to do more exercises in every course. Maybe that will drive the point home! Well, maybe not, but it sure makes for a bland existence.

From the moment the average kid figures out that objects exist outside of their immediate sight, we ship them off to an institution and lock them into a giant building that was probably directly inspired by a prison. They will spend their next 13-odd years here. During this time, kids are told to think for themselves and think outside the box to be the best and smartest person they can be. Interestingly enough, they have to stick to strict timetables, strict work structures, and boring lesson plans the entire time. Being creative and discovering new things was almost always immediately shut down. I remember doing manual integrals in grade 12 and discovering a shorter way to do it. I worked hard on finding out exactly how it worked and showed it to my teacher; later the teacher banned me from using it in my homework and tests. He had me redo that day’s homework because apparently, we were going to learn it two lessons later.

In summary, exhausted kids are stuck in a position where they must learn constantly, but they simultaneously must not think too much. They are told what to do, what experiments to run, how to run them, and what to complete at home. This takes away from some of the magic of experimentation that could help inspire curiosity or act like real-life dynamic learning. It is a high-thought, no-thinking environment that is exhausting, and with as few risks as possible. Most memories are just breaking the rules and things outside of school that just coincided with the years spent there. The schools themselves are an incredibly sanitized environment that rewards just about nothing and serves as a limbo for the young to exist in. It could be so much more, but adults decide once they’ve done it, it’s not worth the time and money to change.

Learning could be interesting and meaningful, we just decided we don’t want to do it. We have designed our schools as a daycare where some learning happens instead of a space for learning that also serves as a daycare. Students’ sleep schedules are all kinds of messed up, their social lives are all kinds of messed up, and their hormones only make it worse. It would be hard to build something worse for mental health and live an interesting life if you tried. There is no physical creation and nearly no real-life skills to be used. Other places use a model that includes these qualities. In Finland, they are incredibly proud of it. The students fare better mentally, learn better, and be more productive. It seems we just can’t think for the longer term.

Adding on, as a student, there is no proper way to provide for yourself at this stage. As you are locked in the building, you are just along for the ride while someone else provides your basic needs. This gives you little in terms of a feeling of actually doing something yourself and can make you feel guilty if your provider is struggling to provide. Any cool new thing you get is the product of someone else’s work. You do this for 13 years. When it causes students to feel isolated and disenfranchised, and confused, we call them out for them having a problem with their brains. They end up being told they have some sort of attention disorder, some sort of depression, or, if they don’t know, some sort of anxiety or spectrum disorder.

Maybe if the kids could meaningfully learn, create, and feel a sense of accomplishment, most of these would just be seen as quirks of being a different person. Instead, to maintain a sanitized environment, it is straightened out with a drug of some sort, and the students are told to go on and do the same thing. If we were to care it could be so enriching, but sanitation seems to be the norm and works well enough for adults (notice how it’s not the kids) that no one changes it. No wonder so many sold weed and smoked themselves out constantly. It was the best way to make a bit of money and deal with the lameness of the whole thing.

Sterile Structures: Building Something Bland

Architecture

We live in a time where we can get more of any specific resource to any specific location faster and cheaper than ever before. This means we could build beauty into regular buildings that people couldn’t have even dreamt of before. Every development could challenge the Gothic, Victorian, and Renaissance in their design. People could work with their favourite art style and communities could be incredibly vibrant and colourful. Well, they could be I guess, but instead of the best being made in more places, we got mcmansions, asphalt concrete sprawling streets, and brutalist buildings.

Somewhere along the way, all the artistic value got moved to the wayside. In search of cheaper productions, we got cardboard cutouts which will barely stand for a few years. Instead of building on the best of older communities and making them even better with new design techniques, utility improvements, and technological advancement, the path taken was to build the least space-efficient, most distant, bland, and boring housing developments in all of history. Maybe farms contain fewer people per square kilometre, but that at least grows something. Car-dependent suburbs use an obscene amount of water just to maintain grass, something that not only produces nothing of substance but also provides no real meaningful ability to play in. Killing bees is just the cherry on top. These places are damn near hostile to the existence of people, communities built to harbour no community. There is an argument that we can use the lawns for kids to play in, but that rarely happens compared to how much space they take, and it is nothing that a community center in a better neighbourhood could not replace.

This housing development fuels the next bland existence. Traffic. Since these neighbourhoods are built to be housing only, everyone who works will now likely have to take a car to get to work. The jobs are all in industrial sectors or downtown tech, so they all have to go there and they all get stuck in traffic every morning of every day of every week of every month of every year. To make this existence more comfortable, cars got built not only larger but more engineered to distance everyone from the outside world. This also means being distanced from each other. The suspension and height of the vehicle make the ground farther away and the bumps disappear. It separates people from the environment, makes them less likely to be meaningfully aware of their surroundings, and makes it harder to see other people in their cars. Compared to walking or biking to work, it is a lonely environment devoid of human interaction. Just an in-between place going from a sterile house to equally bland destinations.

The place people go most often is their workplace. This is probably the most sterile environment, people are forced to do one task repeatedly for hours on end for decades of their lives. To make a profit, employers put as little money into the environment as possible. Interactions with customers are always reduced to flowcharts. Interactions with coworkers are dumbed down to avoid drama, which could get you fired. Interactions with employers or higher-ups are reduced to bootlicking to chase your own higher position. When the customer is first, the customer-facing workers are reduced to punching bags who can’t stand up for themselves. There is no personal growth in most jobs, they are dead-end jobs and the only growth comes from becoming a better worker drone or corporate bootlicker. The goal is to make as much for your company as possible without being a liability on their sheets. The perfect recipe for a place that lacks creativity or adventure.

Since they are growing in popularity, I will address the privately owned public spaces. These are spots that seem like open spaces where you can just rest, but they are owned by a corporation. They may seem inviting, but they are purpose-built to add to the purchasing experience, and if you break any rules, private security may kick you out. The sheer volume of small rules and regulations that must be abided by to simply exist in these places is astonishing. The best part is they aren’t necessarily always enforced, but they give companies the ability to remove anyone for any reason they can find if they don’t want that person there. Businesses maintain these places to be some sort of relaxing stimulant. They exist to allow people to get a sense of relaxation, even though they are being bombarded with advertisements and information, constantly telling them to purchase what is around them. Based on the rules of the place, it might even be a requirement to purchase something or else you may be loitering. It is a deceptive reduction of a place that could be great for meaningful gatherings to a generic corporate-washed consumerist quick rest. The goal is not to provide places to meet. It is to flush out environments of purchase. Almost always, these are places with a few chairs and some trees that aren’t quite enough to block out any logos. There are no activities and nothing to do but consume more. If you try something else, security will have a word with you.

This does not absolve publicly owned public spaces. Where movements like the city beautiful in the past put a lot of emphasis on public spaces, the trend today is to say that they act more as a liability than anything else. Another expenditure on the budget that doesn’t bring in any business. They rarely develop into something truly nice. One litmus test I like to use is skateboard ability. Skateboarding is extremely simple and something that anyone can pick up with a few dollars. The environment doesn’t need to be complicated. A ledge, a little ramp, or some stairs are all it takes to make a spot for people to learn and do something cool. It would be easy to build into as well, add a little metal edge to a few surfaces to grind on, and that’s where skateboarders will congregate. Instead, these spaces are specifically actively designed to have nothing cool going on. Rails have balls welded onto the top, stairs have cracks designed to trap wheels, and any ramps have railings beside them (this is a good accessibility feature, I’m not saying they shouldn’t, but maybe some non-functional ramps just for fun would be nice). More often than not, public parks are purpose designed only for sitting and nothing else. It’s a shame because it would cost very little to have just a few features to spice it up and give it more life.

Overall, most spaces are reduced to being for one type of activity. Be it living and only living in this house, driving and only driving in this car, or sitting and only sitting in this park. This gets rid of the whole blend of activities that bring places to life. It’s exciting to see what different people are doing in different hobbies, and communities are built off of people being able to find avenues to pursue all of their hobbies close to their homes. When you kill that, it all just becomes so bland. The sense of adventure leaves, and you end up with a generic sanitized environment with nothing to do to make the space alive.

Insurance

Insurance is the functional source of so much of the sanitation we see today. When insurance is legally mandated for so much, it gets a vice grip on all cash flow and intended use for everything. Since it must control the amount of damage to make itself profitable, anything that is potentially damaging gets regulated away. The people who purchase the insurance have to abide or else their lives will simply become more expensive. It is a brutal one-way street. Too often, one notable incident will get new rules created for everyone. If those new rules end up being bad, it takes a monstrous amount of work to get it undone.

In their essence, insurance companies are designed to be as all-encompassing as possible and make sure that nothing exciting or new ever happens. They are a completely soulless and stagnant existence that intimidates everyone into not doing anything for fear that if anything new happens, they will have to navigate a hellish amount of bureaucracy just to likely be forced to pay more in the end. With this result, the person not only pays their insurance but also must pay doubly because they have to pay out of pocket to fix any issue as well. Each time you try to get something from them, it is expected to spend hours if not days on the line, completely wasting yet more time just sitting still and waiting. This is not a satisfying existence. It may even be the least satisfying existence. There is an insane drive to not go through this, so there is a drive to not do anything that could make it happen. As such, insurance companies make sure nothing ever happens.

Insurance is a part of the issues mentioned in the architecture. It may be the reason behind so much of it being so bland. If a company wants to allow something interesting to happen on its property, it must make concessions to insurance companies and pay more to allow it. This means that they are paying more to insurance to pay more to build something to pay more to maintain it. No private company is going to do this. The existence of insurance companies ensures that any private space will be as sanitized as possible because allowing for more actual excitement creates a potential financial downside for the insurance company if they don’t charge more.

Another thing that I have seen all too often is insane people who just sue over everything. I knew a girl that slipped while running at the pool in a gym and twisted her ankle. Her parents sued. This wasn’t an injury, just slightly hurt, something that would fully recover in a few days. Each time something like this happens, a new rule is put in place to determine it never has to happen again. For fear of hiring lawyers and the costs that come with that, businesses will ban anything from happening on their property to lower their risk. There is no decision-making or ideas for new fun, instead, each activity has a prescribed list of things to do as well as an extensive list of banned activities. This makes every encounter feel like a husk of itself. A more limited experience compared to what it could otherwise be, because it literally is. If there is room to sue, some insane person will, and it will get written and regulated.

Bureaucracy

Insurance operates through an extensive bureaucracy, so this chapter, while separate, often can act as an extension of the above. I made another section to generalize it as it exists outside of just insurance as well. Bureaucracy is like the eldritch terror of sanitation. It takes every single thing and turns it into a massive stack of paperwork to where once you’re done with it, you’re sometimes left unsure whether anything even happened.

Bureaucracy essentially diverts any proper decision-making to the result of decisions made in the past. This is why you hear about things like court cases setting a precedent. Once the first decision is made, all other decisions just simply get referred to that as the default state. This removes thought from handling complex tasks. There is no independent thinking or problem solving, simply just referring to what is relevant, then deciding based on it. This sterilizes complex situations into their core, which hurts the people in those situations. In a hospital setting, the word for this would be that they cannot get a personal plan. The paperwork demands it gets treated like someone else, and if new situations arrive, there is often a fear of having to make that final decision, and instead a new situation gets put into a box of old treatments for other things that go on to not solve the core issue.

It also hurts the people whose job it is to provide the solutions. These people often hear others on the other side of the line and see that they are a human who is struggling, but their company will not let them help in the way they can for fear of being penalized. The lack of ability to do decision-making sucks the soul out of work so there is no genuine pride or care for work. Instead of it being an involved process, which we have more than enough productive time for, it created the most bland environment where it is impossible to take any pride in your labour. People know they aren’t helping, but they have to continue to keep food on the table. The biggest example of this is call centres. No one likes them, not the people working there or the people calling in, and the managers know their job is evil and they often are just toxic people. Unfortunately, it is just accepted as the most evenhanded way to go about things to check the boxes, so everyone goes along. There is a game to navigate it that anyone can do if they try hard enough. The workers are fine with helping, but it’s such a mind-numbing game that people don’t because it’s so dreadfully bland to do.

It also generates the real core of sterilization: it is built to shut down any fun. You cannot do anything special or new without a monstrous amount of paperwork. If good things don’t have all the paperwork, they get killed. If bad things have the paperwork, they will stick around for far too long. If anything happens too fast or is too exciting, there will be a boatload of paperwork to catch up on that will remove all the excitement one slow hour after another. It is the most awful, bland, and sterile way to go about things.

Politics and People: How The Corpse Remains Animated

Politics

The world of politics has also been sanitized, and as such, all it produces is sanitized output. I know Fukuyama’s End of History is a meme at this point, but when you look at what comes out of politics it really seems like it. Things still change, but it always ends up incredibly watered down, and the language used to describe what is happening is so dumbed down that if you know anything, you realize it means nothing.

Moving into the neoliberal era, the ability of politicians to not only be intelligent but also communicate those ideas to people was eviscerated. Where people used to come out with complex policies and plans, and the masses would listen and see what they liked, now there are only empty slogans that people might recognize and vote for without thinking. There used to be housing policy, development policy, and problems of the times to be attacked. Now we get cheating husbands playing a family man, career politicians playing the outsider, and rich capitalists trying to appeal to their image as a worker. All the caricatures really mean nothing, but it just gives some generic image for people that they can vote on without having to think critically. When people inevitably don’t like the policy plans of the politicians they vote in, specifically the policy plans that they either never read or were never published in the first place, they start to accumulate reasons to dislike a politician. It may be only a few negative things through a pile of good to normal things, but the news will focus on it for the drama. From here there is the cycle of voting a politician out. Whether it be that another politician is more galvanizing and the old one can’t rally the same excitement anymore, or whether people change votes, it is a vibe-based result. Instead of getting real analysis or a true replacement where we realize some things are better or more important than others, it just gets stuck in a party cycle that really goes nowhere. The person who gets voted out gets replaced with a person who has no policy, and the cycle continues.

This voting people out is a perfect spot for the rise of populism. I know that populism is fundamentally fine; it is the circumstances of this populism, dare I say, the sanitation of its actual meaning, that makes it so annoying. Having the masses rally against the elite is so off-putting when the people doing it are the conservatives, who are definedly FOR the elite. Instead of populism being the actual divide in classes rallying for their interests, it is just everyone wanting to be in their own perspective a marginalized group, then complaining whenever anyone points out that their self-image is completely off-mark from any sense of reality. Populist movements are no longer rallied on class lines, but through vague slogans that may or may have nothing to do with the stated goal. You cannot be against the people who run things behind the scenes and vote for a more right-wing capitalist. It is simply disconnected from reality.

All of this creates a politics that is sanitized and soulless. Images are cleaned up, depth is lost, and pretty faces and talking heads go farther than any actual plan could ever hope. Since politics still dominates decisions that are made structurally, it means that democracy and the structures our society is built on are also just eroding into this pretty imagination of what they could otherwise be. We want democracy but don’t care to read policies to vote on. We want better politicians but refuse to force them to actually make a plan. We want improvement but refuse to learn what improvement would look like. It has been replaced with something that looks good enough but has no core and no basis in reality. The meaning has been sterilized, and the husk of itself only exists to replicate its own previous power.

Personal

Being a person is also not the same as it used to be or could be. People are simply not allowed to exist as people. They have to exist as a sanitized image of a person who would likely not exist if not for the modern structures that surround them. The goal of being a person is not to improve yourself and chase personal goals that help to support and enrich yourself as well as the people around you. The goal is to create an image of yourself as a successful person in the society you navigate.

One of the biggest pushes for people in the modern day is productivity. Mental health and physical well-being exist not in the sense that they allow you to achieve personal fulfilment, but they exist in the sense that will help you out just enough for you to work more. They are investments to reap a return. It is to make you a better machine-like worker, able to push through human flaws to increase production. It takes any deviation we have as people and turns it into an issue. Going through tests to check for neuro-divergence doesn’t show whether anything is actually wrong with you as a person. It simply shows whether something is wrong with you as a vessel for labour-power extraction. We could have a productivity that reduces how hard we work to let us chase other goals that make life more exciting. Instead, all it does is ensure we sit in a sanitized workplace for even longer.

Not only are people told that there is something wrong with them, but the blame for that something being wrong gets put onto the person. People are expected to check so many boxes just to become a new image of a normal person that it makes me feel like they want the normal person to not be human. When mental health suffers from trying to conform to the productivity boxes, the expectation is that pushing through that grind will make them better. People need solutions fast so they look to meditation and mental health, but the push for those is so awfully misinterpreted that you end up with people literally trying to purchase inner peace and good health. This does not work. Dare I even call it a sanitized imagination of mental health? This again seems to put yet more blame on the worker, but it’s the problem of the rat race they are stuck in. They desperately need help and they need it now, and since real meaning is not valued, it would only make sense that money should be able to get them out of the awful situation they are in.

This leads to a weird version of what we interpret as good. Good is not doing what is fulfilling and joyful, good is making money. With a lack of worker ownership, this money doesn’t even belong to you. You must be constantly producing for someone else, and any downtime is not good. There is no value in taking time for yourself to meditate or improve your mental health, and there is no value in taking on personal projects to do just because it is fulfilling. This is only good for you insofar as it helps you work, which stands to take away from any accomplishment you make. Right after, you will be back to the same as before.

To cope with this, people create a persona, an appearance that they use to navigate the work world that is separate from their personal reality (at least for the first while). This helps them navigate that life but also creates people devoid of any actual depth. Interactions in the workplace are just two people putting on surface-level costumes, letting nothing else on to keep the production moving along. The relationships are fictitious and only exist to have an appearance of health. This creates a whole new level of exhaustion, however, making people more tired of trying to act with such a strict separation between who they are and who they want to be seen as. It’s kind of like teenagers who want to be cool, but instead of being cool, it is being easily digestible and dumbed down, and it happens constantly instead of just in certain situations.

Overall, the personal productivity mindset alongside corporate world personalities is a sanitized version of people that cannot allow humans to exist as actual humans with their differences. Most people recognize that the corporate world is so bland and sterile, and many have trouble navigating it because of that. There is a negative reaction to the sanitation. A natural reaction to something so inhuman that they can’t force themselves to accept it. The thing is, it’s not unhealthy. They would be fine if the world was designed for humans to have experienced. Since it isn’t, we continue living as the most sterilized versions of humans, potentially ever.

Capital

As a massive Mark Fisher fan talking about an issue, it only seems natural to conclude that capital is the root cause of the problem. Everything that has currently developed has developed through capitalism, so even if other political-economic systems could have issues with something like bureaucracy, the current problems we face related to bureaucracy are specifically capitalistic. The sanitation we experience today directly results from capital and capital alone. It has moulded the world and decided that to maintain its replication, this bland existence is what it wants. It is best for increasing its profits and ensuring that nothing gets too disruptive to the system.

Capital as a system is designed for accumulation. The theory is that what people purchase is a method for rewarding what is good for human behaviour. If places are bad for human behaviour, they just wouldn’t go there. If people didn’t like bland spaces and items, money would go elsewhere to places people would have more fun. Unfortunately, this does not work. Especially since capitalism has consumed the entire world, capital can’t expand outwards and instead must accumulate internally. This has increased wealth inequality, which means people have less money to spend. Add inflation onto this, and the vast majority of people simply must go to the cheapest option possible. The cheapest option is the most sanitized, so the most sanitized is the one that wins in the market.

The market is not designed to reward human behaviour and well-being. It is made of many corporations that all act in their self-interest to optimize their moneymaking potential. To have an environment that is built for humans to live enriched lives involves people being able to do more of what they want to do for free. No barrier of entry, just experimentation. People who want to do things for free will purchase nothing, so it is no use for a company to provide services for free. Historically, that has been a major role of public spaces, but with their diminishing role, we are left with places that will always push to do the bare minimum. Humans are not just made of money. It may seem like that on a company spreadsheet, but that is part of the sanitation. Treating people as such makes life bland. As long as markets dominate, sanitation will continue.

Capitalism and free markets also inevitably lead to crises. That is how it is built and how it reproduces itself. These crises are later legislated to prevent or at least slow the specific cause (not the root cause, which would be capitalism) from causing another crisis. The legislation adds another layer of bureaucracy. Add this to lawsuits that do it at another level, and it just ends up producing another stack of rules. This has gone so far that at this point that the whole legal structure is just a monstrous ball of duct tape that takes a degree plus further education to even begin navigating. There is no way to exist without breaking laws, and if laws are made to not be broken, then living as a human is more or less illegal.

Companies do not care about negative externalities. We are currently dealing with a climate change crisis built on the back of oil companies learning the truth from the science and then paying to suppress it and muddy the waters to ensure profits keep rolling in. The housing crisis of 2008 was built on maximizing profits while ignoring the fact that people would lose their houses because of it. Companies will never care about the negative externality of the sterilization of existence. They will keep buying further into it and trying to block legislation to stop it for as long as they can. History has proven this time and time again. This time is no different. If we let it continue, companies will guarantee further sanitation to keep their profits. The crisis is not as explosive as others, it just presents itself as depression, which we have collectively blamed the individual for and tried to solve using drugs. Under the current system, we will never solve the problem of sanitation.

It is nearly impossible to just go out and have fun, and we see the results. Depression is on the rise, suicide rates have increased, young people are getting into fewer relationships, anxiety is going up, and addictions to social media are so common it is just assumed that people have it unless proven otherwise. It kind of sucks to exist at this point. I feel that in our lives we have effectively seen the last steps of making almost all fun illegal. Nuisance party bylaws have meant that having a few friends over and playing music lands you fines in the hundreds of dollars. People sunbathing or going for a run during the pandemic were fined during COVID even if they weren’t around people. Kids are isolated and unable to find free space to learn for themselves to grow up. Adults have to face a constant barrage of paperwork that sucks the soul out of existence. Work underpays and traps you into wage slavery for the majority of your life, leaving you too tired to exist after.

This is the part where some of you would complain that I offer no solution. IDK read State and Revolution or something.

---

Written in ~24 hours. Editing on top of that. Let me know how you found it, and let me know if there's anything you find specifically wrong, I just kind of wrote as I thought.

---

Oncle Spencer