To Live Is To Reject
Thoughts On The Modern Citizen For The Year 2025
For the entirety of history, it has been humankind’s plight, our struggle, to discern not just how to survive, of course, but also how to live. How to properly, productively, and perhaps happily engage with our surroundings, our culture, and our civilization (which is often not so civilized), to perhaps become one with our own nature when it is useful, and, eventually, begin to reject those parts of our brutish nature that no longer serve us independently or as a group. To survive is to exist, but to live is to exist uprightly, courageously.
It is in many cases also true that the modern citizen has become enveloped in acceptance of much of his or her surroundings. I mean this by way of goods and services, ideas and theories, norms and mores. Oftentimes, these concepts enter insipidly, so tactfully, we hardly notice a change is at hand. That when a new product, whatever it may be, of polished silver or brushed nickel made its way off the plant floor and into the shopping malls, it would soon make its way into the homes of giddy buyers, eager to see the results, the solutions of the products stated intention, that is to say, its promises.
For at least a century now, we have lived like this––eager for the newest invention, the newest service, the newest product to make our lives easier, simpler. What we are sold is happiness, and we are, now more than ever, suckers for it. And this is not simply relegated to household products promising to make our clothes smell and feel fresher, or a fast-food chain rolling out a new hamburger of ungodly proportions.
It is not just the apps that are designed to connect us to friends and family with the touch of a button, or a new service that will monitor your sleeping. It is everything, all at once, all of the time.
In this way, I am referring to the pace of our current civilization, a pace that instinctively feels impossible to match, impossible to meet, impossible to sustain. For the modern-day human, rejection must be a main ingredient when interacting with our lightning-speed society, our instantaneous, convenience-at-all-cost, profit-or-nothing premise. The more we want, the more we have, the more we get, and the more nothing can ever be good enough. We drift through a cycle where yesterday’s working, useful invention pales in comparison to tomorrow’s futuristic promise. We are caught suspended in a web of arrested fulfillment, but the lights are bright and flickering, our contemporary world a vaudeville show that we cannot dare look away from.
If the modern-day human cannot make use of their own discernment, their own judgement, for themselves, they will be victims of their surroundings, prisoners of their own time, their own culture. I say this with a few specifics in mind––
What we eat, now, if done thoughtlessly, will surely kill us. We have long given the standards of what we eat over to the bureaucrats and their greed. They knowingly serve poison when and where they can and engage less in food, but more in “edible, food-like products”.
The marketing, research, and sales psychology behind the success of contemporary food campaigns is designed to engage with the doting citizen, or those either too busy or too distracted by the bright glittering lights to focus on anything else but immediate pleasure. So long has it been since we could pronounce the list of ingredients on the back of the box, it is now a cliché to even mention the phenomenon. Why? For most of us, we have stopped reading, or we never did.
Too, our modern-day existence is plagued by the pornographization of everything possible. Our billboards, littered with cheeseburgers and drinkable syrups, are punctuated with sexual innuendo wherever and whenever possible. It is no surprise the number of men who have succumb to an addiction to all things sex, slinking away to their computers and cell phones for another long gander at those moving bodies.
Useless to themselves, and perhaps to just about everyone else, they empty their pockets to those models, making millionaire of girls just barely out of high school. These girls know most of these men are lonely suckers, prompting one to ask, who is exploiting who? And in the current system, according to its design, who is to say we cannot have it both ways? Is it not the natural conclusion of our society that its members instinctively learn to mutually exploit one another? More and more our interactions are based on transactions. The apps on our phone and computer need not force them––the will is already there, we just need our technological intermediaries to make the introduction, to provide a mechanism for the arrangement.
The modern-day human is being pulled in all directions at once––his and her survival now depends upon a constant state of rejection––to work upwards from our basic needs, instead of backward from our most ridiculous desires. The drive of much of human accomplishment has been hunger. Hungry for food, for myth, for answers, especially for patterns. Hungry for a sense of accomplishment, hungry for affection.
But humans are also hungry for contentment, for solitude. Hungry for the wisdom to know when we have had enough, when we are plenty satiated, plenty entertained, thoroughly satisfied. It is within this knowledge, in my opinion, that humankind at our best. To understand and behold the wisdom of rejection, to look at the modern landscape of billboards promising things to be faster, bigger, more luxurious, cheaper, easier, better, and ignore them. That those who promise us happiness cannot make good on the pledge, for happiness is something you can reliably sell, but can never be bought.
In the year 2025, I hope some of you will join me in this spirit––and remember to keep the idea of rejection not too far away from us. That in modern times, it is not just what we accept that defines us, but more and more, what we repudiate.
JSV
2024
Judson Stacy Vereen is the author of American Pleasure, 62 Poems from Judson Vereen, and Like A Bird Knows To Sing. He is also a staff contributor to Wrong Speak, where he publishes a bi-monthly opinion column. His substack page is Dispatches from Bohemian Splendor.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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In his book Mechanical Bride, Marshall McLuhan is almost vicious in his attacks against the average person seeking status by consuming goods instead of showing sympathy that the average person wanted to at least pretend to by royalty. In one passage, he approvingly referenced Gertrude Stein, who was happy that the war protected Europe from the mass culture that swallowed up the US. It took two seconds to find out that this gay Jewish woman was a Vichy sympathizer. Influential philosopher Martin Heidegger fell into a similar hole, believing fascism under Hitler was the way to restore man as man. Ironically, it seems the various influential philosophers and intellectuals of the 20th Century noting correctly what was happening to humans because of hyper-consumerism simultaneously mocked the guard rails such as communities, nuclear families, and faith that gave humans spiritual purpose over material consumption.
Stellar writing, as usual. Been leaving things to the side for a bit now, and it feels better than to indulge. It's freeing ✌️