Most modern day activities are an exercise in masochism. Get up early without asking your biological clock when its time to awaken, shave with inadequate razors in a painful narcissism, start up the automobile and drown in traffic on the way to work. Outside of work, recreation time is a painful re-creation of luxuries which we have to pay for, a trip to the mall or the beach but nothing fundamentally playful or invested with meaning. The sorry state of affairs has become cyclical despite our belief in linear time, the forced merriment of holidays interspersed amid a life of painful drudgery in the names of labor and freedom, which currently are a contradiction in terms.

What is it that we should seek, that is worth the energies of the spirit in this world's planned out maths that exercise their dominance in the form of quantities? Love comes to mind, but yet carries the odors of domination and establishment fealties, and is a quality that cannot be jump started by mere searching. Meanwhile, the strip malls offer the allurements of desire, the books to inform yourself about a life lived elsewhere, the restaurants to sit in and be treated like imperial royalty, the beauty shops to mesh with a codified measure of beauty made objective by its timeliness and frequency, the mortuaries in parking lots, the dumpsters that betray the cost of consumption. The worthy articles that are deemed to have value become the arbiters of our imprisonment within this structure of half-assed materialism, which doesn't praise what it creates but only proffers its creations for the sake of obtaining money, the measure of wealth.

Abstract concepts have yet to make their way into the economy outside of Hallmark cards and pedantic philosophy texts, we have yet to experience true hope, true beauty, true hatred. For it is the articles of our life that remove us and distinguish us from other people, it is innate classism that serves as the measure for our acquisitions and the forfeit of our imaginary gains. Intrinsic human values are absent from economies, in fact most modern economies can be said to be working against such values. A quick survey of items that can be bought to identify us against others in this fetid game shows the lack of loving, the lack of compassion, the lack of camaraderie invested in this common reality of our lives in favor of the sanctity of safe appeals to human greed.

Truly as people we have been pushed away from true participation in commerce outside of a passive role. Nowhere are commodities distinguished by bold human touches and scarcely are they touched by anything but the workings of the specialist technocracy. The thousands of products that do not exist because of our incessant blase manufacturing protocols could fill living rooms with style, artifice, and invention. Instead, we rely on foreign wage slavery to meet material demands while sacrificing auras, we rely on availability over sanctity. In our passive roles with consumerism, we sleepwalk through the moribund castles of the establishment, tripping on their garbage and vomiting dollar bills for the next chance to participate. And in this one-sided relationship, we forget to embrace the auspices of creation and its spirit, we stew in garbage dumps called houses stocked up with all kinds of asinine garbage, and make the mistake of calling our market participation 'democratic' when it is authoritarian in the aforementioned sense.

I challenge you to create something, a map of your escape woven by the cottage industry's tapestry loom. Create a fan that is also a back-scratcher, or an alarm clock that self-destructs, or a work of art detailing the restrained notions of the spirit transcending the mundane in search of the rebellious, in search of that flint-spark known as human spontaneity that is capable of kindling the fires of the actually lived.