...
It's become increasingly harder since WWII, or so it seems from everything I have seen over the course of my life. When I was a kid boys could still grow up to be president and girls grew up to get married and have babies. Easy peasy, yes? No. By thirteen I was already plotting how to make better arrangements. I was going to have a man who was gone at least half the year. When we were together it would be seh-herious romance, but we'd both be heavily involved in our own gigs. He could be home all the time if we both had separate spaces. I already needed to absent myself from company for long stretches before I even got into high school.
Then I spent most of my time at home holed up in my room with my cat... at some point even eating my meals in there... mostly just not coming out. Reading. Writing. Smoking. Listening to music. Thinking. Dreaming. Talking on the phone. Except... independent as I felt myself to be... I was completely reliant on my parents for everything that cost money until I was a senior. Then I got a job.
I remember being fully able to support myself from age 16 up until approximately age 30. Somewhere in the late 70s or early 80s my income, which was larger than that of most of my peers, even just the one job, the main one, not counting all the extra ones, stopped covering the nut. Until that time my main problem with independence was finding a roommate I could live with. I had to move back home a bunch of times because of that... and, yet, even as I was clearly vastly more emancipated than my circle of friends, there was a big hitch in my ability to be a completely self-sufficient human. My parents, particularly my mother, were apoplectic. I was not married.
They were quite progressive. If I didn't want to be married, I could then become "the president of Standard Oil" or an equivalent, and stop being treated like a worthless maniac... hounded by it. I wasn't against marriage. I was against getting married to be married, but I'd've married someone for love. I was against running a major corporation. Big time. I wouldn't be some cog in a corporate wheel even on penalty of death, let alone run a whole factory of such cogs. Pfeh. What a reprehensible idea!
In my early thirties this hit a fever pitch. I was locked in mortal psychic combat with my mother! It was killing me. Ruining my life. Friends had to drag me out of epic depressions that were nothing like you read about in psychiatric tomes. Not marked by lethargy. Most resembling persisting thunderheads parked wherever I was.
I ended up having to swear off my own family in order to make it into old age.
My point is: It's hard enough to grow up without the whole world reinforcing your immaturity and dependence, turning into your surrogate parent until the bottom line says you need pushing out of the nest... and onto the street. If you had any wherewithal from your family or a good investment or some kind of windfall to cushion such an abrupt halt in met needs, you spend all that before you hit the street, but, in the end, earlier or later, it's get back into the mold, which is at least half the time not an option, or starve. It is optimal that you reproduce early, anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five — don't worry about a spouse for this — totally optional — while you are still healthy and energetic enough, because you're going to be blessed to make it to thirty-five before you start feeling pretty bad... feeding the medical professionals with the sequela of eating, drinking and breathing toxins while riveted to glowing rectangles of one size or another your whole life. For the vast majority of humans in Western "civilization" these are the facts.
Most people can't even tell, but the smart ones who can are obviated by the notion they can vote people into office to fix it. Even if that breaks down, it's okay because people think they're helpless to affect change any other way and start distracting themselves from reality in any number of ways, all with built-in completely righteous-sounding excuses. The really, really smart ones are survivalists, and that requires more attention to suppress, but mostly the trained monkeys are full of enough derision to quell that or, in a pinch, a SWAT team can be sent in. No. There's one way out.
There is no name for it, or word for it, but it is sort of science, art and religion all in one. This is all easily obscured too. Art. Nobody is liberated by it. It makes them feel good. Religion. Nobody is liberated by it, but everybody is convinced it leads to it. Science. Nobody is liberated by it, but it's just useful enough to convince them it leads to it. Why is everybody so easily caught up in these delusions?
Because everybody knows there's something else, something monumentally important, something that usually gets called spirit, a missing ingredient, something very satisfying once you can identify it, find it and stick with it.
Damn awesomely crafted system, no? Yes.
All of it delusion.
Thin air.
Mind-forg'd manacles.
One way out.
Nobody takes it.
