Slavic By Day, Despotic By Night

Many of us are slavish by day and despotic by night. We feel bad about our situation and want empathy, but at the same time we keep the system that sustains this situation afloat.

We have access to cheap food, cheap flights, and nowadays everything can be delivered at low cost to your home, day and night. This probably paints the worst picture of the saying that “he that wills work shall work to the end.”

In this sense, we are doctors exploiting a medical system that is already short of resources. We are the ones who buy branded products produced in countries with appalling working conditions.

As a society, we end up numbing ourselves by consuming endlessly. We are wasting our most valuable resource: our time. This numbness is necessary because, if we don’t have it, we poison ourselves with our own discontent.

Survival is an illusion

Time to take care of family we never see, pay for a trip we don’t enjoy, or give money for a camera we don’t use. This time and other resources slip through our fingers like cold water. Little by little, this erodes your bones. 

We are slavish during the day because  we work under dire conditions to earn just enough money to survive. Survive, and maybe we’ll see one or two dreams come true along the way. At night, on the other hand, we are despotic because we continue to maintain the same system ourselves.

We order food via home delivery when we are hungry, knowing that the couriers are not always treated well. We do this because it’s cheap, because it’s fast, and because it gives us the illusion of more free time. This dream of more free time makes us slavish by day and despotic by night.

We accept jobs that don’t pay well. We feel that if we don’t, someone else will – maybe for less! There is always someone who needs this job even more than we do.

This attitude allows survival for the moment, yes, but it will eventually negatively impact your life anyway. In the end we sit for hours behind a cash register, looking at a screen, or in the driver’s seat of a bus, looking at all the cars that drive past us.

Modern habits are a slavish black hole

We urgently need a personal revolution,  big or small. Either way, a revolution starts with ourselves. We must no longer act slavishly by day and despotic by night.

It’s time we speak out against bad working conditions. So resist the temptation to buy cheaper stuff. Remind yourself that whoever is at the bottom of the food chain is the one who ends up paying the top prize.

Get rid of the idea that eight hours of work is the same as three or four hours of work, as long as the time goes by quickly. Quick bite, quick workout, quick sleep. Why do we want everything to go faster in a world that already functions at roughly the speed of light?

We want to move less and have everything delivered at home in the meantime. Why do we want this in a world that is getting unhealthier by the day? How is it possible that we want so many technological solutions if we only work more?

Why are sales figures so important if material things are not satisfactory at all? In the end, nothing equals the sense of peace we experience when the sun reappears after days of rain showers.

An illusion of the system

This “fast” way of life is just an illusion created by the system. With this it wants to give us the idea that we have enough free time and enough food at our disposal. 

However, we can also ask ourselves whether this is true. Even those of us who feel like we’re getting a great salary. If all the cheap options weren’t available to you, would you still be making enough money to get by?

We work so much, but are we actually making our money in real time? Or is this again about the “fast” time we are talking about now? All these fast things without any transcendental weight blow away as soon as the wind picks up.

After that, only we, alone, remain. We are face to face with reality, naked, without clothing to protect ourselves from the cold.

We look at ourselves in the mirror and feel weird: we are ourselves, but we are not really present. Far away from our own bodies, from the people we love. They sit in the living room staring at a screen, gossiping about people they don’t really know…