A life of unfreedom

You are not free. You have been force-fed lies since you were born. Your first meal, your mother’s milk, was laced with lies, infused with hormones and chemical flavors and colors added to her own meal—lies of wholesomeness designed to mask the nutritional vacuity of the factory.

You are not free. Your very first steps were on the floor of a prison. You learned to walk in a house with windows that latched and doors that locked and baby-gates stretched across thresholds between rooms to protect you from acting on your inborn impulse to freedom. Your early playground was a yard encased in a cyclone fence, a stockade.

You are not free. Your days have always been parceled into tightly monitored segments of time. As a youth you were shuttled to school where you learned to conform and adopt a reflexive posture of obeisance to authority. Later you were taught to think that you were truly free only when every fiber of your being had been bound and directed toward goals that were not your own. Still later you were taught to believe that those goals were in fact your own. Eventually you forgot how to discover what your own goals should be, and you now depend on corporate marketing to tell you.

You are not free. You are trapped by the rules of the game. The game is one of labor and debt and merchandise and consumption, but no one seems to realize it is a game. You don’t realize it is a game. You don’t think you have options. You don’t have options. There are no options. There is only labor and debt and merchandise and consumption.

You are not free. And now you come to your own death. But you are not allowed freedom even here. While you yet breathe, there is money to be made by prolonging your suffering. There are drug companies and medical device manufacturers and hospitals—and all of the people who earn additional points in the game when you die slowly with tubes in your arms and machines in your chest.

You are not free. And then you are not.