Hello, chapos.
I'm posting from Dubai, and I hate everything this country stands for. I was born and raised here to immigrant Indian parents, and my dad owns a business, with a small number of migrant labourers under him. He pays them "more than what they'd get somewhere else" and that basically amounts to "send some money back home and live on the cheapest most affordable food" wages.
My mother is a manager at a company, and I recently saw her reprimanding a group of workers who came to raise a silent protest about their wages being halved. I stood there silently and cringed helplessly.
In this hypercapitalist cyberpunk (it is indeed low life, high technology sans the lawlessness) dystopian hellworld, racism, sexism, homophobia and classism is a way of life; and if it isn't overt, it is most definitely covert. I have been suffering from depression, suicidal ideation and mood disorders for the better part of a decade now.
After getting exposed to Marxist theories, the idea that I have been brought up on the fruit of surplus value stolen from labour weighs down on my mind. I also consider myself an ecosocialist, and that in itself is enough for me to hate the hellhole that I stay in. On the few occasions where I have tried to talk about my leftist ideals to either friends or family, I have been mocked, belittled and disregarded as a crazy fucking loser (been NEETing for 3 years now, I haven't been able to find a job with my college degree, and my mental illness makes it hard for me to persist/commit to anything) who is simply bitter and lazy, and is anyways just living off his parents, and is not to be taken seriously. Or they accept that I'm probably right, right before they sarcastically wish me good luck with a revolution.
I'm sick of living like this. I don't fit in anywhere, and when I do, I feel like I'm faking it. And oh yeah, to top it all off, I'm a closeted queer and an ex-Muslim atheist. I feel like I have very little to look forward in life. Doom-scrolling through r/collapse, seeing how the world is being overtaken by neoliberalism, the hate for minorities back in India led by the current fascist government, climate change denial ensuring a shittier quality of life down the decades in the region I live right now, lack of real social connections with irl folks...
I have been seriously considering suicide for the last week, and it feels like more than ideation. I think I've reached that stage of being at peace with suicide, and I think this post is some half assed attempt to reach out for help. I weirdly relate to a lot of the things you dudes say, so I thought I'd post here.
I guess my situation is somewhat similar. I made a post some months ago that has some info. There's a little more to add, though:
The most ghoulish relative of mine personally knows even more ultra-ghouls, some of whom have been brought up here as exemplifying the total pieces of shit they are, if I wrote their names you'd recognize them immediately (not going into specifics cause I don't wanna doxx myself). So this person really likes to dine with his ghoul-companions, and they occasionally brought me along. Of course at first I wasn't old enough to think much about it, but eventually I started getting into left politics. I remember thinking I could kill whatever corporate ghoul was present at the occasion if I felt like it. How could I claim to be against these types of people as I looked them in the eye, shook their hands, sat across from them and shared a meal? I never said no because I had (and still have) extreme social anxiety and couldn't muster up the courage to do so. In hindsight, so much shit from my childhood was fucked up out of touch shit that most people can only ever dream of.*
I lived a privileged life with the people I supposedly despised, all the while dwelling on the sheet hypocrisy of it all, which sent me into a depression. I flirted with suicidal ideation, and I'm still not sure if it was "true" ideation or just me deluding myself into thinking it was. At this point it should be clear there's no redemption arc where I give away all material possessions and go live in a cave. I'm still able to lead a far more leisurely life than most people. The depression never went away, but I haven't relapsed into suicidal ideation (yet!). For me, a way of alleviating it is by using that free time to go out and do things that actually contribute to the community; volunteer work for example, where I made the first actual friend of my life. At least it gives life just a tidbit of meaning to it, which makes things just a little less miserable. I also took up a photographic hobby, and I find it highly enjoyable and it almost always lifts my mood. What you're going through sounds way worse than my situation, though, and I don't want to make this sound like "The One Simple Trick That Fixes Everything!", just thought I'd suggest some things.
Hang in there. I'd strongly encourage replacing doomscrolling places like r/Collapse with another activity. Don't let things that you can't control make you go full doomer. There are millions in this fight, fighting to keep the light at the end of the tunnel, however dim, alive. Channel the bad news into motivation to fight even harder instead of resigning yourself to hellworld. I try to do this and on a lot of days it just sounds hopelessly naive, but it does give me a few "good days" per month.
*Basically having like 3 servants in all but in name (they called them "helpers"), frequent trips to places like Paris, only staying in the best suites in the most opulent hotels, frequently dining in the private room of fancy restaurants where $2000 was considered chump change, etc. I can't believe how "normal" it seemed. I still recall a conversation with my parents where I was saying something about the one percent, and they said "[name], we are the one percent.", said completely without irony.
Well, I guess I'm not exactly the most relatable and easy to sympathize with character (not that I deserve any), but I hope I've made at least one helpful suggestion.
So what class traitor things did you eventually decide to do? Engles plan of funding patreons is a good start
First would just be not following in my family's footsteps. Second would be the things I've already said, + donating to various organizations. I could do so much more but social anxiety is a fuck. If I didn't mind potentially getting a life sentence I could easily do... certain things but violence bad haha parody. Taking suggestions for more shit to do. It just feels like I could have much more of an impact than I do now.
While adventureism is rad is is ultimately not productive. There are effectively infinite neoliberal ghouls to replace any handfull that could be removed. So you dont actually have to feel bad for not going out in a blaze of samurai glory.
The biggest thing you could do would be to start a mutual aid fund. Imagine if you started a regular credit union and after paying the employees well you just pushed the profit into simply paying for peoples transitions for example.
I pick this kind of example specifically as you are likely to know the kinda people that can get NGOs to slide cash into a project with liberal appeal such as this.
Really, I think you are in a better position to investigate how yo turn your access to resources and highly placed people into the kernal of a dual power system.
Here in the heart of neoliberalism the start of any revolution will be a big pile of money that can be invested and grown untill ebough power is acrued to threaten the system. If you look it up, every projection for how much money it would cost to fix global warming is less than Bezos, or Musk's fortune. If they wanted to, they could just do it.
So imagine you go Musk wild and make a solar powered robot farm that takes in darpa money to build robots and trians them to hunt mosquites and give the food they grow to people.
I am under the impression anything like this is fully within the means of a 1%
Or comedy option. Embezzle as much as you can and defect to cuba will enough money to double their GDP or something. It would actually be hard to find better praxis than this as well.
God damn. The part about speculating how it would probably cost less than Bezos or Musk's fortune to fix global warming, and the rest.
And the things you said about the dual power system. Like I read somewhere, the revolution will require both capital and labour, so you're not doing anyone a favour by pauperising yourself.
A recent united nations report said that fixing climate change could cost 300 Billion. So if musk and Bezos cooperated. They do could the UN plan and have tens of billions left over.
Why not expose them all?