When it comes to happiness, the numbers just don’t add up

SINCE graduating from university (with a 2:1), I’ve been under immense pressure to get a job. It’s a condition many of my peers and fellow alumni are suffering at the minute – fierce competition for limited places in the shrinking economy of a failed state. A state failed by our parents, employers, bankers, politicians and civil servants. In fact, the only people (in most cases) to not fail this generation are, as you may guess from the high rebound rate of graduates into university, our teachers and lecturers (at least, in my country).

But then, Northern Ireland is different. If you tried really hard in your Eleven Plus (like I did), and went to a grammar school, or even further; if you valued going to university, creativity, and learning more than anything in your childhood: more than fitness, more than money, more than television or make-up or sex or whatever trash today’s children and teenagers are interested in. If you put it first and foremost on your dreams list, then the country rewarded you (a little bit) with student finance and encouragement, regardless of background, creed or bank balance. Not with graduate jobs, not with a generous salary with bonus incentives, just with an affordable education and maybe even some incentives to study further. In other words, they incentivised you to be - in what could easily have (and increasingly appears to have) been exclusively my case - happy. (I say this because the biggest gripe I hear from graduates is “I can’t get a job making over £50,000 with zero years work experience and a permanent, 25 hour contract”).

Pity the public aren’t the same, not forgetting the banking houses, and especially Tories, and any sadistic bastard who voted for them. No, they all envision just one citizen: the Anyslave. The Anyslave is isolated and devoid of ambitions or intentions, of opinions and uninformed decisions.  He is, if you will, the human stripped of all society, culture, norms, virtues, aspirations. He is stripped of where he’d come from, what his potential outcomes were, and what his options are. He is not expected to be his genetic self, the roadmap of possibility laid out in his parents’ most survivable traits, and the strengths of his own convictions. No, he is designed for just one thing: consumption.

As a new reality is constructed around him, this agent is taught and will perceive those around him as detractors or benefactors. They do good or bad to him, as there is no neutrality or disengagement. This is engrained in him by an anti-culture of nosiness and trough-feed, watered down pop knowledge (á la Prof. Brian Cox et al.), deterring him from natural curiosity and instilling the belief that everyone has a stake, and therefore an interest, in him. Keep that in mind for later.

Now, this agent is also treated in two spheres. Imagine, if you will, a Venn diagram. A basic, useless Venn diagram (much like those the Anyslave’s benefactors and detractors love to use to describe otherwise easily understood evidence in a garish way). And within the circles (aptly labelled ‘The Good Stuff; and ‘The Bad’), we find behaviours, characteristics, stereotypes, mannerisms, quirks, colloquialisms, thoughts and feelings (as exhibited, because even his masters aren’t psychic). They are simplified, categorised, stratified and organised against the ideals of the reality constructed around the Anyslave. The primary agent in collating this data is the compulsory education system he enters aged just four years old. Ideals include ‘working in a dull office to earn numbers on an ATM screen,’ ‘garnering self-confidence from having a higher number than any other given Anyslave,’ and ‘smiling at those who shout at you if they provide numbers to incentivise it.’ On the flip side, vices in the Bad Stuff circle may be ‘thinking,’ ‘talking back to those who shout at you, and damn the numbers,’ or ‘having unsaleable or ‘Innumerate’ hobbies that may interest, entice or distract you from the humdrum activities in your dull office.’ By judging an agent’s behaviours against the Anyslave pie chart, masters can then decide whether to incentivise the agent. They will act kindly and enthusiastically towards the well behaved, and will act angrily or with confusion, derision or some unholy combination of the two (with dismissive passive-aggression thrown in for good measure) when the agent is, for instance, creative or (God forbid) rebellious.

And so, onward goes the humdrum existence of the poor, material agent. He buys boring things, made for him and his increasingly boring peers. He goes off to school, to play sports, to neither under- or over-achieve, merely to exist, as existence is now an achievement in and of itself. He drifts along like tumbleweed, occasionally hating whatever en vogue group of defectors the media and popular entertainment choose to deride that week. He aims for musculature, reproduction and comfort. He sleeps regularly, is active only in sunlight, and has opinions on football. He bleaches his teeth white and his skin brown. He cuts, colours and styles his hair, because someone might approve if he does or disapprove if he doesn’t. Never, indeed, because he wants to, because he isn’t allowed wants or desires, and only seeks what he is brainwashed into seeking. Over time, as he is better practised in the informal, passive art of Anyslavery, he will wear suits to interviews for innocuous jobs, will drive a car, attend a gym, eat in restaurants, pass opinions, and eventually reproduce a new Anyslave, assuming he is not so degenerate as to be unable to reproduce. For in that case, he is doomed to permanent Anyslavery. If he is lucky enough to reproduce, he will break his indenture and be the benefactor or detractor of an entirely new generation of Anyslaves.    

The Anyslave is a junkie, hooked on positive and negative reinforcement, modern psychology and unabated capitalism. He seeks to please everyone, and his masters have an insatiable appetite for pleasure. His masters enjoyed an untainted countryside, free education, healthcare, an enormous market for jobs, a national identity, community membership, regular (and bankable) periods of pleasant weather, a balance of work, creativity and exercise, and such freedom that they could leave school at fifteen unable to spell much more than their names, and still retire with sizeable pensions (which keep on rising), excellent health, and property. The Anyslave will have none of these things, a 50% chance of getting cancer, a fuel, food, financial and health crisis, but will still be expected to raise a family, keep a (most likely lazy) housewife and care for his elderly masters, and the entire country. He is at once a utilitarian character, an agent acting on his own and for his own interests, free to engage with the society around him at will, and concurrently a slave to all around him, unable to act for himself or on his innate interests, particularly past a certain age.

But the worst of the Anyslave’s lot is that, while forced to act exclusively on his saleable traits, no matter how incredibly boring or stupid they are, he will always be fed a steady stream of entertainment that exhibits individuals acting for themselves, in heterogeneous ways. He will see a broken down homeless man become a local politician and, from his lofty position, make the lives of other homeless people in the community the focus of local politics. Or he will see a battered housewife leave her husband and follow her dream of becoming a solicitor in a city corporation, freeing her children from their father’s largesse received at the expense of their physical safety. What the Anyslave doesn’t realise is that he is only witness to the selling of another used and abused agent’s - the writers - saleable trait, by the enormous enterprises of their collective masters. And in his own life, he will be told to forget his dreams, stick to what he knows, or shut up. Regardless of any desire to, say, be a baker: of any love for baked goods, fascination with the craft, the physical and mental benefits of baking (especially the creativity involved), and the sheer saleability of the activity, he will be told to stick to what he knows. He will be some generic, homogenous bollocks like a ‘Fitness Instructor’ or ‘Financial Services Consultant’ because he can count or is a failed athlete irrespectively. He may even be a ‘Refuse Organisation Practitioner’ or work in ‘Scholastic Appetite Management Provision.’ His dreams are for naught, as his dreams can’t be sold by his peers.

If he obeys, he will live out his days in complete idiotic bliss. Otherwise, he will eventually discover his lot; then his only purposes are to be miserable, to work in a bank or some bullshit for everyone’s benefit but his own, and to die aged 45 from a stress induced heart attack, just like the good little slaves around him.