I just feel like: if my life isn't where I wanted it to be by this point, why should I be courteous to others. There's no reciprocity from them anyways. All I do is live this rut of go work, home and sleep. I know nobody nearby who I can relate to. It drives me crazy how I haven't met any of these milestones for career, family, or friends. I'm just by myself, screaming explitives into a digital void.
I just don't like anybody because of that. I don't like my coworkers and their simple Maga brains, I don't like my rural locality and it's dependency on service work for the elderly. I don't like any of the workers in those services because of how cowed they are and how short they sell themselves. Part of me thinks they deserve their misery for putting up with it all the time. I don't like the conservative culture of my area and how it limits who I can relate to on a personal level. All this just makes me not like people in general and I feel myself becoming more embittered these days. And even if was more amenable like I used to be, experience has told me that people still wouldn't want to bother with me anyways. Idk, these days I have such a jaded view of everyone around me.
What, like Payne's Prairie?
That's not what I had in mind- I was thinking of the edge of the contiguous great american prairie that includes Chicago, Madison, Louisville, and many other worthy places for organizing and self-development.
But as it turns out, there is an entry point into the destituent nexus, less than 30 miles from what you suggested.
Yeah, I went to college there. Won't matter, transient student population and domineering state government. The working class in Florida couldn't even organize a hurricane party, nevermind a union. They're just a bunch of seashells in a bag, they don't constitute anything that could stand up against power.
I wasn't referring to anything connected to that university. Just something that happens to be within a county or so, and not something that's mainly based there.
There are lots of things to vent about in our imperial core late-capitalist hellhole, but ultimately we are going to need to cultivate more than just disdain in ourselves. Nobody is on the cusp of toppling or even openly challenging the empire from within; if they were, they would have done it already. Everything takes a buildup. You seem to be expressing your frustration at not having a path to such a buildup, and I am trying to point you towards a few of them.
Do you want to end up somewhere that's not "where you wanted to be" but is divergently satisfying, and feel affinity, shared purpose, and righteous rage with a bunch of flawed yet remarkable and ardent people? Or do you just want to chill in metro Disney and feel contempt for the liberal subjects around you?
Honestly, to me that is a beautiful dream worth striving for.
Happiness is a bullshit concept that probably doesn't exist and if it does is impossible to achieve, so I don't refer to it. But I'll be darned if meaning, connection, continuity, and a little bit of material security aren't as close as one can get.
At this point I have contempt for everyone. I have contempt for all the treat brained liberal subjects in central Florida, and I have contempt for all The "flawed yet remarkable and ardent people" who are trying to build community and counter systemic politics.
I especially feel anger at the latter because I feel like they're lying to me when they say so confidently that they can change things. They can't. At this point, I am beginning to feel a sense of catharsis watching those people fail and get pulled further and further into the grinding maw of the capitalist system. Serves them right for spending years raising people's hopes with false promises.
It seems you are experiencing something that is to socialist organizing the way male incels are to women. You've struggled to get into it, you've had a long deadening drought of personal connections, and part of the way your brain is responding to this is with a kind of "blackpill" reasoning. But that's not going to help you. It's just a dead end that will slightly reduce your cognitive/emotional dissonance, at the expense of your ability to make real human connection.
There's a perfectionist aspect of this as well. "It's not going to go from zero to Union or zero to Party in 3.5 years, so why try?" But I guarantee you, trying something and reaching something that's way short of the goal, or ends up in a different place from what you were aiming for, is way more satisfying than trying nothing and then giving yourself the empty assurance that it was inevitable that nothing would ever happen anyways.
Politics is not what your opinion is; politics is what you do with other people. If you let yourself stop trying, your smugness and dismissiveness will start to turn inward on yourself, if it hasn't already. And it will be accurate in doing so, because if you don't work on something that's larger than yourself, you are just another liberal subject, with the only difference being that you're poorly calibrated to your reality.
You have to get over the fear of shortcoming. If that means moving, then move. There are lots of lonely people on this site whom I would gladly just buy a train ticket for to get to my area, I just need the space for accommodation first.
The leftist equivalent of "work out and get a hobby." How well has that really done anyone? Do we see any less alienated people here because of that?
That is just a huge non sequitur of an analogy.
Meeting people and doing stuff with them works. Even if it's only a little club for the time being. Not only is it what makes any kind of leftism affectively coherent, it's something that fills a human need.
What you're saying is tantamount to "never mind context, anything I've done hasn't worked, so why try?"
That is exactly what I'm saying. It does work, I always end up being the one keeping it on life support, and I'm not going to be made a fool of by doing so. Especially not by the sort of lumpenized types I see among the left. My dad taught me to have some dignity by not putting myself at the level of such people.