Midlife bear market

My career is dead, my bank account is close to zero each month, most of my time is drawn into parenting and I am going to hit forty next year. I am inhabited by frustration, by the feeling that my life is going nowhere. Words need to be dropped: I am having my midlife crisis.

2022 was just about utilitarian try-hardism about changing a new job and it did not make it. I remain damned into this Hell of Zoom call and Trello tickets, without any room for personal or economical growth.

My life won’t get any better. In fact my life appears to be a series of small catastrophes with less and less time and money, the two currencies of modernity. I did not please God and I am not pleased either. I trashed two years, preparing job interviews, when putting aside my artistic gift. Is this a message? Trading life, passion and liberty for an investment in some wagie future is a shitty deal anyway, and inevitably leads to the question of your very own death: liberty, life, death, and danger are packaged together. The pleasure you feel is symmetrical to the risks you take.

When Skateboarding you can get a broken bone. Motorcycles can get you a wheelchair. And you can end-up buried in the woods, If you play bondage with the wrong stranger.

Death as Liberty

“Death is certain, liberty is not.”

– Cody Wilson

“What do I want to do before dying” is a purely consumerist question that can be solved by throwing money at something. At this point, it’s not even a question, but a conversion funnel where you end-up with Rich Dad Poor Dad on your bookshelf and some overpriced course on how to launch a drop-shipping business.

You should rather ask “What do I want to die for”, because this question does not accept any man-made currency. It’s an alien uniswap smart contract that only accepts blood as input to get these precious $LIBERTY tokens. You suddenly shorted the modern consumerist paradigm to get in touch with ancient times, where the only economy was about sun, waste and sacrifice. And from there only, you can start your romance with Death and Liberty.

And yes, it’s a romance, and it’s very real. In George Bataille’s Eroticism, Death is a future event, and the amount of energy you burn in the present, in some unreasonable fashion, tends to make this morbid encounter exponentially closer and brutal. People touched by Eroticism do not only hypnotise masses (see my essay on Soundcloud rappers) by the amount of energy they give away, they give away so much that they end up invoking an early and sudden death, like these gigantic stellar objects provoking space and time anomalies. We can take as example Rimbaud, Curt Cobain, Lord Byron or Serge Gainsbourg : pieces of their success were nothing but foreshadowing of their death. 

It’s has nothing to do with suicide, it’s the exact opposite: very expression of life and vitality. It’s the anti suicide pod, this mass wagie extermination device that has paradoxically became the climax of our Western consumerist societies.

Shorting the future?

What characterises sensuality is that it is diametrically opposed to morality. Morality is founded on concern for the future and sensuality is founded on indifference for the future.

– Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche

The last show I watched (or started to re-watch) was Californication. You follow David Duchovni as Hank, a middle aged, divorced, Los Angeles based writer, plagued by alcoholism, hedonism and writer’s block. My situation is not exactly the same: I am not divorced, my car has been destroyed by a truck and I cannot afford a macbook anymore. But the important thing is that we are both experiencing decay. We have reached the plateau of our career and the rest of the story can only be about hedonistic pleasure as palliative for our free fall.

All that remains of my life is fucking, writings and caring of my familly. Future is only about heading toward economical downgrades, WWIII and Death, eventually. My productivity, as admitted in our current civilisation, won’t get any better. Only George Bataille’s economics remain. I am shorting the future for an investment in sensuality.

I want to pour myself into unuseful and passionate activities. I want to live through the blade of free speech. I want to write erotic pieces so hard that it would kill me.

And you? What do you want to die for?

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