Where do we go from here?

 Is there anything in this country which isn’t broken? And is it any better anywhere else in the west? Education appears to be churning out malfunctioning clones with despair as their default setting; will they ever get a job, be able to afford a place to live, have a meaningful life? If they observe what is going on and develop opinions which run counter to their peers, will they be labelled as extremists?

And what of learning from your mistakes, especially as today mistakes may well land one in jail. The world has become divided, bitter, antagonistic and downright dangerous. The phenomena of ‘quiet quitting’ and demanding workers rights before ever doing a day’s work have eroded the social contract between employers and their staff. The ever-increasing demand for some nebulous meaning is a drag anchor on ever arriving at true meaning.

Keir Starmer is about to introduce legislation to further prevent people from developing as rounded human beings, enshrining in law that employers must not make demands on their workers that fall outside some poorly understood framework of acceptability, to be decided, presumably, by politicians such as himself and the deranged Angela Rayner.

He cites productivity as his incentive, yet has no experience whatsoever in producing anything of tangible value, claiming that working from home – the skiver’s nirvana – is every worker’s right and that actually turning up to work (presenteeism) is a driver of poor productivity. In the new fantasy, Angela in Labour Land, it is indeed achievable to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

The ideas of earning respect, rather than deserving it without question has been abandoned. The idea of work as its own reward has been left in the dust, presumably because to learn this, one needs to actually apply oneself to work, and lots of it. The gradual acquisition of skills, likewise, appears to have landed in the ‘too difficult’ in-tray; if gratification isn’t instant it isn’t gratifying any more.

No, everybody under the age of 40 (and some old fools, too) wants to be seen, to be lauded, to be desired, to be the envy of the rest. Travel, once the broadener of the mind, has become narrow, egocentric and a mere vehicle for the expression of individuality with every individual posting the exact same message on social media and all following the latest fads. (“Yes, we are all individuals!”) And what on earth is a social media influencer, anyway? What is the point of them?

I genuinely worry for the future of the west when the fewer children who are brought into being will be the product of narcissists and serial failures, the flotsam of a society adrift on an ocean of mediocrity and instant fulfillment of the shallowest of urges. Where is the pride in a job well done; where is the reward for hard work and persistence? And when everything stops working completely, to whom do we turn to fix it? Stop the world, I want to get off.