Zombies among us
post by Declan Molony (declan-molony) · 2024-12-31T05:14:07.929Z · LW · GW · 3 commentsContents
4 comments
I met a man in the Florida Keys who rents jet skis at $150/hour. Since nobody jet skis alone, he makes at least $300/hour. When there’s no customers he sits around watching sports. After work he plays with his two sons. I asked if he likes his lifestyle. He loves it.
Later when I was in Miami, I saw the walking dead. Zombies. The working class people who wished they weren’t alive. I remember what that’s like…
Wake up early. Take the bus with people who never make eye contact with you beyond a quick glance. Grab a stimulant, usually coffee, to force your brain awake. Clock in. Grind for the next eight hours. Maybe your boss is cool, but often not. Maybe your coworkers are cool, but often not. Find ways to cope with your physical or psychic pain (which if you don’t have yet, it’s just a matter of time until you do). Then hope the pain goes away since the only form of healthcare you can afford is prayer.
At the end of the day of doing hard physical labor that grinds your body to a pulp, or dealing with ungrateful customers you’re forced to smile at, your efforts are rewarded with the legal minimum wage: $8/hour. So 40 hours per week (assuming you don’t also have to work weekends) makes you $320—roughly what the jet ski guy makes in an hour.
Having an apartment to yourself is out of the question. Roommates are mandatory—you just have to decide how many you can tolerate, and if you don’t mind sharing a room with a complete stranger. Maybe your roommates are cool, but often not. Maybe your neighbors are cool and have the common decency to not blast music at two in the morning, but often not.
Whether at work or at home, your only privacy is confined to the bathroom. Except you never shit at home—you save that for work so you can get paid for it. You calculate how much per month you make shitting. It makes you feel like you’re getting one over on your employer.
Maybe everything in your apartment functions normally, but often not. When something breaks, it stays broken. You can ask the landlord to fix it, but it’ll take months for him to take a look. And when he does, he may blame you and say it’s not his problem. But your expectations weren’t too high anyway: when touring the apartment you asked if there were any amenities—the landlord laughed because he assumed you were joking.
You sit down in your bedroom with your frozen dinner and numb yourself with your drug of choice: alcohol, weed, video games, porn (because if your lifestyle doesn’t chase away romantic partners, then your low self-esteem will), Netflix, doom scrolling on TikTok, sports gambling (because the parlay will surely work this time and nobody loses forever, right?), Facebook, online shopping, YouTube—anything to help you forget you’re alive.
Before bed you brush your teeth but can’t bring yourself to look in the mirror. Staring into your sunken eyes would only invite the negative self-talk anyway. As a precaution, you wear headphones and blast music to avoid listening to your thoughts.
But what you can't ignore is the tightness in your chest that never goes away. Maybe it’s a heart attack. Sometimes you hope it’s a heart attack. At first, thoughts like this scare you. Then they become background noise.
You collapse on your bed but you don’t “go to sleep.” You never “go to sleep.” You pass out.
When you’re young there’s a spark of hope. You wonder if things will change. And with each passing day, that spark withers. But all hope is not lost. Rather, it changes form: you used to hope that things would get better; now you hope that things won’t get worse.
Don’t worry too much because you won’t be there to experience it. You’ll numb yourself out of existence. You’ll become the walking dead. A zombie.
Then you wake up the next day.
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comment by sjadler · 2024-12-31T20:02:14.781Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
At the risk of being pedantic, just noting I don’t think it’s really correct to consider that first person as earning $300/hr. For example I’d expect to need to account for the depreciation on the jet skis (or more straightforwardly, that one is in the hole on having bought them until a certain number of hours rented), and also presumably some accrual for risk of being sued in the case of an accident.
(I do think it’s useful to notice that the jet ski rental person is much higher variance, in both directions IMO - so this can be both good or bad. I do also appreciate you sharing your experience!)
comment by Three-Monkey Mind · 2024-12-31T19:56:14.620Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Does this post make its readers more sane [? · GW]? If not, why was it posted to Less Wrong?
Replies from: jak, cousin_it↑ comment by jak · 2025-01-03T20:44:04.055Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
thee Are you not Begging the Question here? Asking a question "Does this make one more sane?" And then simply assume that the answer is no?
(Am I begging the question with my response above? ... initiate recursive begging the question loop)
But more seriously, I think it would be interesting to have a more critical conversation about the first question you pose: Does this post make its readers more sane?
First, to point out the flaws that I think are bothering you. The post makes some very strong claims that are not backed up with even simple empirical evidence:
- "The working class people who wished they weren’t alive." (how do you know they don't want to be alive?
- "Having an apartment to yourself is out of the question" (Again stats on the number of people who need roommates in miami would be easy and make this comment more meaningful)
- "You sit down in your bedroom with your frozen dinner and numb yourself with your drug of choice: alcohol, weed, video games, porn" (Again interesting stats can defintely be found on the increase of all these numbing habits, but simply stating these as bad habits with no evidence for or against is frustrating. )
So yes, there are noticible flaws in the way this post makes claims of fact without providing evidence for it. Clear marks off. However, I do think this post gets at a feeling that I believe is common. A feeling of malaise and dread about living a life you don't like. And a story of how that can turn someone into what looks like a zombie. And stories can have sanity inducing effects on people, even without backing statistics.
Harper Lee's Too Kill a Mockingbird did not include stats about how poor African American's were treated, but it still highlighted a specific instance of injustice in dramatized form. Making the injustice more tangible in a way that pure stats don't convey. [LW · GW] Same could be said about The Red Badge of Courage on the terror of war, or 1984 on the terrors of a totalitarian state.
Is this piece as illuminating artistically illuminating as any of the 3 novels I brought above, no. Should he have backed up more of his blanket climbs with real stats to make his more points more salient and add more sanity to his readers, yes. But do I think this work adds some sense of sanity to his readers, providing an artful impression of a life they might live something like, yeah probably. I wouldn't say I'm full zombie, but I can empathize with the feeling of living a boring, exhausting life and finding it hard to get yourself out of that situation. Artful writing, when done well, can be very sanity inducing, even when it isn't fully scientifically rigorous.
Whether at work or at home, your only privacy is confined to the bathroom. Except you never shit at home—you save that for work so you can get paid for it. You calculate how much per month you make shitting. It makes you feel like you’re getting one over on your employer
This paragraph is absolutely gold, and the whole essay was worth reading for this paragraph alone.