Alive, Alive, O!

What comes to mind when you think of 'charity'? For most, some sort of permutation of altruism and altruistic feelings. But year after year, the same charities do the same charity work, and though they make a few nominal advances, nothing ever really changes. Poverty, disease, war -- these things all remain the same. Is there a misanthropy at the bottom of every humanism, like the philosopher Sartre convincingly argues in his novel 'Nausea'?

In a sense, the question can be posed: why do people only accept notions of charity, and only give to charities, that essentially rub a numbing balm over misery and death?

Suppose one gave to nakedly self-assertive life as it is, celebrated life's joy for no good reason, life in its own splendor -- what then? Is it possible (and can we have the courage to) to move beyond the ethical, beyond moral judgment, praising or condemnatory, to see value or 'the good' as an -- aesthetic, not moral, phenomenon: happiness as a beauty rather than a good?

You, charitable reader, seek 'stories.' My wife took a great-paying job in south Florida, with good benefits, and I went with her. Too bad a decent job market, job security, 6 years of experience in e-commerce and even a meager paycheck at all didn't follow me here. Now I'm 8 months unemployed and counting. My credit card payments are months past due. I owe my family and a friend a combined few thousand dollars. My dad's paying my student loans. My mother lives here and makes twice what I made at my previous job, but, out of fairness and her own situation, she can't fully support me.

But, don't be so quick to pity me. I don't beg (you'll see why), and you won't like what you're about to hear, but if you don't appreciate blunt honesty, it ought to be pretty hard to judge me with any moral force. Perhaps you will see how what will seem to be 'ethical egoism' gives over to something beautiful.

I have had 8 months of unconditional freedom from the alienation and drudgery of wage-labor, and I don't regret enjoying it.

It has made me happier than everyone else. I am free in all the ways that others are not, and if one can never experience the undiluted, free joy of living to oneself, beyond social entanglements, Sartre's feeling of existential nausea, the awareness of one's own all-in-all subjectivity and empty objectivity free of socially imposed meaning, 'spreading at the edges like an oil stain,' the least one can do is transform a life for the better, forever, and live the feeling vicariously through me. Where am I going?

And so, my 'charity.' This page is a declaration of war on the alienation-reification scheme of having to labor to earn the right to live and on having to ask permission to be happy. It is an egoistic rather than altruistic appropriation of charity that shows itself capable of creating something both ethically good and aesthetically beautiful.

I ask you to keep me unemployed, to keep me free rather than help me back to my feet. I ask for a large number of small donations because I want you to see how easy it is for the mass to free itself in a simple act of refusal to accept a happiness only allowed to be if it is moral in character. The requested act of 'charity' is, too, coextensive with myself: it becomes me; it will give me the power, by the very same standards that keep us in wage-slavery, to move myself beyond debt-subservience, toward self-realization. Its goal is an art-for-art's-sake thing of beauty, what political social and humane liberalism (as it is classically termed) were supposed to create by empowering the individual: the perfectly free, unconditionally happy, self-realized man.

We, the human race, were never meant to be this way, to live only to work and die, leaving a pile of garbage to a posterity that will create its own compost and do the same all over again.

But I am getting away from my 'story.' I'm on prescription Lexapro generic medication, for anxiety and depression. The pills are delicious. My morning pill is my second-favorite time of day, next to the 1-2 naps that I take in the late morning and/or afternoon. The pills make me want to take the naps, and spending the day in a calm, centered state of mind, contemplating the questions of literature, philosophy, poetry, history, science, culture -- the stream of life itself -- is a higher (aesthetic) pleasure second to none. As a matter of fact, I bought 10 books at the holidays with Amazon gift cards that family gave me (because they did not pay attention to my appreciable request to help meet basic needs over lavishing wants). They are of a nature that they will take me over a year to read (and I'm still in the middle of others). I want nothing more from life than its contemplation.

I eat well, too. I have what I love for breakfast, followed by what I love for lunch, followed by what I love for dinner. It's positively Ancient Greek, the simple pleasure of eating and drinking in my wife's company. A frigid bottle of fresh, pure spring water. The crunch and spray of a fresh apple. Good cheese. Fresh meat. The warmth of a fresh bread, James Joyce's 'smoking pith' of a scone on Buck Mulligan's tongue. Mirabile dictu, I even have chocolate-covered Virginia peanuts that I can't not eat. And coffee, light sweet cream, no sugar -- morning manna. There's a macrocosm of life's bounty in the littlest crumb or drop. Can you see it? Do you have the courage? It takes more than you think, when you never asked to be born and money is to decide whether you live or die.

Unemployment and poverty have allowed me to live life on my terms.

Some greet them with fear and loathing. I, with laughter.

In isolation, I have learned to disdain social issues and sociality itself, the causes of unhappiness, and that this is why I want the brotherhood of man to keep me free. I don't like to be asked to sign petitions for causes, among other things. I don't understand 'causes' or 'ideals' (because I don't believe that they exist without the ideological [unrealistic, and therefore false] thinking that perpetuates them -- the need to live in a State, to compromise with others, to follow the laws, to be moral, to freely adopt civic duties, to earn a living when I never asked to be born, to accept a living that I can't abide because someone has more property than I and therefore makes the rules, and so on; aren't these unhappiness's causes?). I go my way, and I leave the other to go his. I care nothing for civilization, for society, for ethnic identification, for regional fetters, for city or country, for political persuasion. I hate it. None of it concerns me. If it concerns the other, so be it. It shall be a reality all-in-all to him. It is not my reality, and that of everyone else isn't my own. I choose to hang out in my house, pet my dachshunds, eat good food, take a nap at leisure, bask in the Florida sun, and live beyond having to compromise with others.

And I have neither hurt anyone nor 'wrongly taken' (by society's standards) any public assistance in the process.

Unemployment became poverty became nihilism became true freedom, and it has created a beautiful life that I never could have imagined. It has allowed me to live a real life.

Keep me free.