If it helps, just flip the perspective a little:

“Area friends unaware of seemingly ‘aimless’ personal friend’s innate ability to buck capitalist expectations and live free of strain from others’ expectstions”

For a long time, when I was working shitty retail and service industry jobs, I would vacillate between feeling self-conscious when talking to married friends about their kids and their new property, feeling like I was “failing” because I was still working in the service industry and between being content in mostly doing whatever I wanted with my life.

I’m still dating long after these feelings first came about—after my friends got married and sent their kids off to school. I do now have a job that, while still requiring no commitment to climbing some bullshit corporate structure, filling out everyone’s basic checklist of “success” in this backwards-thinking late capitalist hellscape, I do something job that is interesting to outsiders. I live my life, I’m happy. But it’s still pretty atypical when held up to, say, my brother’s life—he’s been married, has worked steady office jobs, and after getting divorced stays in long-term relationships—I have nothing against it. In fact, he’s happy and I’m glad. But we’re different people. I don’t know if I’d be happy in his situation—at least not at this point in my life.

The concept of “succeeding” in regards to the system under which we are forced to live is a stupid capitalist illusion that only serves to force people into being the most beneficial for the system itself. It isn’t the most beneficial to us as humans—we aren’t more fulfilled by thriving under weird, self-serving system. We just “succeed” in relation to ITS principles and expectations. And to see that as the only “success” is nothing more than intense conditioning and an inability to extricate the rules and norms of capitalism from actual human existence. And that’s why the system keeps “working.” But it’s becoming more and more clear as this runaway train barrels straight toward a cliff edge that we need new ways of thinking. Because the capitalist way is insane. But it’s just done such a great job of convincing us otherwise.

But it IS insane. We get one life. To be forced to waste it thinking of our jobs and our possessions and our usefulness to markets as the markers of a life well-lived is a true fucking travesty. Here’s to you, Adam Tessler. You’re a true modern day hero. And here’s to a life in praise of idleness.