Viciou$ Cycle

It was only a matter of time but it now looks like the recession has finally caught up with my life. I've been facing a tight market in the line of work that I've been attempting to establish myself in which is E.S.L. teaching to be precise. I live in an overrated city that is paradise for those who can afford it and just another landlord-enriching, hand-to-mouth exercise in futility for most. Lately the embers of anger have been rekindled inside me. I'm 43 years old and fall far short of the "upwardly mobile" criteria. I have no real assets to speak of, no career, no investments, forget RRSPS. I have a long-distance relationship going on two years with a woman who I want to marry and yet the paralyzing weight of financial reality threatens this possibility. To add insult to injury, a former friend of mine is pursuing a small claims case against me. His aims are dubious and based on an informal understanding that we had about my living there for a time. The circumstances I was in when I was living at his house were as such that I wasn't able to pay him rent but now he remembers it differently and adamantly insists that we had a verbal contract from the very beginning. It's a convoluted story in which he is seeking maximum damages because he is under financial pressure from his mortgage creditors. He decided that rather than wait for me to set my life up and return the favour when I was in a position to, he opted to push ahead with a claim. He did this by editing his memory and trumping up his version of events on legal documents. This is the abyss that I'm staring into right now. Conniving former friends who will stop at nothing and are willing to believe their own lies and spin facts, to get what they want. This former "friend" won't rest until I suffer as much as he claims he has. This is what the world is becoming now. A snakepit where at any moment someone who you thought you could trust might turn on you. Where the enormous economic pressures just to survive are quickly eroding our humanity and where moral lapse, deceit and where many interpersonal relationships are based on some form of transactional pragmatism. I can't help but want to point my finger at the greedmeisters - the untouchable corporate elite who foster these mechanisms and then stand back and unleash them on an unwitting public. Yet I am not so naive as to actually submit to some Marxist or Anarchist solution as I've come to believe that ideology itself is far too limiting. In fact, ideology itself doesn't seem sufficient anymore as the problems we face on a global and planetary scale don't demand one set of solutions. I may not have a sophisticated or detailed knowledge of the international monetary system, but I do believe that if there is a culprit, it's the persistent notion that is propagandized to us by media and governments that market-based capitalism is the indisputable measurement of our success as a civilization. My own life is a microscopic statistic with its own unique history of personal mistakes and poor choices but thrown against the backdrop of a much larger composite I see how the reality of my "statistic" reflects a demographic trend. Should I take comfort in this? Or should I recognize the cold isolation of my circumstances - that my own incompetence and neglect from an earlier age should dictate the present crisis of my life? Is my life a microcosm of the world that has been created in the last 30 years? Booms and busts, sudden bumps and turns and an increasingly rootless and humiliating life of poverty and debt? Perhaps this is why I have chosen to write this in my blog, it's the closest way that I can scream back at the world from my rooftop without being arrested or institutionalized. How can one continue to deny that these pressures arrayed around us are not largely and fundamentally systemic? This blogging exercise might help me to get some things off my chest and I can only hope that it will be a modest contribution to a greater dialogue but I think we're all compassion-weary in the developed world and have become almost de-sensitized to the pain of others, we have adapted this Darwinian reflex that shuns the weak and the dispossessed for fear of becoming so ourselves. Hence this denial is reflected in exaggerated displays of wealth and power in our culture. The usual status-conferring objects like expensive cars or accessories take on even more value in these times. The individual who displays his toys is effectively declaring his "fitness" - that he's risen above the muck of hard economic times and has passed the evolutionary test. And as the times come to reward the crassest modes of behaviour like ruthless opportunism rather than the community ethos of mutual support without a contractual due-date, it seems the collapse of everything we've known and bothered to fight for becomes more and more imminent.
Money has always pervaded our conscious waking-lives and will continue to do so, but now it seems that as we become more fragmented and left to fend for ourselves in this economy, many of us who have simply slipped through the cracks will find ourselves getting too familiar and even comfortable in their surrounding.