Over and over and over again—with every joy comes a downfall for people like you.
Doubt On A CD-ROM by xexnoncores
From a CD-ROM taped to a necromancy tome found in the Wanderer’s Library. The disk is scratched, and much of its data has been corrupted, but there exists a single text file extractable from its contents. It is titled “0000-0000”, dated 07/01/2003.
Its author and owner are unknown.
Why do we care about other people’s approval?
Well, that’s an easy question to answer if you want to be a pedantic asshole. We’re a social species, it’s what we do. The necessity of craving attention is a biological mechanism derived from a complex well of physiologically evolutionary impulses. To be ostracized meant death when the best shelter we had was caves and the trees above our head, to be a pariah meant the cessation of your genes, the only purpose of our bodies back then.
Carry this logic a little bit further into humanity’s development and the same issues still apply. Even when civilization emerged and the first crops were grown, the fear of isolation still festered in our minds. When the world was simply what we had tamed versus what we had not, to be cast out was not an act of death but the act of disowning the entire concept known as “you”. It was a violence more bestial than mere starvation, for now you were singled out as not just unfit for survival, but fit to be counted among the growing number of things humans had begun to subjugate. Your existence would be cast as lesser than the cistern which could not give water, lesser than the dog who could not obey its master.
You were lesser than all that was capable of being made, by those who named humanity, themselves.
So why do I care about all of this now? About the possibility of upsetting the fold, appearing as less than?
I need no money anymore. Percival is content to let me go naturally at this point in my career. Sure, maybe there’s some shame in being the first person fired in over ten years, but that’s for other people. I could honestly give less of a shit about that. Yes, really, I’m not joking. I’ve gotten everything I want out of this company and my position; I’ve seen all the wonders I can handle, fucked all the magical people I could have ever possibly hoped to fuck, and tasted things so exclusive their nascence was a mere one-time event in this part of the universe—
Most of the reason I’m still here now is a formality. A curiosity, even. Well, no, how true can that be? For the last thing I have yet to see to completion is—
Iris, that girl, that little blue-eyed girl with skin as pale as uninked paper—everyone can’t stop looking at her. I cannot stop looking at her. None of us can push out of our minds the concept of her being, along with all its teeth and delicate hands.
We all knew Percy had to have his heir eventually. But nobody thought it would be this fun. She’s the perfect kid one could ask for in an office, the perfect little creature to stare at you, eventually rely some kind of query, and when you answer, you realize there’s a sense of pride within your heart that you’ve never felt before then. Before the boss’s kid decided you were worth it.
But that brings me to my problem.
Iris is so wonderful she makes me wish I got to have a child to call mine. It would be irresponsible of me to pass down my fuckups to someone so innocent, but dreaming leads me back down to reality, and the reality is that I see her running around our main accountant more often than everyone else.
Why does that matter?
Well, have you ever met the guy? God, I wouldn’t wish that on even my worst enemy. Hogarth—just thinking about him makes my head hurt. Remembering that I have to be in the same room as him once a day makes my skin crawl.
Nobody knows where he came from anymore, but we have to bow in respect (metaphorically, obviously, though we all know he’d love for us to actually get on our knees) because of who he is and what he’s supposedly done. We have to bow in respect because his words are dense and he impresses the bosses without effort, without trying, without any acknowledgment of his actions or the possibility of dissent. Marshall and Carter listen to him even when they don’t want to, and Percival won’t stop expanding his office! When he snaps, everyone stands to attention, when he complains, if you don’t run and hide from your mistake, he’s content to lash you in public and make such an awkward scene that it stains the air, stings the carpet and walls with a blasé sense of nothingness…
We have to watch his flaws meander around so obviously, so subtly and so silently, even when he’s wrong, so painfully wrong about something that it blows up yet again that he snips at us and blames it on someone else, only for him to disappear as soon as the dust settles to repeat the cycle all over again,
How could Hogarth ever have convinced them of imaginary worth? They’re the most material businessmen in the universe.
Why did Iris ever take a liking to that bastard? I used to think it was the snake he carried around, (of course another appeal about his person that he did not earn), but I cannot see that as rational anymore. I cannot see it as anything sensible, worth an empirical analysis, because she’s a child, and children do as children please.
But am I not allowed to be concerned? That she is being poisoned by his words, mislead by his fanciful stories and exaggerations of the ghosts of his past? It tears me apart thinking about it. That smile on her face towards someone more rat than he is person, her questions to him that go deeper than the rest of us could hope to get.
Ugh, these are such stupid things to feel. I don’t know why I care. I don’t know why I care about her future, about his place in the world, I don’t know why I love what I do but feel so fundamentally severed from a sense of power to call my own. How does one accomplish that? How does one manage to fumble their own personal failings into such knots?
How can such deficits show themselves publicly but be brushed aside? Have we all become habituated to his musings, to his tempestuous silences, his nauseating abilities?
How?
Why?
I should be recognized as better than him. I deserve it. But the economy of attention at the office is so scattered, so limited. Trying to parse it, what others care about and who they care about brings my mind to a blank, despite all the years I’ve been here. It will never make sense, I’ve concluded, and that perhaps is truly the most broken thing about me, but I’m allowed to be upset about that, right?
I’m allowed to want to someone to say I was better than them the entire time? To wrestle down their egotism, their own easily aggravated arrogance—this isn’t cruelty, it’s simply mundane fantasies, right?
And yet when I put my words out onto this digital ether, my mind ceases to care. It sands itself down in a slow descent of nascent dereliction that I eventually find myself asking again why this mattered to me at all.
It’s not calm I feel, merely a delay of the inevitable. There’s so much pulling me apart I should not care about, for my safety net is so secure but…
What if it’s not?
I don’t know.
I don’t think I want to know.
The years are long, but I’m starting to think my tenacity is more durable than anything that can be thrown at me. That no matter where I go and how often I fall apart, I will never achieve a true sense of peace, but the indomitable human spirit will force me to amble onwards and through life as a corpse caring for needlessness and inanity.
What a nuisance we evolved to be social creatures while all of our physical needs are met. Life would be easier if solitude was physiologically viable.
Or maybe something is just wrong with me, because I’m too scared of everyone else to assume such scandals about them.
Is that what is keeping me from true happiness?
Perhaps in the modern age, even a monetary safety net is not enough…
But what would keep me satisfied then?
What would make me whole?
I ask this like a peasant praying to God for an answer, even though I know it’s cliche. Even though I know philosophers greater than I have asked these questions for centuries. Eons, even, if we want to count the fairies.
But they can all fuck off because they’re not me.
They’re not the ones in my skin feeling this pain today.