Getting Somewhere
Posted: June 5, 2025
Hello, again! First of all, my wonderful boyfriend says hello :>!! He reads all of my blog posts, which really does mean a lot to me. I doubt anyone else cares enough to do that, but I don't write for anyone else. This is my website, after all.
Anyways, the reason I've come back here to write is because I finally feel like my life is moving somewhere now. I've been doing work for a Catholic magazine, and while I find the contents of their publications to be morally reprehensible, they pay me well, and I'm not involved in the production of said content, I just do web stuff. Would I like to work somewhere else? Sure, but I'd like to see anyone else where I live pay me $20 an hour to do anything, so for now, this is where I am at.
Last August, amidst a pretty tough time for me in general, I began my first year of community college. The first semester, although a bit rocky, went relatively well, but when I got into my second semester, things really started to get quite difficult. I was working towards a computer science degree, as it had always been a fascinating field to me. However, once it came down to actually putting in the work to learn the nitty gritty details I needed, I completely lost all interest and motivation. Now, this wasn't my first struggle with motivation (or lack thereof); it was an issue all through high school as well, but this time was different. I had chosen all of my classes myself, mostly pertaining to a subject I loved, but I still just couldn't bring myself to care anymore. It was hard and often stressful work, sure, but I've done hard and stressful before and found myself coming out of the end feeling like it was meaningful. This felt more soul-crushing than any class I had ever had forced on me before. I began to dread my CS classes more than I had ever dreaded anything in school, and one day I had enough, so I dropped out.
What I was lacking was purpose. Not only in the immediate term, but in the long term as well. If I had something I really wanted to do with my resulting knowledge and degree, I would've tried harder to stick it out, but if I'm being honest, I did not see myself enjoying any of the jobs I would've gotten with a computer science degree. I thought to myself, "if I'm doing all this to get a job that I know I won't enjoy doing, what's the point of all of this? Why don't I just leave, start working, and make some money so I can get on with my life?"
That is precisely what I did, which brings me to here. Even though I'm working a job that I hate on multiple levels, I'm working a job, and that's what matters to me. I'm 19 years old, stuck living with my parents in a tiny town with no car (and since this is the rural US, that means no means of transportation at all) and hardly any IRL friends, and I'm sick of it.
Perhaps bigger than all those things is that I feel like my life lacks greater purpose. I don't mean a career or anything like that, I mean something greater than myself or my life or my entire generation. The kind of purpose most people find in religion. I am not a religious man myself (I consider myself someone who oscillates between uncomfortable atheism and hopeful agnosticism) and I don't think I'll ever be.
However, I have already begun to find purpose in something else: Marxism.
Now, I don't worship Marx, Engels, Lenin, or any of the great theorists and practitioners of scientific socialism, but I do have great respect for them as people who dedicated their lives to not only building a holistic understanding of the societies they lived in and developing a framework that can allow us to do the same, but also to putting in the hard work to fight for new, fairer, and more prosperous societies. Marx and Engels spent their entire adult lives fighting for a communist future, but with the exception of the Paris commune, neither of them bore witness to a proletarian revolution in their lifetimes, and after a while, they probably figured that they wouldn't. Did that discourage them? Not at all, for they knew how important what they were doing was. I don't think I could (or would even want to) become the "next great Marxist theorist" or whatever, but I will be content to get out there and start organizing. I will have committed myself to a cause that I genuinely believe in and cemented myself in history, even if only slightly, and I know that will mean a lot to me.
Even now, when I am in a place where I can't do much praxis (thanks to the whole "no car, no license, no local friends, and no organizing experience" situation), I still find purpose in educating myself and others. A while back, I started a Marxist reading/discussion group with my friends in the form of a Discord group chat. We've read a few introductory texts so far, but after I (and nearly everyone else there) got busy with school, the whole "reading theory" aspect of it got put on hold. But now that I'm done with school for the foreseeable future, I can focus my efforts on this and other things.
I'm planning on reviving the group chat by migrating it to a Matrix chatroom. Matrix is far from a perfect platform, but for the purposes I'm going to be using it for, it'll work great. I doubt my associates and I will become named targets of any federal agencies anytime soon, but it does comfort me knowing that I'm in full control of our communications and that our messages are end-to-end encrypted. Once I've gotten everyone there, I plan to start us out again by reading Michael Parenti's Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. I have personally read this one before, and it's one of the things that really helped me to see things more clearly. I know a few of my friends in the group will definitely not need to read this text for that, as they've already had their moments, but with just how many bases this book covers, I know they'll still get a lot out of it.
This is pretty much all I have to say for now. I'll see you all in however long it takes for me to think of something worth writing about.