Me And @a-forsteri Were Talking About How The Narrator Like, Desperately Wants Someone To Tell Him His

me and @a-forsteri were talking about how the narrator like, desperately wants someone to tell him his life is fucked up, what he does is fucked up, he desperately wants someone to respond with the gravity he desires.

Like, he tells these people on the plane what he does. Trying to fuck with them. Desperately hoping!! One of them will go: holy shit!!! That's really fucked up how do you live with that!!! But all he gets is people thinking he's the freak and just asking what car company he works for. Because it is easier to pretend he himself is the problem, maybe just his company, rather than actually face and recognize the systemic, widespread nature of what he's saying.

It leans together with his sense of where he is in his office, too. He feels separate from all these people. They feel fake. They feel like people going on as normal even though they're all working to hasten the apocalypse, and no one acknowledges it! They're all perfectly happy to turn a blind eye to any of the distant consequences of their actions. That is what their jobs are for. Keep them up in the cubicles, nicely fed and watered with inflated salaries, and then they'll have no issue with the distant sense that they may be contributing to a corrupt system. They can't change the system, but they need to feed their kids, so hell, just don't think about it too much.

But he doesn't have that option. He is the one who actually does go out into the field and he sees the direct result of all of their collective actions, but especially his. Every crash related to a faulty part he sees is because someone like him before him, or him himself, ran the formula and let this happen. He has no choice but to see the very real result of his actions.

And he feels INSANE over it. Because he returns to the office and it's just numbers. Applying the formula. Hearing your coworkers chat about a potluck. You're not contributing to a horrific system, you ARE the horrific system, and it's like you're the only one who sees that. He literally cannot sleep over it.

And when you tell people about it, they try to minimize it. To your company, to you. Because that is easier than acknowledging just how many things have to be corrupt and uncaring of human life to allow this to be the case. It's too much. Stick your head in the sand.

He desperarely wants someone to scream at him: how could you do that? How could anyone do that? Why is this allowed to happen? Doesn't anyone see something wrong here?

He imagines his plane crashing. Free him from this. The burden of every piece of normality manufactured for satiating any thought and discomfort he has about his job. It's all petty, pointless fluff. It's putting some artificial grass on the feedlot. Why does everything and everyone say it's all worth it for this garbage?

He wants someone to tell him all this. He doesn't want to be alone. He already feels catastrophically alone. In his life, whenever he talks about this, whenever he does anything. He loves the support groups because you're allowed to have abject misery there. You rejoice in it. Everyone's life is falling apart and ending and nothing means anything good ever. They're all honest about it, too. He plays coy when he talks about his job, but these people, everyone knows they're falling apart, and it's recognized and treated as the horror it is. This is freedom. Hitting bottom is freedom.

But he's supposed to be happy, because he's got his cushy little IKEA nest. It is only when people think he also has cancer and parasites causing his deep dissociation from his own life and general aura of resentment and misery that it's treated as something that isn't just... an individual flaw. Because it's easier for there to be something wrong with him than for that thing wrong with him to be how society makes him be this way. Rewards him for it.

So he invents someone. Tyler. To stop his little dance. To interrupt him. Drag him away and tell him all those little sundries are meaningless. Like he knows. But now he has someone saying it's true. The world IS falling apart. Everything is fucked up. It's everything he knows and has been too cowardly to say and now he finally has someone to say it for him and push to make some changes in his life. To expect him to actually do something. To feel his rage for him. And it's a catch-22, because a large part of what he hates about himself is that he's too cowardly and noncommittal to just do this all on his own.