Millennial's, if the world's 1% offered you a lifetime of easy living, but you must agree to be sterilized, would you take the offer?
That was the offer we were given. No more handouts from the government. No more free healthcare or education. No more food stamps or social housing. The global 1% who owned 80% of the wealth would directly take over care for the world's poor and unemployed. In exchange, we must agree to be sterilized.
And there were a lot of us.
I was a pharmacist. I went through hell to get that degree. Had to sacrificed seven years of my life. Took countless exams and standardized tests. Did my rotations. Finally got licensed. Worked a few years. Hated it. Then everything changed.
The troubles began when I was in first year of pharmacy school. Already, the laws started to change. The government was running out of cash, and they were footing the pharmaceutical bill for the nation's old farts who refused to die. It was a lot of money. The government figured that since they were the biggest payers, they had a lot of buying power. So they fixed the price. Completely fucked the bottom line of pharmacies across the country. So the pharmacy chains cut hours, laid off staff, closed down stores and cut salaries.
We were getting pretty nervous, we pharmacy students, but they (our professors, our parents, and society at large) told us we were still much better off than everyone else. People would always need drugs, we were told, because they'd die without 'em. Graduates in most other programs, computer science for example, had no employment prospects whatsoever, so we were told. We talked to our friends in computer science, and they said they were fucked. No jobs. At least in pharmacy, we could still find jobs, though we'd have to move to some backwater town populated by old fogeys and drug addicts.
Well, after I worked a few years, the laws changed again. Pharmacists were no longer needed. Machines would replace us. Not just robots that could dispense drugs. Those had been around for decades. I'm talking about computer software that could check for drug interactions and assess drug therapy based on the patient's medical profile. Actually, the software already existed, and for quite a few years. It just took the government a long ass time to figure it out and change the laws accordingly so they could save money on prescription drug costs.
So I went on unemployment, and I couldn't be bothered to retrain for a new job. I was still a young man, relatively speaking. Despite everything, I had no debt. I had no family. No obligation. No responsibility. Just a quarter million dollars in my bank account and my car. A small fortune. Certainly not enough to last the rest of my life, but a few years for sure. Plus I got my severance pay, and I had my unemployment benefits.
I moved back in with Mum and Dad to cut down on living expenses. I became withdrawn from the rest of society. I felt like I'd wasted my life on a lie. Sacrificed everything for nothing. And I meant nothing. There was a reason I'd saved up so much money. I never spent it. There was nothing I wanted to buy that would make me happy. I didn't want to travel. I didn't want to engage in thrill seeking activities. I didn't want to live the playboy life either, and the idea of starting a family didn't appeal to me. There was only one thing I knew that would make me happy.
I wanted to write stories for a living.
Fuck. Is that too much to ask? I didn't need to be the next J.K. Rowling. I wanted to make just enough to live comfortably. Maybe fifty grand a year. That was my dream. Making a living doing something I love. Then and only then would I be willing to start a family. If I had to work a job I hated for the rest of my life, I would rather die. Also, I knew in my heart I would begin to resent my hypothetical family if I were forced to continue to work as a goddamn pharmacist.
That's right. I wasn't sad when the government fucked pharmacy up the ass. In fact, I was ecstatic. I celebrated when I got the news that the entire profession was burning down to the ground. Fuck pharmacy. Fuck the corporations that ran the chains. And fuck the patients. Fuck them all. They made my life miserable, and yes, I knew it was my own damn fault for choosing a profession I knew I wouldn't enjoy. I blamed them anyway because I was getting old and pissed. I blamed them because I chose that fucking career 'cause I was told there weren't no jobs anywhere else. And most of all, I blamed them because I failed to achieve my dream.
For years, nearly a decade, I'd worked on my writing on the side. I'd written several novels. None of them got picked up by a publisher, so I went independent. Self-published on Amazon. Did my own marketing. An abysmal failure. So you know what? Fuck writing. I got sick of it.
Hope was the only thing keeping me going all those years. I forced myself to get up every fucking morning, and I dragged myself to that piece-of-shit pharmacy all because of the faint hope that I might one day be able to escape the daily grind – that goddamned rat race called modern life. And no, my hope wasn't dashed by any specific failure. It just fizzled out. You fail at something enough times, hope just dies. Slowly.
So fuck you. When the corporations, dubious as they may be, offered me a lifetime of easy living, I said FUCK YEAH. Go ahead and snip off my balls. I ain't gonna start a family anyway.
But of course, I was lied to again.
To be continued...
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