I'm frustrated with my options.

The truth is, I don't really feel like any business I have worked for has ever provided the world with anything of true value.

Let's see... I worked for a computer repair shop whose owner donated to anti-gay politicians and espoused a hard dominionist line.

I've worked in food service, giving unhealthy people unhealthy food. I was disgusted that I couldn't refuse delivery to some of these people unless I risked losing my job, because they were killing themselves and I was helping them. I was helping to murder shut-ins with bad food!

I worked video production in Las Vegas... to what end? To give the high rollers at the concerts and clubs something pretty to look at on the video screens! Did anything I made ever cause someone to change the way they thought about the world? Did anything I did bring some piece of truth and beauty into someone's life? No, it was just more superficial gloss for a town that already stinks of superficial gloss.

Then there was working inventory for Wal-Mart... excuse me, on contract labor for Wal-Mart because the cheap bastards wouldn't pay their employees to do what we did. I can't tell you how many towns I went to had main streets lined with boarded-up shops and meth-addled hookers soliciting us outside our hotel, but what do you know, the Wal-Mart was doing pretty well!

Then there was my brief stint in the gaming industry, an industry run by shallow psychopaths who target lonely and dysfunctional people. I wasted three months of my life feeding the addictions of desperate people and to help a company with an inferior product pocket as much money from them as possible through a "points" based marketplace where unredeemable points that were paid for with cash were basically money in the CEO's pockets. Some of the customers couldn't spell their own names, but they could tell you all about their adventures with CG characters fixing make-believe problems while their world fell apart around them, and they could tell you their credit card number to get their account re-instated after getting another $100 paycheck from the temp agency.

Now there's this vacation rental thing I'm looking at... I can't think of how that's really helping the world. It's just another shill trying to get people to rent tsunami-bait houses for $1000 a night. To what end? Will anyone come out of that changed, able to see the hollowness of their desperate struggle for some surrogate activity to take their minds off their inner misery?

I'm so sick of being part of the problem. I'm sick of consumer culture. I'm sick of activities that do nothing to enrich me as a person or the world at large. There's so much emptiness and inanity all around me and I can't stand it any more. It seems all the genuine people are either as miserable as I am, or are forcing themselves to love a culture that sucks the life out of them.

It's too late for me to do that. I tried to love it, like every family member and educator taught me to do. They promised me that work would build character, but work put to no good end is worse for you than no work at all. I can't simply "stop worrying and learn to love the bomb" because that is not in my nature.

I want a way out. I'm looking for a way out. I'll take any way out that I can find.