Today is a hopeless, giving up kind of day. The part-time job I got collecting garbage at a fancy apartment complex was taken away and given to a man. When I talked to the manager a couple of days ago to verify that they had gotten all my paperwork and confirm my start date he informed me that they had hired someone else. It’s not like I don’t understand. It’s a job collecting garbage. Large man will always beat small woman for a position like that.
Yesterday, I got five emails and three text messages telling me that my application had been seriously considered, but that I didn’t qualify for the position for which I had applied. Several of them had no requirements beyond having a high school diploma or GED, but still I do not qualify.
I can’t even get a legal job outside of the criminal arena. A recruiter told me no one wants to touch someone with over a decade of experience solely in criminal law. It’ll be too hard to retrain me. It’s cheaper and easier to just hire someone straight out of law school.
I haven’t checked my email today. I know I should. It’s drilled into us constantly, the importance of checking your email regularly. But my brain refuses to believe that there’s any possibility of good news today, and I’m just not up to facing more rejection in my current mindset.
The bad news will still be there later. It always is.
Last night I came up with a plan. Being honest about my education and employment history isn’t working and removing it all and claiming to have been a stay-at-home mom for the last fifteen years hasn’t gotten better results. So, I decided to leave my education off my resume—at least the law degree—and make up a couple of jobs that would make me appear more suited for the kinds of positions for which I’m currently applying.
But in the end, I would still need references, and even though I thought all night I couldn’t come up with anyone I could ask to lie for me.
It is a brave new world in which we live. And I’m not sure there’s any place for me in it.
I used to take SSRIs. That stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. They’re the go-to medication for people with depression and anxiety. They’re supposed to increase the level of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is purportedly a “feel good” chemical. Too little and you’re sad all the time. Just enough and you are happy and calm.
SRRIs do not make me feel happy and calm. They make me feel like a zombie. They do nothing to stop the nightmares. They mute the panic attacks, but do not eliminate them. Worst of all, they mute everything else as well.
SSRIs make me feel like I’m moving through a world of dense fog. Every day and every night, as I would swallow my handful of pills and supplements meant to keep me calm and quiet, I would think of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
“No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy—to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having any emotions at all.”
The SSRIs did not prevent me from having any emotions. They just weakened the emotions I was having, both good and bad. I still felt things, I simply didn’t feel anything very strongly. I believed this was a good thing, because “they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation) how could they be stable?”
Stability is, of course, highly prized in our society, just as it is in Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World. Stability is considered a key component to success. It is, we are told, essential for healthy childhood development. Stability creates social and emotional well-being.
I never felt stable. I just felt stagnant.
I actually used to tell people that.
“How are you?”
“Stagnating.”
That is not one of the socially acceptable responses to that question. When one is asked how one is, one is expected to say something positive, regardless of how one’s life is actually going. There are rules to social interaction. And the rules have nothing to do with reality.
You gotta fake it ‘til you make it.
I was so good at faking it that most people who have known me for years don’t really know that much about me. They know the socially acceptable character I created.
I think about Brave New World a lot. I have thought about it constantly ever since I read it for the first time when I was fifteen.
I was bred to be an Epsilon, but they accidentally put me in an Alpha-Plus tube.
Brave New World was published in 1932, although reading it again today it felt like it could have been written now, with the constant references to the importance of consumerism that permeate nearly every scene of the novel.
The title of the book is taken from Miranda’s speech in act V of The Tempest, by William Shakespeare. “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in’t.”
Miranda’s speech is meant to be taken ironically, as in her naivete she fails to recognize the evil nature of the newcomers to her island home.
Huxley was clearly a fan of Shakespeare, as the Bard’s works are heavily referenced throughout Brave New World. Huxley also makes reference to George Bernard Shaw in the novel, declaring him to be “that curious old writer” and “one of the very few whose works have been permitted to come down” into the World State society.
Unlike his references to Shakespeare, Huxley’s mention of Shaw is not meant to be a compliment. The two men were near contemporaries, with Shaw being only slightly older than Huxley. They were both politically outspoken, but on far different ends of the spectrum.
Huxley’s supposed nod to Shaw in Brave New World was a vague reference to Pygmalion, a play about social conditioning to which I relate a little too strongly. George Bernard Shaw favored eugenics, opposed vaccines, and was a big fan of both Mussolini and Stalin. Shaw didn’t lose his virginity until the age of twenty-nine, and if he lived today, I suspect he would likely be denounced as an incel and a fascist. Think about that the next time you watch My Fair Lady…
Now back to the book.
Brave New World takes place around the year A.D. 2540 on the Gregorian calendar in the city of London in a universal social order known as the World State. In this reality, humans are grown in test tubes, and different methods are used to impede fetal development to different degrees to create castes with different levels of intellectual capacity and physical stature. The unfortunate Epsilons are quite literally physically and mentally retarded, as the breeding facilities use x-rays and alcohol to stunt the physical and mental growth of fetuses assigned to that caste.
After the test tube babies are decanted, they are systematically trained to function within their station through use of somatic learning and quite brutal operant conditioning techniques.
The scene where babies are shown books and roses, then mildly electrocuted when they joyfully crawl toward them, is particularly haunting.
Bernard Marx, one of the primary characters of the novel, is an Alpha-Plus, but somewhere in his development something went wrong, leaving him much smaller in stature than most Alphas.
Having been trained since birth to “associate corporeal mass with social superiority” the other Alpha males mock him, and Alpha females reject his advancements. “The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him.”
Bernard develops a contempt for the social system in which he lives, and his constant outspokenness against the status quo causes his immediate superior to threaten to exile him to Iceland.
The primary arc of the novel is about Bernard. He takes a young woman to a “Savage Reservation” and there meets a woman from the World State who was left behind by her tour group upon her holiday visit. The woman, Linda, was pregnant—an unheard of and indeed grotesque occurrence in the World State society—and remained with the “savages” to have and raise her child.
Sadly, even the “savages” did not accept Linda, or her son John, and they spent their lives in a sort of dual exile.
Bernard brings Linda and John back to the World State. John’s introduction to society, ensuing fame, and ultimate failure to integrate into the World State become the focal point of the novel.
However, it is not Bernard Marx or even John who primarily interests me. It is Bernard’s best friend, Helmholtz Watson, who best holds my attention.
Helmholtz is also an Alpha-Plus, but his physical stature corresponds to his social status. Helmholtz is a writer. He works as an Emotional Engineer, composing “feely scenarios” and drafting content for the sleep learning that all children undergo.
Helmholtz, like Bernard, is ostracized from society, not because of his physical size but because of his “mental excess.”
“’Able,’ was the verdict of his superiors. ‘Perhaps,’ (and they would shake their heads, would significantly lower their voices) ‘a little too able.’”
Helmholtz wants to write art, but having been raised in a society where art has been eliminated, fails to understand what it is he is missing. All he know is that “it is idiotic. Writing when there’s nothing to say…”
When John’s failure to integrate causes social unrest, Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled to Iceland.1 Bernard begs for a second chance, to be permitted to remain in the World State society.
But Helmholtz embraces the exile. Helmholtz believes that his removal from “normal” society will give him the freedom to write what he wants to write, rather than what he is expected to write. Helmholtz sees the exile as “freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.”
Today is a day of hopelessness and giving up. Too many rejections in too short a time have left me feeling trapped in a life I have no desire to live.
Today I have been looking at jobs in criminal law, but I have not applied to any of them. Today I have been considering calling my psychiatrist and asking her to prescribe me high-dose SSRIs, but I have not picked up the phone. Today I have been thinking about the merits of a life with no emotions, a life where I use pharmaceuticals to turn myself into a zombie shuffling through a dense fog, no end or goal in sight, just dragging myself from one day to another.
“That’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.”
The biggest problem with the SSRIs is that they steal my creativity. When I am taking them, there are no characters in my head. I am incapable of seeing the stories that dance vividly through my mind when I am not taking them.
What lesson does it teach my children if I give up the part of me I value most in order to fit into a mold designed by a social order with which I do not even agree?
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
I applied for a job as a library assistant. It doesn’t pay a living wage; I would have to get a second job (at least). Not that it matters, really, because I’ve applied for many library jobs and have never so much as been granted an interview.
I’ve always wanted to work in a library.
I haven’t checked my email in over 24 hours, an unthinkable violation of our current social mores. But emails are where you get bad news; invitations to interview come in a phone call.
It’s Schrödinger’s Rejection Letter: if I don’t check my email, then I still have a shot at getting a job that I want.
I’ve got other applications pending as well. Other jobs for which I am either over- or under-qualified. More rejection letters hovering just beyond the horizon.
It’s exhausting.
Eventually I’m going to have to check my email. It’s part of the modern social contract. But not today, and maybe not tomorrow. Not until I’m ready to field the rejections without resigning myself to a life of chemically induced coping rather than healing and fine art.
In the meantime, I’m taking volunteers to pretend to have been my supervisor at some mindless, plebian job that won’t intimidate the kind of employers I’m currently endeavoring to attract.
John moves into an abandoned lighthouse, embraces a life of self-flagellation, accidentally causes a massive orgy and then hangs himself. It’s a whole thing. ↩︎
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A Brave New World
Today is a hopeless, giving up kind of day. The part-time job I got collecting garbage at a fancy apartment complex was taken away and given to a man. When I talked to the manager a couple of days ago to verify that they had gotten all my paperwork and confirm my start date he informed me that they had hired someone else. It’s not like I don’t understand. It’s a job collecting garbage. Large man will always beat small woman for a position like that.
Yesterday, I got five emails and three text messages telling me that my application had been seriously considered, but that I didn’t qualify for the position for which I had applied. Several of them had no requirements beyond having a high school diploma or GED, but still I do not qualify.
I can’t even get a legal job outside of the criminal arena. A recruiter told me no one wants to touch someone with over a decade of experience solely in criminal law. It’ll be too hard to retrain me. It’s cheaper and easier to just hire someone straight out of law school.
I haven’t checked my email today. I know I should. It’s drilled into us constantly, the importance of checking your email regularly. But my brain refuses to believe that there’s any possibility of good news today, and I’m just not up to facing more rejection in my current mindset.
The bad news will still be there later. It always is.
Last night I came up with a plan. Being honest about my education and employment history isn’t working and removing it all and claiming to have been a stay-at-home mom for the last fifteen years hasn’t gotten better results. So, I decided to leave my education off my resume—at least the law degree—and make up a couple of jobs that would make me appear more suited for the kinds of positions for which I’m currently applying.
But in the end, I would still need references, and even though I thought all night I couldn’t come up with anyone I could ask to lie for me.
It is a brave new world in which we live. And I’m not sure there’s any place for me in it.
I used to take SSRIs. That stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. They’re the go-to medication for people with depression and anxiety. They’re supposed to increase the level of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin is purportedly a “feel good” chemical. Too little and you’re sad all the time. Just enough and you are happy and calm.
SRRIs do not make me feel happy and calm. They make me feel like a zombie. They do nothing to stop the nightmares. They mute the panic attacks, but do not eliminate them. Worst of all, they mute everything else as well.
SSRIs make me feel like I’m moving through a world of dense fog. Every day and every night, as I would swallow my handful of pills and supplements meant to keep me calm and quiet, I would think of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
“No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy—to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having any emotions at all.”
The SSRIs did not prevent me from having any emotions. They just weakened the emotions I was having, both good and bad. I still felt things, I simply didn’t feel anything very strongly. I believed this was a good thing, because “they were forced to feel strongly. And feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more, in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation) how could they be stable?”
Stability is, of course, highly prized in our society, just as it is in Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World. Stability is considered a key component to success. It is, we are told, essential for healthy childhood development. Stability creates social and emotional well-being.
I never felt stable. I just felt stagnant.
I actually used to tell people that.
“How are you?”
“Stagnating.”
That is not one of the socially acceptable responses to that question. When one is asked how one is, one is expected to say something positive, regardless of how one’s life is actually going. There are rules to social interaction. And the rules have nothing to do with reality.
You gotta fake it ‘til you make it.
I was so good at faking it that most people who have known me for years don’t really know that much about me. They know the socially acceptable character I created.
I think about Brave New World a lot. I have thought about it constantly ever since I read it for the first time when I was fifteen.
I was bred to be an Epsilon, but they accidentally put me in an Alpha-Plus tube.
Brave New World was published in 1932, although reading it again today it felt like it could have been written now, with the constant references to the importance of consumerism that permeate nearly every scene of the novel.
The title of the book is taken from Miranda’s speech in act V of The Tempest, by William Shakespeare. “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in’t.”
Miranda’s speech is meant to be taken ironically, as in her naivete she fails to recognize the evil nature of the newcomers to her island home.
Huxley was clearly a fan of Shakespeare, as the Bard’s works are heavily referenced throughout Brave New World. Huxley also makes reference to George Bernard Shaw in the novel, declaring him to be “that curious old writer” and “one of the very few whose works have been permitted to come down” into the World State society.
Unlike his references to Shakespeare, Huxley’s mention of Shaw is not meant to be a compliment. The two men were near contemporaries, with Shaw being only slightly older than Huxley. They were both politically outspoken, but on far different ends of the spectrum.
Huxley’s supposed nod to Shaw in Brave New World was a vague reference to Pygmalion, a play about social conditioning to which I relate a little too strongly. George Bernard Shaw favored eugenics, opposed vaccines, and was a big fan of both Mussolini and Stalin. Shaw didn’t lose his virginity until the age of twenty-nine, and if he lived today, I suspect he would likely be denounced as an incel and a fascist. Think about that the next time you watch My Fair Lady…
Now back to the book.
Brave New World takes place around the year A.D. 2540 on the Gregorian calendar in the city of London in a universal social order known as the World State. In this reality, humans are grown in test tubes, and different methods are used to impede fetal development to different degrees to create castes with different levels of intellectual capacity and physical stature. The unfortunate Epsilons are quite literally physically and mentally retarded, as the breeding facilities use x-rays and alcohol to stunt the physical and mental growth of fetuses assigned to that caste.
After the test tube babies are decanted, they are systematically trained to function within their station through use of somatic learning and quite brutal operant conditioning techniques.
The scene where babies are shown books and roses, then mildly electrocuted when they joyfully crawl toward them, is particularly haunting.
Bernard Marx, one of the primary characters of the novel, is an Alpha-Plus, but somewhere in his development something went wrong, leaving him much smaller in stature than most Alphas.
Having been trained since birth to “associate corporeal mass with social superiority” the other Alpha males mock him, and Alpha females reject his advancements. “The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him.”
Bernard develops a contempt for the social system in which he lives, and his constant outspokenness against the status quo causes his immediate superior to threaten to exile him to Iceland.
The primary arc of the novel is about Bernard. He takes a young woman to a “Savage Reservation” and there meets a woman from the World State who was left behind by her tour group upon her holiday visit. The woman, Linda, was pregnant—an unheard of and indeed grotesque occurrence in the World State society—and remained with the “savages” to have and raise her child.
Sadly, even the “savages” did not accept Linda, or her son John, and they spent their lives in a sort of dual exile.
Bernard brings Linda and John back to the World State. John’s introduction to society, ensuing fame, and ultimate failure to integrate into the World State become the focal point of the novel.
However, it is not Bernard Marx or even John who primarily interests me. It is Bernard’s best friend, Helmholtz Watson, who best holds my attention.
Helmholtz is also an Alpha-Plus, but his physical stature corresponds to his social status. Helmholtz is a writer. He works as an Emotional Engineer, composing “feely scenarios” and drafting content for the sleep learning that all children undergo.
Helmholtz, like Bernard, is ostracized from society, not because of his physical size but because of his “mental excess.”
“’Able,’ was the verdict of his superiors. ‘Perhaps,’ (and they would shake their heads, would significantly lower their voices) ‘a little too able.’”
Helmholtz wants to write art, but having been raised in a society where art has been eliminated, fails to understand what it is he is missing. All he know is that “it is idiotic. Writing when there’s nothing to say…”
When John’s failure to integrate causes social unrest, Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled to Iceland.1 Bernard begs for a second chance, to be permitted to remain in the World State society.
But Helmholtz embraces the exile. Helmholtz believes that his removal from “normal” society will give him the freedom to write what he wants to write, rather than what he is expected to write. Helmholtz sees the exile as “freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.”
Today is a day of hopelessness and giving up. Too many rejections in too short a time have left me feeling trapped in a life I have no desire to live.
Today I have been looking at jobs in criminal law, but I have not applied to any of them. Today I have been considering calling my psychiatrist and asking her to prescribe me high-dose SSRIs, but I have not picked up the phone. Today I have been thinking about the merits of a life with no emotions, a life where I use pharmaceuticals to turn myself into a zombie shuffling through a dense fog, no end or goal in sight, just dragging myself from one day to another.
“That’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.”
The biggest problem with the SSRIs is that they steal my creativity. When I am taking them, there are no characters in my head. I am incapable of seeing the stories that dance vividly through my mind when I am not taking them.
What lesson does it teach my children if I give up the part of me I value most in order to fit into a mold designed by a social order with which I do not even agree?
“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
I applied for a job as a library assistant. It doesn’t pay a living wage; I would have to get a second job (at least). Not that it matters, really, because I’ve applied for many library jobs and have never so much as been granted an interview.
I’ve always wanted to work in a library.
I haven’t checked my email in over 24 hours, an unthinkable violation of our current social mores. But emails are where you get bad news; invitations to interview come in a phone call.
It’s Schrödinger’s Rejection Letter: if I don’t check my email, then I still have a shot at getting a job that I want.
I’ve got other applications pending as well. Other jobs for which I am either over- or under-qualified. More rejection letters hovering just beyond the horizon.
It’s exhausting.
Eventually I’m going to have to check my email. It’s part of the modern social contract. But not today, and maybe not tomorrow. Not until I’m ready to field the rejections without resigning myself to a life of chemically induced coping rather than healing and fine art.
In the meantime, I’m taking volunteers to pretend to have been my supervisor at some mindless, plebian job that won’t intimidate the kind of employers I’m currently endeavoring to attract.
Anybody interested?
Becoming Alternative is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider subscribing to my substack at https://becomingalternative.substack.com/ or making a one time gift at https://venmo.com/u/rmfontenot
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