Social Existence

Social existence is being surrounded by a hundred relentless and incorrigible replicas of everything you have ever disliked and tried to correct in yourself.

Social existence is tolerating what you told yourself you would never tolerate, accepting standards you swore you would never lower yourself to accepting, and pretending you are satisfied with conditions you despise.

Social existence is living and working alongside hundreds of people whom you know to be less virtuous than the five best people you have met, less intriguing than the five best fictional characters you have encountered, and less wise than the five best authors you have read — and sensing that these hundreds are continually vying with those fifteen for control over your time and energy.

Social existence has become like slogging through a mire for days, continually waving away poisonous insects and trying to be stoic about the possibility of toxins or snakes in the water around your knees, sustaining yourself with the slimmest of hopes that somewhere amid this muck and slime a treasure might be found. Indeed, with experience and upon sober reflection one realizes that any rare treasure one has in fact found, or at least one’s ability to keep that slim hope alive, was the only rational justification for having stepped into the mire in the first place.

Social existence, in the final analysis, is the thinking soul’s various tollgates on the highway to freedom. Civilized life, to the extent that it survives in one’s society, determines whether the tolls are affordable or prohibitive — which is to say, whether or to what extent true freedom is still accessible to us.