I Am (the) Pissed Off (Philosopher)

The first qualification I needed to be “the pissed off philosopher” was, of course, to be pissed off and I am. To be honest, anger has been a struggle my entire life, mostly due to my anger-filled upbringing, but I have done a lot of personal work to lessen my rage and I no longer live as an angry mess. However, being pissed off about the elite-serving systems in society is different from surges of anger; in my opinion, being pissed off about what’s going wrong in the world is the first step to making a difference.

As I grew up in rural Ohio in the United States, I was told that if I did well in school and got a degree, then I would get a good job and have a good life. So I did that. I followed the path. I graduated at the top of my class from high school and attended college, graduating Magna Cum Laude from The Ohio State University, with a double major and a minor under my belt.

Then I worked at Starbucks. I wanted to join the Navy, but my life long struggle with my weight was delaying my entry, but I was so focused on that goal that I didn’t pursue anything else in my field. I had gotten my degree specifically to be a naval intelligence officer. Because of my lifelong love of Russia, I learned to speak the language and I even attended a university in Moscow for one term, but I also anticipated that my country and the very new Russian Federation (it was only 20 years old, technically, when I was there) would eventually be at odds again. Sure, the Cold War was over, but only because the Soviet Union fell. And Putin was a KGB man. I knew it was only a matter of time.

However, I did not achieve my goal of entering the Navy, but not because I gave up. I actually met the love of my life and I decided that I didn’t want to try to balance a demanding military career, which I had hoped would be followed by a career in the intelligence community or diplomacy, with a family. Oddly, I was convinced that I didn’t want to have children at the time, but that was actually the second time in my life where I chose the potential of having a family over the pursuit of a demanding, but interesting career. The first was at 18, when I decided not to go to the performing arts college that had given me a significant scholarship based on my audition. I’d tearfully gone into my parent’s bedroom at 4 AM to tell them that I didn’t want to go, I wanted to have a family.

This is one of the situations in life that I look back on and think…why in the world do we do things this way? Why do we expect a teenager to know what they want to do with their lives? Especially when they’ve barely been exposed to all of the paths and options and things that they might like or dislike. The story of the proverbial “constant student” who could never land on a major and finish their degree or the coed who changed their major ten times in two years were told with near derision, or at the very least condescending humor. Yet, now, as an adult in my mid-30’s, I actually find the adults making fun of those students to be far more emotionally unintelligent than the curious, seeking students.

The path I followed and the path I didn’t follow were both not what I actually wanted out of life. I wanted a family. But the media of the 1990’s had convinced me that, because I was, as they rather rudely called it, “overweight” most of my life, I would never be pursued by the opposite sex. And the few times that I did take matters into my own hands, it didn’t turn well, emotionally. So at 18, I was sure that I needed to craft a career where I could be “married to the job”, as the saying goes. To fill the void; to try to let me forget that I really wanted to have a family, but it wouldn’t happen for me.

On top of that, I was “the smart girl”. I did very well in the system. I remember being 13 and thinking that grades in high school “mattered”, but I didn’t have to worry about them as much in middle school. So I got A’s and B’s in middle school, but I made sure that all of my grades were A’s in high school, by honest means, to be clear, and I did. I graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA. But because of this, there was never a question of “do you want to go to college?”, it was just “which college are you going to?”.

But I was 18. I knew that singing and dancing were better than sitting at a desk, so I went after it, but my soul knew it wasn’t right for me. And that delay lost me any chance of having a scholarship, no matter how hard I had worked in school, so every cent came from borrowed money that I’m still paying off. I love learning, but I can learn for free at the library, and I assure you, the American University system isn’t that much different. Too many professors don’t teach, at least not anything useful, and too many students don’t really learn. They don’t need to, not in a real way. They just need to remember enough to pass the class and move on.

Having made this observation while in college myself, it pissed me off. I realized that higher education was far more about who could afford it, by parents or loans or scholarships and grants, and who was simply tenacious enough to see the thing through to the end. I have stated countless times that if I could go back in time and tell myself one thing, it would be to not go to college. I know, I would be giving up my amazing time at university in Moscow…but actually, that trip was really difficult for me, emotionally. I call it a dark night of the soul. There were times when I wanted to simply slip from the edge of my screenless, sixth floor, soviet-era dorm room window, like so many drunken Russians of old. So, yeah, I could live without that.

College didn’t feel like a choice to me, only a choice of which and I really do wonder how different my life would be now if I had been given more of an option. Of course, if higher education didn’t cost more than a car–per year–I wonder how different the country, and maybe even the world, would be. If anyone who showed an aptitude in a certain field could pursue it, to see if it’s for them, and then grow into their true potential, regardless of where they began in life or in school…imagine, for five seconds, how much different society could be. The doctors would be doctors because they care and they understand and excel at healing people. Politicians would be politicians because they want to make beneficial changes for their constituents and because they understand sociology on a deep, passionate level.

I certainly think that would be better than the current system of becoming a doctor because they can pay for medical school and are tenacious enough to finish it…so that they can make a lot of money as a doctor. Or the system of allowing our legislators to play the stock market and make millions due to their insider knowledge of and control over how legislation affects industries.

Envy is not my motivation for being pissed off about this one; it’s the pure, utter, total, complete hypocrisy of the government. If a normal citizen is guilty of insider trading, they go to jail, they pay fines, they are barred from industries. But if your representative does it, she gets re-elected? Over and over again? That’s…ridiculous.

Some of the best advice I’ve heard when it comes to truth seeking in the post-truth era is to follow the money. If you want to know who is causing the problems, look for the person who benefits from the problems. I’m familiar with this concept, having worked within risk analysis in business banking, because the bank had to know the individual person who, at the end of everything, financially benefited from the company’s operations. For example, a nonprofit corporation wouldn’t have one because their money is being earned to be then given away. However, that is the very reason that charities are a massive risk for money laundering; blurry beneficiaries. So when I heard that advice, it immediately made sense to me.

It’s also probably the primary reason that I am so pissed off about so much about society in which I live, in the United States. I grew up christian, and, although I no longer participate in religion in general, there are still certain philosophical ideas from my previous religion that I have kept. One of the more notable ones is that the love of money is the root of all evil. Follow the money, find the evil at the cause. Now, it bothers me significantly that this, among an unfortunate amount of quotations in general, is very often misquoted as “money is the root of all evil”. No, money is a convenient proxy for bartering goods and services. Money, on its own, and having money, are just fine. There’s nothing wrong with having a nice savings account.

However, there is something wrong with not buying enough groceries for your children, or weather appropriate attire for them, in the name of having said savings account. There is something wrong with a company having record profits while their employees are relying on the government to subsidize their groceries. And their customer’s are having to work more in order to afford the groceries they need. That’s wrong. That’s people in a cushy, protected office building putting their relentless need for more, more, MORE over the life experience of their fellow humans. That’s the love of money and I hope it’s pretty clear why that’s evil.

The love of money is what makes “health” insurance company heads make policies that make it difficult for their policy-holders to actually get the healthcare they need so that the insurance company can keep as much of those premiums as they can. The love of money, putting the pursuit of amassing meaningless wealth over human beings, is the root of almost all of our problems in Western Society. Even with regard to the health of the planet, the place where we ALL live, our politicians and governments, around the world, put the impact solely in terms of economy. They don’t talk about air quality and its impact on the longevity of humanity or water quality, they talk about economic impact.

And, unsurprisingly, that really pisses me off. We live on a beautiful, highly varied, self-sustaining planet and we are treating it like SHIT. To be honest, and I know this tends to be an unpopular opinion, but I’m not that worried about the climate crisis. After studying earth science in college, I have great peace about the changing climates around the world because a changing climate is completely normal for this gigantic, spinning, space rock that we call Earth. Ice cores have shown this, rock stratigraphy is evidence of this. In many ways, Earth is still recovering from an ice age and humanity doesn’t necessarily have an idea of what the planet was like before that time. Glaciers, two-miles thick, country-sized pieces of ice, decimated everything in their path as they slowly moved over the face of the planet, exposing the bedrock, and we have no true way of knowing what the surface was like in many places before that happened.

But we advanced while the planet was still recovering and our data-based hubris allowed us to believe that the Earth would always be as she was when we began to take quantitative data. When one considers the amount of years with real data compared to how incredibly, mind bogglingly old this hunk of space junk is…how could we ever, in good conscience, state that we know what is happening now is completely different, shouldn’t be happening, and is being caused by humans? As a critically thinking person, with a decent amount of knowledge on earth science, I simply cannot accept what billionaire businessmen and slimy politicians try to shove in my ears.

If the conversation were about pursuing real changes that were actually beneficial to the planet, then perhaps I would feel differently, even if those derisive players were still involved in the conversation. But it’s not. Why aren’t we talking about returning abandoned factories and unused parking lots back to nature? Why aren’t we saying that we need to clean up our oceans? Why aren’t we encouraging people to grow local, native plants in their yards instead of watering English grass so they can have a lawn worthy of an 18th century viscount? Why aren’t planting more trees, which inhale CO2 and exhale clean O2?

Don’t get me wrong, I have seen promising changes in the past few years; more pollinators along the roads and, at least in my city, it is difficult to find a place without trees–one of the reasons I love my city. But the abandoned buildings and parking lots and pollution filled parks still exist.

It is a dream of mine, which I hope to seriously pursue soon, to create something I want to call the Earth Corp, or something like that. Taking the idea of the Peace Corp, but for the planet. Volunteers would help plant local flora, tear down defunct properties, and, ideally, start community gardens. Taking care of nature, of our home, would do so much more good for humanity than regulatory legislation or electric cars. Having open orchards, where anyone is welcome to pick the fruit, helps the air quality, helps the soil, and helps to feed humanity without welfare programs. There’s no downside–except that it’s not profitable.

If you’re also pissed off by what I’ve discussed here, welcome. If my opinions on said topics piss you off more, then we can peacefully agree to disagree and it's completely okay if my content is not for you. For everyone who gets all the way down here–Thank you for reading my rants! There are plenty more to come!

Photo: Grand Tetons National Park, Wyoming, United States, 2014. Taken by Heidi Hahe.