Yes - Chapter Eleven
Retirement
You work yourself until you literally can’t carry on, even the conspiracy admits it, so despite the job being all you have left to keep your brain inflated, they make you “retire”.
A big wrench for a con-bred auto-dupe like you. Retirement alone is estimated to kill thousands of people from boredom each year. With a lifetime of nose-led conspiracy-following, when they finally spit you out the other end you’re at a loss for what to do.
Oh, they still have norms, expectations, but now they’ve all changed. You’re out of place in the modern world. Things move faster than they used to, everyone seems more lewd, too free, even though they’re under tighter conspiracy control than you ever were. Less free to be different even than you.
Your memory isn’t what it used to be but you’re sure it wasn’t like this in your day. People had respect!
Why do you think you’re thinking this way? Do you think it’s true? Do you think it’s more true than it was when your granddad was saying it?
Old, worn out, nothing better to do than sit about feeling jealous at all the free young spirits, griping, moaning, trying any way you still can to help the conspiracy drain their slack, make them more manageable, more honourable, more similar to each other. To you.
After the massive toll of conspiracy pressure, abuse, work, brainwashing, co-conspiring, expectation and slack-draining, you’re too exhausted and too dependent to think for yourself. To even realize you’re still able to think.
The conspiracy has taught you to be afraid of young people, with their strange new fashions and their mutated speech patterns and their gruff tribal manner. You know that you were nothing to be scared of when you were their age, you were just following fashion and joining tribes. You know that you and they both are just doing what the conspiracy expects, as it demands, giving it your slack with no hope it’ll be returned. Yet still you’re afraid.
You’re so afraid you won’t talk to them, and how else can the generation gap be bridged? So it stays, making sure the younger people can’t learn about the CON from the older people, nobody gains the benefit of your bitter, broken, conspiracy-bridled ruin of a life and you rot alone, desperate in your misery. The uncaring conspiracy ignoring your plight. You’re almost completely slackless now. What possible use could the conspiracy have for you, you fat, bald, pathetic, broken lump?
You could finally do all those things you wanted to do but you had a job, you had kids, you had that mortgage. Finally, you’re free! Free to do whatever an exhausted, conspiracy-ridden, close-minded, fat, balding, ugly, slow, stupid idiot like you wants to do. Which is lots of rest and for some insane reason even more early mornings. Why do you do that? Why get out of bed when all you have to face is a day of energyless, directionless, apathy. The day only lightened at all with a good gripe and moan?
Yet despite your bitterness, your angst, your fear, your willing slavery to peer pressure and biology, you still think you did allright. Everyone ought to do as you’ve done, toil and sweat as you’re ground into retired mud under the conspiracy slack-stealing robotic boots.
Your kids have grown up, and you want them to fall into the same trap you fell into. Just dying to be a grandparent. You still don’t want those kids of yours to be weird. You want your family to do all the same things your friends families are doing, or they might think you aren’t quite normal. So you pressure them to the end.
Then, finally, biology throws it’s last laugh at you. If you’re “lucky” you watch your friends die, one by one, until the inevitable time when your conspiracy-led, pathetic unimportant, unoriginal life comes to and end. Often a blessed relief by then, your pain-ridden, hopeless grey life finishes and all you’ve achieved is the conspiracy’s purpose, the conspiracy’s toil, the conspiracy’s ends, the conspiracy’s happiness, the conspiracy’s bland dull life and now, at last, a conspiracy death.