Numbers.

We are reduced to numbers when we die. Numbers dictate our value while we live. How much do you make? How many views? How many followers? How many books sold? How many?

Numbers are so important to us that we eventually become them. Leaving our corporal forms to becomes ones and twos and zeroes. A sad irony.

Every time they update us on suicide statistics they celebrate. The government is delighted that the suicide rate has decreased as fi they had anything to do with it. As if they haven’t failed to give mental health the budget it needs. As if our mental health services haven’t been terrible for decades.

They take credit for work done by volunteers and charities. Even though there are still too many people dying, too many people being failed by this state - the government continues to high five themselves for a job they never did.

The same government that ignores a genocide. Can you see it yet? The true line of their intentions is evident in all the things they do not do, all the things they ignore until such time that it might serve the bottom line to step in. It’s all performative, like so much of the discourse we see online. How can we expect them to be any different in the end? We are all culpable.

There is so much to consider that I wonder how anyone at all is going about their day as normal. I can’t make myself believe that the projects I’m working on are even slightly important anymore. It’s just a keeping busy, stay distracted effort now. Work because if you don’t you’ll have to sit and see and bear witness.