Truck stops

I don't understand my fascination at truck stops. It's so nomadic, so simple, and decrepit for the most part, so unrefined and basic, rural by design, situated at the edge of societies. They are like those small towns you drive through on a road trip, stopping only if you need gas or a place to eat and use the bathroom. The real thing is never as exciting as what they are in my head.

The past month had been quite demanding of my mental and physical faculties. The tingling of my left temple and the numb upper left row of teeth remind me of the incident. I can't help but relate this to the larger narrative of the United States as being a place where the lack of social safety nets and sensible regulations allow only most disciplined humans to thrive.

It's emblematic of a developing country. That's how I am rationalizing this. Having lived in places like Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Canada. This is not to say that the Swiss make living very fun, but I can safely argue that their rules make a lot more sense.

The human population in the Switzerland are certainly better educated and are more capable of reasoning and logic. While there were many Swiss rules that I had to learn the hard way, I was never told "this had to be way", there was always a reason behind the rule, and the person telling me no could also tell me why. While the rest of the article reads like an indictment to the way of the US, I do preface it by saying I moved to the US from Switzerland willingly. I believe that it is the land of opporunity.

Where as in the States, this is never the case. When I face an obstacle, I do not need or appreciate commiseration. I don't give a shit about how sorry the other person feels while they stop me from doing what I want, I need them to think with me on how to overcome it. Or at the very least give me a rational argument as to why the obstacle exists. Instead, what I get is the feeling of disinterest and resignation from the person across the desk.

We are all resigned to the fact that the American society is built over many generations through a patch-work of patch-works. Like a URL that links to a page that hasn't existed for years, or a sequence of clicks that crashes the system for no apparent reason. Things get way worse when the system gets perturbed even a little, nevermind being stress-tested.

It's a developing country. Things work some of the times. The person across the desk does commiserate, they understand the broken system all too well. It wears them down way more than it does me. They are sympathetic. I feel powerless, frustrated and defeated.

It always take a herculean effort (at least that's how it feels to me) to overcome these obstacles. This is called grit I learnt. In truth, I connive, I muddle through all shades of grey areas, and I skirt with rule-breaking. This is called the American ingenuity. It is all too easy to view the daily grind as a zero-sum game, where one has barely enough energy to look out for themselves. That's the individualism. But, one gets burned for being too individualistic, too creative or too tough. We see the downfall of successful people who played a little too fast and too loose with the rules. These offended the sensibility of the public a bit too much.

By taking the blocks at the bottom to precariously build an ever-height tower, we accept the wobbliness as a cost of doing business. I did the same, and I did pretty well for myself.

An erasure of humanity, something I need to think more about, and runs in a parallel line to the erasure of personality.

This may sound like an overly critical opinion of the society, of my profession and of myself. I write this because the human being behind this enterprise is the one who suffers, indeed the only entity capable of suffering.