Do you feel like your life is taking you somewhere wrong? You work hard like a black man in a quarry, but there is still no gap, and every day the unbearable weight of life is pressing on you more and more? Do you rest less and less, and the rest brings less joy? Congratulations: you have entered the Matrix, and it drinks blood from you in all ways it can.
How to get rid of the constant heaviness on the soul, chest and stomach? How can we break this vicious circle? How to clear up at least your main problems and get at least a little respite?
Society tells us two traditional ways to free ourselves from the power of the Matrix. The bottom exit is for homeless people, downshifters or drug addicts. The top exit is millionaires. Both of these solutions have the most obvious flaws.
The bottom exit does not suit everyone: the fate of a homeless person is difficult and painful. Rather than being free and sleeping in basements, it's better to rot quietly in your office five days a week, and on weekends to get drunk with diluted ethanol to a pig squeal.
The upper exit for the slaves of the Matrix is closed. After all, even a free person is very, very difficult to put together at least a modest fortune. It is no easier for a tired hamster, locked in a wheel, to crawl to a lot of money than for a sick cockroach to gnaw through a meter-long concrete wall.
Is there any other horizontal exit from the Matrix - not up or down?
Instead of answering this question, I will show some of the ways the Matrix has us. Perhaps the conclusions from my post will help you loosen the grip of at least one of its tentacles on your neck.
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1. Credit cards
Petya Klyushkin receives 30 thousand rubles a month. He also has several credit cards with a total debt of 100 thousand rubles. For servicing this loan, Petya pays the banks ten percent of his salary every month: three thousand.
It turns out almost a church tithe. If Petya worshiped the Golden Calf, he would, perhaps, be happy with such a situation. However, Petya prays to other gods, and quietly hates his banks for the monthly extortion of money.
At the same time, Petya cannot slowly pay off the loan and stop paying tribute to the usurers. Firstly, he is tightly hooked by such a technique as the "minimum payment": if Petya stops spending money from credit cards, he will have to live on half his salary for several months, which he cannot afford.
And secondly, there are so many temptations around, so many things-that-can-be-bought-for-money … that Petya sees no other way out but to continue to feed the banks fattening on his trouble year after year.
Fun fact: Petya has long dreamed of his own business, while a profitability of thirty percent per annum would more than suit him. However, Petya cannot organize an absolutely iron gesheft - to pay off the debt to the banks and start putting the interest on the loan into his pocket. The matrix does not resolve.
2. Cars
Kolya Pyatachkov loves cars. He used to ride the subway, then he saved up money for a Zhiguli. Now he moves on a loaned Lancer. He is short of money, and he often has to save on the most important things, such as vacations or doctors. But Kolya can no longer imagine life without his car.
He needs to pay off the loan for the car, pay for the additional equipment the dealer has gotten into, and the ridiculously expensive insurance. He needs to solve a bunch of minor problems with parking, with scratches, with the replacement of consumables and with warranty repairs. He needs to change tires once a season and fill himself a full tank three times a week.
Kolya, in principle, does not complain. Every single cash injection into the car is quite manageable. But if Kolya had carefully calculated the cost of owning his treasure, he would have found out that the narrow-eyed four-wheeled “friend” devours a third of his salary and half of his free time every month.
Could Kolya buy himself an old good Lada Chisel instead of Lancer, so as not to bother at all about CASCO, or rust / scratches, or expensive spare parts? To leave your car anywhere, and to have a small price list in good service near your home, without paper fuss and without queues?
Probably could. But if you tell Kolya that he chose a car not according to the level, Kolya will not even send you in the ass with your advice. Kolya will simply make surprised eyes and twirl his finger at his temple.
3. Charity
Vitya Pechenochkin is a good guy, he has a lot of friends. Friendship is around the clock, so he constantly helps everyone. Meet the neighbor's mother-in-law from the airport, help his nephew with an essay, help Marinochka from the accounting department with a car, haul furniture to a friend in the garage … Vitya does not forget about blood ties. All relatives can count on him firmly. Vitya never refuses to help.
No, Vitya is being paid. Sometimes they say thank you to him, sometimes they feed him with yesterday's cutlets, sometimes they kiss him on the cheek or shake his hand. But if Vitya opens the diary and calculates how much time he spends personally on himself, and how much on relatives and friends, he will get sick. Since he will see that he has long turned into a free lackey, who is used in the tail and mane by all and sundry.
Of course, Vitya thinks that services are a two-way road. Now he helped, and tomorrow they will help him … But here's the thing: Vitya himself doesn't need anything. He somehow solves his problems himself, without bothering anyone. And those people, whom Vitya turns to once every couple of years, belong to the category of his acquaintances who never used him as a free labor force.
4. Sweatshop
Masha Puzikova works twelve hours a day, six days a week. On Sunday, the bosses usually let her rest … or at least leave work early. Masha is paid little, her salary is constantly delayed. Masha is often shouted at, Masha is constantly unfairly accused of not having time to correct other people's mistakes. Masha never has either money or time. She is constantly running around in the park and trying to solve several overripe problems at once.
Probably, if Masha took a vacation, flew to the sea, thought about her life - she would have made the right decision and quit. But her boss is not such a fool to give her slave at least two free weeks. He understands perfectly well: if Masha begins to think, compare, look for other options, she will immediately leave him. Therefore, the boss loads Masha to the limit, so that by the evening she will not have the strength to even rummage around for fifteen minutes on job sites.
Of course, Masha can always slam the door and proudly clatter her heels to nowhere … but only you remember - they pay her little and irregularly. Masha is always in debt, she simply has no opportunity to live in search of a new job for at least a month or two.
5. Lack of sleep
Olya Golovolastnaya sleeps six hours a day. Sometimes it takes five hours. Woke up, popped coffee, and let's hustle until the night.
Another girl in her place would have long ago thought that she was somehow living wrongly. But Olya has not been getting enough sleep for many years now, and she has long been disaccustomed to thinking. When Olya has a free half hour, she pours herself another cup of some invigorating pile and … sits down to blunt. He watches TV, sticks to the Internet, just stares with dull eyes at the wall and drives empty thoughts in a circle.
From the outside it seems as if it is very easy to get out of this vicious circle. You just have to make it a rule to dive under the covers at exactly twelve at night. A couple of weeks of eight hours of sleep, and Olya will not be recognized. She will become calm and kind, stop barking at people and start to keep up with everything.
But … in order to redo all things to the rhythm of a waltz by eleven in the evening, you need to make a non-sour volitional effort on yourself. And sleepy Olya, alas, is not capable of such an effort.
Sleepy Olya will spend several hours every day on all sorts of meaningless nonsense. Because of these lost hours, Olya will go to bed every day, not at twelve, but at two. And at eight in the morning - no matter how hard it is - she will have to glue her eyes full of sand and hoof to work.
6. Expensive things
Gleb Shcherblyunich is not rich enough to buy cheap things. More precisely, he is not rich at all. Gleb is a rogue, and he often does not have enough money even for a cup of steaming coffee in a machine on the floor below his office.
However, Gleb does not know how to say “leave me alone, this is too expensive for me. Because of this, he constantly buys things for himself, at the sight of which even a much wealthier person immediately closes cold green paws on the throat.
A leather jacket worth two salaries? I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things. And it doesn't matter that Gleb doesn't understand the sizes and styles, which is why he looks in this jacket like the brother of a buyer of stolen goods.
The latest model laptop for eighty thousand rubles? I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things. I will take out a loan at insane interest rates, I will eat oatmeal with salt for two years and ride the subway as a hare, but I will watch funny pictures on the Internet from a beautiful silver laptop.
The question is, why shouldn't Gleb be more modest, and not buy himself things a little worse, but ten times cheaper?
It's simple. Gleb is too lazy to spend three hours of time comparing prices and characteristics in order to calculate the pros and cons of the purchase. It is easier for him to chop with a cavalry hand and say "I decided to buy." In addition, despite the holes in his shoes and the glasses sealed with duct tape, Gleb somehow hesitates to tell the sellers that he is a rogue.
7. Repair
Klava Zagrebryuk thinks that apartments in Russia are too expensive. Heaven knows how much effort this new two-room apartment cost her and her family. Now Klava is making repairs in the apartment.
Take the kitchen, for example.
You can go to a hardware store and buy the cheapest kitchen there, for eight thousand rubles. For this money, Klava will receive several wretched chipboard cabinets, albeit without any design claims, but still able to store plates and pots inside themselves.
You can go to the Swedes at IKEA and choose something more decent for yourself, so over fifty thousand. The quality, of course, will not be a fountain, but if you find a good collector who will spend several days fine-tuning the products of tight-fisted Swedes, it will turn out to be quite nice.
You can visit some of our furniture factories and choose a custom-made kitchen from the catalog. It will already be two hundred thousand, but Klava's girlfriends will clatter their tongues approvingly at the sight of the lights inside the cabinets and the sinusoidal cornice above the decorative dust-collecting shelves.
You can walk into a salon of Italian furniture and succumb to the modest charm of the bourgeoisie. There, prices for kitchens start somewhere from one million, but if you are a little lucky, you can grab something from the old collection with a huge discount …
The question is, what kind of chlorine Klava, with all the wealth of choice, bought the kitchen for six hundred thousand rubles? This is her annual salary (!) With her husband. At the same time, no savings are planned in the family, they already had to borrow in order to complete the repairs by winter.
No, I understand, the kitchen is important, the kitchen is for a long time, Italy is the quality … But if Klava could not influence the price of the apartment in any way, then at least the price of the renovation was in her power? Seriously, if Klava had spent not two million, but two hundred thousand rubles on repairs - what, the saved three years of work would not have recouped her moral suffering from the appearance of cheap tiles and a thin laminate?
8. Whining
Yegor Oskopchik constantly tells his friends stories, one is simply more surprising than the other. About the crisis. About some politot, rallies. Egor is always on edge, someone is constantly wrong with him: either the boss, or the traffic cop, or the popularly elected President of the Russian Federation.
Of course, we live in a free country, and Yegor has the right, among his friends, to put his genitals on anyone … but Yegor constantly suffers because of other people's problems. The habit of getting into other people's problems regularly makes him feel oppressive powerlessness, realizing that something is bad somewhere, and he cannot change anything.
If someone explained to Yegor that our world is arranged unfairly, and that the only way to make it better is to start with himself, Yegor would probably have already been in some kind of leadership position for a long time. Yegor's brains and hands are in place, the energy from him is still rushing.
But Yegor, unfortunately, prefers to spend his inexhaustible energy not on creative activity, but on exposing and punishing people who, in Yegor's opinion, behave incorrectly.
Yegor considers himself a person well adapted to life: he knows how to make a row and stand his ground, can, on occasion, even kick in the face. Friends, however, look at Yegor with poorly concealed pity. Since Yegor constantly plunges out of the blue into scandals, then into fights, then even into some ridiculous courts.
9. Reluctance to learn
Dasha Gundogubova spent ten years at school and six years at an institute. It is scary to calculate how many tens of thousands of hours she spent in dusty classrooms, listening intently to the mournful muttering of tongue-tied teachers. Dasha is proud of her blue diploma and never misses an opportunity to boast of the loud letters of the educational institution in which she happened to sit out her term.
At the same time, Dasha is too lazy to spend one day to learn how to work normally in the Word. Because of this, it takes a very long time to make documents, and the result is usually clumsy and unsightly. Dasha does not see any problem in this. The bosses unfairly consider Dasha to be a fool, and pays her half as much as much less intelligent Katya. So Katya, although there are not enough stars from the sky, still mastered the Word at a decent level and draws up documents quickly and beautifully.
Dasha is also too lazy to spend a few evenings to finish driving courses. Therefore, Dasha does not feel the dimensions of her beautiful car, she parks for 10 minutes where a skilled driver would park in a few seconds, and at least once every six months gets into ridiculous accidents.
To the heap, Dasha has a very tight lock on the front door. Every evening Dasha sherudits the key in it for a long time, shuddering from every rustle in the front door and pressing the key from different sides. At the same time, it doesn't even come to Dasha to spend five minutes of time and find a solution to the problem on the Internet.
Unfortunately, at the time of issuing the diploma, Dasha was forgotten to say that the freebie was over, and that the responsibility to force herself to study is now assigned to her personally.
10. Ethanol loop
Yura Skoblelyukhin periodically looks in the mirror and thinks that it would be necessary, at last, to sign up for the gym: remove the beer belly and curl up the muscles with dumbbell weights. However, Yura works five days a week, and after work drinks a mug or two of diluted ethanol.
He is not an alcoholic at all: Yura believes that alcohol in small doses, if not useful, then at least not particularly harmful.
However, work and alcohol structure his time so well that he has absolutely no time to sign up for a gym, and after the exploits of labor, he no longer has enough strength for sports feats.
Yura has no sharp reasons to change the rhythm of his life. It's just that Yura looks fifteen years older than his age and feels a little lousy all the time … but overall, everything is ok. The Matrix holds Yura with a steel grip. Chances to rip her fingers from Yura's throat are, frankly, not much.
11. Bad teeth
Grisha Snegiryak does not suffer from toothache at all. He knows that he has deep caries on fourteen teeth … but specifically now nothing hurts and a visit to the dentist, it seems, can be postponed for now.
Grisha understands that caries is not a runny nose, it will not go away by itself. Grisha understands that inserting prostheses is not only long and painful, but also expensive. Grisha understands that there is no need to delay the visit to the dentist.
But now he has so many different things to do, and now he has so many urgent expenses … Well, Grisha will now cure one tooth. And what will change? After all, there are still thirteen patients left.
The Matrix rarely leaves its slaves with the power to take care of their health. The Matrix requires slaves to pay its bills first.
12. Weddings and birthdays
Alice Skotinenok is getting married. Alisa works as an assistant manager, her chosen one is a junior technical support engineer. The budget of the newly created family is forty thousand rubles a month.
The budget for the wedding is five hundred thousand.
Why shouldn't Alice sign quietly at the registry office and go to celebrate the exchange of rings with her husband in some quiet restaurant? Why does she need this petrosian toastmaster, why does she need these shameful contests, why does she need this crowd of drunken cattle clumsily stamping their feet under Verka Serdyuchka?
Why go into debt, ruin your parents, feed and water people who, let's face it, are quite capable of eating and drinking at their own expense? Alice is not a fool and understands that if she does not arrange a wedding, no one will pay attention to it: they will shrug their shoulders and forget the next day.
Alice has two reasons to let her family's annual income go nowhere. First, the Matrix commands it in the face of our customs and traditions. Secondly, Alice wants to show off in a white dress, and Alice thinks that a year of two people is a perfectly reasonable price for a few wedding photos.
Of course, defenders of a naive girl could say now that a wedding happens once in a lifetime … But there are also birthdays, funerals, New Years celebrations. How much money will Alice spend annually on these stupid gatherings?
13. Minor expenses
Vasya Zhimobryukhov works as a plumber on call. There are a thousand, there are two, here are five hundred rubles … in general, it should have been a good salary. However, Vasya's wallet rarely accumulates noticeable amounts; he is almost always broke.
Why?
Because Vasya, as he earns money, spends it: not counting. Five hundred rubles for a taxi home. A thousand rubles for lunch at a restaurant. It seems like you work and work … but there is no money.
If Vasya got himself a notebook and began to write down all income and expenses, his hair on his butt would move in horror. Vasya would have seen that eating in a restaurant is not a pitiful thousand at a time, as he thought, but fifty thousand a month, six hundred thousand a year. Vasya would have seen that a taxi is convenient and comfortable, but two months of traveling by minibuses will allow him to buy a new computer, which he has been dreaming of for three years.
However, as befits a normal slave of the Matrix, Vasya does not consider it necessary to count money.
14. Expensive savings
Dima Gustitsyn is forced to save on food. He eats homeless bags: he dilutes them with boiling water and eats them with a plastic fork in disgust. Sometimes Dima spoils himself, eats purchased dumplings.
Good pasta with normal meat would have cost Dima cheaper than dumplings with dumplings … however, someone once said to Dima that doshirak is cheap, and to calculate with a calculator how much "cheap" things really cost him, Dima somehow does not guess.
Dima is sure that money is something petty and dirty, and that only goons count them. At the same time, Dima is not embarrassed by the fact that his unwillingness to understand finances regularly makes him act as a decent bastard - without giving his friends debts, for example.
Something like this, probably, argued in the Middle Ages: a neat person never washes his ass: after all, touching impurities with your hand, washing them off your body is such a shameful and unworthy occupation …
15. Advertising
Lena Vurdalakina drinks cola, smokes marlboro, chews stimorol and eats hambugers in three throats at McDonald's. She always smells of dolce gabbana, and Lena carries her iPhone in a Louisvitton bag.
At the same time, Lena is sure that advertising does not work on her in any way, and a sick stomach and an empty wallet are her own choice.
Predatory snouts from the TV screens in chorus support Lena in her naive delusion: "You are a free man, Helen, you are an intelligent and beautiful woman, you always absolutely voluntarily and independently choose which of us you will humbly take your next salary to."