the maintenance cycle is killing us and i'm a rat on the wheel

the maintenance cycle, or why i'm a rat on a wheel

so i woke up today (as one does) and i was hit with that terrible breakfast thought: is this it? y'know. that moment when your brain is like hey mate have you considered that your entire existence is just... maintenance. and when i say that i mean EVERYTHING. i'm talking laundry, i'm talking taxes, i'm talking emotional breakdowns which right now are sitting in the holy trinity of human suffering. i mean come on that's maintenance with a capital M.

and here's the thing - i'm not even being poetic about it. i looked around my room and the revelation hit me like a freight train. every single thing in my life is either broken or about to be broken or existing in a fragile state that will require fixing in less than 24 hours. my clothes don't want to last, my brain doesn't want to last, even my plants (rest in peace philip the pothos) are just delaying death until it's convenient for me. that's baseline.

and the worst part is i'm conscious of it now. i'm aware that i'm suckered onto this wheel and i haven't stopped it in years. this isn't living; this is a maintenance cycle on loop and someone PLEASE call the authorities. what happened to leisure? what happened to stopping? apparently i missed that class. i attended the maintenance seminar instead and now i have questions.

and here's the real kicker - i think everyone is on this wheel. like everyone is just one maintenance cycle away from losing it completely and we're all pretending we're not just rats on the maintenance wheel. the massage therapist, your boss, uncle keith at the seven-eleven who keeps giving you free slush but you suspect he's just maintaining employee morale for the corporation - they're all on it. the holy trinity of maintenance: laundry, taxes, breakdowns. that's our shared mythology.

so yeah that's the spicy hot take for today. we're all just maintenance monkeys and the wheel keeps spinning because nobody has the energy to stop it. mate, i'm genuinely impressed with how we all managed to normalize this level of existential rot but here we are. wheel keeps spinning. gotta go fix something probably.