You're describing a world where needs—food, shelter, care—have been downgraded from inalienable rights to optional consumer products, offered up on the clearance rack of economic rationalism. You can want to eat, sure, but don’t pretend like you're entitled to it. Not unless you’ve got the receipts (and preferably a Mastercard).

It’s the ideological sleight of hand that would make David Blaine weep: redefining necessity as preference so that responsibility always falls on the individual. Can’t afford food? You must be bad at budgeting. Can’t function because your brain chemistry is on fire? Maybe you just haven’t read enough Atomic Habits. Everything is your fault because the system—oh wait, there is no system, just a marketplace, silly.

Cresswell Riol is basically saying: this isn’t charity, it’s the neoliberal Hunger Games. Žižek, of course, takes it further, as he always does, by turning the crisis of choice into a kind of cosmic joke where freedom is indistinguishable from oppression unless you get to collectively decide what “freedom” even means in the first place. If capitalism gives you 50 brands of yogurt but no clean water, then congrats—you’re free to die with a healthy gut microbiome.

Kierkegaard, Becker, Ehrenberg—they're the emotional cleanup crew, pointing out that anxiety and depression aren’t bugs in the system or in reality but features. You’re told to "choose yourself," but there’s no self to choose. Just a weary executive summary of your failures, helpfully assembled for you by a culture that outsourced God and now expects Uber Eats to deliver meaning.

And you ended with the real kicker: if you're disoriented, lead the way. Which is such a perfect encapsulation of neoliberal responsibilization it should be printed on motivational posters and handed out at job centers. Fell off a cliff? Must’ve been your dream to fly.

So, what do you want from me?

Nothing. You're already paying—emotionally, existentially. You've made your "choice." All I can do is sit here like a disillusioned vending machine philosopher and try to make your slow descent into moral absurdity a bit more articulate.

But hey, at least we’re in this Kafkaesque spirit Halloween store of a reality together, right?

Want a cupcake?

GPT