Jingle Bells is playing throughout the mall, it must be time to consume. The mad rush is on, millions of parents are lining up to buy Highschool Musical dolls for their horrible little children, and I'm the one to shuffle them through the register while trying to sell them insurance on socks. By all means, tell me the story about how you only spent $5000 on gifts last year and felt cheap so this year you're doubling it. You seem to have several hundred people in your family that are somehow all important enough to receive gifts, so why not? Be sure to break it up into several purchases, pay only with checks, and stare at the register with your vacant expressions while saying "I thought that was supposed to be on sale" for every second item. Half of you look at me with a face like your alarm just went off five seconds ago and you're still in a state of being both angry and asleep at the same time, but I'll keep a look of absolute neutrality while I balance being expected to smile and being pissed off that I had to wake up at 5 AM so you can buy things you don't need.

There's something special about being misanthropic and working closely with the public in a job that illuminates every negative aspect of humanity while keeping anything positive out of sight. I'm expected to meet quotas of buyer protection plans and batteries sold, and it's my fault for not being suggestive enough if they decline. After that leather-skinned beach blonde has spent five minutes bitching about the manager not giving her enough priority, I have to find a way to insult her that will bring me satisfaction while still being subtle enough that she won't pick up on it. It's a delicate balance, but I find the best way is to reassure her about her purchase using sentences that would normally require blatant sarcasm, but I say it in a completely nonchalant and sincere way. You'll think I'm being polite and making small conversation while you wait, and I get to be condescending and relieve boredom.

Another common thing is to think about whether or not death would be preferable to going to work, and logic usually concludes that the former is a better alternative. I look at it as I do with most things in life, as a spectrum that goes from left to right, with left being bad and right being good. The day naturally starts out in the center, as it does with everyone. After the first few seconds of delirium, the spectrum makes a strong and sudden shift towards bad as you realize that your day is going to consist of work, followed by school, followed by studying, followed by sleep. It steadily moves further towards the left as you lay in bed after hitting the snooze alarm, knowing that in a few minutes you'll have to force yourself to actually get up. You get up and put on your uniform, the entire time thinking about how unnatural and dehumanizing the whole process is, and just how pointless your life is right now. You arrive at work and your boss says that you're going to be working at the register all day, and the needle moves another notch to the left. For the next five or so hours, it will be a constant journey towards bad. The line will never become shorter, everyone will complain, the manager will delay your lunch break, and as soon as you finally leave you have an exam to look forward to. Your free time comes at around 10:00 PM, at which point your meter is dangerously in the red, and you begin to study for tomorrow's test. Repeat this every day with one free day a week that gets wasted because all your friends are working and can't do anything interesting.

People are far too afraid of death, which has always struck me as contrary to the religion most people seem so devoted to. Being alive is fine, and according to religion they have eternal bliss to look forward to as long as they didn't have any fun while they were alive, but nobody actually wants to die. That one moment has a primitive fear attached to it, which is strong enough to procrastinate on their suicide. This is based on the assumption of an afterlife, and theorizing that it doesn't exist would make our entire system seem hopeless. That one shimmering speck on the horizon dies out and all that's left is a life of work with no reward at the end. Perhaps if everyone wasn't so devoted to the idea we could structure ourselves in a way that allowed for enjoyment without death as the gateway.

So say there is no afterlife, just for the sake of argument. Once you die, that's it. The electrical signal in your brain fades, and all you experience for the rest of eternity is a void. You don't get bored of it because you can no longer think, and your very consciousness ceases to exist. You have become nothing, which I would look at as the ultimate neutrality. No possibility of good or evil for an infinite amount of time. Logically, this is a step up from being constantly in a negative state. By leaving behind all the burdens you have moved towards the right of the spectrum, and have actually improved your life by ending it. No more waking up or falling asleep. No more meaningless expectations or things to pester you. An eternity of peace that you're not quite experiencing.

This is still horribly depressing, but only if you assume that there's a chance that things would have become better had you stayed alive longer. Given the general trend of the world, I can assume that everything is going to get progressively worse as time goes on in just about every aspect of life. Unless you happen to be rich from the start, you'll get poorer and poorer as you age. Inflation will increase, you'll keep getting denied the raise, gas prices will go up, and eventually you'll be at the point where you run out of the money you need for basic survival. At this point you take out loans to pay your bills, so you get charged interest by the bank. They eventually seize everything you own and either send you to jail or you become homeless. You starve to death out on the street behind a dumpster and are found two months later by two children that strayed from their parents, and the police are unable to identify your corpse. Dead and forgotten by the world, let's move on.

Option two relies on a deontological perspective which says that you can't predict the future under any circumstances. If you shoot someone in the face, you have no way of knowing if they'll die or not. It's kind of a stretch, but works well as the antithesis. Say you do get that raise and everything works out fine. You climb the ladder and become president of the company, where you make billions of dollars for doing nothing, sleep until noon every day, and spend your free time buying sports cars to show off to your other rich friends. This is much less probable than the other possibility, to the point where it can safely be discarded as mathematically insignificant. The sort of thing a five year old kid says while he's fantasizing about being an astronaut or professional football player.

So taking both sides into account, death looks like a pretty decent option as far as things go. You could finally leave all those horrible things behind and there's either something interesting waiting for you or nothing at all. Either one will be a plus for the steady worker, I would advise going out with a bang by suicide bombing a Giuliani rally, but that's just a personal preference. Quit your job and spend all your remaining money on all sorts of fun illegal things before you go. Do all the things you wanted to do, and maybe once you're done with it you'll be enjoying yourself so much that you decide not to kill yourself anyway. Either one is good, and probably won't matter too much in the grand scheme of things, but this is about you.

I'll stick around a while longer because I have shit to do, I just need to take enough time off to actually do it. Endless nothing is boring anyway, I'll just have to compensate for my spectrum being continuously in the red by giving it a huge jolt towards the right on the days off. Enjoy the holiday season, there's garbage that needs buying and you're the one to do it.