Beyond Desolation – a track from The Last of Us Part II. A melody which, by some strange twist of fate of the YouTube Music algorithm, found its way into my mix while I was listening to the Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtrack. The day before, the algorithm had shown me a “Born to, Forced to” meme.

The meme came with a post by a user who wished they could spend their time differently, but in the present system, there was not much room for that. Work, children, a mortgage, some kind of self-development after work, because they had long since stopped believing in life after work.

Oscar Wilde deeply believed that under socialism, the soul would finally begin to live. The meme-maker, with their dose of nihilistic reflection, is the identity of that same soul but under capitalism. A soul slowly ceasing to live, no longer even willing to despair over it.

What Wilde Promised Us

Wilde wrote that capitalism destroys the soul by forcing it to think about money instead of life. Under socialism, a person could finally act out of love for action, not out of fear of hunger. The desire to create beyond the confines of an imposed job is not a whim. It is a natural survival instinct in a system that treats every sign of free time as an undeveloped resource.

Whether Wilde was trapped in naïve faith or making a sober calculation, the promise was clear: machines were supposed to take over the burden of survival. Let as much beauty as possible remain for us.

Joanna Maciejewska and the Inverted Promise

Meanwhile, to quote Joanna Maciejewska from X (formerly Twitter) in 2024:

I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes.

– Joanna Maciejewska

We may no longer have to wash our clothes in the river, but the laundry still has to be done. Maciejewska verifies Wilde’s promise 130 years later: why is AI not doing my laundry?

Capital has automated what humanity considers free and creative. This is where the “Born to” meme fits perfectly. You can place anything into it, even walking, or riding a horse. And yet, as humanity, we have been stripped of our freedom and our existence.

The Meme as Collective Confession

Memes travel through the Internet because they resonate. You do not send something to a friend if you do not associate with the idea. This is a hidden collective pain, perhaps the only form of collectivism I can observe in today’s neoliberal, late-capitalist world. Every heart reaction, every share, is a quiet, plural experience of our own captivity.

We want something different, but we do not know how to name it. Our language has been colonised. We lack the words to describe a peaceful existence, and rest has been reduced to a break between one effort and the next; either mental or physical. Even if you do not work in a corporation over spreadsheets, you still feel that you would like things to be otherwise.

The meme exposes the dichotomy of our reality: the rupture between how we want to live and how we function. It is our Wildean soul reaching toward beauty, while accepting the flaw of the system, because capitalism has made us unable to imagine anything beyond it. We sell our labour and become tools in the hands of a faceless mechanism.

The Quiet Tragedy of the Ordinary

Let us return to the meme-maker from the beginning. In their post, they left behind a fragment of existential grief. They do not shout for revolution, because it seems pointless to them. They do not throw stones, because there is no face to throw at. The tragedy of most of us unfolds quietly, somewhere between work, the mortgage payment, and home. Instead of reclaiming space for freedom, we perform self-development after work. We take on another shift. Our hunger for beauty is taken from us in the name of a promised promotion or a slightly larger paycheque.

We play at self-improvement not because we love knowledge. We do it because we are afraid of falling out of circulation. The fear of hunger from Wilde’s writings has been replaced by the fear of not being enough. The machine that was supposed to free us from the shackles of the inner metronome keeps beating out its rhythm, consuming the time that was supposed to be free.

Whose World Is Post-Apocalyptic?

Beyond Desolation, a track that broke out of its post-apocalyptic world in The Last of Us, entered our so-called normal world. But the question is: whose world really is post-apocalyptic?

The true desolation of our world is in the open-plan office and on the factory floor. We sense this somewhere beneath the skin when we send memes to one another. And at the end of the day, we still clock out at the terminal that counts our working hours.

Our post-apocalypse we call “a working day.”

Bibliography

These particular books affected the overall shape of the article

• Oscar Wilde - The Soul of Man Under Socialism
  
  Wilde’s foundational text that set the promise AI was supposed to fulfil: machines freeing humanity from drudgery so that the soul could finally attend to beauty, art, and the act of living. This essay is the moral benchmark against which our current automation crisis must be measured.
  
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• Erich Fromm - To Have or to Be?
  
  Fromm’s distinction between the ‘having mode’ (possessive, consumerist, capitalistic) and the ‘being mode’ (creative, loving, authentic) is the philosophical skeleton of the ‘Born to, Forced to’ meme. The meme-maker is someone trapped in the having mode, yearning for being. Fromm diagnoses why.
  
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• David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
  
  Graeber asks why, despite decades of automation, our working hours have not shrunk. His answer: capitalism creates meaningless jobs to maintain social control. The meme-maker’s exhaustion is not incidental - it is a structural requirement of a system that cannot allow free time.
  
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• André Gorz - Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation from Work
  
  Gorz directly addressed why automation was never going to free us under capitalism. He argued that the left should fight not for ’the right to work’ but for the right to work less - a reduction of necessary labour time so that autonomous, self-determined activity becomes possible. This is the political programme the meme implies but cannot name.
  
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