Death By Winning

or, What the fuck is going on?

I do not recall how I stumbled upon the wisdom in the jpg above, but it’s been a long time since such a concise piece so moved me, so many years since such a scant ten lines, a mere thirty words, has so inflamed my passions, has so caused my mind to race with one simple thought I have been unable to banish since I first read them:

What the fuck is going on?

Why do I need a win at all, you smiley fucks, even once a day? Why are you bothering me? “Lifting?” This is a win?

How about “Dropping?” Because for me, dropping is a win. Just dropping really heavy things I should not have bothered lifting, just shattering them on the floor and walking away and saying, “Fuck it.” And not to put too fine a point on it, but “Reading?” Even if this weren’t some twisted, endless-self-improvement, betterment-cult mantra - “reading?” Have we gotten to the point where reading is considered a win? Now I can’t tell if you’re not pushing hard enough.

“Be a complete winner!”

Someone actually wrote those words. Someone thought them, organized them, typed them, picked a typeface, aligned it left, and decided to post it. But it gets worse:

This post has thousands of likes, and endless positive comments.

“Thank’s!” writes one.

“Love this!!!!” writes another.

“Today one more to go!” chimes in a third. “Physical. Great list!”

What the fuck is going on?

How about lose? How about stay in bed? And don’t fucking tell me that staying in bed IS your win, you self-dissatisfied psycho fuck, don’t drag me into your relentless betterment bullshit – I’m staying in bed and failing.

“How true,” one commenter lied.

“What about a money win?” someone else unhelpfully suggested.

“I would also add,” added someone named Conrad, “Do it, yes, but do it well!”

Fuck you, Conrad. Now it’s not enough to work my fucking ass off in search of some capitalo-religious pursuit of expiation for our miserable not-enough selves — now we have to “do it well,” too. Let’s throw judgement onto the achievement shitpile, Conrad! And then, near the bottom of the comments, as if a coda to all that came before it, someone wrote “Checked all three!” followed by the omnipresent emoji of a flexing bicep, a gesture that used to be reserved for adolescent boys with undescended testicles to prove their manhood, but which has now become common for adults to perform in front of the entire world.

What the fuck is going on?

Each of us is, of course, the winner of the Great Sperm Race that took place in our mother’s uterus. Each one of us, against all odds, beat forty million other sperms in the winner takes all Balls-To-Egg-a-thon that preceded our unlikely births.

I hereby suggest that win be deemed enough.

Forever.

We’re done.

All of us.

Mazel tov.

We won the big one, didn’t we? Can’t we rest a bit? Because I’m pretty sure that if I’d known then that that race was only the first race of many — that I was going to have to win and win and win, three times a day, every day, that I was going to have to have a physical win and a mental win and a spiritual win, that I was going to have to win at the gym, win at eating, win at having, win at doing, win at social, win at Substack, win at longevity, win at purity, win at winning, even win at spirituality — I’d have thrown in the towel. I’d have stopped. I’d have pulled over to the side of the old Fallopian Highway, had a smoke and a beer and let the other idiots race for miserable Eggland, where every moment is a race, a race run for nothing, only to be run again.

It got me down, so I re-read it in a German accent, turning all the W’s to V’s, which at least puts it in the proper Aryan context.

Try it, it works.

Vin, Schwein, vin!

But who knows?

Look at the way it’s written.

At the pace

and line breaks.

Perhaps it’s some sort of satiric poem,

or a haiku,

called “Or Lose”

or “Death By Winning,”

meant to underline the madness of a world

stuck on fast-forward.

Reading it again, though,

I notice the cadence

of a mocking prayer,

a prayer to the Great God Win

and His archangel Success,

composed by the fallen Just Okay one,

who laughs down in his non-productive Hell

as those doomed to Progress Heaven above,

toiling away for eternity,

surrounded by motivational hellions

shouting at them to win more.

Yours in the Fetal Position,

S.

For a novel about doing nothing, check out Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov, about a guy who really doesn’t want to get out of bed. Vile scum.

illustrations by Orli Auslander