I want alone time. I think even extroverts and neurotypicals — everyone wants, at some point in their day or week, time to themselves. Maybe if only to poop, or shower. Time to ourselves to be ourselves. Yet this is a luxury devoutly to be wished, won be massing enormous amounts of money or privilege or both, in order to carve out a space for oneself. I need profound amounts of it to self-regulate. I have precious little privacy with disability, doctor’s visits, applications and recertifications for benefits, and the indefatigable nosiness of people who should really have ‘mind your own business’ educated consistently into them. We need each other, need other humans, yes. But we need choices even more. Oh, but the world would go to rack and ruin if we could CHOOSE what we do, and with whom, and where we go, and when. Work would grind to a halt. Professions, economies would collapse, dirty and unpleasant yet necessary jobs wouldn’t get done, trash and waste would be everywhere, systems would fail, governments would fall, and anarchy! Long before we had machines, and jobs, and salaries, and even before money and timekeeping, people made things, did things, built things. Modern conveniences prolong life, make things easier, mechanised, and yet in many ways make things harder, and destroy trust and connection, motivation and drive. Yet we humans invented all these things that force other humans to do things, hoarding resources and basic needs and little by little inventing increasingly insane and complicated systems that now have become more self-complicating. Things that create disparity, crime, and after-the-fact justification for regulating and reserving those things we need to survive. Without trust, without risk, without tolerance for failure and mistakes, we have no trust, and have lost love and giving without expectation. We have made it nearly impossible to get to ‘yes’ through rigid thinking, prejudice, and habits formed around them that no longer feel like choices, but compulsions. We blame and abandon the needy as toxic and dangerous, as we have been abandoned by generations of emotional neglect in favour of hyperfocus on ever-insane amounts of speed, hustle, frantic work to make money to survive and strive to get to some mythical place of financial stability so that life can finally be enjoyed, except by that time stress and lack of connection and love have taken their toll and most people are either dead inside or straight-up dead, in exhausted bodies and minds. In ‘WarGames’ Professor Falken, broken by the death of his son Joshua, withdrew from the world and the human race, unperturbed by any thought of humans being wiped out, ready for nature to start over with whatever insect or life-form survived the nuclear holocaust. Who knew the apocalypse would not be like it is in ‘Mad Max’ or zombie shows, or even ‘The Stand,’ but somehow still have too many living people being as cruel and cold as ever, now turned up to 11? In times of uncertainty we cling even harder to the familiar, and feeling out of control, we try even harder to control everyone and everything around. Not just governments — individuals. Policing each other’s every nuance for signs of threat. No trust. No love. No sense of value or worth, or meaning. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.