Dealer Bust

Life is like a card game. Your whole life is just a bigger game of blackjack on a fancier table. Every single person plays this game and, no matter how well they do or how long the last, the dealer always wins. In life’s case, the devil always has the last laugh.

So what can you do? Live every day as if it’s your last! Well, not really. In every dominant human society work has been the only way to succeed,. Weather you were a Roman legionnaire or an insurance salesman from Dalkey, the society that you were born into is one which requires you to work for the majority of your year. 49 weeks out of 52, with 3 weeks holidays if you’re lucky. The rewards for this are the obvious monetary benefits, but also the sociological ones, the standing you gain among your peers and superiors for being a 'hard worker.' If you choose not to do this then not only will you not have the means to get by but you will also be seen as a deficient subject, someone who can’t keep up with pace setters in the race (even though no one has ever known who set it so fast in the first place)

Therefore, the key must be to enjoy your work as well as your time off as if they were one, and then you will have found happiness. But the problem with this becomes apparent when you try to do both at once. Stay up all night having fun with your friends or your family like you do on your time off and you pay for it the next day. Call in sick too much to avoid this and you’re lumped in with the people who don’t work in the first place. Work was created as a means to enjoy or time off, so there is an inevitable and unavoidable sense of duty always associated with it. And if every other person feels this way then trying to go against that trend is futile.

But this system is flawed. This overabundance of work means that we become conditioned only for that function. When this happens, even on our time off we can’t enjoy ourselves and may even feel guilty that we are not labouring. In the game of blackjack, we are sticking on cards that have no chance of winning; the devil is sitting their laughing at us. Surely we shouldn’t afford him all this. Surely there is something we can do to give him a bit more of a game.

Probably, but this is something so engrained into our society that any attempt to remove it would be met with fierce resistance. Even if you committed your whole life to changing this broken system and overcame all the adversity that was thrown against you, at the end of the day you still have to deal with the dealer devil. And he will have the last laugh, just like he has with every person who's walked this planet in the past and everyone who ever will.



Now that I'm finished this I only realise the irony of writing about blackjack on the day I turned 21!