by Anton Martin Smith antonmartinsmithwrites@gmail.com

So it is a summer Saturday in small town New Zealand. As usual nothing is happening. In NZ nothing much happens, especially if you are over thirty. While being under thirty their are low hanging fruit frivolities of student parties and easy drunkenness. But then after that era is over all social life is destroyed. The over thirties want to sit in their burrows with the co-dependent other and slowly mentally die. This to me just seems a fact.

Disclaimer: Of course – I know this is actually a worldwide phenomenon. New Zealand being an already long term socially and geographically isolated place, it acts merely an amplification of the general effect. A slide towards (techno) isolation. A canary in the coal mine, if you will.

Of course the ‘moneyed’ will always have their ‘dinner parties’ etc – so I’m not so much talking about them. I guess in a way this is a reason for me to hate them less – they know socializing is important. That is why they ‘force it’ like a job they have to attend, when they would rather sit on the couch. [Edit: I have, like all those who grew up poor been guilty of hating that nebulous blob ‘the rich’ I realize now that that is an affliction in itself For the ‘nebulous blob’ is at least half fictitious. It is perhaps poetically more of a haze that clings tightly to a wooded gorge, avoiding the city flats at all cost.

I shouldn’t hate the ‘moneyed’ as if that ‘nebulous blob’ is scientifically real – it’s probably a bad habit I can’t break. I know most of them – pretty much all the ones that are not mega mega rich – actually do work hard. They are not lying when they say that glibly. It’s just I can’t stand how they all sound like the exact same tape recording. That’s usually how they got their money – copying each other. I can see why they do it. I mean they don’t need to worry about being under a bridge catching fat moths to eat. And besides, their genus on the whole are the types that hate to read. Another reason why I don’t like them. That one is a good proper reason.

But I think they (the moneyed) minimize the down side to being so very much a copy-cat all the time. There’s a big price to pay with that psychologically. There’s a dissociative thing that happens. I believe deep down in every human there is a creative soul wanting to be heard. The moneyed don’t realise that this need cannot be willed away by hard work, fine things, weekends away or general copycat-ism. This is where the dissociative aspect enters. It is as if the moneyed middle-class-copy-cat types, all residing cloistered within their tight-knit social groups are all acting as the same character in the same play. They know something’s deeply wrong, but they dare not listen to their muffled souls voice crying out from the bowels of their hearts to them – for they fear if the listen the risk losing all their wealth, or half it or perhaps three quarters of it, and they feel to mention the lie would risk being ostracized, ridiculed, exiled. And of course they are right to fear this – that is what would happen. It takes courage to listen to that what speaks to you from the core of your ancient humanity – your caveman self? More so if you are at the lover levels of the ‘moneyed’ cults. And so the dissociation, the split occurs – the moneyed treat this via alcohol and or class A drugs, or sometimes a sport like golf or running etc.

More than a decade ago I used to work in the ‘Corporate world’ (it’s all in the name – they admit it’s not actually the ‘real world’ its a constructed one, a virtual one, with its own customs and laws). I was around these ‘middle class copy cat culture’ types – perhaps a third were the dissociative ‘moneyed’ types mentioned prior. I was about thirty when I realized I was facing a fork in the road: destroy my life as I know it or become like them (the moneyed), or at least a half-pie version of them. I chose to destroy my life as I knew it. Though it wasn’t really the executive functioning side of my brain making a considered logical choice. The decision came leak-wise and via stealth from my soul. I think it used its ‘veto power’. It issued a clandestine order:

You will self sabotage this life, you will torpedo it from afar.

That is what happened. It was a slow exit over perhaps two years. In the middle of my separation from my ‘rehashed middle class copy-cat life’ was a six month long international trip to three south asian countries (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam but it could have been anywhere really). At the time I thought that trip was happening to ‘revitalize’ me, whereby I would return to some kind of ‘copy-cat utopia’ back in the big rat race city I lived in (Melbourne). Of course my soul new that it was just stretching out the divorce from my former self. Not so much a closing of a chapter but a throwing away of the whole book. The mind trick self delusion of a ‘ nice reset via a international getaway’ was just my soul just making it sure the ‘book throwing’ could be made palatable.

That was more than a decade ago. After that trip my souls sneaky plan worked a treat. I couldn’t rehash that old life, even though I did try for a year afterwards. The attempt to re-copycat myself failed at every turn back in the copy-cat-haven-rat-race city. It all folded so beautifully (but yes, I thought it was a disaster at the time). No employer of copy-cats wanted a bar of me. They could smell I wanted out. So I never had a chance to get my old life back – I now know how lucky that was. Most copy cats die as copy cats, with ingrained downward trend faces and anti smiles, having not had a flicker of light in their eyes for decades.

My life is no longer a copy-cat thing at all. It’s quite original & creative, even if I do say so myself. But anyone with access to a computer can just read my stuff to see that I copy no one in my work. My life – It’s not perfect by any stretch. But I get by, & I no longer am strapped to a cubicle climbing the corporate ladder, dealing with passive aggressiveness, putting up with office politics, getting wildly underpaid. No longer saying copycat-culture empty platitudes about mortgages, marriages, 2.1 kids & career progression plans. That shit is all gone. After the fork in the road opened up to the new highway, I taught myself to ‘fish for my food’. I now source my own jobs out there that people need done in the physical world. Ehen I need more money I work harder. When I have enough I ramp up my creativity. Am I living as the ancients did in a place of bounty? Probably not as that sounds far far to romanticized.

Back to things ‘New Zealand’. Of course there is a new different form of isolation – of small town New Zealand, being over thirty, and being unmarried, single and over forty. Yes, I admit the ‘peacefulness of New Zealand’ is written into the fabric of this place. But the added social isolation is a construction of the people here and that have been here since it became a colonial outpost circa eighteen thirty. My current favourite theory as to why isolation is so entrenched here is that we never got over the wild chaotic pioneering beginnings of things. When there was too much hard work ahead of us to build literally everthing; almost no ‘civilizing’ females here only en-roughened violent and bad tempered men; Law and order was patchy to non existent at best. In those conditions in colonial NZ, it was wise to not trust anyone, given anyone you randomly met was probably some rogue drunk and violent male, most probably a cast-off from eighteenth-century Dickensian London, quite ready to rob, beat or maybe even kill you. The entrenched isolation is perhaps proof it’s all too early in ‘cultural-time’ to expect otherwise.

The theory is surely half right – how could it not be? facts are facts. Sadly, I also think we as New Zealanders don’t know ourselves well enough to be able to fight the unnecessary ongoing culture of isolating patterns of behaviour. It’s almost as if after saying ‘no we are not British we are now New Zealanders’ we have embraced a void – we have something we are not (British) don’t have something we are. Of course anyone with brains knows it is folly to pretend we ex colonials are not still ethno-culturally British/European – even though the white liberals love to pretend they can.

In NZ People allow themselves to be too reticent, too co-dependant with their spouses, too suspicious of ‘others’, never backing themselves to get out of their rut, always worried what people will think of them of they dare put their head above the pulpit. That is why despite the ever-piling-up evidence (e.g. poor mental health) to the contrary, we still pretend ‘everything is ok’ and that we are just people who like to “chill out”. I believe ‘Chilling out’ to much gas killed more people than all the guns, at least in terms of a very real ‘mental death’.

I can only hope this self-deception in NZ can end one day (and everywhere else). I mean if it is true, why is our social society and economy so full of cavernous fractures? For a people who are happily ‘chilling out’ there seem to be hell of a lot of mental meltdowns, early deaths, murders, assaults, poverty, depression etc.

Sometimes I wonder whether I am really happy or really sad. But now with age and experience I realise that’s a ‘silly modern question’. No one asked that kind of question until about one hundred years ago. When the medico-psych industry realized if they could male everyone think they were sick because they weren’t ‘skip through the tulips happy’. A great scam – you could fleece everyone. So since true happiness is a fraud then the real question is one of contentedness.

Under that theory we should ask ‘are we content?’. To be reasonably content would mean we are conventionally ‘happy’. I guess I roughly have that to a degree nowadays. But I also have a nagging feeling that I’m supposed to actually be living some other life, in some other location, making people go ‘wow that’s cool what you just did – tell me more’. I wonder if thoughts like this are a ‘remnant hangover’ from the NZ brand of soco-cultural bad-programming I’ve been subjected to over my lifespan(?).

Perhaps it is Edward Bernays’s fault. Edward Bernays was marketing genius of around one hundred years ago. Bernays was the pioneering propaganda guru who realized you have to manufacture wants in peoples minds, not just wait for them to tell you they want something – and if you do that trick you can’t get ridiculously wealthy and influential. With Bernays era it is the programming of ‘you must be unhappy so buy this flash car you can’t afford’. That crap has immersed us thanks to modern tech where media is blaring at you everywhere, and it’s now in our pockets.

Or as Karl Pilkington said without knowing any of that theoretical stuff at all – “everyone has a ‘worry hole’ that has to be filled” (I paraphrase). It aligns with the manufactured wants Bernays thesis. For it doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are – the ‘worry hole’ is there & must always be filled by things you cant ever get to. The Pilkington ‘worry hole’ is proof the Bernays system has truly worked on everyone.

It has been proved that Multi-Millionaires and even Billionaires do worry a lot, despite their big material comforts. We do seem hardwired to worry. The evolutionists say that it made far more sense to jump first and think later, least a sabre tooth tiger eat you while you were thinking whether to jump or not. This is also very true. Darwin and later (his promoter) Herbert Spenser had a good point there.

Anyway, thoughts of wellbeing are interesting. Perhaps if my parents had not been divorced & I had grown up like ‘The Waltons’ (for those under 40 that was a cheesy 1950s falsely perfect American TV family) and not grown up in a recession ravaged small town in the nineteen nineties. I’m just talking out loud here, being less intellectual for a moment. Wondering about your own ‘Wellbeing’ is a bit like getting into Ufology – no matter how many Alien/UFO podcasts you watch – you’ll never know more than you started, you will never know if ‘they walk among us’ or if Roswell was true. Perhaps that’s why no one in the old days even thought too much of ‘Wellbeing, Self-Help & Happiness’. They just worked, and some were lucky enough to earn more than their neighbor who wore rags for clothes.

Anyway these are all nice musings. I don’t really have the answer. I guess it is best to worry about the day one day at a time. Someone with long hair and a robe said that a very long time ago, & it’s hard to argue that each day has enough worries of it’s own. On that measure, I had a good day today, and a good week. After all I did get a lot of real things done in the physical world (which is a bit of a hang out of mine these days). Maybe the best maxim is ‘if in doubt don’t overthink more than what is in front of you’. Maybe if you do that maybe not much will go really bad. Schopenhauer thought ‘happiness’ was stupid and contentedness was all you could have, and that came from the absence of bad outcomes, i.e. a negatively defined thing. He’s got a point I think too.

I must say I feel much better now for writing this – for expressing myself as a unique individual. Not being a copy-cat. Writing helps. Why? Because have expressed myself as an individual. My soul likes it. And now that I travel down this fork in the road instead of the copy-cat other fork, I do get to do that a lot. That is a very real form of wealth. Maybe I’m secretly content. But will I allow myself to admit that? I am not so sure – it might not be a profitable use of my time & resources – according to a Bernaysian propagandist at least.

Perhaps these are all just the idle ramblings of a lonely kiwi middle aged man. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Where would we be without ramblings? I’ll take a side of ramblings with my main of luke-warm discontent any day of the week, all washed down with a mighty ice cold beer of course.

‘Happy’ (content?) Saturday folks !

Anton M Smith

17 (& updated on the 18th) Jan 2026