Please note: this piece contains strong language.
It was another hot Saturday night and Dan was round Jack’s place, drinking beer. Jack lived in a cramped bedsit in the heart of the city and was Dan’s best friend, in fact, his only friend.
Outside, the disembodied voices of weekend revellers and even some tinny music emanating from a nearby pub echoed into the night.
‘Shit, it’s that nauseating pop shit again!’ said Dan.
‘Yeah, you’re right, Taylor Swift, and unless the DJ has some sort of brain malfunction, next up will be Sabrina Carpenter, rapidly followed by The Weeknd and Ed Sheeran, or vice versa,’ said Jack.
Dan took a philosophical swig from his beer. ‘Well, at least he’s consistent.’
For a while, the two friends sat in silence, drinking steadily and chain-smoking.
‘You know what?’ said Dan eventually.
‘What?’
‘I don’t think I can take it anymore.’
Jack shot his friend a worried glance. ‘You don’t mean?’
Dan cracked open another beer. ‘No, nothing like that, I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. I was referring to the job.’
‘The job?’
‘Yeah, the JOB!’ Dan leered at his friend over his beer can. ‘I mean, is it just my job or is everyone you work with insane too?’
Jack thought about his employment situation, Customer Service Officer in a corporate insurance company. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say they were insane, but some are definitely bonkers.’
Dan sighed. ‘You know, I move from one section to another, and everywhere I go it’s the same thing, people inventing work, making things more difficult than they need to be, or just acting plain nuts.’
‘But Dan, you have to remember that you work for the Government, it’s not like that in the real world.’
Although Dan didn’t deny this, he wasn’t convinced. ‘Maybe, maybe not, but I get the sneaking suspicion that in any big corporation nobody knows what the fuck they are doing.’
‘So how come it’s not chaos out there?’
‘Have you looked out there?’
Jack cracked up at that one, but as Dan continued ranting, he cut his friend short and cupped a hand behind his ear, ‘D’ya hear that?’
Dan stopped mid-rant. ‘Oh shit, Sabrina Carpenter!’
A couple of hours later, the two friends were good and boozy.
‘You know what?’ slurred Dan, after staring at a plug socket for an extended period.
‘What?’
‘The Australian aborigines had the right idea.’
‘Huh?’
‘Fuck work, progress, industry, written records, conquests, wars. Just find a simple and satisfactory way of living and stick to it.’
‘Er?’
‘No nine to five, no office politics, no consuming shit that we don’t want, no packed into trains like cattle, no traffic jams, none of that modern city life hell, which is what it is.’
‘Are you sure it was so good living a stone-age existence?’
‘Where has putting a man on the moon got us? Fucking nowhere, that’s where, pointless nothingness. Let’s examine the facts. They say that aborigines are amongst the most primitive people on earth, but I say the opposite is true. Think how advanced it is to avoid reaping destruction on the planet, utilising industrial pollution, or nuclear bombs? Shit, after an initial period of inevitable environmental destruction those dudes lived in harmony with the land for thousands of years. They knew how to look after it and survive in an inhospitable environment.
‘But they didn’t have beer,’ protested Jack.
Dan eyeballed his can. ‘Okay, that’s a negative, but what you don’t have you don’t miss.’
‘You drink every single day.’
‘Only because modern life drives the sensitive man to drink. You have to understand that the majority of civilised folk are forced to do work which is meaningless, pointless, and very, very dull. This is why they are plagued with stress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia.’
‘Okay, I agree with that, but there’s no way we can turn the clock back.’
‘Yes, we can, we can do whatever we want if we possess the will. We won’t, but we could if we wanted to. Man is meant to be hunters, and that’s what we should be doing.’
‘What, hunting?’
‘Yep, getting out there in the wilderness, spear in hand.’
‘I don’t think we’d be very successful.’
‘Eventually we would, and think how grateful the successive generations would be?
‘Are you sure they’d be grateful?’
‘Of course they would, we’d be made saints, heroes, and given enough time, probably revered as some type of God.’
‘You’re getting a bit carried away. We’d have to live in tee-pees without central heating, modern medicine, or any of the other creature comforts we have come to enjoy and rely on?’
‘Superfluous shit, we’d live off the fat of the land!’
‘Shit, I’m with ya, but it sounds hopelessly unrealistic.’
Dan got up and fetched two cans of beer from the fridge, handed one to Jack, and slumped into his chair.
‘Shit, you’re right. Aboriginal culture has nothing to offer the modern world apart from some odd painting styles, interesting musical sounds, and some lovely myths about the Dreamtime.’
Jack took a reflective sip from his can. ‘So modern man is doomed to live a boring life and then die.’
‘Never a truer word said, never a truer word said.’
‘And guess what?’
‘What?’
‘Can you hear that?’
‘Oh, fuck, Sheeran!’