SHORT STORY FALSE EXPECTATIONS
FALSE EXPECTATIONS
Automatic traslation from the original story in Spanish. Not checked manually
Pedro, sitting on the marble entrance of a closed establishment, looked around and saw many other establishments, also closed with many other people who, like him, used this limited space between the sidewalk and the rickety roll-up door as a living space.
Everyone was waiting fruitlessly for someone to give them something to eat or some money that would allow them to live poorly… Live? That wasn’t life, Pedro thought.
He looked at himself, ragged, filthy and in bones. His only consolation was that his appearance did not differ too much from so many others, who like him belonged to generations whom he had deceived.
Generations who had been made to believe that he could live in luxury without making the slightest effort.
The reality is that it is the year 2055 and he is 55 years old. He has been starving for quite some time now… to be exact, since his parents could no longer support him.
When they reached retirement age, they had some savings and a pension that, between the two of them, was not too bad. As time went by, there were fewer people working and pensions became increasingly meagre.
There came a time when they had difficulty leading a somewhat dignified life and they could no longer help him…
It was then that I realized that I had nothing, not even the possibility of being able to work, since as my father told me, I had neither job nor benefit, I was truly an idiot. I thought I could get rich easily, I thought I was smarter than hunger
Pedro’s mind, almost without realizing it, moves to 2017… “my mother was crying and my father tried to make me understand that he should study or work. I insisted that he was not planning to do it. He was not willing to be exploited, when wealth was knocking at my door.
My father, after trying everything, left me as impossible and told my mother not to give me a single euro. But her love prevented him from doing so and his help was disastrous. I was even more sure that he was born to make me rich.
First, I invested money that I took from my mother in Forex… It was an absolute disaster. Then I managed to convince them that I was doing very well with cryptocurrencies… I talked to them so much about blockchains and all this nonsense that in the end they gave me money to invest… I made them lose almost €20,000. Then came the stock market and then the pandemic… and with the pandemic the aid and after the pandemic the minimum living wage…
I understood it, without a doubt, as a sign of providence. Consequently I had to follow my path, my certainty and I saw my way out on social networks…
I would be a famous influencer, also I would earn an egg and part of the other without hitting a stick in the water, I wouldn’t be an asshole like my parents who had given up their lives for salaries that never allowed them to excel.
I tried YouTube, Facebook, Twitter – even so many years later, “X” still sounds bad to me –, Instagram, TikTok… To make itI spent a lot of money – everything the state measured, plus what I got from my mother, to create content, pay for advertising and become famous…
Very rarely, despite having quite a few followers, do I reach a level of profit that allows me to cover expenses, to remain visible on the networks…
Since there is no worse blind person than someone who doesn’t want to see, it took me several years to understand that I would never be able to get rich… Those who got rich were the companies that owned the networks, thanks to people like me who paid them for advertising and obviously to all the companies. who also mistakenly did it to gain presence in the market…
Of course, in the end, everything went to shit and, not only me, but several generations were left with their asses in the air. Since we had never contributed, the state now ignores us… they call us parasites, when it was the states themselves that encouraged this nonsense…
They needed generations without criteria so that they would not confront the system, continually coming up with laws and nonsense to distract the staff and since they had more and more ability to manipulate us, it worked for them… Now only a few thousand people live like God… the rest of us are outcasts…
Of course, since you can hardly even eat, climate change seems to have slowed down… Logically, if we don’t eat, we don’t shit either, which is why we don’t even produce methane from our shit…
The only consolation is that because of all this life expectancy has been greatly reduced. In fact, luckily, I’m already very close to the average…
I’m sure that if I talked to anyone else, they would have the same opinion as me.”
Three stores to the right of him, Juan, another 58-year-old homeless man, sat in what, in his day, was the entrance to a good business, inside him he pondered.
“I was a real stupid person listening to my parents and pursuing an engineering degree. Even though I was good, I never got an enviable salary. In fact, even when I was working, I went through hardships. It wasn’t even enough for me to start a family.
My parents, telling me, study, work hard and you will make a future for yourself. You will have a better life than ours…
Then with AI, everything went to shit… I have been hungry for years, on top of so much aid that there was during the pandemic and post-pandemic and now they don’t even say good morning. They have turned us into scum.
If I had not listened to them and had dedicated myself to social networks, I would now live in opulence… There are people on them who are still making a lot of money…
I am convinced that, if I asked any other of us in this situation, they would think the same thing.”
One street up, 53-year-old Mario, sitting at the door of “his” abandoned store, thinks about what led him there…
“I should have listened to my parents. He should have studied a career. But no, I was smarter than everyone and I wanted to earn money to emancipate myself and be able to start a family…
He took a vocational training course as a car mechanic and I thought maybe he would have his own workshop. No way! The pandemic came, climate change came, the electric car came and in the end all the car manufacturers went to hell… and, naturally, I was behind them…
You see, years of starvation… If I had studied a degree, if I had been an engineer, I would have been able to reinvent myself and now I would be designing new robots…”
Lying on a bench on the left-hand avenue, Leonardo, 57, mentally laments his bad luck.
“Who would tell me to be a writer? Why the hell I had the bad luck to win a literary award and from there they began to publish, with some success, my works…
With all the rubbish that the editors published, in the end, no one read anything anymore and the publishers went bankrupt and I was left without my source of income and without having prepared myself for anything else and you see, I haven’t even managed to find a portal for closed place where I can stay…
My parents warned me… I should have listened to them and done vocational training, it is what is most sought after. On top of that, the lack of companies has made the aid they gave after the pandemic and that helped so many people unviable.”
A little further down in his corresponding portal, a crazed philosopher asserts: “It’s the fault of the cha, cha, cha…”
In his luxurious mansion, one of the privileged rich broods over the moment… “We were wrong. We didn’t listen to our parents when they told us that it was not necessary to be too ambitious. And we thought they weren’t taking advantage of the opportunity they had…
To obtain what we believed were better results we began to finance ambitious politicians. It was simple… By financing their campaigns and teaching them how to control the media, it was easy for them to come to power and do what we wanted…
But their ambition was so great and their intelligence was so little that they let a series of things get out of hand… social networks, AI, proxy wars and whatever in order to hold power and make money… for this they even sought to attract nations to join them. to your block and thus gain more power.
The territorial politicians began to seek greater prominence, not for the good of the people, simply to manage the money and the show… they tried in any way, even if it meant that part of the population became impoverished…
Then, when everything was already a disaster, the pandemic arrived and as politicians – all over the world – were increasingly inept, they resorted to the simplest solution… printing money. Then to make amends they got into sterile wars that meant that the arms manufacturers gave them juicy commissions…
And the worst thing, we were not able to stop the situation. Better said, we were so engrossed in amassing our fortune that we didn’t even realize it.
We were guilty of destroying the goose that laid the golden eggs. Now, we are in a situation where there is no more money left to amass. A large part of the population is unemployed and unproductive… And we don’t know how to find a way to turn the situation around. If this continues like this, sooner rather than later it will also be our turn to look for the threshold of some closed space as a habitation…”
False Expectations – Short stories series – Copyright ©Montserrat Valls and Juan Genovés