A meditation on the relentless frictions of modern life — the subtle and not-so-subtle forces that chip away at our clarity, autonomy, and inner grounding — and a call to return to what is real, what is simple, and what is ours.
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It’s easy to see how modern domestic lifestyles inevitably break people down and eventually destroy them. It’s the little things, mixed with the occasional big things. It’s the chronic interruptions and disruptions, the light and noise pollution, the responsibilities and accountabilities, and the misuse and abuse of good intentions and generosity — the twisting of empathy, sympathy, friendships, and familial ties.
It’s our choice of living arrangements, the geography and ecology and environment in which we spend most of our days. It’s our spiritual practices, or the lack of them — the spirit-serving, monkey-mind-dispelling rituals we too often neglect. It’s the chosen or inherited career paths and vocations, rarely the ones we’d prefer or feel genuinely excited about, rarely the ones that stir anticipation as we awaken each morning or leave us feeling productive, prolific, joyful, and well-spent as we lay our heads to rest at night.
It’s work. Labor. Tumult and toil. It’s being and feeling like a cog in the machine of consumption and endless extraction. For most, it’s little more than wage slavery.
It’s the fakery and incessant lies of the screens, the manipulated narratives, the untested and mistakenly adopted beliefs, the wanton misuse of information, and the excessive inputs. All of it accumulates into dangerous and wildly incomprehensible choices, into absentmindedness, distraction, escapism, and perpetual quiet desperation — or worse, into self-inflicted injury or harm.
It’s the wholesale “upgrade” to a bloated, do-everything enterprise software suite atop a functional but never-fluid, never-bug-free operating system, when the software in use for 25 years was working just fine. Simple, clean, efficient — its issues long since ironed out. But some manager or bureaucrat, half-naked in their home office and needing to justify their bullshit job and higher-than-necessary pay — someone who will never once use the software — was lobbied, knew a friend of a friend, or was otherwise incentivized to “improve and modernize operations.”
And so the mindless decision was made, now costing the time, energy, nerves, and attention of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of employees. A centralized “cloud-based” developer calls the shots in an effort to appease a dozen industries, unwilling to customize a solution “because then we’d have to change it for everybody.” Sorry if it now takes a dozen more clicks through a convoluted process to do the same task…
It’s the same in every industry, every corporation, every level of government. It’s the toxic lie and massive illusion of “progress.” It’s insanity — wasteful, expensive, stupid — and yet it remains par for the course.
That’s just the way of the modern world, right?
Decade after decade, the lies and delusions of the technocracy pile up. Nothing truly improves, aside from profit margins and the ongoing efforts at dehumanization and automation.
Inevitably, we are relegated to an automated, robotic, sedated presence, acting on only a fraction of our potential at all times, hoping that when the time is finally right — when optimal conditions arise, unexpectedly or entirely by accident — we’ll have a chance to catch our breath, get a good night’s rest, and rise fresh, restored, and ready to live our best lives.
It is, without a doubt, crazymaking. And we’ve normalized it, or we unconsciously keep trying to.
No matter the lengths to which industries, institutions, and governments go to prove their unworthiness — their abject moral and ethical poverty, their hypocrisy, their “predasite” behavior (to borrow John Lamb Lash’s portmanteau) — we give them just a little more time, another chance, another election, another opportunity to do the right and just thing. Meanwhile, they are only too happy to give us a little more rope, another explosive device, another trick, pitfall, or method of entrapment. They’re incapable of being anything else, and yet — because of our inculcated conditioning, programming, learned helplessness, and dependence upon the illusion of their necessity and beneficence — we allow more abuses: more misuses of power, more stupid and senseless “laws,” more childish, tyrannical, and violent conduct, more theft and criminality. And we’ll allow it until the end of time — or at least until the end of yet another civilization.
It seems inevitable, even as there is an evident surge of well-meaning, awake-and-aware individuals, groups, communities, and cultures who are — right now and always in varying degrees — rising up, resisting, building parallel or replacement infrastructures, economies, homesteads, and settlements, preparing should the worst come to pass. And how could it not? There seems to be a schedule to keep, a script to follow, for someone up on high — some element of our reality, some gatekeeper to our collective story, some ultra-wealthy and/or ancient collaborator who has seen this all before, and who, like clockwork, implements the means to collapse our capacity to rectify the effects of their menacing, malicious machinations.
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “don’t let them steal your gaze.” It’s key to reclaiming one’s perception from the grips of widespread mind control and persistent propaganda. Everywhere you look is another lie, a reality distortion, a deception, or an ontological inversion owing its success to ages-old epistemic capture. All of the most critical and essential facets of human understanding and comprehension are under constant assault — imposed upon, misdirected, reappropriated, and repurposed by the predasite class, implementing an overlay that aims to impede our potential at every turn, keeping the vast majority of us dumb, daft, and stupid in perpetuity.
This didn’t happen suddenly. There may, in fact, have been vast swaths of recent or distant history in which humans were far more in command of their true power and metaphysical potential. They weren’t ruled by the nonsensical ideas of commerce and capital. Their spirits weren’t drowned out by the endless violence, expansion, contraction, moaning, and droning of Empire. But we’re not living in that era now — regardless of the manipulative, emotionally charged, and endlessly compelling prognostications of so-called “angelic” representatives of “light,” “galactic federations,” or agents of “cosmic” or “ascended” love. If you believe you need external authority, non-corporeal guides, or any form of hopium, you’re exercising a disempowered mindset. It’s a good sign that you’d do well to learn how to reintegrate your disparate and dissociated aspects of self.
To me, these are all elements of deception — tools of the trade for those capable of playing both sides of a fabricated war against themselves, draining the resources of both, and profiting at every turn: spiritually, energetically, and materially.
The disruptive nature of even one household can be telling — a microcosmic reflection of our civilization. The tenant in the basement suite, banging and clanging at 4:30 a.m. beneath the bedroom of someone who stayed up late reading, stealing away the only hour of darkness and silence. The traffic noise from the busy road where increasing commercial, industrial, and residential activity shakes the walls and sends lightning-bolt flashes of headlights across blackout drapes. The shared bathroom wedged between two bedrooms, offering neither side escape from multiple nightly visits as aging bodies try to keep up with the daily onslaught of low-quality food, emotional eating, and sedentary living. Medications pile up, none of which fix anything — more overlays, more symptom suppression, more deferring to a nonexistent future when “health issues will be addressed.”
The blessing of the sale of a property or business — years in the making, built on slaving away and pushing through slow-as-molasses bureaucratic barriers, inspections, and mounting expenses — feels unreal. Now what? Does the plan, the dream, still make sense? You’re older, more easily fatigued, the body creaking and complaining more each year… and you want to keep plowing ahead like this?
Weeks, months, years, and decades are absorbed into this mindlessness. And if we’re ever given the opportunity to break the pattern, we probably won’t. In the moment it seems silly, our momentum locked into a modus operandi of someone else’s design, even as it plays out through our own devices.
What if less is more? What if getting rid of the big-screen TV, tossing the groaning lounge chair or backside-imprinted sofa onto the burn pile, and donating most of your dusty wardrobe, “someday soon” projects, hand-me-down dishes, forgotten tools, “you never know” supplies, and the other remnants of your past — beliefs included — could liberate your mind, spirit, and body? Those forever-unfinished projects, neatly organized in digital folders, and the myriad things you’ve only ever dabbled with, anchor you to an outdated self. They’re convenient excuses, sources of perpetual self-sabotage through shame and guilt, hopeful lies you keep revisiting and retelling.
Stop the cycle. Let them go. Close the chapter. Return to the now. Everything you’ve learned — all the skills, wisdom, and experience — is with you, always. Begin in earnest from the today-version, with clarity, authenticity, and a new vision.
You likely won’t quit the endless swiping and scrolling cold turkey — pretending you’re “learning” something from a thousand channels of input you can barely focus on for a few seconds, or listening at 1.5× or 2× speed just to get through it. Get real. Get honest. That’s not how we learn. That’s not how we retain anything, nor how we apply any of it in practical, meaningful ways. You’ll never go deep enough into the rabbit hole. You’ll never “learn enough” about the truth. You’ll never be adequately informed about the real happenings or the actual nature of the world. The habit turns you into a porous sponge, one that drips out everything as quickly as it absorbs it.
Worse, if you’re already weakened, your bias bends negative. You retain the dark, the cynical, the fear-laden, filtering out the gems and potential insights that might alter your trajectory.
The world outside us already leans negative, rife with parasitic and predatory overlays — the “antiviral” or “vaccine” for a “virus” that doesn’t exist. But hey, better safe than sorry, right? It’s far too easy to fall into that consciousness, leaning into representations of the world stage and its stupid, calamitous nonsense, instead of heeding your inner sensing — your inherent knowing, your true voice.
The pail of ice cream still calls from the freezer. Snack foods keep appearing in the pantry. Sugar-free sodas, fat-free products, and bouts of self-imposed starvation somehow make you rounder, softer, and less able to fit into your fraying clothing. It may seem that wholesome, simple foods cost more, but that’s the lie. Cheap is cheap, and garbage in equals garbage out. When we shift toward a simpler, soul-aligned lifestyle built on nutrient-dense foods, we naturally eat less because we’re finally satiated. When we step out of that perpetually hungry state — the one where we eat our emotions or snack mindlessly while staring at a numbing screen — we begin returning to a healthier homeostasis.
When we let go of the lies of germ theory, allopathic medicine, and the inversions of natural science that distort how the body actually works — how and why we really become ill — we need fewer pharmaceuticals, fewer surgeries, fewer industrial interventions. “Treatments” become unnecessary because we are empowered, because we understand our bodies, because we listen and feel and simplify, training ourselves into an ancient equilibrium that amplifies our natural state of being, our default state once all misguided, misinformed, malicious constructs, scripts, paradigms, and overlays are shed like the toxic waste they are.
It’s all connected. How we react to the words and ideas of others, how we respond to impulses and intuitions from within, how we make decisions — choosing from the obvious once all distractions and deceptions are stripped away. How we do anything is how we do everything. Massive empathy is only possible when we stand firmly in authentic expression, which becomes possible only when we reset, and reset again, until the accumulated layers of imposition, deflection, deferment, delay, tepid dabbling, and mindless dillydallying are dispersed and discharged.
Our truth is always there, available and unlimited in potential.
We are far more powerful than we’ve been led to believe. We cannot keep passing around blame, shame, and guilt, pointing fingers at everyone who has allegedly wronged us. That’s a coward’s method, a victim mindset built entirely on distortions, fabrications, and lies. That mindset feeds the matrix, which depends on your unconsciousness and learned helplessness. It nourishes the psychopathic forces of this realm. It drags you down, and drags down those who love you, who get caught in the woe-is-me narrative, a self-affirming loop of sabotage, inequity, and imbalance.
Stop giving it away. Reclaim your agency. Drop the luggage — the belief that all trauma must be healed before you can transcend suffering. Clear the mechanism. Challenge your most cherished beliefs.
Belief is the enemy of knowing. To know is to remember, and to remember is to rekindle the eternal flame we entered this existence with — the original substance that is ever-present and without end.
Maybe we’re just passing through. Maybe it’s all a game. Maybe it’s a simulation. Maybe it’s something we chose — again and again — and maybe this is our last round. Maybe it’s all of the above.
Regardless, it doesn’t have to be crazymaking.
Solvitur ambulando