Most people feel it long before they can name it — the quiet sense that something fundamental is off in the way we live, work, and organize our lives. We move through routines that drain us, systems that demand obedience, and structures that promise progress while hollowing out the very things that make us human. Beneath the noise, a deeper truth keeps pressing through the cracks — that much of what we’ve accepted as normal is anything but natural, and the cost of participating grows heavier by the year. This piece is an attempt to trace that unease back to its source, to examine the mechanisms that keep us compliant, and to consider what becomes possible once we stop pretending the modern world is built on anything real.
. . .
If you’re fortunate, you’ll realize early in life that over 90 percent of today’s jobs, careers, and typical methods of earning a living are complete bullshit — fillers, time-wasters that feed only the same machine actively robbing the workers who sustain it. Secondary and tertiary careers exist only because of the spillover effects created by the first group. Illness and disease are practically guaranteed because most of society is captured by the monotone, monochrome mind — believing they need to work for a living, answering to alarm clocks and lunch bells instead of soul impulses and the quiet aspirations of the heart. What actually matters is pushed endlessly down the list because the system we operate within is founded on false premises and unexamined promises.
In truth, industry, commerce, and the corporate world must keep lying — about needs, wants, desires, progress, sustainability, and every other fashionable buzzword — simply to justify their parasitic and predatory existence. More productivity, more extraction, more waste, and more laws and propaganda to prop up the madness of modernity.
Many turn to entrepreneurship, thinking it’s the escape hatch — yet for most, it’s merely creating a day job with more responsibility and a hell of a lot more risk. If you can’t work, you can’t earn. Stop hustling, and you lose your clients, your cash flow, and the illusion of independence. Scaling becomes another trap. Hiring help dilutes the very thing you’re trying to build.
Business ownership may seem like the next step — hiring operators while you take the remainder as profit. But you still carry the risks, expenses, maintenance, insurance, red tape, and taxes. And to actually build wealth, you must keep acquiring more: more businesses, more assets, more diversification in the endless game of mitigating risks that are almost entirely out of your control. All while you hope the market doesn’t crash… again.
Quit the hustle, and you become dependent on managers, assistants, and supervisors — trusting they’ll care about your assets as much as you do. So you hire lawyers, auditors, accountants, and other forms of institutional babysitters to keep everyone honest through the threat of punishment.
There’s a through line here. The thread tying modern commerce and capitalism together isn’t human — it’s mechanical, algorithmic, and cold. Inconsiderate, unemotional, black-and-white. Everything relies on a system built on big lies: distortions, deceptions, fabricated needs, and fake necessities. Deviate even slightly, and you risk being dismissed as contrarian, confused, or lost. Sounds almost religious, doesn’t it?
Your values, priorities, and beliefs are shaped by the same fabrications. If you paused long enough to question what you truly believe matters and why, you’d likely experience a crisis of conscience — maybe even lose your mind a little. And perhaps that’s exactly what’s required.
It’s madness. It’s crazymaking. And we go along to get along. We compromise, accommodate, and normalize dysfunction. We make excuses for terrible behavior, tolerate infantilized adults, lower our standards, and numb ourselves into submission. Chronic disease, psychological imbalance, and mental illness should surprise no one. Break the pattern.
Those who choose a simpler, more minimalist, or traditional lifestyle are often denigrated, seen as backward, unambitious, or missing out. Yet such choices usually arise from spiritual cohesion, community, and a shared code of conduct. You see this in homesteads, settlements, eco-villages, and intentional communities. From the outside, it appears these people have nothing to aspire to. But that’s the trick, the illusion that unlimited options are a virtue. When options are endless, commitment dissolves. Another shiny object always waits just over the horizon; another “perfect” community or partner just one swipe or border away.
Humans only truly thrive in groups of up to about 200 individuals, yet we keep centralizing, densifying, and corralling ourselves into cities. It works for a while, then corrodes from the inside out, requiring more lawmaking, more management, more manipulation to sustain the façade.
In the city, even if you “own” your residence, you don’t truly own your space. There’s no land to expand, create, grow food, or simply breathe. We are not designed to live in confined, high-density boxes — stacked geometry, stale air, noise, light pollution, and a thousand invisible stresses.
We’re meant to live in harmony with the earth — bare feet in the soil, hands toughened by wood, stone, metal, and craft. We’re meant to know herbs and homeopathic remedies, grown or gathered nearby. We’re meant to debate, argue, philosophize, observe, and learn through natural cycles, seasons, and the grounded culture of people living their most authentic stories — untouched by toxic ideology, divisive politics, or bureaucratic overreach.
Many live this way still, and many more are returning to it. It’s not easy, especially after becoming dependent on modern conveniences — conveniences designed to distract the working class and maintain quiet desperation. Their hidden costs are immense, though we rarely want to look closely.
And yet, look around: every year brings more alarms, alerts, warnings, and outsourced decision-making. More control is handed to machines, algorithms, and centralized institutions — the same entities causing the problems in the first place. What grows is dependency, apathy, mental-health collapse, and the slow deterioration of heart, mind, and body.
There are no technological solutions to problems caused by technological overreach.
There are no governmental solutions to problems created by government expansion.
There will never be enough safety measures to compensate for lack of skill, attention, and experience. There will never be enough government to prevent rebellion born of generational resentment and distrust.
The dumbing-down of society is partly deliberate, but also self-reinforcing. We’ve been trained to defer to Siri, Google, GPS, ChatGPT — anything that promises ease, convenience, or escape from our own discomfort.
How do you escape the crazy? See it for what it is. Stop lying to yourself. Assume responsibility for your life. Let go of the childish belief in voting, democracy, or the fantasy of benevolent centralized authority. The experiment has failed. It exists only to give you something to complain about while waiting for someone else to save you.
Re-engage your logical thinking. Look at the world as it is. If you’re complaining about politicians, you’re lost — they don’t care about you. Their job is to maintain the illusion of government, the illusion of order, the illusion of their usefulness. Modern civilization is propped up almost entirely on bullshit jobs and fabricated wants — and those same illusions permeate every level of governance.
It may be time to reassess your values and priorities, and make sure they’re actually yours, aligned with what’s authentic, real, and true.
If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything, selling or surrendering your creative, material, and metaphysical resources along the way.
The old ways aren’t backward. Humans of not-so-distant generations were more productive, healthy, intelligent, creative, communal, and capable. No smart devices. No central banks. No sprawling “global” institutions. No surveillance states or propaganda machines. No military-industrial or medical-industrial complexes.
The modern, progressive, technological way forward is an artificial overlay, one that must rely on deception because any honest scrutiny destroys it.
Have a brutally honest look. See how you’re living, and why.
Where does it all end? How can it be resolved in a way that unites, harmonizes, and empowers people across the world?
It can’t.
So — what’s next?
Solvitur ambulando
Addendum
In a fantastic bit of synchronicity, I was reading again from Book 8.1 of The Ringing Cedars of Russia, The New Civilization, later that evening after writing this piece. The parable of “Demon Cracy” in particular caught me with a pleasant jolt of recognition. The main character, “Cracy,” one of a very small enclave of high priests, social manipulators, cultural directors, and power-hungry psychopaths since time immemorial, observes from on high the slaves, the sentries guarding them, and rumors of an imminent uprising. In response, he devises a simple plan to enslave all of humanity for the next millennium and more — under the guise of “democracy.”
“With the dawn of the new day, all slaves will be granted complete freedom. For each stone that he delivers to the city, each free man will receive one gold coin. The coins can be exchanged for food, clothing, shelter, a palace in the city, and for the city itself. From this day forward, you are a free man.”
Each free man… Clever, isn’t it? When you see it, you can’t unsee it. This is how truth works, arriving through moments both seemingly insignificant and outright revelatory, all of them shaping our trajectory in this one brief life.
But it should also be noted that no one is spared from this ensnaring:
“…The people who control today’s world by means of money think that only power and money can bring a person happiness. And they’re managing to convince the majority of people who are striving to earn coins that this is so. But the victors in this senseless race often suffer, very often. They attain some illusory stature and then, all the more keenly than other people, they sense the utter meaninglessness of their lives.”
With only a few words, the whole operation — our entire civilization — was placed under a spell. And parable or not, this idea persists today. We’re all playing our part, unconsciously and complacently, grumbling, infighting, competing, and quietly miserable if we fail to see it for what it is. We keep developing fixes, reparations, remedies, and policies that further enslave us, mindlessly playing along with the script, unaware or convinced we’re incapable of breaking the cycle of parasitism and predation that this one profound image of reality has encaged us within.
“Over the past millennia, entire empires have risen and vanished, religions and laws have changed, but in essence, nothing has changed: man’s remained a slave, just the way he was before. Is there really no way to remedy this situation?”
Of course, as explored in this essay, and by many others far more capable than me, there is a way to remedy the situation.
But the harder question is: do you even want to?
Now you’re aware. You’ve been lied to all your life. As were your parents, their parents, and those before them.
What’s next?
How to Get Away from the Crazy
Most people feel it long before they can name it — the quiet sense that something fundamental is off in the way we live, work, and organize our lives. We move through routines that drain us, systems that demand obedience, and structures that promise progress while hollowing out the very things that make us human. Beneath the noise, a deeper truth keeps pressing through the cracks — that much of what we’ve accepted as normal is anything but natural, and the cost of participating grows heavier by the year. This piece is an attempt to trace that unease back to its source, to examine the mechanisms that keep us compliant, and to consider what becomes possible once we stop pretending the modern world is built on anything real.
. . .
If you’re fortunate, you’ll realize early in life that over 90 percent of today’s jobs, careers, and typical methods of earning a living are complete bullshit — fillers, time-wasters that feed only the same machine actively robbing the workers who sustain it. Secondary and tertiary careers exist only because of the spillover effects created by the first group. Illness and disease are practically guaranteed because most of society is captured by the monotone, monochrome mind — believing they need to work for a living, answering to alarm clocks and lunch bells instead of soul impulses and the quiet aspirations of the heart. What actually matters is pushed endlessly down the list because the system we operate within is founded on false premises and unexamined promises.
In truth, industry, commerce, and the corporate world must keep lying — about needs, wants, desires, progress, sustainability, and every other fashionable buzzword — simply to justify their parasitic and predatory existence. More productivity, more extraction, more waste, and more laws and propaganda to prop up the madness of modernity.
Many turn to entrepreneurship, thinking it’s the escape hatch — yet for most, it’s merely creating a day job with more responsibility and a hell of a lot more risk. If you can’t work, you can’t earn. Stop hustling, and you lose your clients, your cash flow, and the illusion of independence. Scaling becomes another trap. Hiring help dilutes the very thing you’re trying to build.
Business ownership may seem like the next step — hiring operators while you take the remainder as profit. But you still carry the risks, expenses, maintenance, insurance, red tape, and taxes. And to actually build wealth, you must keep acquiring more: more businesses, more assets, more diversification in the endless game of mitigating risks that are almost entirely out of your control. All while you hope the market doesn’t crash… again.
Quit the hustle, and you become dependent on managers, assistants, and supervisors — trusting they’ll care about your assets as much as you do. So you hire lawyers, auditors, accountants, and other forms of institutional babysitters to keep everyone honest through the threat of punishment.
There’s a through line here. The thread tying modern commerce and capitalism together isn’t human — it’s mechanical, algorithmic, and cold. Inconsiderate, unemotional, black-and-white. Everything relies on a system built on big lies: distortions, deceptions, fabricated needs, and fake necessities. Deviate even slightly, and you risk being dismissed as contrarian, confused, or lost. Sounds almost religious, doesn’t it?
Your values, priorities, and beliefs are shaped by the same fabrications. If you paused long enough to question what you truly believe matters and why, you’d likely experience a crisis of conscience — maybe even lose your mind a little. And perhaps that’s exactly what’s required.
It’s madness. It’s crazymaking. And we go along to get along. We compromise, accommodate, and normalize dysfunction. We make excuses for terrible behavior, tolerate infantilized adults, lower our standards, and numb ourselves into submission. Chronic disease, psychological imbalance, and mental illness should surprise no one. Break the pattern.
Those who choose a simpler, more minimalist, or traditional lifestyle are often denigrated, seen as backward, unambitious, or missing out. Yet such choices usually arise from spiritual cohesion, community, and a shared code of conduct. You see this in homesteads, settlements, eco-villages, and intentional communities. From the outside, it appears these people have nothing to aspire to. But that’s the trick, the illusion that unlimited options are a virtue. When options are endless, commitment dissolves. Another shiny object always waits just over the horizon; another “perfect” community or partner just one swipe or border away.
Humans only truly thrive in groups of up to about 200 individuals, yet we keep centralizing, densifying, and corralling ourselves into cities. It works for a while, then corrodes from the inside out, requiring more lawmaking, more management, more manipulation to sustain the façade.
In the city, even if you “own” your residence, you don’t truly own your space. There’s no land to expand, create, grow food, or simply breathe. We are not designed to live in confined, high-density boxes — stacked geometry, stale air, noise, light pollution, and a thousand invisible stresses.
We’re meant to live in harmony with the earth — bare feet in the soil, hands toughened by wood, stone, metal, and craft. We’re meant to know herbs and homeopathic remedies, grown or gathered nearby. We’re meant to debate, argue, philosophize, observe, and learn through natural cycles, seasons, and the grounded culture of people living their most authentic stories — untouched by toxic ideology, divisive politics, or bureaucratic overreach.
Many live this way still, and many more are returning to it. It’s not easy, especially after becoming dependent on modern conveniences — conveniences designed to distract the working class and maintain quiet desperation. Their hidden costs are immense, though we rarely want to look closely.
And yet, look around: every year brings more alarms, alerts, warnings, and outsourced decision-making. More control is handed to machines, algorithms, and centralized institutions — the same entities causing the problems in the first place. What grows is dependency, apathy, mental-health collapse, and the slow deterioration of heart, mind, and body.
There are no technological solutions to problems caused by technological overreach.
There are no governmental solutions to problems created by government expansion.
There will never be enough safety measures to compensate for lack of skill, attention, and experience. There will never be enough government to prevent rebellion born of generational resentment and distrust.
The dumbing-down of society is partly deliberate, but also self-reinforcing. We’ve been trained to defer to Siri, Google, GPS, ChatGPT — anything that promises ease, convenience, or escape from our own discomfort.
How do you escape the crazy? See it for what it is. Stop lying to yourself. Assume responsibility for your life. Let go of the childish belief in voting, democracy, or the fantasy of benevolent centralized authority. The experiment has failed. It exists only to give you something to complain about while waiting for someone else to save you.
Re-engage your logical thinking. Look at the world as it is. If you’re complaining about politicians, you’re lost — they don’t care about you. Their job is to maintain the illusion of government, the illusion of order, the illusion of their usefulness. Modern civilization is propped up almost entirely on bullshit jobs and fabricated wants — and those same illusions permeate every level of governance.
It may be time to reassess your values and priorities, and make sure they’re actually yours, aligned with what’s authentic, real, and true.
If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything, selling or surrendering your creative, material, and metaphysical resources along the way.
The old ways aren’t backward. Humans of not-so-distant generations were more productive, healthy, intelligent, creative, communal, and capable. No smart devices. No central banks. No sprawling “global” institutions. No surveillance states or propaganda machines. No military-industrial or medical-industrial complexes.
The modern, progressive, technological way forward is an artificial overlay, one that must rely on deception because any honest scrutiny destroys it.
Have a brutally honest look. See how you’re living, and why.
Where does it all end? How can it be resolved in a way that unites, harmonizes, and empowers people across the world?
It can’t.
So — what’s next?
Solvitur ambulando
Addendum
In a fantastic bit of synchronicity, I was reading again from Book 8.1 of The Ringing Cedars of Russia, The New Civilization, later that evening after writing this piece. The parable of “Demon Cracy” in particular caught me with a pleasant jolt of recognition. The main character, “Cracy,” one of a very small enclave of high priests, social manipulators, cultural directors, and power-hungry psychopaths since time immemorial, observes from on high the slaves, the sentries guarding them, and rumors of an imminent uprising. In response, he devises a simple plan to enslave all of humanity for the next millennium and more — under the guise of “democracy.”
Each free man… Clever, isn’t it? When you see it, you can’t unsee it. This is how truth works, arriving through moments both seemingly insignificant and outright revelatory, all of them shaping our trajectory in this one brief life.
But it should also be noted that no one is spared from this ensnaring:
With only a few words, the whole operation — our entire civilization — was placed under a spell. And parable or not, this idea persists today. We’re all playing our part, unconsciously and complacently, grumbling, infighting, competing, and quietly miserable if we fail to see it for what it is. We keep developing fixes, reparations, remedies, and policies that further enslave us, mindlessly playing along with the script, unaware or convinced we’re incapable of breaking the cycle of parasitism and predation that this one profound image of reality has encaged us within.
Of course, as explored in this essay, and by many others far more capable than me, there is a way to remedy the situation.
But the harder question is: do you even want to?
Now you’re aware. You’ve been lied to all your life. As were your parents, their parents, and those before them.
What’s next?
Published in Journal Entries