A moment comes when you can no longer pretend the world is sane. Something cracks — a perception, a belief, an illusion — and the truth begins leaking through. This piece is about that moment, and what you choose to do once you finally see the machinery for what it is.
. . .
If you’re fortunate, you’ll realize early in this life that over 90% of today’s jobs, careers, work opportunities, or 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 due to the spillover effect caused by the first group. Illness and disease are a guarantee because most of society is working for a living, answering to alarm clocks and lunch bells rather than soul impulses and the aspirations of the heart. That which truly matters is always further down the list because the system we’ve been living within was founded on false premises and misleading promises.
In truth, industry, commerce, and the corporate world must keep lying — about needs, wants, desires, progress, sustainability, and all the other buzzwords — to justify their parasitic and predatory existence. More productivity, more extraction, more waste, and more laws, policies, and propaganda to perpetuate the madness of modernity.
You may seek entrepreneurship, but for most, this is simply creating a job for yourself, with more responsibility on your shoulders and a hell of a lot more risk. If you can’t work, you can’t earn. If you quit hustling, you lose your clients and your apparent independence and stability. Forget about scaling or hiring help — all of it undermines the nature of what you’re aiming to build.
Maybe you’ll be fortunate enough to enter business ownership, where you hire or contract operators to run your business for you, leaving the remainder as profit, while still assuming the risks, expenses, inevitable maintenance costs, insurance, red tape, and taxes — though ideally you’d be wise enough to sell it off before anything of significant consequence occurs. And still, to build wealth, you’d need to buy and manage more businesses, diversify into assets, and keep expanding your portfolio in the endless game of averting and mitigating potential risks — virtually all of them totally out of your control, while you hope and pray that the market doesn’t crash… yet again.
And again, if you quit the hustle, you become reliant upon assistants, managers, supervisors, trusting they’ll care about your assets and income generators as much as you do. Your only option is to hire lawyers, auditors, and other police forces to operate in your stead so the threat of punishment keeps everyone honest.
Perhaps you’re picking up on the through line here. There’s a thread tying all these elements of modern commerce and capitalism together — and it isn’t a human thing. It’s a machine thing, an algorithmic thing. It’s mechanical, inconsiderate, unemotional, and black-and-white because that’s all that matters on paper, and on digital representations of the same. Regardless of the businesses or assets you invest your time, energy, and hard work into, they rely upon a system built upon big damn lies. We all have to accept the nature of a system built upon distortions, deceptions, fake and fabricated needs and necessities, or risk being deemed contrarian, confused, or to have lost our way. Sounds almost religious, doesn’t it?
Your values, priorities, and beliefs are facets of these fabrications. If you dared to pause, think, logically process everything you believe matters — what should be prioritized, and why — you’d likely experience a crisis of conscience and identity, and begin slipping, cracking, losing your mind. And maybe that’s exactly what you need.
It’s madness. It’s crazymaking. And we simply go along to get along. We compromise, accommodate, and make do. We make excuses for terrible behavior, perpetual victims, infantilized adults, bad manners, unethical and amoral standards. We take things in stride only because we’ve adapted, subdued and suppressed our better knowing, set aside our sensibilities, numbed our sensitivities. Is it any wonder there is so much chronic disease, psychological imbalance, and mental illness in our modern world? It shouldn’t be. It’s plain and obvious. Break the pattern.
Those who choose a simpler, perhaps more traditional lifestyle, are denigrated — considered lesser-than, uneducated, backward-thinking, and going in the wrong direction. Usually, there’s a spiritual or religious element to such a choice because it provides cohesion of family and community, guiding principles, an elemental code of conduct. We see this in planned communities, eco-villages, settlements, and homesteads. Humans thrive in groups of up to about 200 individuals, and yet we repeatedly attempt to centralize into townships and cities which may work for a time, but inevitably corrode or are corrupted from the inside out — requiring more resources, more lawmaking, more management, and more manipulation to maintain the façade.
In the city, even if you “own” a residence, you don’t really own anything. You don’t have land to live and breathe upon. You likely can’t grow much of your own food, practice your trades, have creative space, workspace, or distance from others doing the same. Humans are not designed to live in confined spaces — crammed into high-density accommodations, contained within the unnatural and unhealthy geometry of square rooms in square halls in square buildings.
We’re designed to live in harmony with the earth — bare feet on the ground, hands toughened by dirt, tools, wood, stone, metals, and hand-made textiles. We’re supposed to know herbs and homeopathic remedies — growing a selection right outside our doors or foraged nearby in our backyards. We’re supposed to welcome argument and healthy, spirited debate, philosophy and natural science — informed by observation, application, organic processes, seasons, cycles, and the default positivity of a culture perpetuated by those living their most authentic stories, uninhibited by ideology, politics, paradigm, or government overreach.
There are, of course, many who live this way, and others who always have. Many are choosing to return to this path, seeing the insanity and madness of the inevitable collapse of the system as it stands. It’s not an easy choice, especially when one grows accustomed to the convenience of modern amenities — conveniences primarily designed to keep the working class distracted, entertained, subdued, and generally happy, if not quietly desperate.
But you only need to look at the ever-increasing amount of safety being introduced into every aspect of society to see where things are going. More alarms, alerts, warnings — more handing over control to machines, AI, algorithms, and apparent solutions that give yet more agency, autonomy, and authority to the same centralized forces at the root of our problems. More dependence on the state due to increasing mental-health issues, cultural apathy and malaise, deteriorating hearts, minds, and bodies. We must keep up appearances, even if we know something is fundamentally crumbling beneath it all.
There are no technological solutions for problems caused by unchecked dependence on technology. It is insane to think otherwise.
There are no governmental solutions for problems created by unchecked governmental expansion. They must keep the citizenry mildly content and convinced that government is necessary — for anything else is dangerous, leads to anarchy, and inevitable collapse. Indeed.
There will never be enough safety measures implemented to prevent accidents that better training, more experience, concentration, and focus would render moot.
The general dumbing down of modern civilization is no doubt partly deliberate, but has also become self-affirming and all-encompassing. We’ve been trained to defer to the Siris, Googles, and ChatGPTs, to GPS and self-driving, to automation and every tool that promises to alleviate the discontent of our own making.
How do you get away from the crazy? You have to see it for what it is — and stop lying to yourself and to those you care about. Assume responsibility for every aspect of your life. Let go of the asinine notions of voting, democracy, free and fair governance, and centralized authority of any kind. It’s a failed experiment — giving you something to forever complain about while waiting for someone to save you from yourself.
Stop. Re-engage your logical thinking. Observe the world, and the world stage, and see it for what it is. If you’re complaining about politicians or anything they represent, you’re lost and confused. They don’t care about you or your family. Their sole task is maintaining the status quo: the illusion of government, the illusion of organized and functioning society, the illusion of their usefulness. Modern civilization is propped up almost entirely on bullshit jobs and fabricated wants, needs, desires, and aspirations.
It’s likely time to reassess your values and priorities, and make sure they’re actually of your own design.
If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything, selling, losing, or voluntarily giving up all of your creative, material, and metaphysical resources along the way.
The old ways are not necessarily backward. Educate yourself about the truth of history. Humans used to be — and not so long ago — far more productive, intelligent, erudite, healthy, vibrant, creative, self-reliant, communal, connected, and capable in nearly every way. No smart devices required. No loans, debts, or banks. No massive centralized authorities. No surveillance, coercion, manipulation, or propaganda required. No military-industrial complex. No medical-industrial complex either.
The modern, progressive, technological way forward is an artificial overlay, founded upon lies, distortion, and deception — and must be, because any scrutiny destroys the illusion.
Have a good look. Be brutally honest with yourself about what you see, how you’re living, and why you’re doing what you do every day.
Where does it end? How will any of it be resolved in a way that harmonizes, unites, and empowers people of every race, color, and creed?
It can’t.
So — what’s next?
Solvitur ambulando
How to Get Away from the Crazy
A moment comes when you can no longer pretend the world is sane. Something cracks — a perception, a belief, an illusion — and the truth begins leaking through. This piece is about that moment, and what you choose to do once you finally see the machinery for what it is.
. . .
If you’re fortunate, you’ll realize early in this life that over 90% of today’s jobs, careers, work opportunities, or 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 due to the spillover effect caused by the first group. Illness and disease are a guarantee because most of society is working for a living, answering to alarm clocks and lunch bells rather than soul impulses and the aspirations of the heart. That which truly matters is always further down the list because the system we’ve been living within was founded on false premises and misleading promises.
In truth, industry, commerce, and the corporate world must keep lying — about needs, wants, desires, progress, sustainability, and all the other buzzwords — to justify their parasitic and predatory existence. More productivity, more extraction, more waste, and more laws, policies, and propaganda to perpetuate the madness of modernity.
You may seek entrepreneurship, but for most, this is simply creating a job for yourself, with more responsibility on your shoulders and a hell of a lot more risk. If you can’t work, you can’t earn. If you quit hustling, you lose your clients and your apparent independence and stability. Forget about scaling or hiring help — all of it undermines the nature of what you’re aiming to build.
Maybe you’ll be fortunate enough to enter business ownership, where you hire or contract operators to run your business for you, leaving the remainder as profit, while still assuming the risks, expenses, inevitable maintenance costs, insurance, red tape, and taxes — though ideally you’d be wise enough to sell it off before anything of significant consequence occurs. And still, to build wealth, you’d need to buy and manage more businesses, diversify into assets, and keep expanding your portfolio in the endless game of averting and mitigating potential risks — virtually all of them totally out of your control, while you hope and pray that the market doesn’t crash… yet again.
And again, if you quit the hustle, you become reliant upon assistants, managers, supervisors, trusting they’ll care about your assets and income generators as much as you do. Your only option is to hire lawyers, auditors, and other police forces to operate in your stead so the threat of punishment keeps everyone honest.
Perhaps you’re picking up on the through line here. There’s a thread tying all these elements of modern commerce and capitalism together — and it isn’t a human thing. It’s a machine thing, an algorithmic thing. It’s mechanical, inconsiderate, unemotional, and black-and-white because that’s all that matters on paper, and on digital representations of the same. Regardless of the businesses or assets you invest your time, energy, and hard work into, they rely upon a system built upon big damn lies. We all have to accept the nature of a system built upon distortions, deceptions, fake and fabricated needs and necessities, or risk being deemed contrarian, confused, or to have lost our way. Sounds almost religious, doesn’t it?
Your values, priorities, and beliefs are facets of these fabrications. If you dared to pause, think, logically process everything you believe matters — what should be prioritized, and why — you’d likely experience a crisis of conscience and identity, and begin slipping, cracking, losing your mind. And maybe that’s exactly what you need.
It’s madness. It’s crazymaking. And we simply go along to get along. We compromise, accommodate, and make do. We make excuses for terrible behavior, perpetual victims, infantilized adults, bad manners, unethical and amoral standards. We take things in stride only because we’ve adapted, subdued and suppressed our better knowing, set aside our sensibilities, numbed our sensitivities. Is it any wonder there is so much chronic disease, psychological imbalance, and mental illness in our modern world? It shouldn’t be. It’s plain and obvious. Break the pattern.
Those who choose a simpler, perhaps more traditional lifestyle, are denigrated — considered lesser-than, uneducated, backward-thinking, and going in the wrong direction. Usually, there’s a spiritual or religious element to such a choice because it provides cohesion of family and community, guiding principles, an elemental code of conduct. We see this in planned communities, eco-villages, settlements, and homesteads. Humans thrive in groups of up to about 200 individuals, and yet we repeatedly attempt to centralize into townships and cities which may work for a time, but inevitably corrode or are corrupted from the inside out — requiring more resources, more lawmaking, more management, and more manipulation to maintain the façade.
In the city, even if you “own” a residence, you don’t really own anything. You don’t have land to live and breathe upon. You likely can’t grow much of your own food, practice your trades, have creative space, workspace, or distance from others doing the same. Humans are not designed to live in confined spaces — crammed into high-density accommodations, contained within the unnatural and unhealthy geometry of square rooms in square halls in square buildings.
We’re designed to live in harmony with the earth — bare feet on the ground, hands toughened by dirt, tools, wood, stone, metals, and hand-made textiles. We’re supposed to know herbs and homeopathic remedies — growing a selection right outside our doors or foraged nearby in our backyards. We’re supposed to welcome argument and healthy, spirited debate, philosophy and natural science — informed by observation, application, organic processes, seasons, cycles, and the default positivity of a culture perpetuated by those living their most authentic stories, uninhibited by ideology, politics, paradigm, or government overreach.
There are, of course, many who live this way, and others who always have. Many are choosing to return to this path, seeing the insanity and madness of the inevitable collapse of the system as it stands. It’s not an easy choice, especially when one grows accustomed to the convenience of modern amenities — conveniences primarily designed to keep the working class distracted, entertained, subdued, and generally happy, if not quietly desperate.
But you only need to look at the ever-increasing amount of safety being introduced into every aspect of society to see where things are going. More alarms, alerts, warnings — more handing over control to machines, AI, algorithms, and apparent solutions that give yet more agency, autonomy, and authority to the same centralized forces at the root of our problems. More dependence on the state due to increasing mental-health issues, cultural apathy and malaise, deteriorating hearts, minds, and bodies. We must keep up appearances, even if we know something is fundamentally crumbling beneath it all.
There are no technological solutions for problems caused by unchecked dependence on technology. It is insane to think otherwise.
There are no governmental solutions for problems created by unchecked governmental expansion. They must keep the citizenry mildly content and convinced that government is necessary — for anything else is dangerous, leads to anarchy, and inevitable collapse. Indeed.
There will never be enough safety measures implemented to prevent accidents that better training, more experience, concentration, and focus would render moot.
The general dumbing down of modern civilization is no doubt partly deliberate, but has also become self-affirming and all-encompassing. We’ve been trained to defer to the Siris, Googles, and ChatGPTs, to GPS and self-driving, to automation and every tool that promises to alleviate the discontent of our own making.
How do you get away from the crazy? You have to see it for what it is — and stop lying to yourself and to those you care about. Assume responsibility for every aspect of your life. Let go of the asinine notions of voting, democracy, free and fair governance, and centralized authority of any kind. It’s a failed experiment — giving you something to forever complain about while waiting for someone to save you from yourself.
Stop. Re-engage your logical thinking. Observe the world, and the world stage, and see it for what it is. If you’re complaining about politicians or anything they represent, you’re lost and confused. They don’t care about you or your family. Their sole task is maintaining the status quo: the illusion of government, the illusion of organized and functioning society, the illusion of their usefulness. Modern civilization is propped up almost entirely on bullshit jobs and fabricated wants, needs, desires, and aspirations.
It’s likely time to reassess your values and priorities, and make sure they’re actually of your own design.
If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything, selling, losing, or voluntarily giving up all of your creative, material, and metaphysical resources along the way.
The old ways are not necessarily backward. Educate yourself about the truth of history. Humans used to be — and not so long ago — far more productive, intelligent, erudite, healthy, vibrant, creative, self-reliant, communal, connected, and capable in nearly every way. No smart devices required. No loans, debts, or banks. No massive centralized authorities. No surveillance, coercion, manipulation, or propaganda required. No military-industrial complex. No medical-industrial complex either.
The modern, progressive, technological way forward is an artificial overlay, founded upon lies, distortion, and deception — and must be, because any scrutiny destroys the illusion.
Have a good look. Be brutally honest with yourself about what you see, how you’re living, and why you’re doing what you do every day.
Where does it end? How will any of it be resolved in a way that harmonizes, unites, and empowers people of every race, color, and creed?
It can’t.
So — what’s next?
Solvitur ambulando
Published in Journal Entries