The best traps are the ones we build for ourselves. The best lies are only true up close. Piece by piece we build our own prisons — one should at a time. Until, one day when we look up, our entire life is something we should do and nothing is what we want to do
No one designs prisons better than ourselves
I want to stop doing things for good reasons. It’s either the right thing to do or it’s right for me. Really, those two are the same if you’re doing it right. If you sit with it for a moment. A wrong thing for a good reason is no less a wrong thing
This is how it works. It would be a beautiful design if its results were not so sinister. It hides behind reasons, in details.
Say to yourself, what exactly am I complaining about? What’s so bad? Would you really quit your job to be free?
Show me the bad part. And you do. It’s endless meetings with no purpose. It’s petty, droning minutae. It’s a dull, glazed look in the eyes of your peers. They know there’s something better. They want something they don’t know how to ask for.
Well I do.
I see this for what it is now. It will hide behind individual good reasons, but if you look at the whole you will see a carnival of malaise. Even the word carnival is too considerate. That implies too much. This is grey, beige, “yes sirs”, “you can’t do that”, being on time, — I can’t. I can’t even type it. You already know. To speak it in parts is to act in service of these patterns. These idea-energy machines that take in people and spit out drones, but only after they’ve bled them dry over decades. And we call that lucky. We call that a good living and then a good retirement.
We are withering. I am withering and I can no longer make the excuses to convince myself otherwise. This blows major chunks. No one should live this way. Commute 2.5 hrs one-way to sit around in a cell, waiting to do work that even the people asking for it do not care about. There is meaning in every moment. And this moment is telling me to get the hell out of there! Why are you still doing that?
Resist the urge to find a good reason this feeling is not true. The answer is not in another job. It’s not in a business. A sideways move is a downward move because it prevents you from admitting the truth. Your sense that this structure is a siphon is not wrong. You may still be in a cage, but you don’t have to pretend to like it. You don’t have to reinforce the bars by pretending this is okay. You don’t have to settle for a meek gratitude that, because it could always be worse, it’s fine that it’s merely bad
This isn’t okay. We were never meant to live this way.
The good news… the good news is that we don’t have to. We can dismantle this thing and it starts by accepting that it is real and beyond us. It starts by accepting that we have constructed it.
I’m done with this. I can be here without being inside the machine. It’s… not a simple thing to undo. I have been trapped, at first against my will, since about four or five years old, but it is only now that I accept I have willfully reinforced my own prison. No longer.
I’m leaving this thing and replacing it with everything I’ve ever wanted. Fuck reasons. I know what I want and now I know I can have it. Anyone can. Get this shit out of here.
I’m done even considering it worth repelling. It will simply fall away now. Bit by bit a new, radically different and wildly whimsical life structure — because structure is not the evil here — will replace the old. It will just happen. I believed it. Now I am acting in accordance. And now it is happening. Already it’s well underway.
Sorry it took me ~33 years.
I finally found the door
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