Weird Liminal Numinous Grace

…the adults, it seemed, they looked like they were constantly bracing for a blow that never quite landed, but never stopped being swung. And there was this pervasive sense that everything in their lives was a burden. And not just the jobs that they complained about or the bills, but the lives that they’d built for themselves.

I’d watch the way that they would sigh heavily when they collapsed into a chair or the way they talked about their responsibilities like they were pushing a boulder up a hill…It felt like they were all participants in some normalized, slow motion disaster where they traded their pulses for the right to keep worrying about next month…

So for me, even way back then, the whole thing felt like a scam, this idea that you give away the best parts of your day, the parts where you’re actually awake and alert, in exchange for a home that you’re too tired to even enjoy and a car that mainly serves the purpose of just taking you back to the place that makes you tired…

So most people think they want freedom, right? And you know, we talk about that like it’s a vacation or winning the lottery or something, but real freedom is actually like a heavy blunt object. And the reason is, when the system stops telling you who to be and you stop jumping through its hoops, you’re suddenly responsible for your existence in a way that you never were before. Because now it’s up to you to try to live your life on your own terms. And it’s just you and the ticking clock.

And that’s the part I think that keeps people in the cage, which is cramped and smells like coffee and regret…

So we trade our freedom for the comfort of being told that we’re productive because being free feels too much like being alone. One of the big fears [is] that pursuing your autonomy makes you an outcast and it can be isolating. You will be ostracized to some extent…

[In trading freedom for stability], you think you’re buying safety and security, but you’re really just buying a slightly more comfortable seat on a train that’s heading to the same destination as everyone else is. We are brainwashed to believe that focusing on the present is some kind of hippie-dippy mindfulness exercise or something. It’s not. It’s an act of rebellion against a system that requires you to be perpetually dissatisfied with now…

I find it weird how we used to talk about downsizing like it was a spiritual retreat or something. You’d see this these glossy magazines with some guy in a $400 linen shirt standing in a blindingly white cabin holding a blank ceramic mug which just blended into the background. And it would give me this impression that it was an aesthetic choice for people who had so much abundance that they were bored with it.

But you know these days it feels like the walls are actually closing in and nobody’s really calling it choice anymore. I think the massive technological mechanized engine that’s been the powerful tool of the ruling class for this past several hundred years. It’s finally starting to throw belts and leak fluid all over the place. In case you haven’t noticed, the people who are supposedly running it, they’re not trying to fix the leaks anymore…

There’s also a side effect to this breakdown that I don’t think they plan for. When you can’t afford the distractions anymore, you’re forced to actually look at your life. I think what’s happening is we’re waking up from a long expensive fever dream and realizing that we’re sitting in a room that we don’t even recognize anymore.

I see people doing this silent revolution thing now and it’s almost never born out of a manifesto. It’s born out of just pure bone deep exhaustion. You know, people aren’t quitting their jobs to go on expensive retreats or something. They’re just retreating from a pathological system.

They’re becoming invisible to the marketers instead of buying to fill the hole in their chest. I think people are realizing that a lot of what they thought they needed was just a symptom of the stress they were under. And you know, you need a hell of a lot of toys when your life feels like a prison. And I see this I guess this rather grim irony in this because the system is unintentionally pushing us towards a simpler and more self-sufficient life.

But it’s not doing this because it cares about you or the planet or any other living thing on the planet. It’s just too broken to keep providing the existence that it promised everybody.