Turn on the television. Drive down the street. Reach into your pocket. Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, corporate entities vie for your attention. They want to get you hooked to their products, which make life better, tastier, more enjoyable.

They want you addicted.

Our brains have been trained by modern society in the most terrible way: to be fixated on stimuli, on excitement, on dopamine. Instead of relishing the journey and the search for knowledge; instead of appreciating every step, we are feverishly chasing after imaginary endpoints, salivating over vain, self-imagined glory.

None of us are nearly as great as we’d like to think, and this fear, this worry, we tuck into the back of our minds. Our egos hide from the truth, living in a rosy painting of perpetuity. When someone comes along who points out the truth, we conveniently belittle them, then ghost them in a cancel culture that feeds its own egotistical bubble.

We’ve stopped listening to each other, caring for each other in genuine ways. Not entirely, but enough so for society to have stooped into this sticky, gloopy quagmire we now find ourselves in.

Who’s To Blame?

You are. We are. All of us, collectively, are at fault, for playing into this great big farce. We do not care genuinely for one another. We do not enjoy working hard and finding joy in self-improvement. Instead, we seek to improve ourselves in order to gain some other reward: more recognition, more fame, more money, more sex, more made-up joy. We are in perpetual pursuit of something made-up, something “more.”

All of this is nonsense. We have forgotten the inherent joy of being, of stillness. If we do not stop ourselves, if we do not temper the momentum of our industries, we will indubitably crash.

There is no value in external human attention. The only love you need comes from within. There is no worth in belongings and possessions. Everything can be destroyed, everything comes and goes. All life is an illusion, all possession, a delusion.

You do not own a thing. Your things own you.

What Can I Do?

Stop. Be still. Stand outside, breathing the air. Watch the clouds for a bit. Don’t talk, be silent. Stand in the gentle rain. Hold your breath. Watch the sun set. Watch the sun rise.

Stay. Watch. Be.