People are always in a hurry to get somewhere faster, and with less effort. It’s the need for new tools and technologies that created our way of life right now.
You want to be able to move faster, be stronger, eat more, see farther, hear over long distances, learn anything immediately, own as much property as possible, amass as much power and influence as possible, and have all the trappings of immeasurable wealth all while being comfortable, and not exerting much effort, time, or resources.
The old solution for this was, of course, war. If you run out of resources in your immediate environment and you learn of some other groups who have those resources that you crave, well, you gathered a raiding party, loaded up on weapons, and went over there, killed everyone who stood in your way, and took what you wanted.
The solution created its own set of problems as those folks you attacked will always want revenge and will most probably attack you back and destroy your entire community. So, well you had to kill everyone if you could and enslave the women and children as free labor and more means to increase your population, besides they eat less and consume fewer resources than the able-bodied men you slaughtered.
Alas, other groups who are no less aggressive and strong-willed as yours will learn of your feat, and will be afraid that you might do the same to them and take precautions, build defenses, and train for war, or try to destroy you before you turned your eyes in their way and actively prepare to preemptively attack your tribe. Not to mention that other tribes and city-states are bigger, more equipped with better weapons, and more men who would do the same thing to you if you don’t make preparations, and negotiated a pact or created a system for trade that allowed both communities to thrive and prosper without much needless bloodshed.
This engine of survival instinct is the main reason we created war, weapons technology, trade, laws, and politics. Our way of life now is based on getting more for ourselves without losing much of what we have, and it’s going to be like this for as long as human beings are alive.
The problem of course is that there’s this unavoidable mischief in the world caused by tricksters, confidence men, and snake oil salesmen, who want to sell you the shortcut to solving your huge problem for a small price. The problem is this solution as cheap as it may seem to you at first is incredibly overpriced because you’re getting zero benefits from it. It’s a waste of your time and money that only benefits the con artists.
They’re raiding your camp with the weapons of advertising, enslaving your people with marketing, and ravishing your resources all while giving you nothing but a nonsense job, and a whole slew of addictions and time-wasting activities to dull the fight in you and effectively obliterating your agency and spirit of independence.
The secret they don’t want you to know is that you don’t really need all of this nonsense they keep flashing before your eyes. What you really want is the same thing every human being has ever wanted, to survive, to thrive to become better, to know yourself and the world, to be one with the universe, and transcend this mere state of toil that we call the human experience.
People used to be able to look up and see the stars, planets, and galaxies and feel utterly in awe at how small we are in this magnificent universe. Now, we can hardly see anything because of the blinding power-efficient LED-lights that flood our nights.
It is the Big Disconnect. We’re disconnected from nature, we don’t ponder the universe and our place under the stars, and we don’t consider why we’re here and what meaning we can create for ourselves. We’re disconnected from reason, spirituality, independent thinking, poetry, imagination, creativity, agency, and a sense of purpose.
All we do day and night is listen to sales pitches. A flood of raiding parties round the clock aiming for our attention to steal our time and effort in their corporations and machines of the economy.
What you have to do and do on your own is to step away from pursuing shortcuts. None of the shortcuts and easy solutions you’ve subscribed to are doing you any good.
The shortcut for cooking actual food is fast food, and junk food. All food that is prepared by other people who want to make as much profit from you and pay the least possible price for ingredients and raw materials with utter disregard for your health and well being.
The shortcut for health is our modern-day medicine-pharmaceutical industrial complex that gives you the “pill” to mask all the symptoms of bad health resulting from eating maliciously prepared food crammed full of harmful substances that we got trapped into consuming them in the first place because they are cheap and they “save our time” so we can “work” to get the money we have to spend on fast food and medicine.
The shortcut to real knowledge is TV, movies, songs, round-the-clock news, and unlimited entertainment. You get stuck in front of a TV, literally bypassing your imagination, and spend endless hours in an uninterrupted stupor. This numbs your mind as it stalls your ability to reflect on your life and the world, and it effectively stalls your ability to plot your escape from this trap.
The shortcut for getting money to exchange it for goods and services is to get a nonsense “job” instead of doing something worthwhile, providing real products and services to other people, and being a person of actual valuable utility in the world. You don’t really have to wait for the government to find employment for you, or just cram yourself into whatever nooks and crannies in modern capitalism to find a source of income that affords you the means to make yourself endlessly stupid by nonstop entertainment and bullshit news, to eat garbage that comes in a microwave wrapping that will fill your body with illnesses, to afford medical insurance to pay for all the damages your lifestyle is incurring on your body.
Shortcuts are the new bondage and we’ve been all turned into mindless indentured slave labor pooling our resources to enrich a band of high-functioning corporate slaves and rich snake oil salesmen.
The solution is to seek good health, make very good use of your time, seek mastery in a discipline or profession that you like, fight for your independence, learn on your own by reading good old-fashioned books, unplug from the TV hypnosis machine, buy real food and cook it knowing exactly what you put in your body, move your body, touch nature, feel the sunshine on your body and look at the stars.
Break free from your addictions. Stay clear of the shortcuts. Question everything you are taking for granted as a necessary need in your life.
The long road is the safest one. Do hard things. Whatever comes easy for you is stealing your freedom.
You are free. The shackles of slavery are not real. The Matrix isn’t real, and you can wake yourself up.
Good luck.
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