(Almost) everything, means nothing

We have become impossibly stupid.

Perhaps that is too harsh. Instead, we have all become, impossibly incapable of vision and depth.

We are surrounded and enveloped and obsessed with a world of unimportance. One that lacks meaning and has been augmented and weaponized to convince you that you need everything you do not while stripping away the things that make you, at your roots, human.

Two things matter in life: How you treat other living entities, and how you treat yourself. Absolutely everything else is just noise.

Our addiction to the glowing rectangles in our hands has made us dumb, depressed and poor. We are a slave to an algorithm whose sole purpose is to manipulate you with just enough dopamine to keep you clicking, liking, following, spending and obsessing over….garbage, all while straying away from the aspects of life that truly define what it means “to be”.

The politicians you worship and plant flags in your yard for don’t give two shits about you, and yet you’ll spend years not speaking to your family because of them. You’ll cut social ties and end friendships because of them. You’ll see others as more or less and let part of your self determined value be related to which box you check every 4 years. You’ll lose all ability to think critically and see reality clearly, in favor for blindly yelling words and ideas you hear in the echo chamber you are trapped in. How ridiculous it is to be defined in any part by another who cares so little about you.

The teams and fan clubs and all the tribes you associate with are made up to feel like you belong because being just you, apparently isn’t enough. You’ll tattoo the logos and memorize the histories of those you support or “belong to”. You’ll spend hours watching other humans expressing the highest levels of proficiency in their chosen craft, while poisoning yourself with alcohol, poor sleep and a sedentary life. You’ll waste away, slowly, while watching your antithesis charge forward. You’ll scream and argue and punch each other in the mouth because the shirt they’re wearing is a the “wrong” color and you’ll start wars if their outfits, belief systems and languages are different enough to be scary. What an odd way to lose control this is.

The job you work for currency we deem important is a construct to slowly sap the life from you in the form of minutes, hours, days and years that you devote to a company or a boss that would replace you in a day if needed. You’ll beg for a few extra days a year to celebrate a birthday or a holiday or sit on a beach with your family while slowly falling apart spending 9 hours a day in a cubicle or surrounded by an environment and a purpose that brings you no joy.

I spent 7 years of my life in Chicago and every morning would see the thousands of suit and dress clad workers sprinting away from their warm homes and families, through the cold, to catch buses to offices, to please a boss who barely knew they existed. I always wondered if we as a society were wrong to view these people as the traditional stereotype of success. Maybe, just maybe I thought, that concept has been burned into our brains by those who want more suits and more dresses running to their offices to do their work for them, and so they tell you this is what it means “to be” and that it should be celebrated.

Today, as I sip my coffee, knowing I will be spending the majority of every day of the rest of my life, with my wife and dogs, in a place I love, doing what I love, without a fucking suit on, I no longer wonder if we as a society are wrong. I know it.

The social media influencers you admire and copy and strive to be like are all highly edited, disingenuous version of reality. Get them out from in front of a camera, and they suck too, just like the rest of us, probably more. How and why do we allow a 30 second, curated clip of a strangers life, dictate a single breath we take in our own? Everything you see when you scroll is fed to you to drain money, time or energy from you, and it’s done purposely by people and powers that will continue doing so, as long as we allow them.

The ancient ideologies you follow or don’t follow are just belief systems created to control societies by cultures who no longer exist, their texts and “rules” translated hundreds of times from languages that no longer exist, by imperfect humans who could barely read and write, and yet so many blindly follow their words because they are incapable of autonomy, of the extreme and massive responsibility that it is to be human. How have we lost, so completely, our abilities to understand what is right and wrong on our own? Are we really so incapable as a whole that we must be given lists of rules and “ways” in order to not murder and steal from each other? Maybe we do. But if we do, then I fear we give ourselves far too much credit for what we are and how advanced we believe we are.

It’s all complete and utter bullshit. I am angry at what I see society as a whole is deteriorating into. I’m tired of seeing the worst versions of humanity being held on the highest pedestals with the masses bowing at their feet, begging for another lashing. I want us all to wake up up, wipe the fog from our glasses and see, that absolutely none of this, fucking matters. Except for two things.

I won’t ramble on endlessly about these two things, because they really are not that complicated. And that is the point. The road to a life fulfilled is paved with bricks far easier to lay than we realize.

The way you treat yourself is the defining characteristic in how your life experience will play out. To honor and love, care for and nurture those around you, you must first do the same for yourself. You must be able to look in your own eyes each day, objectively…recognizing your current state, your gaps and your strengths, what is right and what is wrong and then take action accordingly. It is the way all areas of life should be. Simple, honest assessment and directive responses to those assessments.

Even if you can look yourself in the mirror every single day, love the person you see with all your flaws and imperfections, grow while giving yourself grace and empathy to be less than what you seek to be, and exist in a state of constant development, you still will never “arrive”. But you will come close. And close is the best we can do.

There is one shared trait amongst every single oxygen breathing organism on this planet…life. How you cultivate it, honor it, interact with it and integrate with it is your second defining characteristic of who you are and what you life will be. This extends far beyond how you treat your fellow man. I’ve never met someone who treated their dogs poorly and stomps through the plant life off trail who wasn’t an ass hole. I’ve never met someone who hates another for what they look like or believe who didn’t deserve to fall down a flight of stairs. I’ve never met anyone who consistently chooses hate that is happier than someone who chooses love. We are all one. The stardust that forms you and I is the same that forms the meat we eat, the grass we walk on, the water we drink. We are the result of hitting the organizational lottery within that stardust. We stumbled into the ability to speak and build and create and interact and as a whole, are squandering that gift with war and infighting, with hate and tribalism. With pure and utter stupidity.

What does this all mean? I wish I knew. My frustrations are incomplete thoughts from an imperfect mind without answers or solutions. But in speaking them, I hope they can cause the reader to look within and see themselves in some of my words. Take stock of how you’re living. Are you really experiencing this place, this time, in its fullest? Can you remove some of the strings of dependency and influence that tug you in the wrong direction and see clearly, through your own lens, and express what life is, to you? Because at the end of the day, thats what matters. Our existence is both a uniquely individual experience while also being the one common thread we share with every other being on this planet. The most beautiful, complicated, contradictory experience in the universe, and we are here, living it.

I’ll leave you with this.

A friend of mine once said “I am better than nobody, and nobody is better than me”, to which I’ll adapt and adjust and muse that “I am better than nothing, and nothing is better than me”, because how could I be, and how could anything else be?

Onwards, Always.