Real(ity)

We have lost connection

"George Orwell wasn’t right—our power won’t be taken away from us by some authoritarian master. We’re giving it away for cheap dopamine."

— Jimmy Carr

What have we become?

I spend much of my time silently observing. Humans. How they move, how they speak, how they engage with the world around them, how they create their version of “being”.

I believe we are utterly lost.

Look around you and you’ll see it, just use the right lens. Our world has become disconnected from what it means to exist. We are stuck in an augmented reality horror story where we spend all of our time and energy chasing any possible path to avoid what is by chasing what we can create.

And how can what is not be enough? Have you truly opened your eyes to what this existence is?

We’re trapped in bubbles and self-built prisons that take the form of social media and booze and drugs and porn and entire lifetimes spent chasing “clicks” and “likes”. We’ve become tenants of a windowless reality that doesn’t allow for, nor encourage, growth and tangible experience. We pay rent with each breath we waste.

We worship and idolize politicians and athletes and people in power we deem to be superior, when the reality is that every single human doing things you deem to be impossible or “better” is a collection of skin and bones identical to yours.

Nobody on their death bed has ever reflected on their time lived and wished they had spent more time at the bar, on TikTok or that they’d wished they had spent more time melting their eyes starring into a video game. Nobody has wished they’d spent more hours arguing with strangers on the internet about politicians who couldn't care less about them. Nobody has ever wished they’d have spent less time with their loved ones.

Nobody has ever looked back while at deaths door, and wished they’d lived less.

If you spend enough time disconnected…in the mountains, in the forests, in the seldom seen places, you can feel the earth breath. Flowers blossom, terrain shifts and reshapes itself in front of you, weather comes and goes, air thins and thickens as you ascend and descend. You feel the earth, be. And you realize how magnificent this reality is when you remove all of the noise we consume ourselves with.

I would like to say I have hope that we as a society can find our way. That we can have an awakening that leads the large majority of us to find a better, deeper connection with the ground beneath our feet. But we will not. Short term gratification will always win out for the majority of us because at our root, we’re dopamine driven creatures incapable (or afraid) of autonomy looking for our next fix. Existing is not enough for the masses and in constantly seeking more, they will miss the experience of being.

But for some, for the rare individuals who can think one level deeper than the surface, who can look around and realize the madness and foolishness that surrounds us and can open their eyes to the real, true beauty of this space and time we exist in, there is the opportunity to live a life connected. For those who can think, speak, love and experience freely, who can immerse and not evade reality, who can be an active participant in life, there is no limit to what life can become.

It is your decision to chart your path. Will these words fade from memory after you read them? Will you go back to letting the mindless masses around you dictate your way forward in life?

Or will you break from the norm and reconnect with what it means to be?

I hope you are brave enough to choose well.

Onward, Always.