Some people look everywhere in a zoo and find no wild quality, and conclude that it doesn't exist. Likewise, people look at our alienating civilization and find no soft love, and conclude that it doesn't exist. Or they find no sanity, no one who is grounded in Reality and can live outside of the prison of their (self-informed) mind, so they conclude that humans are innately insane. Or they find no genuine peace, the kind that is content with doing nothing and taking in the beauty of the sky, the kind that doesn't need to hoard and accumulate more and more, so they think that human beings need to be disciplined and neutered so as to remain docile, and they call this "peace" when it is really castration, a violent act of domestication.
In other words, people look "everywhere" within an echo chamber, so as to convince themselves of a conclusion they already want to believe, that life is meaningless, that human beings are cruel, that the system is needed for us to live well (or at least not dysfunctionally), that freedom doesn't exist, and when it does, it makes us existentially anxious, and that love is bullshit. The conclusions live in the bones, and the justifications live on the surface, it's always this way when it comes to the important matters.
The problem with how most people approach "meaning" is that they're using an alienated mind to ponder about alienated existence, informed by alienated intellectuals. It's like theorizing about freedom while being inside a prison, and worse than that, being of the prison: eating prison food, hanging out with fellow inmates, sharing gulag wisdom 1 and reading from people who have been living in a cage their entire life.
A better way to approach meaning is really through aliveness instead, because the embodied joy of being in our senses does not lie. Our world sells its own surrogates of all the important qualities in life, and thus replaces joy with crude pleasure, and presents the latter as the former, hence the meaningless hedonism of our times in the form of the "entertainment" industry. Hedonism is terrible when it comes to real joy, in fact it tends to make us even more unhappy, because we get cravings for another high.
This can be seen by how addicts, whether to substances, or nowadays porn, internet and video games, essentially go through life as zombies. They are hooked to pleasure because they do not feel any real joy in their belly, because they are so disconnected from their body and their direct experience. To be present is not a neutral experience, it can actually be very fulfilling in and of itself, a sort of warm and subtle sweetness, a gentle hum singing from the belly, which makes you amazed at all the amazing things around you that you have taken for granted. People see clouds and trees all the time, but have they really looked at them? Taken in their strange beauty? It can be difficult to take in the fact that all of those things are right there in front of us, totally free for us to experience, and yet most people would rather look at their screen and be (apathetically) bored.
This is what real meaning is like: consciously living, saying yes to life with all of one's being. Meaning can come from other sources of course, we have the meaningfulness of real culture, the kind that makes us feel at home and in which our participation temporarily softens our self and makes us part of something greater than just our self. Or we have the meaningfulness of real work, the kind that brings us satisfaction through self-mastery, and doing something of importance to our community, a form of prayer as John Singer Sargent would say.
The problem is that real cultures and meaningful work have been utterly destroyed by the modern world, because it has no use for them, which is why many people drift around from place to place, looking at their screen, because they feel alienated from everything around them. But the primal source of meaning, the conscious connection to Reality, attending to the cloud-in-itself, or the body-in-itself, is something that no one or nothing could deny us, which is why the closest we can get to nature and its fractal beauty is in ourselves, the forest of our belly, why the people who hold the most love for others can have a deep connection with Reality even when they are alone, and why the greatest artists and writers point to the astounding truth that was always there in front of us, but which we couldn't see from our usual disenchanted eyes.
"Common sense" advice is a bit like learning to live in a colorless world by making yourself muted, because it's the best one size fits all type of advice, but that doesn't mean it leads to the type of joyous colorful world you might want to inhabit.
The world is a large techno-social machine built from replaceable parts and which makes us live in generic ways as a result, but who wants to have a generic marriage? Work on generic things? Have generic experiences? Not that the desperate quest for specialty is a cure for that condition of course, but that by and large, the "normal" in our times is a betrayal of the unique, the mysterious, the beautiful and the noble which in inherent to Reality and which, by virtue of being in and of the same Reality, animates us as well.
The modern world likes to scoff at words such as 'soul', and yet even atheists sometimes us the word 'soulless' to describe our times. We all know deep down that something is horrifyingly wrong with our times, that what is in front of us is not life but rather a pretense of it, like being surrounded by personas who lost the sensitivity to distinguish between who they are from the mask that they wear. And alas we meet with those people the final justification for this ersatz world that we live in: be reasonable my dear. They disregard mystery because they have a blind faith in the ordinary. 2 They tell us that the ocean doesn't exist because they have looked everywhere in the tiny pond they live in.
I distinctly remember many instances where my coworkers complained about something they had to do, and in the next minute proceeded to do it anyway. Sometimes they would complain and protest for longer, but ultimately they did the thing they didn't want to do anyway.
This is how most people seem to operate. They complain, usually looking for other people to complain with, accomplices if you will, but it is built on a bedrock of acceptance. That's why they smile to one another when they complain, because they want to reassure one another, look for a sense that they're not alone in disliking something, but they don't really want to do anything about their life situation. They complain, and the conclusion is always the same: "well, we have to do it anyway, that's life".
This is another major reason why I felt the need to quit my job. We are shaped by the people around us, and if those people are cucks who never live the life they want, and who always bend over backwards for the demands of other people, then I too will end up wasting my life and look for people to complain with. But I don't want to do that. I might complain, but that would only be to express the truth and channel my frustration, so that eventually I do the thing that matters. Complaining that doesn't lead to action ends up rotting your soul.
I come back again and again to the same lesson when it comes to life: that the most important things are not a matter of choice, but a matter of courage. Choice is about two options which are essentially the same but provide you with different tradeoffs, but I genuinely believe that the important decisions are not about tradeoffs, but about living in integrity, even if it's scary, uncomfortable, uncertain, versus being a coward and choosing the path of least resistance. It is not hard to know what the right thing to do is, what is hard is to actually follow up on it, do the difficult work of forging one's character, work on meaningful things, shed away the false self, and love whatever is present in the situation (rather than one's fantasy).
People complain because they don't want to make the difficult decisions, that's why they delay, delay, delay, and that's why I had a very specific date in my mind for when I was quitting my job. Not 'if', but 'when'. The decisions was already made, because there is no choice in life.
One thing you learn rather quickly about the office (and all institutions where you have to listen to someone's orders) is that it doesn't matter how amazing you are, people are going to complain about you.
In fact someone who is great at everything is likely to arouse a lot of suspicion: 1) what is he doing here? is he going to demand more money? 2) when and how will he make me feel bad about being mediocre? 3) why isn't he doing more? if he gets tasks in a quarter of the time of most people, why isn't he doing 4 times as much? This is why it is often the people doing the most who receive the most negative attention. Firstly because their output is critical, meaning that more people interact with it, meaning that whatever problems arise from it will be more visible and be traced back to them. And secondly, because they care more about the results, meaning they will demand more from others too, which they will resist because they want to remain mediocre and maintain the bubble of pretending to work.
This is why it is so important to learn to not care about the opinions of institutionalized people and live for something beyond worldly approval. They don't care about greatness, love, courage, or any virtues, they care about someone who is obedient, someone who is helpful to them, which can always be improved upon, which means they will always find fault with you. Many people get stuck in this cycle of "how can I serve my masters in a better way?", "how can I make them happy?" like good little cucks, because school establishes that pattern in us while we are young, since we have no other choice. They can't tolerate someone disliking them because they can only function in institutionalized environments, where social approval and consensus dominate over Truth and competence.
And this is why so many men find the modern world so intolerable, because institutionalization is antithetical to the masculine drive to master your environment and live for something beyond your self. There is no mastery in a technologically complex environment, only work within the machine system, with its interfaces and protols and complication which you have to submit to, and there is nothing "beyond your self" either, (again, within society) no love, no freedom, it's all just for the self of other people, namely, the power and safety they derive through their wealth. Your contribution in a company consists in working and thinking hard about how to make the stakeholders and higher ups richer. What kind of man would want that to be their legacy?
1 Term from the Apocalypedia by Darren Allen. Gulag wisdom is what helps you live within a prison, not what helps you live truthfully.
2 One of the aphorisms at the end of Darren Allen's Fire Sermon, although he probably uses it elsewhere.
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2026-03-31