It's been more than a month since my last day at work, a job that I held for roughly 3.5 years. It hasn't been long enough for me to have a definitive assessment of how well I deal with not having paid work as the main structure of my life, but I have really enjoyed alternating between writing and drawing. (Edit from a few weeks after I wrote this: I definitely need to learn how to focus my attention and use my time better, unsurprisingly) I could be a lot more efficient with my time, but my main thing for now is focusing on enjoyment and sustainability by developing good habits, before focusing on quality and efficiency later down the line.
Work was not enjoyable because I didn't care about the tasks and their results, and they were utterly moronic. It's very difficult for me to do something if I don't feel like it's important, or at the very least cool or interesting. I am somewhat ADHD in many ways, and this aspect of that condition, the way that uninteresting tasks feel way worse than difficult but mentally stimulating tasks, is very true for me. At least give me something worth challenging myself with if it's meaningless.
Work was also not enjoyable because, obviously, I didn't have freedom about the type of things I could work on. Everyone has this issue with work, but for me it felt particularly insulting because I was put on tasks that had nothing to do with figuring out anything of real value, and instead had everything do with busy work and interfacing with stupid tools. The sense of wasting my time, and even my life, felt quite pronounced.
There was this unshakeable sense—in fact it was simply reality—of being a pawn in the middle of a stupid game played by stupid players. Managers would have their idea to put on the table, and they would pretend to "ask" my opinion about it, I would say what I thought about it, and they basically didn't care in the meetings that followed. They make up their mind very quickly, and if you oppose their intention in any way, they keep trying to push over and over until you get tired of that game. So I learned how to attract as little attention as possible, for the purpose of having to do as little as possible, and one of those ways is to avoid unnecessary arguments with managers.
And lastly, the power dynamics in the office, and the way that gossip was a regular thing, gossip about bullshit things mind you, really killed my soul. Spending my time in what is essentially high school but for 30, 40 and even 50 (!) year olds is the closest thing to a circle of hell to me. I had some moments where I wanted to punched people in the face because of how fucking ridiculous it felt to have to listen to the type of things that people were talking about.
Fortunately I don't have to deal with any of this anymore, which is why I am not particularly interested in doing a deep review of my time spent in office work. I did it for the money, now I have the money, and I can focus on more important things in my current situation. If I have to get back to office work to get money again, I will do it, this time more mentally prepared for the temporal desert that is the office, but it's better to focus on the important things I want to do right now.
Schumpeter predicted that capitalism would end up failing, not because it would be directly replaced by something better, but because it would end up collapsing onto itself, mainly because of what he called the intellectual class.
In a sense capitalism fails because it is too successful: the intellectual class can afford to do nothing directly productive, and instead spend its time learning about society and history, and theorize about general ideas. Because of their relative privilege, many would naturally tend to be critical of society and defend the other classes (i.e. turn to leftism), and over time Schumpeter says that this leads to a feedback loop of worsening trust of capitalism, and more and more people becoming "intellectuals" (not necessary intelligent, but being in the intellectual class). In other words, more and more people critiquing capitalism, and less and less people being able to do anything of tangible value.
I think this is one of the many dimensions alongside which the modern world collapses, the other main one being of course energy, as discussed in the piece about peak oil. And I think his predictions are very correct: most people are not only very cynical about our society, but they also aren't very capable of contributing to anything of inherent value. Their intellect compels them to destroy sacred cows, but they cannot build anything back to compensate for that.
But then there is this thing that the defenders of modernity do, where they blame those who oppose our society for not enjoying being part of it. I am not a supporter of cynical critiques of our world that do not provide any meaningful form of action, but also you cannot blame people for feeling like there is something wrong with our society, due to all of the craziness at the global and local scales.
My critique of modernity mainly comes from the direction that it is simply not sustainable, on so many levels. You can argue whether it is "good" or "bad" to live in our times, but the way I see it is that we only have a couple of decades left at most in this world driven by global supply chains and cheap energy, and then we'll be forced to transition to a world with significantly decreased (and local) access to energy, work that is predominantly manual, and an overall local economy and lifestyle reliant on direct human relationships.
Whether the transition will be smooth or rough, when it will happen, and who will be able to survive in such a transition is up for grabs, but at the end of the day this is what unsustainable means: unable to maintain itself in the long term. You can't run away from Reality forever.
Paraphrasing a tweet I saw: telling young people to be wise is in fact a sign of cultural decay. In a healthy society, young people are valued for their energy, curiosity and innocence, and are steered by older people who have more experience and perspective on life, which creates a healthy balance between generations.
In a dysfunctional society, the status quo is so bad that the responsibility is handed out to young people, the same way that young children have to fill the shoes of their neglecting parents in dysfunctional families. This is not them being “wise”, it is the environment they are within which forces them to do things they aren’t supposed to.
In practice I think forcing younger people to take on more responsibility only makes them more anxious, because of all of the negative trends of our society, cynical, because of the inability of the world to self-correct its course, self-righteous—think of the tone that activists use in their discourse, or that leftists use in debates—and because of all of this, less able to take on regular responsibilities, such as holding a job, taking care of children, etc.
When young people are constantly plugged into a screen that shows them how awful the world is getting, it's unlikely that they will be motivated and disciplined enough to have an impact on the world. Expanding people's spheres of concern is very harmful if their ability to influence the world doesn't grow in proportions. 'Wisdom' without energy and competence ends up creating adult corpses.
No one pays serious attention to societal collapse the same way that no one pays serious attention to their own death. The latter is crystal clear when you bring it to attention, there is hardly anything more certain than our own death, yet people treat it like the kind of things that happens to other people on the news, but not them or their surroundings.
Can you believe it? He died! No way, I thought he would live forever! Likewise with societal collapse. Can you believe that we can’t maintain perpetual growth on a finite planet? No way!
Darren Allen, in his short book The Fire Sermon, describes the progression of what aspects of society suffers due to societal collapse as such: first it is the arts, because they aren’t useful, then it is healthcare, then education, then transportation, then the quality of the food.
The specific ordering might vary from country to country of course, but I notice that we have hit the phase where the impact on our food is more than clear: companies trying to cut corners everywhere they can, and serving things which are borderline comestible at this point, while they cost more and more as the years go by. Fruits in particular have become utterly tasteless in many parts of the world, not much more than water with a smidge of sugar, and it feels like they're displayed on the shelves more as a reassurance strategy—don't look further, everything is normal—than because they are genuinely tasty and healthy for you.
The predicted El Nino of 2026 will certainly make things even worse, and an agricultural crisis might be the most undeniable sign that things are truly going bad in our seemingly "advanced" techno-society, because what good is all of our fancy tech if we can't even feed people?
People in the future will be shocked at how energy-blind we are. They will be forced to contend with a significantly decreased, and local, access to energy, while our civilization takes for granted the gargantuan energy subsidy we get from fossil fuels, and our intellectual class raves on about the newest technological gimmick, which only increases our dependence on that finite access to cheap energy.
I genuinely think that our era will be looked at as a dark age in the future, in several ways. Firstly, a lot of our media can only be read on technologies that won't be available in the future, which means that there will be a massive void that future historians will have to try to fill. Secondly, the quality of writing in our times is significantly lower than in the past. It's not just the average which has gone down, which is the natural effect of democratizing technologies that lower the entry barrier to writing things that others can read, it's that even the intellectual class of our times is incredibly flimsy with its ideas and its style, because the incentive structures of our time favor fashion and sensationalism over depth of any kind. Thirdly, because people spend less and less time in real environments, and instead spend more and more time in mediated ones, particularly the screen, the type of experiences which are at the basis of people's writing becomes less and less conscious and personal, instead infested by the homogenizing and stupid slop of internet "culture".
They will be dumbfounded as to how people just like them could have channeled such intricate technologies and networks of trades that would supply us with all sorts of objects, but couldn't see the obvious truth that such a scheme was built on an unsustainable basis, how no significant figure talked about the central role that fossil fuels played in our society. Maybe they will have a mythology that portray us as giants: massive beings with consideral amounts of power, but no real intelligence, destroying everything in their path thinking that they are Gods, but only destroying themselves in the end.
There are 2 genders when it comes to minimalism: Marie Kondo, and Ted Kaczynski. Clean your own closet, or bring all of the complexity of society down so that you solve the problem at its root.
Well technically, the root of the technological system is the self-informed self 1, which means that perhaps Lao Tzu is a better representative of the second gender of minimalism. From the Tao Te Ching:
Those who seek knowledge,
Collect something every day.
Those who seek the Way,
Let go of something every day.
Modernity is all visuals, which has no smell (or even music to it, people put music in the background, but don't really listen to it). This has a notable consequence to people's memories, which have more to do with sounds and smells than images—though of course there are notable exceptions, with particularly emotional scenes, both good and bad, for visuals.
This is because sight is spatial, whereas hearing and olfaction are temporal. This is why we perceive an image immediately, which is very useful for maps and diagrams as they allow lots of information to be seen together at the same time, whereas it takes us time to listen to a song, or read a novel, or fully smell the room that we are in. The latter experience is fairly quick compared to auditory experiences most of the time, but when smells are layered on top of one another, it can take some time to get a good sense of the olfactory landscape of the room at hand. But when we do, we tend to remember them, which is why smells tend to bring us back in time, but visuals not so much. 2
Most people are the PR of their own prison. Knock on the cell of their life and you'll be sure to be met with lots of reasonable-sounding excuses as to why they can't change.
There is a minimum amount of knowledge required to pretend to be an expert and say bullshit that sounds smart to the average person. Usually, knowing the "table of contents" of a field and the main terms being used is enough for that. LLMs have made it easier to reach the minimum viable bullshitting threshold, but before that, we had video essays and all kinds of similar shallow content on the internet. At some point, you become good at spotting the MVBs because all they know are pointers to things, but nothing in any particular depth. Like someone who knows all the terms and techniques that chef use, but can't cook anything to save their life, or someone who writes about all sorts of topics but doesn't have any real personal experience with them. In many ways I too am an MVB.
If you think someone is intellectually humble, wait until you look at their metaphysics. The types of claims that people make about Reality, and what they believe to be "obvious" or not, tends to reveal a lot of confidence about unexamined claims. Questions which have puzzled philosophers for millennia get dismissed in a few sentences, like swatting away a fly before returning to more "serious" business.
It is incredibly rare to meet someone who earnestly admits that they do not know something. Usually they make up an answer on the spot. Or they defer their knowledge to some authority—scientists must know this, they might say. Or they pretend to admit their ignorance but really they just want to dismiss the topic at hand—yeah I don't know anything about time, anyway about the football game yeah?
I don't think there is anything wrong with being totally ignorant about metaphysics. It's difficult to wrap our heads around such fundamental notions, especially when we are constrained by the limitations of language and of our own minds (and thus imagination). But it would certainly be better to have more humility instead of what we have right now: bullshitters—most scientists are bullshitters when it comes to metaphysics—and a majority who doesn't give a fuss.
It's striking how stupid much of contemporary media is when you strip it of its fanciful appearance. You can often boil down movies or TV shows to the following claims:
Or if we look at commentary on said media, it basically boils down to contrarian takes, such as "[Popular thing] is actually bad and [Niche thing I got into one week ago] is actually best".
If we look at non-fiction on the other hand, such as in the realm of the news and politics, we get things like:
Not that all of those statements are necessarily false, but that those hardly link up into a much bigger, and more meaningful thesis, one that speaks about human life and how one can live more responsibly. More often than not, it's just a way to point a finger at a group of other people so that the reader and writer can both feel good about staying exactly the same as they are.
I am aware that reducing a story, or any form of writing really, to its basic premise renders even the most sublime stories trivial if it is done with bad faith, but my point is that great stories have much more than just a single idea in them—and ones that aren't so crudely simpl. They are like entire trees, full of branches that account for the author's rich observations and life, and likewise with non-fiction, with the best essays and books containing several major theses, punctuated by all sorts of interesting observations along the way, like the kind you would get from reading Schopenhauer.
Shakespeare's tragedies for instance cannot be reduced down to "human beings are inherently bad", it's rather that our greatest strengths and weaknesses tend to come together, they are one and the same. The brave and ambitious Macbeth ends up becoming a paranoid and tyrannical king who kills everyone who threatens him, and those two sides form a natural continuity which expresses itself through time. Contrast this with Black Mirror for instance, which has (from my memory having watched only the first two seasons) no real human quality whatsoever, only likeable characters at best, and most of the time a bunch of cynical and largely replaceable plot devices serving as "characters", and we can see how far we've fallen culturally speaking, considering that Black Mirror is typically seen as being on the more "thought-provoking" end of the spectrum.
I looked up "popular thing is actually bad" on Google to get a sense of what the internet would say, and I stumbled upon this Buzzfeed article which has the following gem:
[I don't get] the hate for Taylor Swift. It's super trendy to hate on her, but the gal goes up on stage and actually sings and plays. That's already not common in pop music. She writes her own songs, which is also not common. She has single-handedly gotten girls who cared nothing about football into football. She also single-handedly got young people to register to vote in America. She's changed the world for the better. I get that people may not like her music, that’s fine. But there are people who straight-up hate her simply because it’s trendy, and that’s ignorant.
Can you believe that? She actually sings and plays music! She even writes her own songs!! 3 And she got girls to care about football, and young people to vote!! 4 What an amazing icon of the 21st century. Truly, I am delighted to live on the same plane of existence as this literal Goddess.
This paragraph singing her praise sounds like it was engineered to make you as mad as possible upon reading it. This is an impression I get more and more, being on the internet, that what I am reading has been deliberately made so as to make me angry and spend more time on the site as a result. In many ways this is actually true, because social media has such an incentive, and the creators of those platforms undeniably use outrage to get more and more people sucked into the dreadful feed. But in this case, I think that it's far worse, it's something written by someone who is genuinely stupid and has no discernment of the important things in life. Sad.
Restrain an inordinate desire for knowledge, in which is found much anxiety and deception.
—Kempis, Thomas. The Imitation of Christ.
I feel very uninterested in learning more about anything right now. I want to feel more, certainly, and be more in touch with my conscious I, but know more? To what end? Right now I only want as much knowledge as I need, and I have plenty of it. Whenever I come across people who share about the things they've been reading and learning about recently, I get the unshakeable sense that they are just running away from their boredom, and running away from themselves, into books and whatnot. But I might simply be projecting. In any case, I don't care much about learning about theoretical subjects right now.
I commit to attain enlightenment in my life, not for myself alone, but to liberate all sentient beings from suffering.
As long as they pay me for my coaching practice of course.
In this school we put the growth of our students as the highest value, which is why we spend exactly 0 seconds talking with our students and asking them how they feel about school and their own life in general.
It could be fine.
Those who can't sleep or can't be in silence are clinging to their current self. Death is renewal, a fresh perspective on life, a new-found love for what is around us. People become more and more mechanical and afraid as they get older because they cling to their self.
Without death, work becomes an endless grind and our devotion loses any kind of gravitas. Without time by ourselves, the company of others becomes a bore and we stop appreciating their quality. Without silence, our acts become mechanical and we find ourselves controlled by external circumstances, rather than being directed by our conscience.
A deathless life ironically leads to a living death, except that those who are "living" it cannot sense it from the inside. They think that their life is fine, becoming numb to real passion, or real curiosity, which is why having children is such a life-changing experience, because one gets to see firsthand what that quality of freshness and innocence is like. Children are not perfect, far from it, but in an important way they do not have the same baggage as adults do, who are burdened by the need to function within the alienating technological system which forces them to act against their nature. As a result, children are far more in contact with their Divine spark in comparison.
1 Described by Darren Allen in his book Self and Unself.
2 There are of course many factors that determine why we remember things better than others. Visuals for instance tend to change a lot more from decade to decade, not just the things we see on a screen, but even the items that surround us tend to change fairly frequently. Smells on the other hand? Not so much. If your family made lots of onion soup as a kid, you can make onion soup again and are basically guaranteed to smell something similar. Not so much with the covers of books, or the sofa in the living room, or the clothes that your mom would wear.
3 Have you ever seen someone praise an artist, especially one from the past, for actually ... making something? Does Mozart get praise for simply composing his pieces—not the fact that they're great mind you, just the act of making them. Does Dostoevsky get praise for having written his novels? Does Rembrandt get praise for putting paint on a canvas? I guess the point being made is that most popular "musicians" don't write their song, or even sing (what do they do then???), they either get someone else to do that, or nowadays, use AI. This is actually quite shocking how low the standards are now. Now the bar is "do you actually make something?"
4 It's an interesting example this one, because what exactly did her influence change about the outcome of the 2024 election? Trump still won, this one in particular quite hard because he won the electoral college and the popular vote, by pretty significant margins too. I guess you could say that trying is better than nothing, okay, but in this case popular figures were literally shilling for a president without any clue of what the latter would do once they got in the white house. Is blind endorsement really a good thing? Not that it matters in practice, because no politician has any power to meaningfully influence the technological system, but still.
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Monthly Broadawareness Collapse
2026-05-24