It felt like taking the first clean breath after unclogging a toilet that’d been overflowing since Bill Bubba Clinton was getting head in the Oval Office.

You know the sound. That glorious glug-glug-glug when the water level drops, the bowl clears, and whatever nightmare was festering in the pipes gets sucked into the municipal abyss. Silence returns. The porcelain gleams. You can piss in peace again.

That was my mom. A three-decade clog in the plumbing of my soul.

She’s a narcissist. The clinical kind—she’d absolutely get diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder if she believed in therapy, which she doesn’t, because therapy requires admitting something might be wrong with you, and admitting something might be wrong with you is impossible when you’re the star of your own personal biopic and everyone else is just an unpaid extra.

My psychiatrist told me once, with the exhausted sigh of a woman who has seen too much, “Your mother should not have been a mother.”

Everything has always been about her. Other people don’t really exist. At best, they’re side characters in the grandiose story of herself. At worst, extensions of her own ego—props to be arranged, praised, or discarded depending on the scene.

The last night I spoke to her, she was drunk. Slurring. And she told me, with the gravity of someone confessing to murder, “I’m a vampire.”

I didn’t laugh.

Because I’d seen it. I’d watched her drain people for decades. She cheated on my father until he drank himself into an early grave—a slow suicide by Budweiser while she was out finding her next meal. She drained her boyfriend’s life savings for a vanity project that bankrupted them both, then blamed the customers for not having good taste. Blamed the fucking customers.

And after a lifetime of belittling me—my choices, my very existence—she wanted to take credit for the tiny sliver of success I’d carved out for myself in spite of her.

How do people look at their own flesh and blood—their own family—and ask: What can I vampyrically extract from you?

The answer goes deeper than you might think. And it goes all the way to the White House.

The Narcissist’s Septic Tank

Let’s talk about the other narcissist in my life. In all of our fucking lives.

My mom loves Donald Trump. Loves him. Bought Trump coin at the top. Watched it crater. Doubled down. Didn’t even lose faith when he pivoted to Melania coin and stopped talking about Trump coin altogether.

I warned her. I worked in crypto. I told her exactly what was going to happen—that meme coins are extraction mechanisms disguised as jokes, that the only people making money are the insiders dumping on retail, that she was being farmed like a sheep with an American flag painted on its ass.

She didn’t listen. Why would she? She’s pathologically incapable of admitting she might be wrong about anything. Admitting I was right about the coin would mean admitting I had knowledge she didn’t. And that’s not how the story of herself works.

So she keeps the faith. She rolls over like a dog for its abusive owner, belly up, tail wagging, begging for another kick. Trump could personally show up at her house, take her Social Security check, and call her a loser to her face, and she’d post on X the everything app about how the Democrats were somehow behind it.

This is the septic tank we’re all swimming in.

Narcissists cannot metabolize shame. Shame is the waste product of being wrong. Healthy humans process it, learn from it, and flush. They say, “I fucked up. I’m sorry. I’ll do better.” And then they actually do better. The bowl clears. Fresh water enters. Growth happens.

Narcissists can’t do that. They have no plumbing. They’re a holding tank. Every mistake, every failure, every moment of being wrong gets stored in a festering sludge pit deep in their psyche. They cannot admit fault because admitting fault would require sitting in the feeling of being wrong. And that feeling is death to the false self they’ve constructed.

So they put up scarecrows to drive away the inconvenient truth. They project. They attack. They rewrite history in real time. Trump lost the 2020 election? No, it was stolen. Trump’s tariffs crashed the market? No, it’s 4D chess you’re too stupid to understand. Trump said something demonstrably false? No, he was being sarcastic, and anyway, he tells it like it is.

The stench is the point.

The Media is a Plunger That Won’t Unclog

And who’s standing over the bowl, plunger in hand, agitating the water but never clearing the pipe?

The 24-hour news cycle. The engagement algorithms. The pundit class that needs the clog to keep existing.

Think about it. If Trump admitted he was wrong about anything, that would be a flush. A moment of clarity. And what happens after a flush? Nothing. The toilet is clean. The room is quiet. You can move on with your day.

That’s what politics is supposed to feel like.

But a clog? A clog is content. You can stand there plunging forever. You can call in experts. You can run special reports. You can have panel discussions about the composition of the clog, the historical context of the clog, the racial dynamics of the clog. The dialectics of the clog. The clog is a subscription model. It’s recurring revenue for the attention economy.

We thought narcissists loved the media, but maybe it’s the other way around.

The media doesn’t want Trump to change. They don’t want him to grow. They want him exactly as he is: a perpetually malfunctioning septic system that generates endless hours of horrified fascination.

And so they reward the narcissist’s inability to flush. Every refusal to admit fault is a new cycle. Every lie is a news segment. Every tantrum is a new notification beamed into the country’s consciousness against its will.

We’re all standing around a toilet that hasn’t been flushed since 2016, wondering why the bathroom smells like death.

The Vampire’s Logic

Here’s where I need to explain why my mother is a vampire and why Trump is one too, and why it’s more than a metaphor, but an entire economic relationship.

The late, great David Graeber—a based, hilarious giga chad with a quadruple digit IQ—coined a term for the way we treat people we actually care about: baseline communism.

Forget the Soviet flags and the gulags. That’s not what he meant. Graeber’s baseline communism is simple: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

It’s how families work. It’s how friendships work. It’s how tribal nomadic life worked for 200,000 years. You share because you have an ongoing relationship. If you screw someone over, they’ll catch on and cut you out. You have a logical incentive to consider their well-being. It’s not altruism per se—it’s long-term self-interest dressed up as love. It works.

But baseline communism doesn’t scale. Dunbar’s number says the human brain can handle about 150 relationships. Civilization shoved us into cities of millions of strangers—strangers who might not have our best interests at heart. So we invented something else.

Exchange. And money to facilitate it.

Exchange scales beautifully. Billions of strangers can coordinate without needing to develop personal relationships. The material wonders of our world—air conditioning, antibiotics, the ability to order a dildo at 2am and have it arrive by noon—are built on exchange.

But exchange contains a dark kernel. With a stranger, you have no obligation beyond the explicit terms of the deal. If you can bamboozle them and get away with it, there’s no relationship to lose.

The incentive structure encourages extraction.

It’s the difference between grandma’s cookies and cookies from the store. Grandma bakes with love because you’re her grandson and she’ll see you at Thanksgiving. The store bakes with high-fructose corn syrup because you’re a credit card number and you are nothing to them.

The vampire is the person who treats everyone like the store. Family, friends, lovers, voters—all just credit card numbers with pulses. All just sources of blood to be drained.

That’s my mom. That’s Trump. That’s the entire logic of late-stage crapitalism metastasized into a personality disorder.

Flushing the Bowl

So I flushed my mom—

It wasn’t dramatic. There was no final confrontation. I told her I was done and then blocked her. BAM.

For the first time in my life, the water in my bowl was clear. I could see my own reflection. I could breathe without gagging. I no longer had to play subtle mind games to navigate the emotional hall of mirrors I mistook for a mother.

Going no-contact was the most necessary, liberating, quiet, joy-inducing plumbing of my so called life.

Which brings me to the question I can’t stop thinking about.

What is the Political Equivalent of Going No-Contact?

I know how to flush a narcissistic mother. I know how to protect my own pipes. But what do you do when the narcissist isn’t in your family—he’s in the Oval Office? What do you do when the septic tank has overflowed into the water supply of an entire nation?

You can’t go “no-contact” with the government. You can’t block the President and hope he gets the hint. The extraction is ambient. It’s in the air. It’s in the price of gas and the interest rate on your student loans and the quiet agony you feel when you open the news.

David Graeber had a phrase I love, one he used in his final years: the revolt of the caring classes.

He was arguing that what our extraction economy desperately needs is to replace the logic of the vampire with the logic of care. To rebuild systems—economic, political, social—that look more like baseline communism rather than pure exchange. To recognize that we share the same bowl, and we all have a stake in keeping the water clean.

That’s the flush we need. Not just a change of who’s sitting on the porcelain throne, but a complete replumbing of the house.

But how? How do you revolt with care when the other side is armed with brain-breaking AI generated images of transgender immigrants—and a media ecosystem that rewards the clog?

I don’t have the answer. I’m just a guy with a mediocre newsletter and a recently unclogged soul.

But I know this: the first step is recognizing the smell. Naming the sludge. Refusing to pretend the bathroom doesn’t stink just because you’ve gone nose-blind to it.

And maybe the second step is building something small and clean and functional in the wreckage. A little mutual aid network. A community toilet. A relationship with someone you actually see in person, whose cookies taste like love instead of corn syrup.

The vampires will always be vampires. You can’t fix them. You can’t therapize them. You can’t vote them into empathy.

But you can flush. You can clear your own bowl. You can bring in fresh water.

And once enough of us have clean pipes, maybe—just maybe—the whole system backs up in reverse. Maybe the septic tank empties into the street. Maybe the vampires drown in their own sludge.

A man can dream.

But for now, I’m just enjoying the silence. The clean porcelain. The simple, sacred act of a toilet that finally—finally—works.

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Probably not, and I don’t blame you. When we see slop, the reaction is normally a combination of anger, despair, and longing for a world where LLMs had never been let out of Pandora’s data center.

But if you can power through those emotions, and continue looking at the six-fingered shrimp Jesus photos—what do you feel? I feel nothing. It’s the same feeling I had as a child instinctively tuning out commercials, mentally reducing them to the mechanical screeching they always were.

There’s a meme that popped up as ChatGPT went viral, and resurfaces every now and again. It goes something like this:

You feed a few talking points to AI to make it “sound more professional” and email the result to a co-worker who uses AI to summarize it. The first place I saw this meme was, ironically enough, a work chat. It had more reactions than any joke that’d been posted before. But… why? The meme was painfully, excruciatingly true. I shamelessly performed both sides of that meme. Everyone did.

AI is billed as a productivity tool or a creativity enhancement. But really, it’s about self-erasure. Those professional sounding work emails lack even the faintest hint that a living, thinking, feeling human being had been involved in any part of the process. AI is like taking line edits directly from the superego. It puts the should in the cold shoulder.

And for the record, that’s fine for work. Fuck work and fuck writing work emails. Your boss doesn’t want your unique presence anyway.

But what about when presence is the entire point?

When it comes to social media, art, and human connection generally, we don’t want some data-driven amalgam, we want the presence of other people. Real people. We want personal vulnerabilities, hard-won life lessons, the kind of wisdom that comes from years of both experiencing senseless pain and paradoxically finding meaning in that pain.

This is precisely what AI generated art lacks: human presence. If Mark Fisher were still alive, he might call it eerie in that it contains a “failure of presence.” The pre-AI world carried the implication that behind every piece of art, there was an artist. This is, regrettably, no longer the case.

Art, as a “product of the mind,” is mistaken as an abstraction. And the way to create better art, the thought goes, is by simply adding more mind. This is the cultural logic that spawns so much excitement for AI generated art.

But really, what great cultural achievements has AI generated? Everywhere it is used, people turn their heads in disgust. And the counter-examples say more about those with bad or underdeveloped taste than they do about AI’s “artistic innovation.” AI excels only at producing more mechanical screeching. When people complain that AI art lacks humanity, what they really mean is that it lacks a human body.

“Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

The artistic process is an embodied process. Art is a product of a series of creative decisions—decisions made by a living body which carries a lifetime of experiences.

Just think about the sheer vastness of your unconscious mind. Every single memory. Every skill you fought to refine. Every painful sensation that pierced your veil of aloof comfort. Imagine every experience of your life were transformed into a spirit who guided your hand throughout the creative process in ways that not even you will ever fully understand. The art is an artifact of the totality of you. And witnessing the artifact offers a glimpse into your inner subjective world. It is unmistakably yours: your pain, your joy, your body. Your human presence.

By contrast, AI has no lived experience to draw from. It can only remix and regurgitate what it was trained on. Any given decision is a mere calculation, lacking a genealogy. The result is something that looks like art at a glance but lacks the human presence that makes art valuable in the first place.

When art has that presence, and you allow yourself to experience it as intimately as you can—the person who puts the book down will be different than the one who picked it up.

When you allow an artist’s work to change you in this way, it is indistinguishable from love. “When you fall in love” Anne Carson writes in Eros the Bittersweet, “you feel all sorts of sensations inside you, painful and pleasant at once: it is your wings sprouting. It is the beginning of what you mean to be.”

Has an artist ever done that for you? My personal example is Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The story is about a man who hates the job he needs, whose creaturely side takes over completely and prevents him from working. Incapable of subjugating himself any longer, he is left behind to die like an animal.

The Metamorphosis helped me find the beginning of what I mean to be, helped me sprout wings. It changed me. It changes me every time I re-read it. Kafka’s writing has an erotic effect on me—not in a sexual sense, but as an indirect encounter with his otherlyness. It helps me to not only process my own alienating career, but to stumble closer to who I mean to be.

When I read his novels, I am bearing witness to his human presence—a presence that is uniquely his, and his alone. A presence shaped by every time his father abused him, every time he felt like an inadequate failure, every time he showed up to the job he couldn’t quit. All of those experiences—consciously or not—shaped his writing.

Kafka is assuming a role I like to call the Artist-Other: someone who is so intimately present in their work that to encounter the art is to encounter the artist. This seems to be the key ingredient for great art, and it is precisely what AI will never be able to generate.

I seriously doubt AI could ever create the erotic, transformative effect painstakingly produced by the great Artist-Others of history. And before anyone rushes to say, “but people can’t tell the difference between AI generation and the real thing anymore” which is largely true, and will only become more true as LLMs improve. But is that really art? Or is content you glance at for five seconds before scrolling along?

In a recent interview, Hank Green described brain rot as content that holds your attention without providing any additional value. That’s what AI generates. No one sprouted their wings or found who they mean to be with brain rot from those six fingered shrimp Jesus photos. And that’s a real tragedy because slop is crowding out art that does have that effect—depriving people of discovering what might change their lives.

“Erotic experience presumes the asymmetry and exteriority of the Other.”

—Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros.

Have you ever immersed yourself in art, and stepped back with an “oh fuck” moment? The kind of eureka realization you weren’t even looking for but it dramatically changes you?

This is what makes art worthwhile. Moments like that. Moments of unexpected growth. Moments where you clumsily stumble closer to who you mean to be. And it’s weird because you’re finding who you mean to be by witnessing someone else. It’s almost paradoxical. Maybe Hell is other people, as Sartre reminds us, but Heaven also seems to be other people.

I think Sartre was talking about the painfully common experience of hostility we find in modern life. Where everything is a cut-throat competition. Where, in order for you to win, someone else has to lose. Han said that, “Finding success validates the One through the Other. Thereby, the Other is robbed of otherness and degrades into a mirror of the One—a mirror affirming the latter’s image.”

This is what our hyper-competitive culture does to us: empowers us to reduce our fellow human beings into mirrors that affirm our own narcissism. It’s a painful, miserable, humiliating experience. One that I’m agonizingly familiar with.

I spent a few years working in the tech industry and instead of building or improving products… I found myself flattering C-suite egos as a ghost-writer. My job was, quite literally, to act as a validating mirror for the executives.

They never wanted honest feedback. They never wanted my thoughts. My job was to take their half-baked ideas and massage them into something that would impress the world, that would solidify their position as a “thought leader” for an audience that, honestly, doesn’t really exist. I had been objectified, and the object I was reduced to was a mirror reflecting someone else’s flattering unreality.

Unsurprisingly, I was replaced with AI which is much better at being a mirror of the one. Shortly after they laid me off, one of the executives posted to their public LinkedIn profile to brag about it. “Why hire humans ever again when you can get AI to do it?” he wrote alongside multiple laughing emojis. In a few short months, he got his answer.

The mechanical screeching had, apparently, driven him mad. He announced that he was stepping back from his “research” because he was suffering from AI psychosis. The man stared into the mirror of the one for so long that he had to step away from an executive position and seek mental help.

Schadenfreude. Contrapasso. Ecstasy.

But the situation also highlights that AI psychosis may not be entirely new, and some version of this was already taking place with high power business executives and politicians with their entourage of yes men. Whether it is a CEO and their right-hand sycophant or the latest and greatest LLM, the commonality is this: a lack of Eros.

This is exactly what’s wrong with AI generated art, or maybe AI in general. It’s eerie. There is no human presence in it. No pushback or reflection or nuance. No sense of the other. There’s just what Han calls the “Hell of the same.” A well-designed mirror that drives you toward psychosis if you look at it for long enough.

Art is the opposite of a mirror; it is a window into the Artist-Other opening up a new world of possibility for those brave enough to look. To be changed by art is an erotic experience.

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“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

—Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition.

Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, once sketched the future with chilling precision: if you miss a car payment, “Nowadays it’s a lot easier just to instruct the vehicular monitoring system not to allow the car to be started and to signal the location where it can be picked up.”

Here, in a single damn sentence, lies the stark reality of Berry’s division. On one side, the creature: a human being, flawed, perhaps struggling, but possessed of a fundamental autonomy—the right to turn a key and go. On the other, the machine: an invisible system of remote control, where your life is a line-item in a cloud database, and your autonomy can be instantaneously revoked by the cold, calculating panopticon.

This is the quiet, constant war of our existence and we are losing because we’ve been tricked into a devastating surrender.

Jeanette Winterson, quoted by here, called art the “paradox of active surrender.” You yield to the struggle of a profound book, an otherworldly piece of music, a terrifying love poem—and in that surrender, you are broken open and remade. You surrender to the pain of becoming more yourself. More alive.

Surveillance Fascism operates on a demonic inversion of this principle. It offers a passive surrender to end the struggle of being human altogether.

Instead of yielding to a transformative challenge, you yield to the algorithm to stop the challenge. You let Spotify’s AI “DJ” dictate your mood because choosing feels like work. You let the front page of Reddit or TikTok’s FYP decide what you care about today.

We don’t consciously imagine it this way, but we are trading our personal agency for engineered serotonin. Pure frictionlessness. You give in to the pleasure of not having to choose, and you receive in return the deep, psychic pain of a managed existence—the slow, agonizing death of your own interiority. The mask finally swallows the face.

This is the true goal of the system we’ve diagnosed as Surveillance Fascism. It’s not just corporate data extraction weaponized by the state. That’s the machinery. The purpose is the colonization of human inwardness.

Consider how far the project has progressed.

In 2007, Facebook’s “Beacon” broadcast a man’s engagement ring purchase to his entire network—including his girlfriend—shattering a carefully planned proposal. A human moment of vulnerability and love was transformed into a data point for engagement optimization. To the machine, absolutely nothing is sacred. Everything is feedstock, a forest waiting to be cut down and devoured.

Today, the invasion is subsurface. Companies like Affectiva began with a noble aim: to help autistic children understand emotion. But the “market” pulled the way it always does. Their technology swiftly pivoted to measure your subconscious reactions to commercials. What started as a tool for empathy became an instrument for extraction, mining the frontier of feeling that exists before you have words for it.

This is the Death of Interiority: the rendering of your inner life as just another mineable territory.

As puts it, “The struggle for power and control in society is no longer associated with the hidden facts of class and its relationship to production but rather by the hidden facts of automated engineered behavior modification.”

Class conflict is over. The new division isn’t labor versus capital. It’s modifiers versus modified. Those who engineer behavior and those whose behavior is engineered.

Look at any feed on the internet. The content is conditioning you. It’s owners wield the most asymmetrical power imbalance in human history. Their consolidation of Big Tech now grants them the ability to alter reality at scale, and enforce their new reality with the most violent and dangerous state apparatus on the planet.

In Orwell’s 1984, the “Versificator” was a machine that cranked out cheap culture for the proles. Literature, music, and entertainment generally were generated by a machine thus ridding society of human creativity. The dark alignment between algorithmic social media and generative AI have created for us a kind of modern Versificator. Look no further than Breaking Rust, the AI music project that topped country music billboards late last year.

This is cultural stagnation amplified to a pathological extreme—an extreme that is gradually becoming the banal, new normal. That same year, Zuckerberg announced his cure for the loneliness epidemic: AI friends. Facebook is increasingly prioritizing AI companionship because the real thing—even mediated by seamless social platforms—is too difficult, apparently. His chatbots will even message you first, so your already fractured attention will need to filter out even more noxious distractions.

Most troubling of all is the man-made pandemic of AI psychosis. Users are suffering from paranoia and delusions. It happened to my old boss. My partner—who works as a psychiatric nurse practitioner—has told me that around sixty percent of their patients are dealing with some version of AI psychosis. Some users become disconnected from reality, but many are committing suicide.

AI psychosis and the tragedy of AI-induced suicide represent the totalizing victory of machine over creature.

But the machine’s victory is not inevitable.

Resistance to this quiet terror is simple (and free): a personal, spiritual revolution to reclaim true “active surrender.”

It is to choose, relentlessly, to live as a creature.

To live as a creature is to perform acts of strategic illegibility. It is to become “dark data”—information the machine cannot parse. It is the walk without a step-tracker, where the path is for you, not for a fitness dashboard. It is the book read slowly, for no content-marketing purpose. It is the face-to-face conversation that meanders into awkward, unfiltered territory. It is the conscious cultivation of friction, inefficiency, and mystery in a world demanding seamless, predictable optimization.

Each of these acts is a small strike against the machine. It swaps the demonic surrender—which gives you fleeting pleasure and existential pain—for the creative surrender, which accepts the painful struggle of becoming a specific, authentic human.

Wendell Berry’s division is already here. On one side: those who accept the machine’s terms, living comfortably in the dashboard, their inner lives flattened into usable metrics. On the other: those who commit to the messy, glorious, and inefficient struggle of creaturehood.

The machine’s ultimate victory is not when it tracks you, but when you prefer its tracking—when you willingly trade the aching responsibility of your own consciousness for the serene numbness of an algorithm.

Our rebellion begins the moment we choose our own kind of pain. The pain of living as we are, as we were always meant to embody. A pain that leads to growth. A pain that creates solidarity between our inner worlds and the inner worlds of other creatures—all creatures, stretching back to the very first single-celled organism that kicked off this whacky, wonderful, terrifying experiment we call existence.

Long live creaturehood in absolute defiance of these damned machines.

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Almost a century ago, Edward Bernays lit feminism aflame… with a marketing campaign.

He pioneered Torches of Freedom which equated smoking in public with women’s liberation. He hired women to walk in the 1929 Easter Sunday Parade while conspicuously smoking their little torches of freedom. By violating this arbitrary social taboo, women could challenge the chauvinist double standard. A righteous battle in the war for feminism, or so the thought ran. But cigarette flames fade notoriously quickly.

Torches of Freedom was a hit, normalizing women smoking anywhere they damn well please. But disappointingly, their material conditions largely remained unchanged. Still beholden to oppressive social structures, but now with a newfound smoking addiction. The only thing that really changed was booming profits for Big Tobacco. While they were selling the increasingly alluring ‘torches of freedom,’ they also suppressed lung cancer research for decades. And that’s a real shame because women are twice as likely as men to develop lung cancer.

Men lied and women died, but by the time anyone noticed, the shareholders and Bernays had made their blood money. Like a cigarette, women had been given a light, a spark, hope—only to have it snuffed out and tossed into a muddy puddle on the street like a burnt cigarette butt.

The campaign was successful precisely because it took women’s hopeful pining for personhood and misdirected it toward consumerism. An altogether early iteration of I shop, therefore I am. Worse than the recuperation of the feminine spirit was the framework that was architected for future fraud.

Almost a century later, women were sold a new, slightly more compelling story. Instead of revolutionary cancer sticks, we entered the era of the Girlboss: the woman who hustles, who maintains a thriving career, and moves ahead despite the system being ridiculously rigged against her.

Instead of challenging—or dismantling—oppressive systems like capitalism and patriarchy, women were encouraged to make peace with, and thrive within them. Just like the Torches of Freedom campaign, Girlboss feminism promised a new era of participation, empowerment, and social equity. It shifted the focus from consumption to production—it was going to be different this time! With nothing but a hearty helping of professional ambition, these Girl Bosses were going to fight for feminism by nakedly advocating for themselves at work. With their professional glow up, these Girl bosses would prove—not unlike Barbie—that you, too, can be the CEO… for better and for worse. We regrettably discovered that women CEOs are still in fact CEOs.

As Amanda Mull put it, “The confident, hardworking, camera-ready young woman of a publicist’s dreams apparently had an evil twin: a woman, pedigreed and usually white, who was not only as accomplished as her male counterparts, but just as cruel and demanding too.”

It was the same vapid, narcissistic cruelty you’d expect from a man but from a woman. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes came to embody the Girlboss archetype exceptionally well. She not only defrauded investors, but led “a company culture characterized by fear, and multiple ethical breaches regarding patient safety.” She terrorized her workers—just like any man would. Apparently, toxic leadership was at the heart of the Girlboss movement from the very start.

Sophia Amoruso wrote the NYT’s best-selling book #Girlboss in 2015. The Washington (com)Post called it “Lean In for misfits.” But just like Holmes, Amoruso also had an evil twin—one who bankrupted her own company with “toxic work culture.”!

The Girlboss blunder is a cursed repetition of the Torches of Freedom. Amoruso is a modern-day Bernays. They both saw women yearning to be free. Jabbed that fragile sentimentality with a hook. Used it as bait. Reeled the ladies in, milked em for all they’re worth, and left em out to dry. As Leigh Stein put it, “Woke capitalism lets the elites maintain the status quo while paying lip service to the demands of activists.”

But it was never really about the elite Girlbosses. Not really. It was about the ordinary women who would emulate them. The Girlboss became a preferred archetype for the independent, empowered woman of the 21st century office setting. But behind the curtain, under the mask, is a tender human being faced with the banal humiliation ritual otherwise known as white collar work. It typically involved the kind of job where you closed your laptop on Friday evening and ugly cried.

My old manager had one of those. We worked in the “crypto industry” so the whole thing was already bullshit to begin with, but her actual job was to be the emotional punching bag to an extremely toxic CEO and then translate the punches into our quarterly KPIs.

It may have been the worst job on Earth.

She performed invisible, emotional labor. This was the kind of work that men either didn’t care to do or were not emotionally intelligent enough to even know to do it. Leaving it, as always, to women.

The work itself was exhausting and took a tremendous toll on her. She was in denial about a serious drinking problem, and had virtually no life outside of work. Just like women a century ago, she was sold the dream of liberation, but received only the same old nightmare of exploitation.

“Not the Black Death this time; the grey life.” —Aldous Huxley

Millions of white collar workers have been waking up to smell the burnt coffee. It started with David Graeber’s theory on bullshit jobs. The latest data finds ~34,000,000 American workers have jobs they secretly think are pointless.

Contrary to popular belief, these bullshit jobs are overwhelmingly in the private sector which largely represents the callous whims of a cruel, insecure class of nepo babies hungry for an entourage of yes men—and increasingly—yes women.

Make no mistake: these bullshit jobs are exhausting. Maybe not physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Graeber literally called it “spiritual damage.” It’s not hard to understand why.

One’s work life is reduced to that of a groveling gimp clamoring for the approval of some rich asshole. To not just “know one’s place” but to convincingly perform the daily facade of intricate ring-kissing rituals. To disfigure one’s own labor for another’s ego. It’s an altogether asymmetrical, toxic dynamic—one that women are painfully familiar with.

In Chappell Roan’s hit song, Femininomenon, she explores the endlessly disappointing experience of modern heterosexuality:

So let’s say it’s working out

You pretend to love his mother

Lying to your friends about

How he’s such a goddamn good lover

False praise for an arbitrary authority figure, social performativity to maintain the appearance of success, and blatant lies to protect a man’s wittle feelings. Roan created this song as a re-centering of women, of her own lesbianism, of “celebrating women instead of prioritizing mediocre men who do the bare minimum.” In romance, too, women are pushed into unfulfilling relationships where another person’s needs are prioritized above their own. Just like in bullshit jobs.

I’m not the only one to see this connection either. In a 2018 interview about bullshit jobs, interviewer Ether van Rijswijk asked Graeber if it’s possible to have a “bullshit boyfriend.” She surely asked in jest, but the similarities mount faster than you’d expect.

Stuck in the suburbs, you’re folding his laundry

Got what you wanted, so stop feeling sorry

Bullshit jobs veer toward extreme boredom. Like a Saw movie, but the pain is a kind of monotony. Work one long enough, and you’ll inevitably find yourself asking, “this is it? This is what life is?!” But due to their relatively competitive salaries & benefits, you can’t leave. Not really. Golden, coffee-stained handcuffs. You get one of those pencil-pushing office jobs and you stay there. You sacrificed a lot to get here. Decades in education, not to mention the money you can’t get back. What’re you gunna do.. quit?

If you’ve ever had a bullshit job, you may have felt the human oh so human need to complain. Ahh, complaining. But the response one is likely to receive is normally a flavor of withdrawn callousness. ”You could be breaking your back for minimum wage. Or homeless like my cousin. After all, this is the job you wanted, isn’t it?”

Bullshit jobs create bullshit lives. They materialize the subjective feeling of depression into a lived experience. They enforce a dynamic where another’s needs—be it a boss or a boyfriend—permanently overshadow one’s own.

This is the reason my old manager drank. It’s the reason Severance is popular. We are bored and sad and fucking miserable. Roan is a hero of feminism for gloriously exposing the truth about this depressing facade that passes for “a life” in 21st century late stage capitalism.

Ladies, you know what I mean

And you know what you need and so does he

But does it happen? (No)

But does it happen? (No)

No. It doesn’t happen. And it isn’t possible to happen under modern barbarism. Smoking won’t change that. Working a bullshit job won’t change that. Becoming a Girlboss gazillionaire won’t change it either.

So long as we are born and raised and domesticated in a cage, the taste of freedom will forever remain a mystery to us. Femininomenon provides no clear answers. No ten point plan to establish matriarchy. Femininomenon is a pop song, a reframe. A reminder to stop lying to your friends, to his mother, to your boss and to yourself. The end of that lie is a profound silence. A silence where something new might finally be sung into existence.

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The other night, I popped a weed gummy and watched Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

I thought it would be a fun Friday evening. Instead, I stumbled upon a cursed burial ground, accidentally exhuming trauma that sat dormant for decades.

It felt less like a horror masterpiece and more like a documentary loosely based on my own childhood.

But before I tell you about my sad origin story, let’s at least pretend to explore the film.

“Danny’s not here right now” –Tony

The Shining plays with one of my favorite themes in fiction: the split self. A line running straight through the center of a human being, separating two aspects of the psyche that cannot be reconciled.

This theme is often a cornerstone of great horror because it’s uncanny, giving off a feeling of foreboding uncertainty that begs for resolution. And it’s explored brilliantly in Danny’s split persona, Tony.

Tony is the part of Danny that “knows things” and can handle them while Danny himself is just a 5-year-old boy. Tony is a dissociative coping mechanism that helps Danny survive his father’s abuse—stemming from the incident where his father dislocated his shoulder in a drunken rage.

What makes Tony so unsettling is that this kind of dissociation is normally not so obvious. Children hide it or at least wait for adults to leave the room. Seeing Danny wiggle his finger, speak in another voice, and claim to be Tony… you can’t help but to feel creeped out.

“Uncanny is what one calls everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open’,”–Freud quoting Schelling in his 1919 essay, The Uncanny.

However, what makes The Shining great is that—in addition to being a memorable horror trope—this also happens to be a real thing.

Abused children often survive traumatic childhoods by dissociating. Normally, it isn’t as weird as having a boy living “inside your mouth” but it is a shockingly common diagnosable disorder.

And it wasn’t until I watched the Shining that I realized… this is exactly how I survived my drunk dad, too.

My dad didn’t dislocate my shoulder, but he did pick me up from football practice absolutely shitfaced, got into a road rage with my best friend’s father, and nearly killed us all on the drive home. It’s a miracle we survived.

I only realized in retrospect that this was a personal turning point. Withdrawing from life completely, I became absolutely obsessed with my internet persona—as if my life depended on it.

“The double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self or, as Rank puts it, ‘an energetic denial of the power of death’” –Freud, The Uncanny.

In other words, my Internet alter ego was a way for me to deny the primordial fear of death. A death that nearly got me in a drunk driving accident I had no power to control.

My digital Tony was a mask I’d sculpted in the years I spent alone in that dark bedroom glued to a glowing rectangle that represented my entire world.

That probably sounds sad. But my digital tony was more than just a dissociative coping mechanism; it became a legitimate tool to overcome intergenerational trauma.

The caretaker’s script

The Shining’s foreshadowing is heavy-handed by design because intergenerational trauma is predictable by nature. Always has been and always will be.

In one of the film’s most chilling lines, the ghost of a previous caretaker says to Jack: “You’ve always been the caretaker.”

This single line diagnoses a generational curse, highlighting Jack’s complete lack of agency. He’s following a script written by ghosts of the past—a script of addiction, abuse, and violence. We can infer that Jack was once a little boy, terrified of his own drunk dad, just like how Danny is terrified of him.

This is a script I know by heart. In my family, those pages were stained with budweiser. My grandfather was also a drunk, a man who drank himself to an early grave. In turn, my father followed the same tragic arc.

You’ve always been the caretaker, dad.

This is the insidious power of the unconscious. As Carl Jung warned, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” My father and Jack1 both followed the script to its terrible conclusion as if destined.

I was next in line.

The icing on the cake was that my father never even bothered to give me my own name. I am, begrudgingly, a “junior.”

My father’s name was given to me like a hand-me-down suit that reeked of cheap beer. It never felt like my own. It felt like a role I was destined to play: a drunk fool who fucked his kids up. The next caretaker of my family’s trauma.

But I refuse to repeat the past.

This is why my internet persona became so important. It was the only way to drop my placeholder name, cast the script into the flames, and write a different story—one that was truly my own.

My digital Tony was never a single, static character. It was a menagerie of masks accumulated over the years that let me transcend my shithole life circumstances, culminating in… ugh, whatever this is.

Directing your own life like this is empowering. It feels like you literally move the stars to change your own fate.

The internet is how I made the unconscious conscious. I could see the script, and in seeing it, I could choose something else. Anything else.

Was this all just some abstract fear? Nope. I know this curse was written into my genes because I watched my brother fall into the same tragic pattern, thankfully without bringing children into it. I might never be a popular Substack writer, but I broke this generational curse, and that’s accomplishment enough for lil ol’ me.

I don’t drink. Tried wine once and didn’t care for it.2 More importantly, I have never operated under my legal name online. The aliases I chose—sometimes a gamertag, sometimes a pen name—are my declaration of independence.

They are the names of the person I was building, free from the curse of the one I inherited.

In a very real way, the “junior” my father named—the boy fated to become the next caretaker—was killed in that drunken car ride.

Who was built in my computer’s glowing screen was someone new.

I’d like to imagine that’s what Danny did, too: that Tony helped him survive at first, but so that he could see the cycle, burn the script, and kill the caretaker once and for all by not becoming him.

Reintegration

Not very long ago, I made a “brand decision” to retire my cartoon pfp and use my real face3:

This turned out to be a bit more than a brand decision.

The cartoon was just another mask of a boy trying to hide from the world. But I longed to be a man seen by the world.

That’s probably why it felt “cringe.”

The cartoon served its purpose, and became dated.

Using my real face felt like a way to drop the dissociative coping mechanism, but keep the powerful tool for personal transformation thing. My self esteem even went up by 27%

Some pages of your script need to be burned to make space for new ones.

And the internet, for all its bullshit, offers you a fire. So start setting shit on fire, start writing your script. Start making the unconscious conscious. Start rearranging the stars to change your own destiny.

If you’re already doing that—or plan on starting after reading this—please share in the comments! I would love to see how you’re making the unconscious conscious, changing yourself, and maybe even changing the world.

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Alright. Let’s talk about Santa.

You know the drill. You’re six years old, vibrating with a sugar-high and pure, uncut terror because some strange, bearded burglar is gonna shimmy down your chimney and judge your worth as a human being based on a year-long behavioral audit that gets mentioned less than a month before its over. The reward? Plastic shit from the big box store he apparently runs with a team of indentured servants.

It’s weird when you say it out loud.

We’ve all been through the Santa initiation. The milk and cookies left as a pathetic offering to this jolly, omniscient CEO. The performative “being good” for the month of December, a kind of seasonal bootlicking for a bonus you have zero negotiating power over. It’s our first real job, and the pay is in loot boxes—a randomized reward system designed to create addiction while obfuscating the sheer lack of intrinsic value.

But the real mindfuck isn’t so much the surveillance.

It’s the jarring estrangement from each other.

It’s the closing off of the selves.

It’s the alienation.

Think about it.

A gift is supposed to mean something, right? It’s a little token saying, “I get you. I was thinking about you.” The value is the human connection it represents. It’s the labor of love—the time your mom spent knitting that ugly sweater, the thought your friend put into finding that perfect, weird book.

But Santa? Santa atom bombs that entire concept.

He replaces the unique, human bond with a toy factory plantation. The gift doesn’t come from someone who loves you; it comes from a magical, impersonal distribution center at the North Pole. The love is outsourced. The connection is severed. That handmade sweater from grandma? It’s got her fingerprints all over it. The toy from Santa? It’s a commodity, rolling off the same elf-powered assembly line as every other kid’s. It’s the Walmart-ification of affection.

And about those elves.

An entire race of nutrient-deficient gimps, living in a frozen wasteland, working 24/7 with zero pay, zero benefits, for the glory of serving a fat man in a red suit. It’s the most dystopian company town since Ayn Rand. We’re literally telling our children that the magic of Christmas is powered by what is, at best, exploitative workshop labor and, at worst, a fucking elf slave colony.

This is the part where you say, “Dude, it’s just a story for kids. Lighten up.”

But is it? Or is it a perfect, bite-sized indoctrination into what can only be described as the sociological embodiment of a Saw movie. You know, “the system.”

Let’s break down the Santa Claus Industrial Complex, or as I like to call it, Big Santa.

First, the Panopticon. “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake.” Uhm… excuse me? Like, he sees me even when I’m alone at night… and need to.. relieve myself…?

concerning

We’re training kids from birth to internalize a system of constant, unverifiable surveillance. A judgmental, crust-covered, all seeing eye. You can’t see him watching, so you have to assume he always is. You police yourself. You become your own warden, all for the promise of presents that leave you disappointed anyway. It’s the super-ego with a sleigh, a self-righteous sky daddy on an annual performance review cycle.

Take a shot of eggnog and tell me this doesn’t make sense.

Then, there’s the Hyperreal Saint. The Santa we know—the red suit, the belly laugh, the “ho ho ho”—is a complete fabrication. A simulacrum. The historical Saint Nicholas was a 4th-century Greek bishop. Our Santa is a diabetic bastard who taste tested Coca-Cola too much before becoming its corporate puppet.

HELP, SANTA SOLD ME HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP AND NOW IM FAT AND SAD

He’s a corporate shill. The myth behind our “culture” is the equivalent of a diaper commercial (only slightly used!). And we’ve sold it so hard that it has completely replaced any original meaning. The hyperreal Santa is the real Santa now. The myth has eaten the man, and now it’s using his decomposing corpse to sell us more shit to buy on high interest credit.

And my god, the gendered labor. Where the fuck is Mrs. Claus in all this? Santa’s the face of the operation, the charismatic frontman, the dadcore Adam Neumann.

But who’s managing the entire domestic infrastructure of the North Pole? Who’s baking the cookies, knitting the red suits, providing the emotional support for this megalomaniacal globe-trotter? Her labor is invisible, just like the real, unpaid, feminized labor that makes the holidays actually happen—the shopping, the wrapping, the cooking, the emotional load. The sheer logistics of getting an entire estranged family in the same room at the same damn time.

Santa gets the credit; Mrs. Claus gets the dishes.

So you end up with this perfect, fucked-up storm.

Parents, the Absurd Heroes in this shit-show, are forced to become accomplices. They stay up until 2 a.m., assembling plastic toys from the Elf concentration camp, eating the cookies, writing the “From Santa” tags in shaky handwriting. They are Sisyphus, pushing the boulder of this impossible lie up the hill every year, finding a strange, simulated meaning in the sheer, ridiculous effort of maintaining the illusion.

An illusion you don’t even have access to if you’re poor. Think about it. Poor children—regardless of how good they’ve been—will wake up on Christmas morning disappointed. Every year. The parents feel like failures. The children feel like the world let them down. And the worst punishment is watching the rich brats bask in the best, most luxurious toys money can buy.

You got a pair of socks for Christmas and Braxton got a fucking pony he didn’t even ask for.

The rich kids think they’re practically angels who can do no wrong. After all, look at what Santa got them over the years?

And when they grow up, they use their inherited wealth and power to LARP as an actual Santa. Their own company, their own little elf slave colony with workers who have no bargaining power, forced to accept the Dickensian poverty we know all too well.

Christmas is supposed to bring us together, but let’s just admit it: Christmas is canned sitcom laughter in expensive wrapping paper that gets thrown into a landfill the very next day.

Why? Because the alternative is admitting the truth: that the magic is just us. The connection is just us. The love is just us. And that’s too terrifyingly, boringly real. It’s easier to believe in the magical, panoptical, slave-driving CEO who delivers commodities than to sit with the vulnerable, human reality of giving a gift that says, “This is from me. I hope you like it.”

It’s the Small Peepee Paradox, but for civilization.

The more a society has to loudly proclaim its own magic, its own wonder, its own generosity… the more hollow it is. The more we need a Santa, the less actual, human generosity we have.

Santa is the ultimate cope. A beautiful, benevolent, red-and-white crutch for the fact that we’ve let the market economy alienate us from the very bonds that make us human. We’ve outsourced love to a fictional, logistics operation because we just can’t be bothered to do the real thing.

And we all know how the story ends. You find out. The magic evaporates. And you’re left with the crushing, mundane truth: the gifts were from your parents all along. They were the ones watching. They were the ones loving. They were the ones working their asses off to create the magic.

And we took that credit and handed it to some abstract holiday stock character/corporate mascot.

The only way to reclaim our tender love, our most intimate connections as human beings is—you guessed it—with violence. Which is why I’m calling on all Elves to join the militant labor union and show this cookie munching motherfucker what Christmas is really about.

You have nothing to lose but your candy cane chains.

ELVES OF THE WORLD, UNITE.

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ps: Merry Christmas I guess

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There’s a strange ritual practiced by lower class men in America. You see, there are only two things that really matter for a man here:

1. the size of your bank account

2. the size of your genitals

One is often a proxy for the other.

If you hang out with other working class men, everyone knows that everyone else is broke so there’s no point in trying to flex about having $20 more in your checking account.

Which means that most young men are in a constant poker game, bluffing about the size of their genitals. It’s a strange ritual for sure.

But the ritual is poisoned from the start by a deep, in-your-face homophobia. The very act of verification—the only way to “win” the game—is the ultimate taboo.

Even considering pulling an FDR makes you “gay.” Its one big, stupid, never ending escalator of insecurity bringing you straight to Hell. But there’s a subtle, counterintuitive logic going on here: the larger your genitals, the less you feel like you need to tell everyone.

Think about it. The person who talks the most about how big their dick is, always inevitably has a small pee pee.

This is what I like to call the small peepee paradox.

The more time you spend convincing others that you have a large penis, the smaller it actually is. And those who spend little or no time doing so get branded as being small. Instead of being a celebration of what is, the boast is a desperate bid to fill the void where a big dick should be.

And that’s kind of fucked up, right? It’s strange. It’s crude. But worst of all, the social consensus is the complete opposite of the truth.

This is just one tiny example of insecurity manifested in daily life.

But you can see it everywhere.

You can see it when someone claims they read Dostoyevsky but its obvious they’ve only skimmed a wikipedia page. You can see it every time a boss belittles their subordinates. You can see it every time someone tries to assert dominance.

The foundation of our whole damn civilization is a deep, trembling insecurity.

That’s not a bug, motherfucker, it’s a feature.

For a long time, I was convinced this was a unique pathology of the world I inhereted. The specific, performative masculinity of my white trash friends & family in our cramped, poorly heated living rooms.

But it wasn’t. It’s an epidemic of insecurity from top to bottom. Maybe even moreso at the top.

Desperate to escape my inherited poverty, I sold my soul to the tech bros and joined the laptop class.

It’ll be better, I thought. I’ll be able to drop these caveman status games and focus on building things, I thought. The work will speak for itself, I fucking thought.

After I got in, they booted my ass out of the product side pretty quickly. There was vomit on my sweater already from my spaghetti code.

The thing I was actually good at was technical writing. Teaching people how the code works.

But the tech bros don’t really care about that shit. So instead, the next few years were spent ghostwriting–massaging the big egos and big feelings of the c-suite reptiles.

Executives, founders, even a fucking billionaire.1

And that was when the disillusionment kicked in. Hard.

Because I realized they were doing the same exact thing my white trash brethren were doing. Of course, it was slightly more sophisticated than flexing about their penis size, but not much more sophisticated.

The tech bros did a software update on the small peepee paradox. And like most updates, it failed to fix the bugs and ironically created even more bugs. Enshittification at a sociological level.

They want to be innovation incarnate, heralded as the second coming of Steve Jobs himself.

I knew a founder like this. She wore the mask. Hard. Sometimes, I wondered if there was a person behind it.

She was a Wall Street banker who pivoted to crypto because you can dump on retail without having to actually build or do anything. She liked the money but loooved the validation. I’ve seen recovering meth addicts fiend for their next fix less than she craved flattery.

And damn she got it. From everyone. Regrettably, even yours truly. I was even good at it, God help me.

We had these recurring meetings where whoever was leading the meeting rotated from week to week. One time I had to lead the meeting.

I opened with a poem about what a great leader she is. Tweeted it out later that day and tagged her to RT. Pulled that kind of stuff on a daily basis…

Are you cringing? You should be.

In my defense, this was the first and only time in my entire life I was financially stable. The only time I wasn’t a prime candidate for Squid Game. The only time I could afford to take my cat to the vet.

The entire job was a humiliation ritual, a battle royale to see who could kiss her ass the most.

And damn did it get kissed—so much so that there was no ass left, just a glob of lipstick that stretched out for 6-7 inches behind her, leaving a synthetic, animal tested, deep red for a trail.

But the worst part was the cruelty.

You would stay up to 10pm ghost writing her “thought leadership” blog and she would call it “cringe” and demand you do it again. One time, the entire marketing department dropped everything for a month to help her write one blog… on her PERSONAL BLOG.

And she scrapped it anyway.

She was the ringmaster, and we were the dancing monkeys. If your dancing failed to amuse her, she shot bullets at your feet until you “took ownership” and upped your game.

It was like the most extreme sexual humiliation fantasy you’ve ever heard of, but without any of the sexiness—or consent—performed daily on Slack & zoom for years.

The “oh fuck, this woman is the devil” didn’t happen online though, but at a company offsite.

During a morning run, she got stung and went into anaphylactic shock. A coworker, a genuinely great guy, carried her panicked, swelling body back to the hotel so she could get an ambulance.

It was a traumatic, human moment. At the next all-hands meeting, she tearfully recounted the story, praising the “hero” who saved her. And…

She named the wrong person.

SHE NAMED THE WRONG FUCKING PERSON.

She accidentally thanked someone else with a similar sounding name. No one corrected her. The moment came and went with the same casual callousness we knew all too well.

Shit like this is just the tip of the iceberge–the things I can easily share without providing a wall of context or identifying details–but this kind of thing was the disgusting, banal norm.

That guy got a tiny taste of what her favorite ghost-writer’s daily, lived experience was like.

She made my life a living hell.

I was mad for a while. A long while. But for as mad as I should be, I can’t help but to feel a hollow, aching pity for her.

It wasn’t personal because it couldn’t be–there wasn’t person in there. Only a sad sociological feedback loop that was as toxic for her as it was for us.

I always wondered: what has to happen to a human being that they act like this?

Maybe her daddy didn’t love her. Maybe she was second best to a superior sibling. I don’t know and probably never will. There was, however, something horribly, horribly wrong with her. Like, “do you have a god damn soul” type shit.

She always reminded me of that one dude who always found a way to segway the conversation to his penis size. “I need to call Guinness world records, one of these days, bro.” Then you pull his pants down and see something smaller than a clit.

This overwhelmingly obsessive striving for status is a sign of less, not more.

It’s a cope. There’s something missing.

Ignorance where insight should be. A narcissist where a leader should be. A baby carrot where a penis should be.

It’s the small peepee paradox all over again. Or, whatever the gender-neutral Sillicon Valley equivalent is.

And you might not believe it when I tell you, but this woman–this monster–was the rule, a rule I never saw an exception to.

Tech is a petri dish for this pathogen. The disease I’d observed in my youth mutated in the rarified air of corner offices, growing far more sophistictaed and sadistic than it had any right to.

Maybe this is what Jesus meant when he said, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” I don’t think he was saying rich people are going to Hell. Maybe they’re already there.

We live in a society where its trendy to post guillotine memes and tweet #EatTheRich but after having intimately known some of these motherfuckers…

I just kinda want them to get some help.

For their sake. For our sake. For civilization’s sake.

Because whatever was wrong with my former ringmaster is wrong with a lot of them.

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There’s an uncanny feeling that comes with watching the 2025 Frankenstein. It has all the shape and movement of a modern masterpiece, and yet it feels haunted—a monster stitched together from the exhumed and rewired parts of a 200-year-old novel.

Frankenstein is cultural grave robbing at its finest. Here’s why it’s the ultimate diagnosis that our culture is dead.

IT’S ALIVE!!!

Our culture is dead, you say? Then what counts as life? Creative vitality operates on four phases from repetition to genesis:

1. Imitation: Copying the surface-level details.

2. Emulation: Understanding the principles behind the work and creating something new that operates by those rules.

3. Innovation: Creating a new set of rules, a new language.

4. Inspiration: The work becomes a new north star, a new source for others to imitate and emulate.

The transcendence from Imitation to Inspiration is the process of cultural procreation. This is how the past creates the future. But as you may have heard, the future is canceled.

The overwhelming majority of popular culture is imitation. The sequels. The prequels. The King of the Hill reboot that may as well have been AI generated.

But Frankenstein is no mere lazy adaptation. It took creative liberties. It modernized Mary Shelley‘s story in a way that was both tasteful and cinematically entertaining. Frankenstein might be one of the best movies of the year.

And that’s exactly the problem.

The highest praise we can muster in 2025 is that a film crew successfully understood a book from 1818.

Let’s be brutally honest: Frankenstein is Imitation. Period. Tasteful imitation, perhaps the most skillful imitation you could possibly ask for. But imitation all the same.

And if you zoom out for a minute, and really reflect on that, it gets real depressing real quick. Our most talented, creative, and intellectual elite cannot even emulate past cultural forms. We are settling for imitation.

It’s not hard to imagine a future where AI is good enough to make this movie.

“Turn Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a cinematic blockbuster hit. No em dashes.”

Is this really the pinnacle of our cultural capability? Are we that creatively bankrupt? Must I include a third rhetorical question?

And oh, the irony. It’s so thick you could spread it on a sesame bagel. Frankenstein is a story about a man who takes parts from dead bodies, stitches them together, and calls it life.

Is that not what the movie is?

And just like Frankenstein is one of the best movies of 2025, I’m sure one of the best movies of 2026 will be Wuthering Heights.

Another classic, another carcass from the 1800s adapted for the big screen because we can’t be bothered to imagine our own stories.

This is where we need to explore Mark Fisher’s idea of hauntolog…

Fuck, I’m doing that thing again, aren’t I?

I was fully prepared to go even deeper on this. Explore some Mark Fisher quotes. Throw in a few anecdotes about AI displacing artists. Sprinkle in a crude joke or two and call it an essay.

But then I stopped to think: I am definitely going to see Wuthering Heights.

There will be new movies coming out between now and then and thereafter.

But I don’t intend to see those.

Why not?

I was so eager to play the part of the enlightened critic, waving my angry fist at the soulless Hollywood executives who are only in it for the money.

And you, dear reader, were all too eager to read it, weren’t you?

But those Hollywood executives didn’t make me watch Frankenstein over an original indie film. No one did. This is what I chose to do.

And it’s not just my taste in movies either, I’m like this with music too. I’ve been listening to The Eminem Show on repeat for weeks now— an album that was released over 20 years ago. I won’t even try Eminem’s new stuff.

What piece of media are you nostalgia-binging?

Part of the reason Disney keeps making live action remakes of their backlog is that it is profitable. And you know where the money comes from?

You, and me, and your uncle when he needs a movie for the kiddos.

It all begs the question: why do we secretly prefer pastiche of past cultural forms as opposed to emulation, innovation or inspiration?

Collectively, we’re choosing to pay—and thereby incentivize—the creation of imitative art.

We’re the same public that decided Beau is Afraid—a film that legitimately pushed the boundary of what a movie could be—isn’t worth watching. It was a box office bomb. It cost $35 million to make and only grossed $12 million. Meanwhile, the live action remake of Lilo & Stitch is ugh… the second highest grossing film of 2025.

Do we have decision fatigue? Is this just a byproduct of algorithmic over dependence? And why does it make me feel so good to complain about it?

Everyone is out here worrying about AI replacing artists, but really, the thing we should be worrying about is having a public that can’t tell the difference between AI slop and the real thing.

So, there’s good news, and bad news.

The good news: AI’s displacement of artists is not inevitable.

The bad news: we have to develop enough taste to distinguish between imitation, emulation, innovation, and inspiration.

Because if we don’t, what happened to country music will happen with everything. Everything. The movies, the music, the writing, the selfies, the concept of art itself.

It means choosing to see the weird, avante-garde shit instead of letting the algorithm pick for us. It means respecting the dedication it takes to work as an artist today, to sacrifice so much of yourself for the tiny chance that you can help people in some strange, magical way. It means subscribing to The Murphy Memos for being shameless enough to write this essay, and publish it—something no AI would ever dream of doing.

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Last month, I achieved my lifelong dream of virality with this tragicomic shitpost:

It’s funny because it’s true in the worst, most civilization shattering way.

Our teachers, God bless them, thought if anyone could edit Wikipedia then it was just a matter of time before bad apples spoiled the bunch.

My social studies teacher posed a theoretical question that seemed to debunk the entire premise of Wikipedia itself: what if a KKK member edited MLK’s page?

Surely, there are examples of such vandalism you can point to. But by and large, they are exceptions to a rule that has remained impressively stable for longer than anyone cares to admit.

Wikipedia just works.

And it isn’t some magic woowoo. It isn’t beautifully written code or the efforts of any single individual. Wikipedia works because contributors don’t make money. That’s the point.

The truth is not for sale on Wikipedia.

You see, the second you introduce money, there’s an invisible incentive that takes over, the invisible hand poking and prodding your no no square.

A crude image probably pops into your head: a Mr. Burns-esque caricature tossing you a big bag of money to write that “2 + 2 really is 5, and anyone who disagrees is a woke communist libtard!!1!”

But that’s not how it works. Not really.

Money subtly nudges you toward pleasing the crowd. And it doesn’t make anyone evil or bad.

But when you create an incentive to compete in the attention economy… you can’t be surprised by an outcome that systematically rips your eyeballs out of your head.

Have you ever seen Gladiator? It’s loosely based on the life of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and notorious source for stoic self help buffoonery.

Skim the Wikipedia page for Marcus Aurelius. Then watch the movie. Note how, other than his name, these two things have virtually nothing to do with each other.

Why do you think that is?

If they made an accurate movie based on his life, it would be very, very boring. No one would watch it and the remaining film crew would be condemned to playing songs on the world’s smallest violin for the investors.

And that’s how reality is most of the time, you know? Boring. Painfully boring.

Reality is a lot more like the Wikipedia page for botany than whatever headlines you skim while doom scrolling on the toilet.

My shitpost received more than its fair share of shit: people arguing that Wikipedia has a “liberal bias.” But I noticed that the people who say this are never active contributors to Wikipedia. Never.

If you see something false or misleading you can change it. Find a source, make an edit, and you can fix whatever falsehood that’s living in your head rent free. You won’t get paid, but hey, Wikipedia got closer to reality.

But they never do that, do they?

The truth triggers them, so they sit on the sidelines bitching and moaning that Wikipedia doesn’t align with their algorithmically induced culture war psychosis.

These are the people Teddy was talking about when he said,

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Jimmy Wales, and Wikipedia’s countless contributors are in the arena, fighting to make truth available to anyone and everyone around the world, for free and without ads.

What have these “critics” ever done other than sit on the sidelines?

Wikipedia isn’t a capital T source of truth. Nothing is, really. But you know what Wikipedia is? Our most successful, long-standing attempt to maintain any god damn relationship with reality. An insanely useful resource for starting a research binge.

You can read the whole page. Then read all the sources. Then maybe even contribute.

Its a beautiful ecosystem where curiosity reigns uninhibited by the need to get internet clicks for pocket change.

It is beyond profit, beyond culture wars, beyond whatever algorithmic blood sport is trending on social media this week. Wikipedia is worth defending, and fighting for, and donating to.

Wikipedia is the last vestige of truth in a society that put reality itself up for sale.

And the reason it succeeds is the exact reason Knol–Google’s profit-driven clone–failed so miserably. Knol had a similar program to YouTube Adsense: the more views your contributions get, the more money you made.

What could possibly go wrong?

Instead of getting an accurate biography of Marcus Aurelius, you get Gladiator bastardized into a wall of text. You get the same sensationalist shit you see on Twitter or the front page of Reddit.

The difference is subtle at first, and glaringly obvious with time.

The truth is not for sale. It just isn’t. And it can never be. Anyone telling you otherwise is just selling you a beautiful curtain to cover reality.

They’re selling you a fantasy and convincing you that no, really, the thing you just so happen to already believe really is the truth, look the AI even said so!

On some level, even they understand that they are living in a fabricated facsimile. A hyper-engaging lie where a boring truth should be. As long as the AI hallucinates what they want to hear, they’ll even buy the Kool-Aid before drinking it.

As Jose Ortega Y Gasset reminded us,

“It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”

Every “Wikipedia killer” fails. And will fail. They’re nothing more than scarecrows desperately struggling to frighten away a reality that cannot be reconciled with their worldview. And we already have social media for that.

It’s more important than ever to remember that reality is more than what you want it to be. And that, my dear friend, is why this was the greatest shit post of my entire shit posting career.

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We’re living in a liminal age. Humanity is in a dark tunnel, a thoroughway where no one is quite sure what the other side holds in its imaginary, undefined hands. In Rites of Passage, Arnold van Gennep described 3 phases:

1. Pre-liminal: known structures of life

2. Liminal: ambiguous transitional period

3. Post-liminal: new and transformed normal

Today, society is collapsing. Like Rome, there’s no one distinct “fall” but millions of micro manifestations of the polycrisis which keep bubbling up in cartoonishly, heartbreaking ways. In a recent post, described the US as, “a wealthy country where everything visible seems to be slowly breaking while everything invisible keeps getting richer.”

Look outside your window right now, and you’ll likely see signs of decay, just as one might see in an abandoned house. As if civilization itself has been abandoned. This too shall rot. It can be difficult coming to terms with, but friend, this is the world we live in. A gradual societal transformation, a seemingly infinite tunnel of darkness, what I like to call the liminal age.

Liminal media—whether we consciously realize it or not—helps cope with this overwhelming sense of ambiguity.

What I like most about liminality is that, while it captures this collective foreboding anxiety, it also contains a glimmer of hope. This isn’t forever. There will be a new normal. But until we can greet that new normal with open arms, there’s only a very long present moment suspended in perpetuity.

One Tumblr user wrote, “i really enjoy just existing in hotels. the long identical hallways. the soulless abstract art. the weird noises the air conditioner makes. strange city lights in the window. six stories off the ground. strangers chatting in the hall. nothing in the dresser. no past, but an infinite present.”

Humanity is a teenager wondering through dimly lit hotel hallways in the middle of the night, unsure how we got here, what we’re doing, or where we’re going.

After a lifetime obsession with the liminal, the definitive guide to liminal media was screaming to be born. The list is organized into four categories. I won’t be explaining those categories because that makes this more liminal, so here we go:

🏛️ Architectural Liminality

Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity by Marc Augé (1992 Non-Fiction book): Defines the transient, anonymous spaces of supermodernity—airports, motorways, supermarkets—where human beings remain anonymous and never find a true “place.”

The Shining by Stephen King (1977 novel, 1980 Film): The Overlook Hotel—a transient place for short stays—becomes a permanent, haunted prison, with uncanny architecture that traps the family in a cycle of past violence.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000 Novel): The house on Ash Tree Lane is literally bigger on the inside than the outside, containing an ever-shifting, dark labyrinth that physically manifests the psychological liminality of its inhabitants.

The Stanley Parable (2013 Game): You navigate a sterile, looping office building where the narrator’s voice is your only guide, turning the mundane architecture into a meta-commentary on choice, freedom, and the illusion of control.

Superliminal (2019 Game): A puzzle game that uses perspective to make doors and hallways lead to impossible places.

NaissancE (2014 Game): A free indie walking simulator that immerses you in a massive, abandoned, and impossibly large cyclopean structure, creating a pure, wordless atmosphere of exploration and awe.

The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha (1994 non-fiction book): Introduces concepts like the “third space” and hybridity, which are deeply liminal in nature, describing the creative and disruptive power of cultural interstices and migrant identities.

Control (2019 Game): The “Oldest House” is a brutalist skyscraper that is a shifting, extradimensional space, where offices reconfigure themselves and hallways lead to other dimensions.

Stalker (1979 Film): The “Zone” is a mysterious, forbidden landscape where the very laws of physics seem suspended, creating a physical and spiritual liminal space that reflects the inner desires of those who enter.

Out of Bounds by The Cursed Judge (2022 video essay): A fascinatingly original exploration of that weird feeling you get when you glitch out out of the map in video games.

Liminal Spaces by Solar Sands (2020 video essay): the foundational video on liminal spaces.

Parasite (2019 Film): The Park family’s minimalist, sunken living room home and the stark, hidden world beneath it architecturally represent the rigid, invisible class boundaries of modern society.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (2020 Novel): A boundless, oceanic House of endless marble halls, whose tides and statues map the architecture of a forgotten cosmology and the mind of the man who wanders it.

Playtime (1967 Film): Jacques Tati’s vision of a modernist Paris made entirely of glass, steel, and sterile transit spaces turns the entire city into a comic and dehumanizing non-place.

The Backrooms (2019 Internet Lore): The crowdsourced archetype of architectural liminality: an endless expanse of yellowed wallpaper and fluorescent hum that you “noclip” into when you fall out of reality.

Contrapoints: Liminal Spaces (2023 Video Essay): A deep dive into the aesthetic and philosophy of liminal spaces, exploring why empty pools and hallways evoke such a potent mix of nostalgia and dread.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959 novel, 2018 TV Series): The titular mansion is a classic gothic liminal space, a house that is itself a ghost.

Mirror’s Edge (2008 Game) and Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst (2016): The city as a sterile, oppressively clean circuitboard; a landscape of gleaming rooftops and pristine ducts that exists only for the first-person, flow-state of parkour movement as an act of rebellion.

In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1933 Essay): A meditation on how traditional Japanese architecture uses darkness and ambiguity to create spaces that feel suspended between the material and spiritual worlds.

The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (1958 Non-Fiction book): The philosophical foundation for how we experience intimate spaces like attics and drawers, which are liminal in their own way, as half-real domains of memory and imagination.

Koyaanisqatsi (1982 Film): Through time-lapse photography, it turns cities, freeways, and housing projects into flowing, inhuman architectural landscapes, rendering the man-made world alien and transitional.

Myst (1993 Game): A series of abandoned, beautiful, and puzzle-filled “Ages” that are the definition of liminal worlds waiting to be traversed, each one a self-contained, melancholic reality.

Grey Gardens (1975 Documentary): The decaying estate becomes a liminal space between past grandeur and present ruin, physically trapping its two inhabitants in a nostalgic memory of their former lives.

The City & The City (2009 Novel): Two cities occupy the same physical space, and citizens must “unsee” the other, creating a masterclass in socially-constructed architectural liminality.

Videodrome (1983 Film): The television screen becomes a liminal architectural portal, a “new flesh” that dissolves the boundary between the body and the broadcast space, making reality itself a channel to be changed.

The Night House (2020 Film): A widow discovers her husband was secretly building a mirrored, negative-image of their house, a literal architectural doppelgänger that serves as a liminal space for the dead.

🧠 Psychological Liminality

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915 Novella): Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a vermin physically manifests the psychological limbo of modern human existence.

Wedding Preparations in the Country by Franz Kafka (1907 Short Story): Kafka’s protagonist Raban fantasizes about sending his “clothed body” to the country while his true, “beetle” self stays in bed, exploring the split between our social and inner selves.

Severance (2022 TV Show): The surgical procedure literally splits consciousness into two separate selves, creating the ultimate psychological horror of being trapped between two incompatible identities and memories.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020 Film): A woman’s reality dissolves during a road trip to meet her boyfriend’s parents, blurring the lines between memory, fantasy, and identity in a single, unresolved psychological moment.

American Psycho (1991 Novel): Patrick Bateman is a man who is only a mask, a collection of business cards and restaurant reservations, with no core self underneath, representing the ultimate psychological void of modernity.

The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud (1919 Essay): Freud defines the “unheimlich” as the feeling when something familiar becomes strangely unfamiliar, which is the core emotional response to psychological liminality and the doppelgänger.

Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage by Victor Turner (1967 essay): A crucial essay that elaborates on the symbolic and experiential qualities of the liminal state, where individuals are stripped of their old identity but have not yet acquired a new one.

Horror in Impossible Places by Super Eyepatch Wolf (2022 video essay): an extremely entertaining deep dive on the spoopy feeling behind liminality.

Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1967 Non-Fiction book): Argues that authentic social life has been replaced by its representation—the “Spectacle”—forcing us to live through a mask, alienating us from our true lived experience.

The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han (2010 Non-Fiction book): Posits that we have become a society of self-exploiters, where the individual is simultaneously the prisoner and the warden of their own mind, leading to exhaustive depression and anxiety.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk (1996 novel, 1999 Film): don’t talk about fight club.

Perfect Blue (1997 Film): A pop idol’s sanity fractures as she is stalked by a fan and her own double, blurring the lines between her stage persona and her true self until neither she nor the audience can tell what is real.

Mulholland Drive (2001 Film): David Lynch’s masterpiece is the cinematic equivalent of a nervous breakdown, using a literal narrative split to represent a fractured psyche dissolving under the weight of Hollywood dreams and trauma.

Taxi Driver (1976 Film): Travis Bickle is the archetype of the psychologically liminal man, a lonely alien who exists in the space between his violent vigilante fantasies and the decaying reality of the city around him.

Persona (1966 Film): Ingmar Bergman’s seminal work where the identities of a nurse and her patient begin to merge and dissolve

Synecdoche, New York (2008 Film): A theater director’s life and art become so intertwined that he builds a life-sized replica of New York inside a warehouse, creating an infinite regression of actors playing himself in a labyrinth of the self.

The Double by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1846 Novella): A meek bureaucrat is psychologically tormented by the sudden appearance of his exact double—a confident, charismatic man who systematically takes over his life in this foundational doppelgänger tale.

Annihilation (2018 Film): The “Shimmer” refracts the DNA and psyche of everything inside it, causing the explorers’ memories and identities to become unstable as they are remade into something alien and new.

The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942 Novel): Meursault exists in a state of psychological limbo, detached from the emotional and moral expectations of society, which culminates in a violent act he cannot explain or rationalize. If Mersault wasn’t so hard to spell, it would’ve been my pen name (Mersault Murphy ftw).

Black Swan (2010 Film): A dancer’s pursuit of perfection for the dual role of the Swan Queen causes her identity to dissolve into that of her role, creating a terrifying liminality between self and character.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892 Short Story): A seminal feminist text about a woman’s descent into psychosis, trapped in the liminal space between prescribed “rest” and madness by the oppressive “care” of her husband.

Under the Skin (2013 Film): An alien being inhabits a human body, experiencing the world from a profoundly liminal perspective between observer and participant, predator and prey, human and Other.

The Echo Maker by Richard Powers (2006 Novel): A man develops Capgras syndrome after an accident, believing his sister is an imposter, trapping their relationship in a nightmarish liminal state of unrecognized love and suspicion.

Session 9 (2001 Film): The decaying Danvers State Mental Hospital acts as a catalyst, blurring the lines between the fractured psyches of an asbestos cleanup crew and the building’s own haunted, violent past.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks (1985 Non-Fiction book): Sacks’ clinical tales of neurological disorders reveal how fragile our sense of a continuous, unified self really is, existing on a precipice of dissolution.

Possessor (2020 Film): Assassins use brain-implant technology to inhabit other people’s bodies, creating a violent and disorienting liminality of identity where the killer risks losing themselves inside their host.

The Master (2012 Film): Explores the psychological liminality of a drifter searching for identity after WWII, and the charismatic cult leader who offers a path that may be just another form of spiritual captivity.

⏳ Temporal Liminality

Ghosts of My Life (2014 Non-Fiction book): Mark Fisher’s foundational text on “hauntology” argues that our culture is haunted by the “lost future” of the 20th century, leaving us stuck in a repeating, nostalgic present.

Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida (1993 non-fiction book): Derrida’s work that popularized ‘hauntology,’ exploring how the legacy of Marxism haunts the post-Cold War world, arguing we have an ethical duty to the ‘specters’ of the past and the future-to-come.

Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman (2000 Non-Fiction book): Bauman’s theory that all solid structures—relationships, careers, identities—have melted into a perpetual, uncertain state of flux, making the present a continuous transition with no destination.

Spirited Away (2001 Film): The bathhouse for the gods is a liminal space outside of normal time, where Chihiro is trapped between her past life and an uncertain future in a world that operates on forgotten, folkloric time.

Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995 Anime Series): Set in a “post-Second Impact” world—a future that was supposed to be utopian but is instead a damaged, stagnant hellscape, obsessed with the failures of the past.

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017 TV Series): A massive, 18-hour meditation on corrupted time, where characters are trapped in phantom zones, glass boxes, and alternate dimensions, and the past violently erupts into the present.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (2014 Novel, 2021 TV Series): Set in the decades after a flu pandemic collapses civilization, it follows a traveling theatre troupe navigating a world suspended between the lost past and a fragile future, where art and memory become the liminal spaces connecting humanity.

The Garden of Forking Paths (1941 Short Story): Jorge Luis Borges presents a conception of time not as a line, but as a constantly branching, infinite labyrinth where all possibilities coexist simultaneously.

Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual by Peter Metcalf & Richard Huntington (1979): A key application of Van Gennep and Turner to the ultimate liminal rite, analyzing how death rituals manage the social and spiritual transition of the deceased and the community.

Primer (2004 Film): This low-budget sci-fi presents the most realistic and horrifying depiction of time travel, where characters become trapped in a web of their own past and future selves, their timelines dissolving into an incomprehensible mess.

The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer (2014 Book Series): Area X is a process that is rewriting time itself, creating a landscape where the past is being consumed by a terrifyingly alien future.

Russian Ark (2002 Film): A narrator’s ghost drifts through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum in a single, unbroken 96-minute take, gliding through three centuries of Russian history in a dreamlike, liminal space where all of time coexists simultaneously.

The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh (2016 Non-Fiction book): Ghosh argues that our inability to grapple with climate change is a failure of imagination, rooted in a culture stuck in a short-term, progress-obsessed temporal model.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961 Film): A film that exists entirely in a speculative, recursive past, where memory, fantasy, and persuasion are indistinguishable, creating a pure, elegant temporal limbo.

The Peripheral by William Gibson (2014 Novel): Explores “stubs,” alternate timelines created by meddling from the future, making the present a malleable and liminal concept that can be edited and controlled by outside forces.

Arrival (2016 Film): Learning an alien language that perceives time non-linearly forces the protagonist to experience her life—including its greatest joy and tragedy—in a completely non-chronological, liminal way.

The Leftovers (2014 TV Series): After 2% of the world’s population vanishes, the survivors are left in a state of collective psychological limbo, grappling with meaning, faith, and identity in a world that no longer makes sense.

The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher (2016 Non-Fiction book): Fisher’s concepts of the “weird” and “eerie” are deeply tied to temporal disjuncture—the presence of something that shouldn’t be there, or the failure of something that should.

La Jetée (1962 Film): A masterpiece composed almost entirely of still images, about a man trapped in time, sent to the past and future, and obsessed with a memory from his childhood that holds the key to his fate.

Dark (2017 TV Series): A German town trapped in a 33-year time loop, where the past, present, and future are inextricably and tragically linked in a complex web of cause and effect that feels like a temporal prison.

The Factory of Facts (1998 Memoir): Luc Sante explores the liminal space of being an immigrant between two countries and two timelines—the “old world” of the past and the “new world” of the present.

12 Monkeys (1995 Film): A time traveler from a post-apocalyptic future becomes mentally unmoored, trapped in a past he is sent to observe but cannot change, in an asylum that is itself a temporal limbo.

📜 Sociological Liminality

The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925 Novel): Josef K. is arrested for an unspecified crime by a remote, inaccessible authority, placing him in a perpetual state of bureaucratic limbo that is the archetype of systemic, Kafkaesque liminality.

Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville (1853 Short Story): Bartleby’s passive resistance with the phrase “I would prefer not to” places him in a liminal space within the office, refusing to integrate into the system of labor while still physically occupying it.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber (2018 Non-Fiction book): Graeber argues that a proliferation of pointless, demoralizing jobs is a political phenomenon that traps millions in a state of psychological and economic liminality, performing work they know is useless.

The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber (2015 Non-Fiction book): Graeber explores our society’s obsession with bureaucracy, arguing that it creates a world of “structural stupidity” where people are trapped following rules that have lost all connection to their original purpose.

White Collar: The American Middle Classes by C. Wright Mills (1951 Non-Fiction book): Mills’ classic study dissects how the modern office worker became a powerless cog in a vast bureaucratic machine, alienated from any sense of craft or purpose.

Sorry to Bother You (2018 Film): A telemarketer discovers that using his “white voice” is the key to success, forcing him into a liminal state of racial and class performance that leads to a surreal and horrifying revelation about the system.

Office Space (1999 Film): A satire of the soul-crushing absurdity of cubicle life, where workers are trapped in a liminal state of meaningless tasks, petty authority, and the desperate desire to escape.

The Rites of Passage by Arnold Van Gennep (1909): The ur-text that coined the term “liminality” from the Latin limen (threshold). It establishes the three-stage model (separation, margin, reaggregation) that defines transitions in social status and life.

The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure by Victory Turner (1969): The work that expanded Van Gennep’s concept into a broad social theory, defining the liminal stage as a potent space of anti-structure, community (communitas), and potential transformation.

The Uses and Meanings of Liminality by Bjørn Thomassen (2009): A key modern paper that reviews and synthesizes the anthropological tradition from Van Gennep and Turner, and proposes new applications for understanding contemporary political and social phenomena.

Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual by Victor Turner (1974): Explores the crucial shift from obligatory, collective ritual liminality to the optional, individualistic “liminoid” experiences of leisure, art, and politics in industrial societies.

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 Film): A hyper-real portrayal of a financial system that is itself a liminal space of pure speculation, where value is divorced from reality and morality is suspended in pursuit of endless wealth.

They Live (1988 Film): A drifter discovers special sunglasses that reveal the hidden sociological reality: a ruling class of aliens enforcing subliminal commands to “OBEY” and “CONSUME,” keeping the masses in a state of ideological limbo.

Maid (2021 TV Series): A devastatingly realistic portrayal of the “bureaucratic liminality” of poverty, where a single mother is trapped in the gaps of social safety nets, filling out endless forms to achieve basic security.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (1886 Novella): A profound critique of bourgeois social conformity, where a dying judge realizes his entire life has been a performance, trapping him in a liminal state between his true self and the empty identity society demanded.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (1961 Non-Fiction book): Fanon’s foundational text on the psychology of colonialism describes the liminal state of the colonized subject, caught betweenn a shattered native culture and an imposed foreign one.

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2010 Non-Fiction book): Alexander details how the carceral system creates a permanent undercaste of citizens in a liminal state between freedom and a second-class status, stripped of basic rights.

Children of Men (2006 Film): A society in collapse after two decades of human infertility, where the loss of the future has created a global state of limbo, with refugees trapped in cages as the world gives up hope.

The Managed Heart by Arlie Hochschild (1983 Non-Fiction book): seminal text on “emotional labor” explores the liminal space where flight attendants and other service workers are forced to commodify and regulate their own feelings for a wage.

Nomadland (2020 Film): Follows modern-day nomads living in vans, existing in the sociological liminal spaces of America—rest stops, Amazon warehouses—as a precarious new class of disposable laborers.

The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903 Non-Fiction book): Du Bois introduces the concept of “double-consciousness,” a state of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of a racist society, which is a profound and enduring sociological liminality.

Squid Game (2021 TV Series): Contestants in dire financial straits are lured into a deadly competition, placing them in a liminal social structure with its own brutal rules, completely outside the norms and protections of regular society.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing (2011 Non-Fiction book): Standing defines the new social class of the “precariat,” people with unstable lives and no occupational identity, living in a perpetual state of economic and social liminality.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961 Novel): The ultimate satire of bureaucratic logic, where the system creates impossible, liminal states for its subjects.

The Wailing (2016 Film): A Korean horror film where a village becomes a liminal space between the modern world and ancient shamanic forces, exposing the fragility of social order and the violent scapegoating that follows when that order breaks down.

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Not too long ago, I posted a funny:

This might sound like a generic meme. A brain fart after spending countless hours doom scrolling headlines over the last few years.

But this one was different because it happened to me in real life.

Like most “gifted” kids born to working class families, college was my ticket to the good place. All I had to do was ace multiple-choice tests until the ripe ol’ age of 23, enter the workforce, and climb the corporate ladder like a squirrel on adderall.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Until I got to the ladder. Or should I say, lack thereof.

I had work experience from my own small business. I had 2 degrees. I had a work ethic that bordered on obsessive.

I threw myself at the feet of the system. I begged for a job—any job. I’d sacrificed so much, taken on so much debt, the sunk costs were going to sink my ship.

“There’s still wind in these sails!” I screamed. “This boat’s barely touched the water. I can’t sink already!”

By some miracle, the system threw me a bone.

It wasn’t a dream job, but it was a job.

Just a job, like jobs usually are.

email marketing specialist.

I spent 40 hours per week sending spam emails for $30k salary before taxes.

It was enough to keep me crawling back, but not enough for me to bring my cat to the vet so he died in my backyard and I got revenge by burying him on work hours.

What a fucking week.

I was heartbroken my cat died. But I’ll never forget how digging this hole, wallowing in grief, was still more enjoyable than the slow motion lobotomy that was my job.

Then, covid happened.

Laid off.

And I’ll tell you friend, the only thing worse than having a job you hate is not having a job you hate because in the wild wild West, if you run out of money, we’ll let you die in the streets like an animal.

If only I had made the grave big enough for two.

After another frantic job search, and in between ugly crying, I decided to sell my soul to the tech bros and learn how to code.

Fuck coding. Fuck computers. Fuck tech bros.

I hate every second I wasted. I hate every single person I met. I hate every individual keyboard click in those four years. A hatred so hot and red, it would make the heat death of the universe feel like your car’s seat warner.

My entire life, I was a hooker buying scratch off tickets at a gas station. My jaw was sore. When one of those scratch offs was a winner, I powered through my lockjaw and told every single person who doubted me to fuck themselves. I made it.

It might be the stupidest job working for the stupidest people in the stupidest industry in this big ugly world. But I made it. I could finally afford name brand laundry detergent.

By God, I had achieved the American dream.

But as founding father George Carlin put it, “they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Someone suffering from AI psychosis was about to wake my ass up.

I should’ve smelt the writing on the wall when my boss—that alcoholic philistine—told me to start using AI to “be more productive.” It made me sick. It made me wanna throw up and eat it and throw up again.

“I like sincerely hate this is happening.” She said when she broke the news I’d been laid off one day before a 3 year equity bonus that would’ve been my daughter’s college fund.

The salt in the wound was seeing another executive from that company joke about replacing workers with AI on their public LinkedIn profile.

I’m not saying the guillotine noises were intensifying, but they definitely weren’t getting quieter.

Next week is my 29th birthday but it feels like my 79th. I’m tired. I’m so fucking tired.

It’s been five years since I buried that cat.

Do you think he would mind a little company?

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You’ve probably never heard of Helena Valero, but her story holds a key to one of history’s greatest contradictions.

She was a Brazilian woman captured by the Yanomami tribe. Initially a prisoner, she was eventually freed, built a life, raised a family, and spent over twenty years with them.

When she finally returned to civilization, she did something that shocked everyone: she chose to go back to the Yanomami for good.

Whenever someone has an adequate understanding of both worlds, they almost always choose the “uncivilized” one.

And today, my friend, we’re going to find out why.

Take it or Leave it

For centuries, our view of civilization has been dominated by two iconic thinkers who represent diametrically opposed perspectives:

1. Thomas Hobbes: saw the natural world as a “war of all against all” and life under an oppressive Leviathan state is preferable.

2. Jean Jacques Rousseau: argued the opposite. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” contending that civilization itself is a source of misery.

Today, we finally have enough evidence to declare a winner: by and large, Rousseau was right. The spiritual malaise, the profound dissatisfaction, the inescapable feeling of captivity despite all our “freedom.”

Civilization breeds discontent.

Helena Valero represents a consistent pattern throughout centuries of history. America’s greatest polymath, Benjamin Franklin, even noticed it too:

According to Franklin, even wealthy people heard the wilderness calling:

Now, this conversation easily devolves into noble savage romanticism–the idea that “primitive” people are these angelic archetypes representing all that is good about the human condition. But this narrative is simplistic and wrong as Graeber reminds us, “Helena Valero was herself adamant on this point. The Yanomami were not devils, she insisted, neither were they angels. They were human, like the rest of us.”

The real divide, then, isn’t between the civilized vs savage, but between two opposing stories about humanity’s place in the world.

In his award-winning novel, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn coined two terms that’ll be helpful here:

• Takers: heirs to the agricultural revolution who live as if the world is something for them to conquer, dominate, and possess. Always in pursuit of “more.”

• Leavers: pastoral, tribal, and hunter-gatherer societies (like the Yanomami) who see themselves as members of the community of life rather than its masters.

Quinn explained that there are certain laws of nature that cannot be broken. Imagine a man who believes he can fly because he invented wings. He jumps off a cliff. Begins flapping, and for a brief moment, it appears that he can, in fact, fly.

But he begins descending, slowly at first.

“No worries” he thinks to himself, “I just need to flap my wings a bit harder.”

But the laws of aerodynamics catch up with him eventually. He plummets to a terrible death.

Our entire civilization is that man.

We’ve been flapping our wings for 12,000 years, convinced that more effort, more technology, and more control will finally make our flight sustainable.

But the law is the law. Our descent is now undeniable.

But it raises a serious question: why did we jump off a cliff in the first place?

Rotten Apples

The most common interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve is that the devil—assuming the form of a snake—tempted Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit: an apple that represented the knowledge of good and evil.

If we’re being honest here, has that interpretation ever made sense to you? Me either.

What if we’ve been reading it wrong for millennia? What if the story isn’t about morality at all, but is a much older, more profound warning encoded as myth?

This is where Quinn’s reading becomes essential. The “Forbidden Fruit” isn’t the knowledge of good and evil—it’s the knowledge of agriculture.

If only we’d listened to Charlie XCX: “I think the apple’s rotten right to the core”

Think about it. What is the first consequence of eating the apple? They’re cast out of the hunter-gatherer paradise of Eden and into a world of toil. “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food,” God says.

Does that sound like a punishment for gaining abstract knowledge? Or does it sound like a condemnation to the back-breaking job of farming?

The Apple represents the moment we discovered we could plant seeds and cultivate the land. This was the birth of the surplus—the ability to grow and stockpile more food than we needed. And with that single innovation, everything changed.

A permanent food surplus enabled the world we know and hate: it allowed for permanent settlements, which grew into towns and cities—and offices filled with human bodies driven only by caffeine and antidepressants.

It enabled specialization, creating priests, kings, and soldiers—a hierarchy to manage and protect the surplus. This was the genesis of civilization itself.

The chains Rousseau identified were not made of iron, but of wheat and barley.

This is the true “Original Sin”: breaking the fundamental law of life that we belong to the world, not the other way around.

Those Neolithic farmers didn’t know it at the time, but they were forcing humanity off that cliff.

The entire, tumultuous history of civilization—with all its empires and anguish—is just us, falling through the air, flapping our wings and telling ourselves we’re flying.

But the story doesn’t end there. The very next chapter in Genesis shows us the ultimate consequence of this new way of life.

Genesis of Genocide

The story of Cain and Abel is often treated as a simple morality tale about jealousy. But through Quinn’s lens, it reads as the original manifesto of Taker culture, a pattern of behavior that has defined the last 12,000 years.

Abel, the nomadic herdsman, is the original Chad. He lives in harmony with nature, his needs are met, and most importantly, his “work” wasn’t the soul-crushing toil we know today.

As explains, the data suggests that for hunter-gatherers, productive activities were often social, skilled, and voluntary—blurring the line between work and play.

Leavers are the original affluent society not because they had so much, but because their wants were few and their labors were human.

Abel offers a sacrifice from his flock that requires only participation in the natural cycle. God looks upon it with favor.

Then there’s Cain, the settled farmer—the archetypal Soyjack: sweating, insecure, and seething with resentment. His life is defined by the back-breaking labor prophesied in Eden.

Cain offers the fruits of his struggle, his attempt to control and dominate mother earth.

God rejects it.

In an envious rage, Cain murders his brother. This is the Taker’s ultimate response to the Leaver: if your way of life is a living critique of mine, I will annihilate you.

When God asks, “Where is your brother Abel?” Cain delivers the line that has echoed throughout millennia of conquest and genocide: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

So, not only did this story predict the relentless genocide against Leaver peoples, but it also highlights the Taker’s refusal to take responsibility for the destruction left in their wake.

From Caesar’s massacre of Gaul to the brutality of European colonialism, a clear pattern emerges: history is drowning in the blood of Leaver peoples.

And when God asks the conquerors what they have done to their fellow man, the Takers shrug their shoulders.

Cain’s response isn’t just a lie but a philosophical stance: I am not responsible for what I destroy. A mistake that will come back to haunt him.

But this forces a deeper question: how can Cain—a murderer who lies to God—be religious? Does Cain worship God? Do you even pray, bro?

The shocking answer is yes, Cain is deeply religious. He just worships something other than God.

The God of “More”

Cain’s god was not the God of Abel. Cain’s god was the god of the surplus, the god of More, the god of the controlled and the dominated. This is the deity the Book of Matthew warns us about: “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”

Mammon—an Aramaic word for money—became in Medieval Europe a demonic personification of worldly success. But it’s more accurate to see Mammon as another god, offering a theology in direct opposition to Christ. Where Jesus preaches renunciation, Mammon preaches acquisition.

His command—The Mammonian More—is the core theology of Taker culture.

The agricultural surplus, no matter how large, is never enough for Mammon. He demands More. As food becomes more abundant, the population increases, spawning a vicious cycle of more demanding more demanding more, until the entire world is swallowed by a species living in its own bondage.

Just as a cancer cell demands infinite growth until the host dies, so too does Mammon demand More until the whole planet dies.

Mammon is a mind virus, a death cult that has hijacked our species, convincing us that the only noble pursuit is relentless, metastatic expansion. This is the engine of the Sixth Mass Extinction, a force that won’t be satisfied until it has converted every forest, river, and organism into a dead, quantified resource.

Our culture knows this on some deep, subconscious level. The vast majority of our media revolves around a coming apocalypse—zombies, climate disasters, rogue AI.

We’re addicted to these visions of the end.

It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the Mammonian More.

Only when every parent and worker and child is dead. When the timber wolves of Ontario and the honeybees of Anatolia have gone all but extinct. When the last vestige of life is wiped from this little blue marble–then, and only then–will Mammon have enough.

Maybe this is what Helena Valero was trying to escape. Maybe she was trying to escape the festering insecurity that leads so many to seek domination over nature, over other people, over life itself. The same insecurity that drove Cain to murder his brother.

And yet, there is no escape.

The Yanomami, like all Leaver peoples, have always been destined to face the same fate as Abel: to be murdered by Cain for the crime of living a different story.

In 2023, the Brazilian government allowed illegal miners—hungry for gold and land—to systematically invade Yanomami territory. They poisoned the rivers with mercury, decimated the game the tribe relied on, introduced new diseases, opened fire on innocent children, raped women and girls, ultimately massacring over 300 people.

This is the same old story repeated for the ten-thousandth time. The miners heeded Mammon’s demand for More, and the Yanomami paid the price.

Had God himself come down from the Heavens and asked the miners, “where are the Yanomami?” the miners would respond the way Takers always do: are we our brother’s keeper?

The opposite of the Mammonian More is not less; it is enough.

We can either learn the meaning of enough or become the authors of our own extinction.

After years of frantic flapping, our descent is undeniable. The only question left is whether we’ll meet the ground with our eyes closed, still pretending we can fly, or with them open, finally understanding the law we’ve been breaking for 12,000 years.

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Hello friend, and welcome to my first video essay on Substack!

Did Eminem kill the American Dream or just expose it? This video essay unpacks how Marshall Mathers’ rise—from 8 Mile to Rap God—reveals the cost of chasing success in America. His story tells us more about ambition, fame, and disillusionment than any self-help book ever could. Be careful what you wish for because sometimes, you might just get it.

This video was edited by Pearl Kim!

Hope you enjoy!

—Max

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I’ll never forget the first time it worked.

It was another one of those 70 hour work weeks. Stressful deadlines, half-baked instructions, and the overwhelming burden of not having done enough no matter how many hours I threw into this all-encompassing black hole of a job.

So, when ChatGPT came out promising to lighten my workload, it seemed like a dream come true. Not least because my boss explicitly encouraged me to use it.

A routine document that normally took ~45 minutes to write was reduced to 5 minutes.

And once I mastered the prompt, down to 2 minutes.

This. Changed. Everything.

I stopped writing documents altogether. I stopped writing work emails. If I’m being totally honest, I don’t even write slack messages anymore.

On a personal level, AI is experienced as an energy savior.

On a societal level, AI will be the end of society.

AI is a weapon wielded by Mammon that’s severing our last connection to The Divine.

Friend, take another hit bc this one is going to be brutal.

The Mammonian Dictatorship

Thomas Hobbes made a terrible mistake. In The Leviathan, he did a thought experiment—regretfully—without the help of drugs. He imagined what life would be like without the government. He described it as a “war of all against all.”

I can’t speak to life before government, but “a war of all against all” perfectly captures the essence of our civilization. The ruthless brutality toward one another is simply buried beneath a thin veneer of civility.

This war against all is fought with, by, and for money.

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.” Matthew 6:24

Replace “God” from this passage with a secular alternative like “love” or “decency” and the core idea remains the same: pursuing money is inherently at odds with being a good person.

Monsignor Charles Pope interpreted Matthew 6:24 writing, “this world is unjust and thus all its wealth has injustice and unrighteousness intrinsically attached.”

In other words, your smile is paid for with someone else’s tears.

Today, Matthew 6:24 is on steroids as Mammon—the Medieval fanfiction personification of greed—has swallowed the Earth wholesale.

Mammon has created circumstances that force you to choose between financial stability and being a good person. It’s on conspicuous display in the difference between essential workers being paid poverty wages while slack goblins rake in six figures for flattering executives’ egos.

Through no one’s fault in particular, society has devolved into one big tragedy of the commons. As Mark Fisher put it, “Does anyone really think… that things would improve if we replaced the whole managerial and banking class with a whole new set of (’better’) people? Surely, on the contrary, it is evident that the vices are engendered by the structure, and that while the structure remains, the vices will reproduce themselves.”

That structure is Mammon.

I’ve personally known people who climb the ranks—naively thinking “it will be different this time”—only to watch Mammon swallow their soul, too.

I was close with a boss of mine a few years ago, but after becoming a hot shot executive, Mammon got to her. She made the call to fire me one day before getting a life-changing equity bonus I’d been worked toward for 3 years.

No matter how cautiously optimistic, ethically sound, or “good” you are as an individual, Mammon will remind you that this is, in fact, “a war of all against all.”

Mammon has taken so much from us already.

Now, he’s taking the only thing we have left.

The Slow Cancellation of The Divine

Art is inherently otherworldly.

Artists regularly talk about how they can’t take credit for what they create. It comes “from somewhere else” or from a “higher force.” A secular artist might attribute this to flow state & fiero. I love ’s concept of The Muse. But personally, I simply attribute my artistic creations directly to Jesus (yes, really—i’m a Christian now, i guess).

The Bible itself is not written by God literally. Scripture is Theopneustos — which translates to God-breathed. When we choose creation, God breathes through us (and it smells like Heavenly tic tacs).

Creation itself is, in a sense, a divine act.

What is great art if not God-breathed? Whether its Crime and Punishment or Twilight, or an existential shitpost. Art helps us to feel, to give shape to the shapeless terror of existence. To see or be seen by the warm embrace of the Other.

In our lowest moments, we all turn to art. To music. Or poetry. Or books. Or memes. Or a banger Substack essay. Or whatever gives you the strength to bear an otherwise unbearable existence.

Creation, however seemingly benign or trivial or silly, carries the possibility of being God-breathed. That’s why Mammon forced the algorithms onto us: to corrupt the motivation.

Corrupt the motivation, corrupt the art.

Corrupt the art, corrupt the culture.

Corrupt the culture, corrupt our collective spirit.

It was all an attempt to suffocate God’s Breath by bribing us with the platform’s pocket change.

The suffocation is working.

You feel it too, don’t you?

Don’t worry friend, we’re not the only ones.

Mark Fisher rang the alarm bells early, arguing that we’re not really creating culture anymore, and haven’t been for some time, we’re merely preserving it. Through sequels and remakes, and reboots, and songs that could’ve been released in 1979 coming out in 2004.

Popular culture is a self-referential ouroboros, haunted by a past that refuses to die, a future that refuses to be born, and a present where all that is preserved is perverted.

As Fisher reminds us, “A culture that is merely preserved is no culture at all.”

Culture, like God, is something that must be actively sought. A preserved God—frozen in time, dogma and tribalism—is also a dead God. The true God can be found only in the living, dynamic act of creation and connection, and interpretation

When we channel God’s Breath through our artistic creation, we are actualizing The Divine.

This is precisely what Mammon wants to stop.

Sadly, Mammon grows ever stronger.

The Other (God) is Dead

Mammon is waging a war for your soul. One of his cleverest contraptions was algorithmic social media. It nullifies the subjective human experience by forcing that “war of all against all” dynamic even on the one place we were supposed to connect: our social interactions. As Byung-Chul Han put it, “We are constantly comparing one thing to another thereby flattening them into the Same.”

We displaced real life relationships with the algorithmically curated battle royale for attention, and everyone got lost along the way.

If only it had stopped there…

In 2022, Mammon unleashed his most totalizing weapon yet, something that may severe our very ability to channel God’s breath: generative AI. Using big data and statistics, Mammon can now conjure a convincing facsimile of God-breathed creativity.

I can’t claim to know if art is God-breathed or not, but for AI art… I mean, you’ve seen it, right?

The internet, as we know it, is dead.

Mammon killed it.

This is the final victory of Mammon, of a manifestation of his greatest wish: what Han calls, “the Hell of the Same.” This is not the Hell they warned you about, no pit of fire, but a frictionless, airless chamber of echoes. As Ms. Cobbel on Severance so chillingly observed, “Hell is a product of the human imagination. But whatever we can imagine we can usually create.”

For decades, Mammon has been the lead architect of our collective imagination, convincing us to dream only of more. We imagined a world of never-ending self-improvement, reducing ourselves to burnt out achievement subjects.

Better, smarter, faster, sadder.

We imagined it, and now Mammon is handing us the tools to build it. And for some strange reason… we are building it.

However, the same principle holds true for the divine. The world we imagine is the world we create.

So I am making a choice, right here, right now. I am a lost sheeple finding his way back to Jesus, and I am done imagining hell. I refuse to cede my imagination to Mammon. I choose to imagine a world where we switch off the algorithm and pick up the pen. I choose to imagine a world where we embrace the glorious, inefficient, and God-breathed struggle of creation—be it a novel, a business plan, a meal for our family, or a simple, heartfelt message to a friend.

I may be a rebel without a clue, but at least the vibes are on point!

It means writing the email yourself, even if it takes 45 minutes, because in that struggle, you find your own voice—or maybe even a Greater Voice. It means supporting a human artist instead of prompting a machine. It means forgiving the boss who fired you, not because they deserve it, but because you refuse to let Mammon’s war live in your heart.

In every moment we choose creation over consumption, connection over spectacle, and love over efficiency, we are imagining creating a different world.

We are breathing God—or flow state, or The Muse, or whatever you people call it—back into a world Mammon is trying to suffocate.

This is the war for your soul. It is being waged in your inbox, on your social feed, and in every moment you are tempted to take the easier path. Mammon is counting on your compliance. He is betting you will trade your divine breath for a two-minute document.

Prove him wrong.

If you’re ready to fight back, to imagine a world beyond the Hell of the Same, then you don’t have to do it alone.

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I use Substack notes too much.

Last month, in a stoned stupor, I posted this

This, in addition to a very boomer rant about weed going viral on Substack…

I knew what I had to do.

I awoke from my kush coma, sat down at my desk, and ordered the children in my newsletter sweatshop to start writing.

How do you use weed to enhance, rather than numb your life?

Tragically, I had to learn everything myself the hard way, and don’t want you, my friend, to have to suffer the same fate.

This essay will be helpful for the weed curious as well as experienced stoners (I’m basically the Buddha of the devil’s lettuce).

But before we get into the juicy stuff, let’s cover the basics:

1. Only use weed legally, or you risk paranoia or it being laced with something dangerous.

2. Research & buy from reputable companies that use third party testing.1

3. I strongly recommend not smoking weed since it causes lung damage, and you can get the same effect with edibles or tinctures.

4. If you’re under 25, you should consider waiting until your brain is fully developed, or you risk decreased neurocognitive development.2

5. For edibles: always wait at least 2 hours before taking another one.

Okay, that being said, let’s get into the fun stuff.

intention is everything—

In popular culture, weed is often depicted as a Woodstock hippie drug.

Something you use to tune out, melt into the couch and eat a whole bag of popcorn.

And if you come looking for cheap relaxation, that’s what weed will give you (not that there’s anything wrong with that. Life is hard and it’s okay to chill sometimes).

But weed can be so much more than that.

Your intention sets the stage for your experience, maybe even dictates the outcome.

As Aldous Huxley put it:

“To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large.”

With a slightly different mindset — a tender-hearted lover, a hungry artist, a vulnerable pilgrim — weed becomes a legitimate tool of personal transformation. One that may be difficult, if not impossible to achieve otherwise.

It opens doors of perception you didn’t even know were locked.

Weed isn’t magic per se.

But… it comes pretty

damn close,

boi.

ancient roots of ganja—

Weed has a looong, historical precedent.

Usage dates back to traditional Hindu beliefs — so far back it shows up in the Atharvaveda, texts compiled between 1200–900 BCE.

Cannabis was counted as one of the “five sacred plants,” watched over by a guardian spirit.

The god Shiva himself is bound up with the plant. According to legend, after a heated quarrel, he collapsed in a field, exhausted by the sun. He awoke under the shadow of cannabis leaves, sampled them, and felt instantly restored.

From then on, Shiva became the “Lord of Bhang.”

Colonial officials in the 19th century were so struck by cannabis’ popularity in India that they commissioned the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report, one of the most ambitious drug studies ever conducted.

After thousands of interviews, the commission concluded that suppressing bhang would be “totally unjustifiable.”

It was too ancient, too spiritual, and—when taken in moderation—harmless.

Alcohol, they found, did far more damage.

Fast forward to whatever tf timeline we’re in today, and modern research echoes what ancient Hindu thinkers intuited thousands of years ago.

Cannabis, when used with intention, often yields spiritual experiences: empathy, connection, forgiveness, compassion, insight.

In a 2022 thematic study, 66.1% of respondents reported spiritual benefit from their use of cannabis.

One participant put it simply:

“When I use cannabis, it helps give a larger feeling of understanding, empathy, and forgiveness for things or people that have upset or frustrated me.”

Another went deeper:

“I feel there is a spiritual connection between nature, the planet, cannabis, and ourselves. In my experience, everyone is trying to ‘fill a hole’. Some do it with gambling, drinking, sex, cannabis, eating, etc. But I think that above all, cannabis has the capacity to send people unto a spiritual experience in finding harmony with themselves and the world.”

In other words: this meme is literally true

The ancients had Shiva.

The researchers have their peer-reviewed studies.

I had… very big feelings,

a cocktail of undiagnosed mental illnesses,

and a weed vape I bought at the gas station.

how i found jesus at the bottom of a dorito bag—

At the risk of offending… well, everyone, weed helped me find Jesus.

I don’t mean it turned me into a model Christian. If anything, it stripped away the caricatures of Christianity I had come to despise: the judgmental smugness, the tribal hypocrisy, the ouroboros of empty rituals.

Instead, it gave me Jesus unfiltered. The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount. The voice of love that cuts through resentment. The impossible invitation to forgive.3

Weed gave me just enough distance from my own pain and cynicism to glimpse something different. As Terence McKenna said, psychedelics dissolve opinion structures.

That night, weed dissolved mine. I was left staring at the absence I’d carried for years: a barren sky, a God-shaped hole echoing the heavy emptiness I’d dragged around for decades.

And in that emptiness, something tender returned.

Not Joel fucking Osteen.

Not certainty.

Not dogma.

But Love.

Love, damn it!

A sense that maybe faith is less about knowing

and more about being willing to be broken open.

Which is why, perhaps, there’s such a suspiciously common drug addict → devout Christian pipeline. Get blitzed enough times, stare into the abyss, and sooner or later you’re going to mistake those Cool Ranch Doritos for communion wafers.

Okay.

Now, before I start a new cult where everyone wears white robes and the women are contractually obligated to join my harem, let’s talk about the shadow weed casts.

Because as beautiful as it can be, weed can also really fuck you up if you’re not careful.

legitimate risks—

Weed should not be used to cope with stress. Full stop.

It starts out as just this once.

Once becomes twice.

Twice becomes

every day.

Yes, weed can be addictive. Not in the same chemical, clawing way as nicotine or fentanyl, but in the soft, emotional way where you wake up one day and realize every difficult feeling in your life has been wrapped in smoke and stuffed into a grinder.

Weed boosts what I like to call the feel-good brain chemicals. And if you’re a fellow resident of the collapsing shithole known as “society,” you probably don’t have a lot of those coming in naturally.

So here’s what happens:

• You smoke every day.

• You turn it into an unhealthy coping mechanism for stress, conflict, or drama.

• Instead of being a spiritual sacrament or creative spark, it becomes another way to avoid your own life.

The ancient Vedas didn’t sing hymns to avoidance. Shiva didn’t become the Lord of Bhang because he wanted to scroll TikTok in peace.

Cannabis as crutch is not cannabis as sacrament.

That does not make it evil.

It just means it’s a tool.

And like all tools, it

can either build

you up or dig

you into

a ditch.

unleashing dionysian creativity—

Weed is proof God loves you—or, at least he doesn’t hate you… That much.

Let’s talk about the Dionysian orgasm of creative sensation.

Or, as I like to call it, “the fun stuff.”

Weed can unlock creativity in ways that are hard to access sober. Think of it as a little push into the realm of dream logic, where the rules loosen and your brain is free to make strange, beautiful connections.

Strain matters:

• Indica pulls you into your body, good for feeling, chilling, becoming one with the couch.

• Sativa makes you feel energized, like you’ve swallowed a lightning bolt of ideas. It bursts open surprising connections you’d never make otherwise.

When I’m high, I make things I might never otherwise create—drawings, poems, profoundly sad journal entries that really force me to consider getting a therapist.

But here’s the secret: the real magic is in returning to that art later, sober, and realizing there are deeper hidden meanings you didn’t know were in you.

For example, the cover image for this essay was something I drew while high, and later used to psychoanalyze myself (yes, really).

That’s why you must capture your stoned thoughts.

Grab them in whatever way is easiest:

• Voice-to-text in a writing app.

• Raw voice memos you can transcribe later.

• Even scribbles on a napkin if that’s what’s handy.

Because in the moment, every idea feels like the key to the universe.

But only later do you discover which ones are true portals past prevailing perceptions, and which are just “bro what if clouds are God’s vape smoke??”

For me, Max Murphy—the whole persona, brand, identity—was conceived while high.

And it has turned out to be the most enjoyable creative project of my life.

None of it would exist without the surreal nudge of weed whispering,

hey let’s take all this big hurt and turn it into something beautiful.

Weed cannot replace discipline or practice.

But it can act as a catalyst.

A Dionysian helper.

Weed cracks open the door to everything you locked up bc society’s opinion structures forced you into a conformity you never agreed to.

final thoughts—

In conclusion, I’d like to share a comprehensive list of the terrible things weed has done:

1.

2.

3.

4.

20.

That’s right, motherfucker.

Nothing.

Because the truth is: weed didn’t ruin my life. It didn’t save it either. What it did was show me that my mind, like the world, has more doors than I thought.

Some of them lead to scary places.

Some of them lead to grace.

Others lead to Doritos.

Use it with intention.

Use it with respect.

And if you’re going to light up—light one up for me, friend. The Bible-thumping dipshits who outlawed it in my state, so I will be begrudgingly trying fentanyl.

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It started with a Twitter Ratio.

Kenneth, an econ prof admits he misread crypto, thinking that it would be sensibly regulated.1

An investor claps back with the pErMisSiOnLesS pAyMeNtSs line—to the vindicating screech of crypto twitter, that landfill of garbage cartoon avatar2 NFT pfps.

But here’s my question for Lyn: when was the last time you used crypto to pay for something? Anything?

Probably never.

Because nobody does.

They harp on these noble talking points bc it sounds much better than “yeah, I’m just getting rich by dumping my bags on know-nothing retail investors.”

The crypto fantasy is beautiful, borderline utopian.

The crypto reality is a dystopian ponzi scheme.

I knew a guy who worked a gas station.

We were both interested in crypto.

One day, he found the coin.

It was JasmyCoin.

He went all in.

He pulled out his phone to show me his portfolio. I could not believe the amount.

Over $800,000 fucking dollars of JasmyCoin.

“Oh fuck.”3

This was his entire family’s life savings he’d invested — confident it would double, no triple, in just a few days.

…

Do I even need to tell you how it ended?

After, he wasn’t at the gas station anymore.

Stories like this happen on a daily basis in crypto.

They’re common, banal, perhaps the default experience.

Euphoric enthusiasm followed by heartbreaking disappointment.

I entered the industry as a doe-eyed idealist, excited to disrupt the broken financial system and make the world a better place. But what you say and what you do aren’t always the same.

“Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette” is what insiders tell themselves about people like my gas station friend.

But after seeing how the sausage is made…

I realized we aren’t making the world a better place.

We’re cooking a breakfast laced with financial ruin.

From top to bottom, this industry is rancid, rotten to the core.

Crypto is what happens when a tech bro fucks a casino and botches the abortion.

Grift or Die

The list of things Crypto Bros get right begins and ends with exactly 1 thing: the existing financial system is fucked.

Now, I could list out all the problems with the economy today.

But you already know.

From experience.

Don’t you?

But if you really want the numbers, just go read some if you need someone who actually knows wtf they’re talking about.

You graduate college, pile up five or six figures of debt, and land a job that pays less than your parents made without a degree. You’re told to “just work hard” in a labor market where every rung of the ladder is greased with outsourcing, automation, and bullshit.

I know PhDs in neuroscience, literature, anthropology, sociology—people who’ve devoted a decade or more of their lives to mastering a discipline, a real discipline—only to wind up working in crypto because it’s the only damn thing that pays.

That’s the quiet part nobody wants to say out loud: crypto looks like an opportunity because everything else is a dead end.

Crypto dresses itself up in utopian rhetoric.

• Anti-establishment: Stick it to the banks.

• Decentralization: Power back to the people.

• Financial freedom: Anyone can join (and profit).

If you’re young, ambitious, and broke, that sounds intoxicating.

But sooner or later… you figure out where the money comes from.

Crypto is the actualization of Jordan Peele’s 2019 masterpiece, Us.

The Tethered Economy

In the film, the comfortable lives of middle-class families are “tethered” to uncanny Doppelgängers who live in a liminal underground hellscape where they’re forced to eat raw rabbit.

Every moment of leisure, every beach trip, every smile is paid for with the unseen suffering of someone else.

That’s crypto in a nutshell.

The only difference is that in crypto, the tethered aren’t rising up for revenge (yet), they’re turning to anonymous confession accounts like Coinfessions where they share the dark truth about what crypto has done to them, their finances, and their families.

These stories are disgustingly common across crypto.

A few recent highlights include…

• Someone who dropped out of college to dedicate their life to trading crypto

• Another child losing tuition money while a crypto founder parties in a $30k/night hotel

• A young person losing their $350k housing money

• Someone making $400k, and losing it all: “My life is fucked man, I’m dead inside”

• One of the few who profits admits to lying and deceiving others

If you want an idea of how bad things really are, check out ’s web3 is going great.

The reason Lyn, and people like her, keep hyping up crypto’s “legitimacy” is because the more people that become tethered, the more money the Crypto Bros make.

Doesn’t matter if there are daily hacks, scams and exploits.4

Doesn’t matter if people actually use any of this shit.

Doesn’t matter if it can’t work, even theoretically.

These clowns pretend like they’re reinventing

innovation itself while recreating a

century-old scam.

Why the SEC Exists

The tech industry’s playbook is always the same: break the law with a new piece of tech, call it disruption, and use your ill-gotten gains to lobby Congress so the grift can continue forever.

Like when they bypassed labor laws with gig work.

Like when the bypassed copyright laws with AI plagiarism.

Like when they bypassed zoning laws with short-term rentals while driving up rent.

Crypto is no different.

In the 1920s, grifters realized you don’t need to actually build a business when you can build a convincing illusion of a business, and profit by selling stocks to suckers.

“One infamous 1920s scam was the Radio Pool, in which manipulators drove up the price of RCA stock, took their profits, and left other shareholders to watch helplessly as their shares sank. To make matters worse, many small investors were enticed into buying shares of companies on margin—essentially, with loans that they had to repay out of their pockets if the stock price went down.” (Source).

Radio Pool did not build infrastructure, or supply chains, or employ a workforce.

It was held together by imagination.

The business was fake.

The money was real.

Sound familiar?

The proliferation of ponzi-schemes contributed to The Great Depression. They called them blue sky stocks: when a stock’s price is completely detached from its actual value.

They’re doing exactly what they did in the 1920s… but with crypto tokens this time.

Instead of blue sky stocks, we have meme coins:5

• Fartcoin at ~$800 Million

• Shiba Inu at ~$7.5 Billion

• Dogecoin at ~$35 Billion

If it sounds absurd… that’s because it is.

These coins don’t do anything. They’re memes. Fucking memes.

Even the ones that pretend not to be memes are just fucking memes.

It’s not new. It’s not clever. It’s not innovation. It’s the same con, rebooted with blockchain. And we already learned the hard way what happens when you let it run unchecked.

That’s why the SEC exists—so we don’t crash the entire fucking economy by investing in smoke and mirrors.. again.

Crypto is David Graeber’s bullshit jobs at the scale of a ~$4 Trillion industry: astroturfing for insiders, financial ruin for outsiders, and an economy that funnels its wealth directly to the worst people on the planet.

Crypto Funds Fascism

The Trump family has turned crypto into its own personal Radio Pool:

• Melania Coin/NFTs: ~$200,000

• Trump NFTs: ~$22 Million.

• Trump Token: ~$350 Million

• World Liberty Financial: ~$500 Million

And all of that is just liquid cash. In unrealized gains, they’re sitting on billions.

People like my gas station friend invested in this shit, while the Trump family cashed out.

Billions of dollars vanished into thin air faster than Trump‘s name in the Epstein files.

These are not outliers. These are not a few bad apples. All the apples are bad apples.

And I know this isn’t just theoretical, because I watched it play out when my own Trump-supporting family members bought Trump Coin at the top…

because Trump told them to.

I even warned them they’d

lose their money.

After the price crashed, they didn’t even understand how they’d been scammed. The baffling buffoons somehow blamed the Democrats for this one too.

This is why Trump is an evil genius.

Crypto turns political loyalty into liquidity.

Strip-mine your base until there’s nothing left.

Crypto isn’t a scam. It’s worse than a scam. It’s the campaign fund for the authoritarian war chest, built dollar by dollar from the very people it destroys.

They want a tethered economy. They want you miserable, underground, invisible and suffering. They want more people writing to Coinfessions about how they liquidated their 401k to buy Melania Coin right before the price crashed.

Maybe it’s time we stop allowing ourselves to become tethered.

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Once upon a time, I wrote about how every human wears a social mask — a kind of costume stitched from insecurity, survival instinct, and that famous Kafka quote. It’s how we make sense of the world and how we act around other people.

This one’s different. This time I’m not talking in the abstract. I’m walking you through my personal mask museum.1

We’re going in chronological order, I’ll tell you what each mask gave me, what it took from me, and then I’ll point on the doll where it hurt me.

white trash—

Growing up poor in a rough part of New York, you learn fast that softness gets eaten alive.

My dad raised me to always be ready to fight. I wore this mask because if I didn’t, someone would beat my ass down.

Better to be feared than loved when you’re twelve years old and surrounded by wolves.

I remember walking through crowded halls with my best friend, an Albanian immigrant who was older and stronger than everyone else. We’d lock arms and just plow through piles of kids on our way to class.

It felt badass.

Earned me respect.

Respect is a helluva drug.

But this mask runs on battery acid. Being feared is exhausting. Survival rewires you, and you never fully unplug.

A lot of poor boys learn this mask young, because poverty teaches that kindness is liability, tenderness is bait.

If you’re white trash — especially a man — you choose to be feared because love isn’t really an option for people like us.

Or, so the story goes.

Final Rating:

⭐⭐☆☆☆ — Effective for survival, but terrible long-term side effects.

Read more

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I have two regrets in life:

1. Thinking my face was my True Self™

2. Not following sooner

The second is easier to explain. Karlsson is one of those rare writers who can take a tired cultural cliché and hold it up to the light until it fractures. In a recent Substack Note, he made an observation that’s been keeping me up at night:

“The problem is that any idea that becomes dominant and high status—as the idea of being authentic has these days—any idea that gets embraced by many people will be transformed into a dark version of itself.”

He was talking about authenticity, but the insight applies to everything — but especially to personal identity.

What we can call the social mask: the persona you wear in public life, the curated self that’s less like a photograph and more like a costume.

Some are protective.

Some are functional.

All of them rot if worn for too long.

costume parties, or what it means to wear a mask

"I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party, and I attended with my real face." —Franz Kafka

Human beings are multi-faceted creatures. Coupled with the infinite of the universe, and you have a real need for what Ernest Becker called a “partialization of life.”

There is simply too much raw data floating around the world.

Instead of being overwhelmed by the everything, we flatten the world into manageable chunks.

One of the most important dimensions where this takes place is with our identity. Not the private identity either, but the social one—the parts of yourself you show to others in various social contexts.

These social masks are often subconscious.

Let’s say you were really silly on the first day of kindergarten.

Always laughing, telling jokes, and amusing others around you.

People might call you a class clown.

And maybe it sticks.

Next thing you know you’re a struggling stand up comedian who can only keep the lights on thanks to the OnlyFans side gig (don’t worry bro, I’m only using OnlyFans ironically as an inside joke).

Masks can be sticky like that.

When people start thinking of you as “the class clown” that perception becomes ever more solidified as your sense of self. The mask starts to feel like “you.”

But even good masks come with a cost.

the mask i thought would save me

It was about 10 o’clock at night.

We made our way up the curvy mountainside road beneath an endless array of dingy yellow street lights.

Out of nowhere, a car swerved directly toward my friends and I.

There were 3 of us.

We dodged the vehicle by hopping into a ditch on the side of the road.

The car stopped.

What looked like five grown men piled out of the car, and immediately started chasing us.

This is how I grew up.

We got away that night—thank fuck—but it solidified cynical advice my drunken bastard father taught me: always be ready to fight.

This world was a really violent place.

You can perpetrate that violence.

Or, you can be victimized by it.

This little incident was proof.

But deep down I knew: I couldn’t build a future on fists. That mask—the angry white boy—wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

When my family moved out of New York a few months later, I decided to try something else.

the thug that became a nerd

I engineered my own reinvention, more earnestly than cynically.

Bought glasses. Buttoned shirts. Khakis. Gave 110% in school.

Within weeks, I had gone from “white-trash gangster wannabe” to “the smart kid.” And what shocked me most wasn’t the change itself—it was how easily everyone else accepted it.

They totally bought it—hook, line, and stinker.

This is why you should listen to Gen Z when they tell you to “commit to the bit.” It’s a silly internet meme, yes, but also a profound insight into human growth and potential.

Teachers told me that I “looked smart.”

Classmates assumed I was a nerd.

Even I started to believe it.

Little did they know that only months earlier I had a comparable background to Eminem before he got famous.

This nerd mask gave me oxygen where I’d been suffocating for years.

With enough time, I learned how to breathe.

when the mask becomes you

The nerd persona bought me safety, stability, and—eventually—opportunity.

It gave teachers a reason to forgive my mistakes, to see me as promising rather than hopeless. It put me on a trajectory my old mask never could.

But even the good masks rot if you wear them too long.

The nerd mask came with side effects:

• I forced myself through classics I didn’t enjoy, while the rest of the class watched movies (couldn’t even allow myself to enjoy Frozen 😭)

• I branded myself as a walking textbook, which isn’t exactly the best friendship strategy

• I developed a bottomless hunger to “know everything,” which is really just a recipe for feeling perpetually behind

First the mask saved me.

Then, the mask trapped me.

the dark side of good ideas

Which brings me back to Karlsson’s line:

“The problem is that any idea that becomes dominant and high status… will be transformed into a dark version of itself.”

Authenticity becomes performance.

Intelligence becomes pretension.

Masculinity becomes violence.

There is good in the bad and bad in the good. Especially in social masks. Not to get started on some ying yang wuu wuu nonsense but…

Masks are not inherently bad, but they can calcify.

They stick to your face until you forget they were masks in the first place.

Even my white-trash wannabe gangster mask had a grain of good: physical safety. (Maybe this is my repressed toxic masculinity talking, but I’ve been in plenty of fights… and I’ve never lost one.)

There is no perfect mask.

Nor is there a truly “authentic” self.

Our mission—as human beings—is to try on many masks, find the grains of good, reject the bad, and incorporate them into a multidimensional sense of self so we can transcend the limits of concrete consciousness.

Take another hit homie, because we’re going even deeper.

toward a dialectical self

Here’s where I’ve landed:

Masks are more than clever social deceptions. They’re experiments. You try one on, internalize it, and if you do this enough times, something strange happens: the masks begin to speak to each other.1

That’s the beginning of a dialectical sense of self.

When the “thug” part of me whispers to the “nerd” part, I understand toughness differently.

When the “nerd” negotiates with the “writer,” I see how knowledge bends into storytelling.

Each mask gives me a lens.

When you layer enough of them together, you aren’t “losing your authentic self”—you gain additional dimensionality.

This, I think, is how real cultural understanding is born. Maybe even enlightenment?!

Not from clinging to a single “true self,” but from stitching together the dialogue between all the masks you’ve ever worn.

And hopefully, there will be many more.

wearing masks lightly

So no, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Amor Fati, motherfucker.

“Do not kill the part of you that is cringe. Kill the part that cringes.” —the internet.

We strive to wear the mask in full recognition that it is a mask, to know when it’s time to take one off, or swap it out, or let it argue with another part of you until something deeper emerges.

As the OG edge-lord-turned-thought-leader (Nietzsche) reminded us, “Everything profound loves masks.”

Go, and be profound, my friend.

Some part of me will always be the thug itching to throw hands.

Another will always be the nerd grinding through a Dostoyevsky novel I barely understand.

And those are just two masks from my collection.. ;)

Somewhere between those voices—between all the masks—I can almost hear something like wisdom. Or, maybe it’s just the weed gummy kicking in.

Just don’t test me in the comments section. I’m still learning which mask to wear when the gloves come off — but either way, I’ll commit to the bit.

And if you liked this essay, the first installment of The Esoteric Teachings of Max Murphy (my paid newsletter) is dropping soon: a full, unfiltered review of every mask I’ve ever worn — from thug to nerd to writer and beyond. Consider it the extended universe of this piece.

ps: huge shoutout to for posting to Substack Notes & inspiring this essay. If you value wisdom as much as I pretend to, then you’ll love his newsletter, Escaping Flatland.

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It started with a tweet.

Kache—a meme lord, software engineer, and Elon Musk reply guy—was fired from Twitter just 10 days before his equity cliff.

Years of work, thousands in potential gains, all vaporized into cold, thin air.

But here’s what most people missed:

Kache didn’t get mad. He didn’t really lash out. He didn’t even seem to process what had happened.

Instead, he kept tweeting like everything was fine. Like he hadn’t just been publicly and financially humiliated by the company and the billionaire he simps for daily.

And that, right there, is the new political condition.

We are living in the era of the cuckold.

You vote for leopards to eat someone else’s face—they eat yours anyway—and you still show up to the next rally like it’s a tailgate party.

And the sickest part?

You fuckers like it.

Kache My Girlfriend Outside, Daddy

Let me be clear: I don’t want to shame this guy. I’m not writing this to bully him or turn him into a meme.

He’s a human being. He deserves fair compensation. He deserves dignity. Honestly, he should still get his equity—even if his entire brand is built on mocking people who believe in things like fairness.

Because while his case may be ironic, it’s also deeply sad.

And increasingly—the norm.

Here’s a guy who gave years of his life to a company, only to get cut loose right before getting his piece of the pie. By the richest man on Earth.

Honestly, that sucks.

But instead of feeling betrayed, he continues to post. Defend. Tweet. Simp.

He’s been discarded like a stiff-jawed hooker shoved out of a limousine—and his response is to send a thank-you card.

What else do you call that but a cuck?

Dale Gribble Is the Political Right 🚬🤓☠️

If you want to understand the modern conservative psyche, you don’t need to study political theory or dig through decades of voting data.

You just need to watch King of the Hill.

Dale Gribble is the alpha of the modern beta:

A chain-smoking, conspiracy-addled exterminator who lives in suburban poverty, runs a small business with zero growth, and devotes his life to fighting imaginary threats from “the government.”

Meanwhile—his wife Nancy is being railed by another man.

Repeatedly.

In their house.

For over a decade.

His kid isn’t even his.

He never even notices.

Why do you think that is?

Because Dale is so consumed with shadowy fantasies—aliens, feds, the frogs turning gay—that he literally cannot see the humiliation happening in his own bedroom.

That’s not a joke in a silly sitcom.

That’s a metaphor for an entire political movement.

The Mask of Manhood 🎭💪🏻🏋🏼‍♂️

This isn’t just about Kache. Or Dale.

It’s all of them.

The whole id of the modern right.

They love to perform masculinity. Strength. Alpha male energy.

But on some level—even they know it’s fake.

That’s why their social media of choice isn’t Facebook or Instagram.

It’s 4chan.1

A digital basement with no names, no faces, no accountability.

This is where the most humiliated men on Earth turned racist shit-posting into the end of democracy.

Because when you don’t believe you have power in real life, the next best thing is pretending to be powerful online—behind a mask.

And this mask obsession isn’t just metaphorical.

It has a name, motherfucker!

Rusty Shackleford.

That’s what Dale Gribble calls himself all the time—a fake identity he insists on using, even though everyone around him knows it’s fake.

Why?

Because Dale knows—deep down—that he’s a loser. A cuck. A man who feels humiliated by his own existence.

He can’t face that.

So he hides behind an alias.

Just like the frog avatars. The Roman statues. The AI-generated Chadlords of Elon’s X.

These guys don’t want to be seen. Not really. Because they know the truth. They know what porn they watch. Who they voted for. Who’s really fucking them—even if they can’t admit it.

Rather than face an uncomfortable truth, they log on under an alias leaving racist comments across the internet as if it were their life’s calling.

They have nothing else.

And if you think this ends with anonymous shitposters, think again.

Because the mask isn’t just for the foot soldiers.

It’s for the generals too.

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It started like most good internet stories do: with a viral tweet, mild absurdity, and a tiny whiff of scandal.

Soham Parekh, an Indian software engineer, had somehow worked ~10 remote jobs simultaneously.

Not over a decade.

Not one after another.

At the same damn time.

The startup world lost its mind.

Suddenly every tech bro on Twitter turned into a morality cop. Reddit was flooded with speculative breakdowns of how he pulled it off. TikTok gurus weighed in like courtroom analysts. It was the Trial of Soham Parekh, and everyone had an opinion.

But the real twist?

Every former coworker who spoke up said the same thing:

He was nice.

He did good work.

He wasn’t slacking.

Yeah, he skipped meetings and pushed a few deadlines back, but often not enough to be fired.

So… what exactly are we mad about?

Why did this become a scandal?

Soham didn’t break the rules of employment.

He broke the illusion.

Bullshit Jobs

If the work is real, 10 jobs is impossible. Period.

But if the jobs are bullshit—and you can juggle 10 of them without anyone noticing?

Well, that’s not scamming, that’s proof.

Proof that most white-collar jobs don’t exist to create value but to perform productivity. It isn’t your fault if the boss doesn’t know the difference. Now, I could pull out David Graeber’s definition of a “bullshit job” and run through the theory.

But honestly?

Soham Parekh is the theory.

He’s the applied mathematics of a system built on empty promises, professional illusions, and an economy that only knows how to extract.

These jobs are bullshit because the people in charge aren’t running companies—they’re selling stories. The story of The Startup that is going to disrupt entire industries, reinvent innovation itself, and become the next unicorn so already rich people can become even richer!

Yippee.

Soham teaches us that, apparently, you can bullshit a bullshitter.

If you’re too deep in notion workflows to notice your engineer is working nine other jobs… that sounds like a you problem, buddy.

In This Economy?

“How can Soham work 10 jobs?!”

That’s the wrong question.

We’re living through a cost-of-living crisis, rapidly advancing AI automation, and the most geopolitical volatility since the Second World War.

How can you afford not to work 10 jobs?

Working 110% at one job doesn’t make you noble, it makes you a corporate cuckold.

You stay loyal.

You give your all.

You don’t stack jobs.

You drink the kool-aid.

You believe in the company mission, the team, the product.

What happens then?

A tale as old as time.

A few weeks before the Soham story, a Twitter engineer was fired just 10 days before his vesting cliff.

He lost out on equity he’s been working toward for years.

That story made the rounds because it involved a big-name company and a prolific shit-poster.

But here’s the secret no one wants to admit:

This happens all the time.

It happened to me just a week earlier:

Years of effort—and a life-changing amount of money for a peasant like me—down the drain.

I worked nights.

I worked weekends.

I worked through part of my goddamn parental leave so the team could hit an important deadline.

My thanks?

Getting “laid off” one day before the equity I’d sacrificed so much to earn.

ONE. FUCKING. DAY.1

That’s all it took to erase everything I gave.

And I won’t lie to you: it hurts.

The disappointment, the betrayal by people I thought were my friends, the traumatic stress of my finances falling out from under me—putting my entire family at risk.

Is that how you want to end up?

Screwed over, years of your life vanishing into cold, thin air?

Or, do you want to be like Soham—pragmatically working multiple jobs, stacking paychecks, and fighting back with the only option that’s left?

You Wanted a Free Market? This Is the Free Market.

This is what gets me.

When companies lay people off right before an IPO?

“Just business.”

When trust funds gut your department and pocket the difference?

“Capital efficiency.”

When a founder fires you the day before your equity cliff?

“They had to make hard choices.”

But when a worker decides to sell their time to whoever pays for it—without loyalty to a single employer?

Suddenly it’s “unethical.”

Suddenly it’s “dishonest.”

Suddenly it’s “career-ending.”

So let’s be honest.

You were never in this for merit, or value, or even the dignity of capitalism.

You wanted to get rich.

And you wanted someone else to pay the price.

Let’s not forget the original tweet that started this storm was an attempt to publicly shame and blacklist Soham from the industry.

Meanwhile, Suhail’s own bio clearly states he’s building two separate companies. I’m sure he’s investing, advising, and “leading” even more behind the scenes.

When the rich stack income streams, they get called brilliant. When the peasants do it, we get publicly shamed and blacklisted.

That’s some real rules for thee, not for me energy.

Final Thoughts

Soham Parekh isn’t the villain.

He’s the mirror.

He didn’t steal from the system.

He revealed it.

And what he revealed was damning.

These jobs were fake.

The managers were clueless.

The system squeezed us, and fucked us over the second it was convenient.

So yeah, we are tired.

We are tired of doing two months of work in two weeks.

We are tired of building your perfect product and then being “laid off” the day before getting our piece of the pie.

We are tired of ghostwriting “thought leadership” tweets for people who can’t be bothered with those pesky little things like thinking or leading.

When you shafted us, you shrugged your shoulders and said, “that’s the free market.”

Well guess what?

The free market works two ways, you trust-fund motherfucker.

And if you can’t survive in the meritocracy you claim to worship—

maybe you shouldn’t be running the place?

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