Making Sense of Whats Happening.

How to make sense of the unfolding reality of our present moment.

We grow up believing in the stories of heroes, fairy tales, and the promise of adulthood. But what happens when the illusions shatter, and we find ourselves adrift in a broken game, surrounded by systems that stifle vitality and truth? This piece explores the lost art of initiation, the sobering truth that what we think is adulthood is another form of adolescence, and how awakening is both a personal and collective necessity. It is the first congealing of a manifesto for radical self-ownership, reclaiming the life we were meant to live and the horizon of possibility we would want to leave for our children.

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You were born into this world, arriving in a mess of confusion, bewilderment and utter helplessness, so that you could make your own unique way through a necessary combination of nurture and struggle, to the playground of childhood.

Childhood is a state of being defined by its own necessary pairings of discovery and instruction, of limits and curiosities. As children, we wake into a garden of innocence, already on a journey towards a destination we both cannot wait to arrive at and over time become certain we can never reach. Our greatest desire as a child is to be a grown-up.

We never imagine the pain and heartbreak life has in store for us. We have to be cured of the ignorance of it, through the cruelty and selfishness of other children, through the way our will is shaped by the pruning and grafting of education and parenting we are gifted with and burdened with by the world, at the same time.

And then, at some utterly indiscernible point, a moment you never realise while it is happening, the wonder and innocence die and the troubling demands of being grown-up begin to arrive, first in the body, and then the voice. And then at some point, you discover—far too late—your childhood has died. You don’t know when it happened, only that you were ejected rudely from the garden and you find yourself in the awkward limbo where you no longer belong to childhood, but you also do not belong to adulthood club either. A chapter was closed behind you with no rite of passage and no acknowledgement. You wake up one moment to find yourself a stowaway of your own uncertain future—no map, and no passport—awakening into the sobering realisation that adulthood is something of a sham. You discover with a mixture of alarm and anger that you don’t know how to process, that your parents are deeply flawed, that the future is not nearly as bright or hopeful as you needed it to be, and that adulthood is not the sweet passport to empowerment and freedom you one imagined.

Any attempt to claim the inheritance of hope and wonder you had a child is guarded by the shades of wounding, which if we try and wrestle with those, without the sacred gift of initiation, that encounter only deepens the pain of the loss of innocence and deepens the sense of grief we do not have the tools yet to process, tools it takes years to acquire and a lifetime to master.

But life drags us forward, and we fall out of love with our childhood, and along with it, we fall out of love with our parents and their entire village of sensibilities and beliefs. We fall instead deeply in love with our village of peers. Raw and without initiation we metaphorically (or literally) sneak out of the house, to fumble and gate-crash our way into the illicit house party—a heady scene of culture, language, music, and fashion we call adolescence. Still languishing helplessly in the throes of puberty, we arrive in an excited panic, to a raging marketplace of meaning and social currency, a volatile and seductive economy of status, reputation and attention. Our whole project of life during this time is how to play the game we want to play, flirting with the rules and limits of the game that are imposed on us by our families and school.

The psychological immaturity and ignorance we begin with is its own blessing without which we could not throw ourselves so headlong into that project and thereby engage so deeply and so seriously with the ridiculous premises that adolescence is always founded on.

But that same absurdly convoluted intestine of our education system and the social operating system of modern life provide the peristalsis by which we are ushered, almost against our will, and eventually ejected from the rectum of that farce of that. We are flushed promptly from the half-baked reality that we spent so much energy belonging to and tumble into the sewage works of our first delusion of adulthood. We embark on careers, relationships and other life paths of exploration that believe at first to be certain pathways to citizenship of the world. We start playing new games, with increasing seriousness, drawn deeper through the seductions and thankless demands of the career game, the relationship game, the acquisition and consumption game. These pull an invisible matrix over our eyes, shaping a reality we imagine reality to be, and all that it means to be an adult. Only much later do we only discover that this is simply another childhood in which we engage with a new fantasy to figure out which dreams can be realised and which we have to give up on, to make room for others.

The ‘giving up’ on dreams is itself a necessary part of discovering who we are.

All of these phases of life are necessary, both in their spacing out and in the completeness of the illusion we subscribe to while we inhabit them. At every phase, we imagine we understand ourselves and what life is, and it takes precisely that exact phase to work on us like an alchemy. The hard knock of it is what grinds or smelts away everything that is not us. Equally, the ‘us’ that we become is not a fully formed thing waiting only to be liberated from an unnecessary husk. The husk is just as essential to the phase of life when the kernel has to be abandoned to the vastness of the world so that it can protect the precious seed within while it finds purchase and waits for its season. The husk is just as necessary as the threshing it endures. Our different phases of life are like different phases of a rocket launch, and in our transitions between phases, something always has to be jettisoned so that the payload can be propelled forward.

Initiation is simply the guidance given to that which is becoming, to make it aware of the necessity and inevitability of change, the reality of the forms of death it has to endure, and how these are the essential gate-keepers of transformation and renewal.

In the absence of initiation, these transitional experiences can be frightening and disorienting. Collectively we are experiencing the ending of our old delusion. This is because the reality that we believe we inhabit has begun to unravel. Our models for how things work and how we get our needs met, what we value and find important, has begun to change. And by definition, it’s not as if we have a better model to replace it with. We have to step off the shaky ground of our crumbling reality and have nowhere to step onto in the meantime. That is always the fact of transition from one phase of reality to the next.

Initiation is the practice by which someone who is experiencing that transition is helped by the kindness of context. Once you know what you are experiencing, it does not remain quite so difficult. Once you understand that it is normal that you are supposed to feel uncertain and that you cannot realistically feel any other way, the valence of the anxiety and distress becomes more manageable. Initiation ideally also provides a model of reality that is more enduring and a set of practices and guidelines by which that model of reality can be integrated. Integration is how we belong to reality.

It needs to be mentioned that this transition is not something that is going to happen all at once, either for an individual or for the collective.

Remember puberty doesn’t happen to all the children of a generation at the same time, and then for each child, it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in waves. Some earlier than the rest and some trailing behind the masses in the middle. Animal Migrations are this way. Not everyone transcends their adolescence at the same time, or in the same way. This is how our awakening is happening.

Awakening is not some spiritual nonsense, it is just a process of this transition as experienced from the first-person perspective, with or without the necessary context. In the absence of initiation, the models of reality that we reach for, the philosophies and truths we try to pull over our heads like a blanket determine the reality we inhabit after that transition. There is no end to the list of old and new ideas that someone waking up can encounter on the internet today. Even the best blankets we have woven are not exactly sufficient for the task right now, and some of them make our predicament worse. At best someone reaches for something wholesome and well constructed like Buddhism. At worst, they reach for conspiracy theories or any of the thousands of content creators peddling ideology, identity politics, Instagram spirituality or frat-boy Stoicism.

If you are experiencing burnout and overwhelm, if you are questioning the meaning of the reality that you inhabit, it means your psyche is declaring its readiness for an awakening.

As part of a Public Service Announcement, I am letting you know that what you are experiencing as psychosis and burnout is your sanity and vitality protesting the fact that the reality you think you belong to is already unravelling. There are no right or only ways to step through this process, but there are better and worse ones.

As a child, you begin by believing in heroes and princesses. The doorway to adolescence is where those dreams are taken from you, through heartbreak or from wanting to distance yourself from your own earlier foolishness.

They become replaced with the cultural heroes of teenagers: celebrities. As teenagers our entire hierarchy of meaning is determined by a brokerage of glamour and status we call celebrity. If you were lucky, what you had and what you were, intersected with the current market sentiment and you were regarded as popular. If you were unlucky in that way, you were unpopular. The worst fate an adolescent can endure is not unpopularity, but a form of ‘negative celebrity’ where they occupy the focus of attention into that powerful and terrible form of psychological abuse we call bullying.

It is precisely because of this dynamic that we are forced to rebel against and reject our parents and the other adults in our community, their beliefs and systems of control so vehemently because they “have no game”. They don’t understand. They have no appreciation for the kind of social consequences we have to contend with, they are deaf to our plight and worse, they complicate the life we have to endure with rules and expectations that have no alignment and resonance with the needs and burdens of that life.

That rebellion becomes essential so that we can learn a curriculum of social skills, and define an identity and a personal psychological resilience that we build on as we make our next transitions.

We think we achieve adulthood when we start college, or when the law says that we can have sex, drive a car, or drink alcohol legally. Our rites of passage are thus associated with the tokens or facts of these things: Graduating, losing our virginity, getting a driver’s license, getting drunk with our friends.

When we actually achieve adulthood, our model of reality is shattered again, when we finally wake up to the foolishness of the celebrity game and can see it for the farce that it really was this whole time. Humans who occupy the highest social status at school invariably have the hardest time letting go of the celebrity and social value they once enjoyed. They struggle to adapt more than the unpopular kids because they are conditioned by that reality to expect a steady feed of validation and meaning through the way that once worked.

Sports, show business and social media have become channels of bypass, by which so-called adults can thrive in the celebrity game without going through that necessary transition.

The regular 'rank and file find it easier, but the deeply unpopular kids suffer a different kind of handicap where their informal and necessary education of social skills is not only incomplete but deeply compromised by the level of bullying they have to endure. The effect on their psyche and nervous system is lasting and has to be stumbled through awkwardly via work, social and romantic relationships. Additionally, kids who were not allowed to rebel, therefore carry a similar but different social and psychological maladaption.

Like sports and the celebrity game, success in our many professional games of status forms the trappings that keep the players wedded to broken games. This is why science, medicine, academia, business and politics have cultures that are predicated on the preservation of their own games. Whatever is systemically broken cannot be fixed, because it cannot be challenged, because ultimately no one wants to jeopardise the gains they have and the privileges that go with it.

Over the past 100 generations, as we disintegrated the art and practice of Initiation, we unconsciously and unwittingly created the social operating system we call our current reality. Gradually all our seats of power became occupied by the uninitiated. What we think of as the adult world, is really a confusion of clueless grown-ups who don’t really get it, adolescents who think they are all grown up, and celebrities who are too captured by their status and success to understand the implications of the reality they live outside of.

You can tell it is a form of adolescence because of the way we attribute meaning to celebrity and status and by how the mob are titillated by the flexing of populist heroes. Teenagers thrive psychologically on confected drama—Becky commented something about Chloe and now Tiffany has to run with her to the bathroom while they pump each other’s emotional tyres and perform fractal autopsies via text and social media until everyone is drawn into the media storm of it.

This is the exact state of our news and politics now. If’s not gossip and scandal it is propaganda and spin.

Anyone still hedging for their team or their guy, or at worst braying and rattling pitchforks in the service of a political or ideological cause, is the virus not the antibody.

Politics is not dead, it is the sword we are throwing ourselves on, it is the fire we are immolating ourselves with, it is the bestial erection we are violating ourselves by, it is the perversion through which we are desecrating what we have raised that was worthy.

Politics has become a cult war, with each cult demanding you compromise your integrity and with it your dignity, placing buffoons and grifters on pedestals, so that you can belong to the group whom the law protects but does not bind, as you look the other way whilst dehumanising the rest, who the law must bind but not protect.

This is the madness we call reality. Social media is the delivery system of this social contagion.

Social Media would reward saying “Fuck Social Media” if it trended.

Similarly, if you think you are not being treated like a child, consider the reality of the business world we have accepted as normal. What we have normalized in the context of business and enterprise is a social structure that functions disturbingly like totalitarian servitude.

‘They', meaning organisations, dictate what you do, when you are allowed to go, where you sit, how loudly you can speak, what you can say, how you dress, and, to some extent, how you think—even when you can go to the bathroom. While they cannot legally harm you, they readily co-opt your mental health, eroding your sense of autonomy and well-being.

Insubordination is treated as one of the three ultimate social crimes.

Disloyalty and dissent are the others. To be insubordinate is to demonstrate your disloyalty, which is to demonstrate your lack of gratitude and therefore your lack of character. To challenge the party line is to mark yourself as ‘the wrong sort’, regardless of the merit of your challenge or what it was aiming to protect.

Regardless of how you are treated, the insult to your integrity and intelligence, you have to swallow the spin and be seen to agree with it. It is your job to perform ideological correction in your fellow employees.

You are technically free to leave or dissent, but they wield control over your reputation and future prospects, ensuring that leaving is often as much a submission as staying. Dissent results in a mark against your record and leaving implies disloyalty and a lack of appreciation for the privileges you were given. Within this culture, an elite minority are protected by rules that they are not bound by, and the rest are bound by rules they are not protected by.

Our organisations are less accountable than ordinary citizens and the citizens of the elite class in this social structure are less accountable than the rest.

It is a system where submission and inequality are institutionalized under the guise of professionalism and order even though we know that in every shootout between ethics and profit, profit has to win.

Within this culture, you are expected to tow the party line, and like a totalitarian regime, you cannot sow dissent by contradicting the official party line, its noble claims and deified reputation. "You are free to starve" as Noam Chomsky says.

LinkedIn is the social media face of that culture. It is a form of psychological indoctrination that rewards compliance, where adults normalise and perpetuate a culture we last saw in grade school where meaningless accomplishments are celebrated with fake accolades. Everyone is so conditioned to a collective game of Emperor’s new clothes that you are left believing you must be flawed if you cannot play along.

Very cleverly the politics and ideological capture that infuse business and social media so insidiously, have skilfully diverted the mistrust and ire of the public not at the organisations who orchestrate the drama, but at ethical boogeymen and ideological scapegoats. The rabble are completely engrossed in this spectacle with all the class of the UFC, this grotesque carnival that is deliberately shaped and perpetually agitated by the media.

AI is not good or bad on its own. It is a technology, but you have to face the reality of the level of wisdom, maturity and goodwill of the leaders who are deciding how to deploy that technology and how that aligns with what you care for in this world, or not. We are all waiting around for the moment when technology eclipses human strengths and intelligence, but we missed this other threshold that has already happened, where technology undermined our human weaknesses. Social, media, politics and business know exactly how to manipulate your psychology. They have all your data, and they know how to manipulate the law.

Art is our Cultural mirror.

What would you still like me to show you in that mirror that you have not already seen—the direness of the unnatural predicament you are caught in—that has not already been explained in art:

The Matrix.
Severance.
Silo.

These shows come to mind readily. They are part of a growing genre that has been getting more and more disturbing over time, not because the stories are more disturbing, but because gradually we are waking up to the fact that art imitates life and we are recognising how overt the dysfunction and systems of control are.

These examples are part of a long list of shows and movies that spell out our dystopian dysfunction.

You are Here!

Bring to mind your social media feed, the news cycle you cannot avoid, the endless torrent of absolute trash that we generate in our engagement with that, with memes and opinions, the petabytes of video, photos, posts and opinions that we co-create into that apocalyptic deluge.

Now freeze frame and take a look at the chaos of glamour and drama and lols, and all the other absurd bullshit we are engaged in, supposedly as adults, and try to find any fucking meaning out of any of it beyond what your ancestors would have wanted from life: To be prosperous and to leave a worthy legacy. If our visions of greatness ever aim to eclipse that, we are truly lost.

My Manifesto is acting as if nothing else matters more.

The key is not to rage against the machine endlessly or to place blame outside ourselves but to engage in radical self-ownership: to reclaim our energy, focus, and vitality from the broken systems we inhabit.

There is no way our current model is ever going to make real contact with that. We reached a tipping point and there are no levers in the game we created that can pull things right. All the levers are part of the brokenness of the game.

We are in another childhood, another adolescence. This time, there are no grown-ups, all our so-called leaders are all caught in the same matrix.

You are going to have to pull yourself out of the digital and synthetic filth and undead rot! Social media is an insidious parasitic carrier system and your sanity and vitality is the host. That carrier system itself is possessed by the Spirit of Empire, to which we owe everything, all our triumphs and all our terrible and damning failures.

Life is the unwilling host.

You shake the disease by choosing Life. That is what Love is, or it is nothing.

Get the taste of blame out of your mouth. Face your own shit.

That’s what real adults do.

Our choice really boils down to the plain truth that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

I am raising a flag, a tent of sanity on the battlefield for the human soul that we are already in, to let people know there is a way to reclaim your sanity and your sovereignty. There can be no right or only ways, but there sure as hell have to be better and worse ways—I am committed to exploring and practising the better ways.

If fifteen years from now my child will become a young adult. When she looks at the mess we are creating and asks me what I did about it, I want to be able to meet her eyes without shame and say “Whatever it took”.

I am looking for anyone who is past ready to engage meaningfully with this conversation, who is done looking away, who is already wise to the fact that politics is the disease, not the cure, and who wants nothing more than to make sense of what it might mean to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. You are my kind of people, and I cannot and do not want to keep doing this alone. I cannot be the only one who reasons this way and feels this way.

This is my way of lighting a beacon so we can find each other in the rising storm, pull our light together and begin acting like the leaders we would follow.