What follows isn't about a woman. It's about what the feminine can do for the masculine:

She is the hand on my shoulder in the middle of a dream, telling me to wake up.
She is the breath that lifts me when my chest forgets how.

She is the softness behind my eyes that lets me see beyond the shadow of mind.
She is the waterfall that finds the rigidities in me and softens them.

She is the scent of jasmine as I descend upon the mountainous hill.
She is the sweetness I felt when I saw myself in her eyes.

She is real. What she opens in me is ancient.

She makes me see how right I was and yet how wrong I was.

She breaks the small boy in me who is still waiting to be approved of.

She sees me as something older than a lover.
Something her first memory already knew.

There is no fear of obligation or what the future holds, for together we breathe the same air.

We live in a world of small fears, but with her I remember I’m just a visitor.

I don’t want her for the sex or the likes.
I want her because the part of me that wants her dissolves the moment she’s near.

If she elevates me we elevate. If I elevate her we elevate.

She and I are, on some level, One.
I sense I’m going too far, I better stop now.

She says no keep going, so I kiss her goodnight.
Before we drift into a stillness quieter than sleep.

Remember Covid? Feels like a blur, doesn’t it? A global event that shut the entire planet down for the best part of two years. And yet when you reach for it in your mind’s eye, it’s hard to remember it all.

Lockdown blurs into lockdown. Months fold into each other. The thing that was supposed to define the decade has the texture of a half-remembered dream.

Remember DVDs? Before Netflix. Renting a film from a shop, holding the case in your hand, deciding for an entire evening on one thing and committing to it.

Remember landlines? A single phone in the hallway, ringing into the house, with no notion that a person could be reached at all hours.

Remember dial-up internet? The kind that made that lovely, welcoming screech just before you connected, making you feel like you were on the cusp of entering an exciting new world.

Now reach further back.

Remember walking down a street and not seeing a single person looking at a phone? More people walked with their heads up. They looked at buildings. They looked at each other. They made eye contact with strangers, and the eye contact occasionally turned into a conversation, and the conversation occasionally turned into a friendship, partly because nobody had a portable escape hatch in their pocket.

Remember, nobody was taking pictures? And if they were, they were using real cameras that made the moment seem really worth it. You went to a wedding, a birthday, a concert, a sunset, and you experienced it. The memory of the event had to live in you. There was no second version of the night in the camera roll. Whatever you took away was what was actually inside your mind when it ended.

Remember the pace? The slowness of everything? Sunday afternoons that stretched. A trip to a friend’s house that took the whole day because there was nowhere else you were supposed to be, no parallel conversations running in your pocket, no algorithm refreshing for your return.

People sat in cafés without reaching for anything. They waited at bus stops without scrolling. The boredom wasn’t a problem to be solved. It was just a texture of being alive.

People seemed more content. They moved more slowly. The speed of them, the unhurriedness, the absence of that thin permanent frown of someone half-checking something, was unmistakable.

That world existed inside one lifetime. Yours.

And it doesn’t feel like one lifetime ago. It feels like another civilisation.

La belle époque.

Something has happened to us.

The convenience has obscured the size of the trade. We are more powerful than any humans who have ever lived. We can reach anyone, find anything, learn any subject, build any tool, all due to high-speed access to the internet and everything it entails. The gains are real. I am not pretending they aren’t.

But we have lost something in our core to get there. We have become scatter-brained as an entire civilisation, constantly scratching an itch we can’t locate. Less patient. Less able to sit with a single thought. Less able to remember what happened to us last week, let alone last year. The texture of time has been stripped from our lives. We have traded depth for reach and assumed it was a free upgrade.

It wasn’t free.

The Hybrid.

I am not arguing for the landline era. Or dismissing the utility of these services. I do not want to go back to renting DVDs and waiting six weeks for a letter. I want to be able to connect to anyone from around the world. The convenience is real. But what I want is the parts of the old world that we accidentally threw out with the bathwater: the continuity, the patience, the long unbroken stretches of attention that made a week feel like a week.

A hybrid. The power of the new world. The texture of the old one.

This essay is my attempt to take both sides of the trade.

The part nobody takes seriously enough.

You open the app. You look up. Twenty minutes have passed, and they have left no trace. No memory, no residue you can point to and say: that happened, I was there. Pure deletion. The cleanest theft ever invented.

The deletion compounds. Days collapse into smears. The week ends, and you cannot account for all of it. The month closes, and you reach for the memory of it and find nothing solid to hold. You weren’t lazy. You weren’t doing nothing. But something is blurring the edges.

You were on the platforms and checked them all for a total of over five-hundred times in a single month and never considered it was abnormal because you weren’t counting.

The damage doesn’t stop when you put the apps down.

Every time you switch from the real world to the screen and back, your mind pays a tax. A piece of you stays on the last screen while the rest of you tries to function in the room you’re standing in. You are smeared across two places, owning neither. Do this ten to fifty times a day, for years, and something silently erodes.

The blur of constant switching is what destroys the texture of a day. This is more significant than the time you lost on the apps or sites. You are physically present at lunch but mentally on the message that arrived two minutes ago. You are physically with your partner, but mentally drafting the reply to the message you read but didn’t respond to.

The lunch dissolves. You think about the YouTube short you just digested. The conversation dissolves. The day dissolves. Not because any single switch was catastrophic, but because the repeated switching itself was the catastrophe.

The switching has stripped the texture out of time itself. Call it ‘Deep Time’: the kind that holds shape because attention was given to it long enough for memory to form. Deep Time is what your great-grandparents had and what you don’t.

These platforms don’t just steal your hours. They steal your sense of how many hours there were to begin with.

You are not getting older faster. You are remembering less of getting older. This is what is happening as our use of technology grows towards a compulsive direction. This is why the year you just lived feels shorter than the year before it, and why the next year will feel even shorter unless something changes.

The solution.

Step 1: simplify the playing field.

All email accounts collapsed onto one site, so no hopping between four inboxes like a man checking different doors for the same package. Reddit only via old.reddit.com on the web, which is the original interface and still the only one that doesn’t try to swallow you whole.

Browser extension installed to strip the feeds out of X, Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook. Every casino becomes a document. Visual demotion. Make them boring before you make them less accessible.

And that’s the first part.

Step 2: Bring in the wardens.

ColdTurkey runs on the computer. I’ve set it to block email, WhatsApp Web, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, Facebook, and YouTube four days a week. Total blackout. No exception.

AppBlock runs on the phone. However, the phone only has one social app installed: WhatsApp. For four days, it blocks access to WhatsApp, the Firefox Focus browser, and the Google Play Store. It receives a text. It has maps. And a calendar. And can play an audio file.

For four days a week, I can’t check any of the above services.

Step 3: Delete/deactivate some of your accounts.

LinkedIn and Instagram, both deleted and accounts deactivated. In case it doesn’t go without saying, no TikTok too. These are the worst offenders, the ones that strip-mine the soul most efficiently. You don’t moderate plutonium. They are gone.

The caveat: if you are a content creator or your work requires serious networking, those have utility you cannot easily replace. But they must be used exclusively on the computer with limited access.

Why this works.

These platforms are designed as curvilinear mazes. No corners, no endings, no moments where the path forces you to make a decision. Arthur C. Clarke wrote: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. The very basis for being able to contact someone across the world or access their videos is so incredible that it’s addictive in its own right.

But when you couple it with the cumulative, iterative tuning of the apps for maximum engagement, you naturally drift towards being a person on a moving walkway who forgot how to step off.

Tristan Harris, formerly a design ethicist at Google, alarmed by the impact of algorithms, put the stakes plainly in his testimony to the U.S. Senate: “What these companies are selling is not your data, it is the capacity to imperceptibly change your identity, beliefs, and behaviour”.

What they cannot defeat is a wall.

They hit it, the path ends, and you are forced into a conscious decision. Either wait until the wall comes down, or do something else. There is no smooth continuation, no soft gradient, no “well, maybe just one more.”

The wall doesn’t negotiate. ColdTurkey is a wall. AppBlock is a wall. Four days of total blackout is a wall four days strong.

What happens during the four days?

For four days a week, I am a baby.

I am not a citizen. I have no identification, no inbox, no notifications waiting to confirm I exist. No one knows me, and I know no one. People speak of a four-day work week and how it would be a dream. I have a 4-day digital detox every week, and it’s better.

Old circuits start to reactivate. The dormant ones. The ones that caught my attention before the apps were installed in my head. The mind, given enough days, remembers what it used to do with itself.

It is a Tuesday morning in Qingdao. I have been off the platforms since Saturday. I am looking at the trees and seeing the leaves blow in the wind, noticing the subtlety of each leaf in its full geometry as each one twirls in its own uniqueness, while the tree is gently enraptured by the force of the gust. Nothing extraordinary is happening.

But it seems extraordinary. The watching is enough. I notice that I have been present for a long time without checking anything, and I notice that I had forgotten this was something a person could do.

Time continuity returns. The morning connects to the afternoon. The afternoon connects to the evening. The day connects to the day before it and the day after. Nothing in the chain has been pulled out because there have been no intermittent digital compulsive checks, so the chain holds. A week feels more like a week. The old power, restored.

This is the thing that was missing. And I didn’t need to get rid of my smartphone to experience it.

Summary.

The unit that matters isn’t hours off social apps. It’s days.

For three days, I see what people have sent, I reply, I watch YouTube, listen to a podcast if something stands out, I reach out to people, take the conveniences of the modern world, and I use them. But it feels much more meaningful and enjoyable because it’s compressed into a shorter time-frame.

Then the wall comes down again, and I am a baby once more. I am not on the run. I am not in hiding. I am simply in my own world for just over half the week, by design, on platforms that were designed to make sure I never was.

This is the hybrid. Not the landline era and not the smartphone era. The power of the second, with the texture of the first.

This is not radical.

The radical position is the default one: leaving yourself open to every social app, all day, every day, and calling that freedom.

Further reading: My thinking on this topic was partly influenced by the following essays:

1. ‘How social media shortens your life’ by Gurwinder

2. ‘What happens when you stop consuming information’ by Ben Lucas

3. ‘Unplugged & Unmedicated’ by Mehret Biruk

P.S: People speak of a four-day work week and how it would be a dream. They wait for something that might never come. Meanwhile, the thing they actually need, is available right now without permission, free of charge.

To end, here’s a song, titled ‘Deep Time’ inspired by this essay:

War in the east. A minister lies. House prices up. Liverpool striker sold. Cancer breakthrough. Mandelson files. Henry Nowak. Pensioner freezes. Heatwave coming. Trossard’s wife leaves him. Tax raid on the middle class. A new war. Outrage.

That was the front page. You read it in eleven seconds.

How do you feel?

You don’t know. That’s the answer. You feel everything, which is the same as nothing but something. On the edge of your conscious awareness; you are however aware of a faint electrical hum behind your eyes.

This is what the Telegraph does to you every morning before you’ve finished your tea. The same is true for The Daily Mail. The New Yorker. The Times. The New York Times. The Guardian. The BBC. Not the articles. You don’t read the articles.

The front page is all that’s needed.

Each headline drops a different frequency into your mind. Grief. Angst. Appetite. Dread. Envy. Mild curiosity. And your attention doesn’t move between them like a person walking between rooms. It gets yanked.

Snapped from one to the next before the last one has resolved. And each time it snaps, it leaves a piece of itself behind in your neural wiring.

By the time you close the tab, you are no longer just a single reader.

You are a dozen abandoned half-concerns. None of which you chose. None of which you can do a single thing about. All of which took a cut on the way past, leaving the residue.

The residue is the point.

You close the tab.

That is not a failure of the paper.

The paper is working perfectly.

Every headline competes with the one beside it for the half-second of alarm that makes your eye stop. The page is an auction. The currency is your nervous system.

The winning story is not the one that matters most to your one finite life. It is the one that spikes your nervous template the fastest.

Read this way for a year and something begins to set. You become a creature of the scan.

Skim, spike, move on, forget, and you take that rhythm out of the paper, and you run it on everything.

On books. On your wife or husband talking. On your own quiet mind, when you finally sit down and try to hear it and find only the emotional residue of the headlines still playing behind your eyes hours after you had closed the tab.

The whole time you were reading the world’s front page news, you weren’t reading yours because of ‘the moral duty to be aware of world events’.

You stayed informed about everything.

And missed the small print of your life; the one line that mattered.

Somewhere in your mind’s eye, there is a version of your life that went exactly the way it was supposed to. A great childhood and a family life that met all your needs. The right career path from the outset. No injuries. The right romantic partner at the right time.

No significant mistakes. Loved and cherished by everyone around you from an early age. No one around you died. No major flaws and you always won at everything you set out to win. You never spiralled into negative emotions or addiction. You had no struggles.

You were born a prince, and the world treated you as such. The demons left you alone.

Nothing was taken from you, and everything was given to you.

You have never met this version of you.

But you grieve him without realising it.

He is the life you feel you were owed, and every disappointment or ambition you didn’t reach gets measured, quietly, against him.

He is the phantom prince.

What scarred you is the space between the life you got and the one you were certain you'd get.

You feel it as a fracture, as if time broke somewhere behind you and left you stranded on the wrong side. But where did it break? Nowhere.

Amputees report pain in limbs that are no longer there. The nerves keep firing into space.

You are doing the same thing with a life: grieving a shape that was never attached to anything.

Here is the part nobody says plainly.

Your life was never meant to go anywhere near exactly the way you wanted. This is not a tragedy. It is a fact. There was no correct version sitting in a drawer that the universe forgot to hand you. The belief that there was is a disease of the mind.

You didn’t lose the good timeline. There was no timeline. There was only what happened: your surrounding culture, the traits you inherited, the cause and effect of your decisions, happenstance, and the prince’s ghost you built afterwards to measure it against.

Years ago, I wrote that you heal the past by analysing it. Name the wounds. Extract the lessons so the past serves you instead of owning you. Psychologists speak about the same thing as if it were a cure-all.

It isn’t, and I was wrong.

You can dissect your history forever and still get nowhere. Although you are learning from your mistakes, you are still negotiating for a refund.

There is no one at the counter.

I have no one-size-fits-all solution for the sense that life went wrong. Only this: the belief that it was supposed to go right is what keeps you in an emotional cage, kneeling to a prince who was never born. A man with no mistakes behind him is not a luckier version of you.

He is no one.

A story where nothing goes wrong is not a story.

There was never a version of you that grew without making mistakes.

We are taught that God is watching. The angels want the best for us. That the universe is friendly and arranging things, quietly, in our favour.

It is a comforting story. It is also how grown women and men make silly choices and take life too lightly. You take the risk you shouldn’t, because some part of you believes it works out in the end. You eat the whole tub and skip the work because God loves you anyway.

That is entitlement dressed as faith.

The universe has no preference on whether you stay grounded or fall. Gravity does not care about who is falling. The belief that the universe does have a preference for you is a child’s narcissistic certainty that the world was arranged for him, carried unexamined.

Life is not a story moving toward a destination. It is a standoff between chaos and order. The order is the part you build and can name. Chaos is everything still waiting to challenge you.

The phantom life is the fantasy that the standoff was already decided in your favour before you were born. That the good version of life was promised, signed, and held in a trust for you.

But no one promised you anything.

The promise was the first thing your mother’s love taught you to expect, and the thing the world never agreed to honour.

The man who knows this stops waiting for the order he was owed and starts building the only order there is: the kind you make with your hands.

The prince is a fantasy.

The man who buries him is the only one who gets to live.

Imagine worshipping a God you didn’t know you worshipped. Imagine believing in a God who does not stand above you but underneath you. The opium of your thinking. The water you swim in. The O₂ you breathe. The fabric woven into your consciousness by the modern world before you were old enough to consent.

Most Gods require something explicit.

Mammon’s genius is that he does not.

Your belief in him is unregistered. The fish does not believe in water. The fish does not need to.

Water is all it has ever known.

The modern translation of ‘Mammon’ is “riches or money.”

The truer one comes from the Aramaic ma’mon: “that in which one trusts.”

The thing you bank on. The thing you hand your weight to before you hand it to anything else.

Mammon is often misunderstood as ‘capitalism’.

By the late 6th century, Pope Gregory the Great had codified the seven deadly sins. A thousand years later, in 1589, the German bishop Peter Binsfeld assigned each sin to a prince of hell. Mammon was given greed.

The naming was deliberate. Theologians saw a power. A presence. A hunger with its own agenda.

What he actually eats.

Mammon is not interested in your money. What he eats is more specific.

He eats the part of you that decides what is real.

You check your phone. For messages. Maybe a few reels. But also for numbers. Bank balance. Portfolio. Crypto. The number is up. You feel a small lift. The number is down. You feel a small drop. You do this often. Twice. Six times. Twenty times. In a single week. You do not notice the subtle sensations pulsing around your nerves when you do this.

You call it “staying on top of things”.

You do not call it worship.

Every refresh of your portfolio is a quick prayer. Every career plotting strategy is a sacrament. You perform the rite countless times and do not know you are operating under Mammon’s influence.

The currency you hold in your mind’s eye most often is the God you serve.

The inversion.

Consciousness was the original wealth. Awareness, attention, and presence all unfolded across hours that nobody owned. Money was designed as a mechanism to value the investment of consciousness into something over time.

Mammon’s central trick was the swap. The silent swap.

He convinced humanity that time is money.

Time was the substance. Money was the symbol. He flipped them.

Now money is treated as the substance and time as the convertible resource. You sell your hours to acquire the symbol, then spend the symbol to buy back fragments of the substance.

You never notice that the time you sold was the real wealth, and that the money you accumulated was the receipt for the wealth you gave away.

The receipt cannot be exchanged for the original.

This is the trick. And the sad truth.

Manipulating your self-worth.

Mammon’s second trick was manipulating your sense of self-worth.

You check your bank balance and feel something about yourself. You check your debts or lack thereof, and you feel something else about yourself.

You think about how much money you used to have or how little you used to have, and either way, you feel something about the fundamental nature of your ‘worth’ as it progresses through time.

You hear another man’s income and instantly rank yourself as deficient or superior.

You compare your net worth to last year’s and rate your life’s progress.

Notice the language. Net worth. The word for what you have has become the word for what you are.

You feel like you’re worth something when you have a lot of it. You feel worth little when you don’t have much of it.

The mirror appears to show you who you are.

But it’s only showing you what can be counted relative to the time and energy you put into becoming skilled at something in a marketplace that’s always changing. Or whether you’ve invested your money prudently.

Your self-worth has become externalised to the God of Mammon.

Your consciousness, the unique fractal of the universe that you are, and your inherent self-worth barely register as but an afterthought in your plot for acquisition.

Mammon’s mirror has only one core axis. You stare into it for decades and gradually shrink to fit the frame.

You want to get rich. To be special. To have a great life. And to do that, you’ve conflated money with so much of that promised life.

But there’s another reason you want more money.

Your inner world has been colonised. You take the demon’s measurement and apply it to your own soul.

How he became invisible.

Mammon was not always silent. For most of the Christian West’s first thousand years, he was named openly. Aquinas, one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Catholic theology, wrote against him in the 13th century.

For Aquinas, the threat of Mammon is not that wealth is evil. It is that wealth is the most successful counterfeit God, because it offers real power and real provision. The competition with God is genuine, not symbolic. That is why he writes about it with the seriousness of writing against a rival deity.

By the 18th century, Mammon had a new set of names. Commerce. Industry. Enterprise. Trade. Adam Smith, writing The Wealth of Nations in 1776, does not write about Mammon. He writes about the invisible hand, about self-interest, about the wealth of nations. The old God disappears from the discourse that organises his activity.

He was renamed into invisibility.

This is the genius. He needed to be unspoken. Once the activities that constitute his service could be discussed without reference to him, his victory became structural.

The most reliable form of worship is the one the worshipper does not recognise as worship.

By the late 20th century, the renaming was complete. The institutions matured. Money slipped its last tether to gold in 1971. Capital began to multiply itself with no detour through the physical world. By the time you were born, he was already everywhere, and the word for him had been retired.

You inherited a temple and were told it was a marketplace.

He is the air you breathe.

Walk through any city in the developed world. Almost every action you take is now a transaction.

This is what is meant by ambient.

Mammon no longer operates in discrete moments of exchange. He operates in the background of everything. The metric against which every action is silently calibrated.

This is the deepest victory. His power is not that he convinces you. His power is that you can be unconvinced, fervently, articulately, and still operate within him. There is no escape into purity. There is no domain outside his jurisdiction.

He is omnipresent not by being but by intermediation. Every gesture passes through him on its way to its object. Every relationship is mediated by his rails. Every choice has its price tag.

Fear is what keeps you inside.

Fear is Mammon’s central operating emotion. Not greed.

The man who measures himself in his coin is afraid of having less. The man who plans for retirement in his denomination is afraid of an old age outside his system. The man who works fifty hours is afraid that forty-five would not be enough. The professional who builds a personal brand is afraid of being unnamed in his marketplace.

Mammon does not demand fear.

He makes the alternative unthinkable and lets the fear arise on its own.

Two lives.

There is a life that uses money. And there is the life that is used by money.

In the first, money exists below the ledger of consciousness. You earn, spend, save, and give, all without your interior weather depending on the numbers. The numbers go up, and you are the same man. The numbers go down, and you are the same man.

In the second, money sits above consciousness. The numbers determine the weather of your soul.

Mammon hates the first life and loves the second.

The withdrawal.

Walk through any capital city at rush hour and watch the eyes. Most are gone. Not dead. Pledged.

The trust was transferred years ago. The body is just completing the contract.

The spell breaks at the point where you stop measuring yourself in the demon’s units. You still use the units. You still pay for things and appreciate what money brings. But you no longer take the demon’s yardstick to your own soul.

This is difficult work.

When you withdraw your measurement, the offering ends. Mammon does not get angry. He cannot. He is not a person.

He is a hunger that has lost its mouth.

Consolidation.

Some readers will mistake this for an anti-wealth essay. It is not.

Money is a tool. Wealth is great. Providing for those you love is great. Building something of value and being compensated for it is wonderful. There is no virtue in poverty and no purity in scarcity.

Mammon is not money. Mammon is what happens when money stops being the tool and becomes the measure of your soul. When the number on the screen sets the temperature of your inner world. When the figures dictate the thoughts you allow yourself.

The poor man who holds money loosely is freer than the wealthy man who clutches it tight. The question is not how much you have. The question is what holds your soul’s weight.

You can have lots of money without serving him.

You can have little and serve him completely.

When it ends.

We cling to the idea of enough money to never work again. The number that would let us stop. But Mammon’s influence means that the goal posts will keep shifting.

We never ask whether the longing itself is his.

I do not write as someone who escaped from Mammon’s influence. I write as someone who is closing the door, day by day, and noticing what stays standing when his measurement is withdrawn.

The banquet ends the moment you name the uninvited guest of honour.

The indigenous people of North America coined the term ‘Wetiko’ to describe the pattern that was eating their world alive. A spirit of consumption that turns the hunter and the hunted into the same body. A hunger that takes up residence in a person and lives off their choices.

Wetiko affects all of us.

It influences our minds, helping us justify that the smaller choice was the wiser one. It covers its own tracks. It is the line of reasoning that arrives just after a bad decision, dressing the smaller life as the wiser one.

The sly story is what your Wetiko writes to hide its workings. It is the elegant reasoning that arrives just after a wrong decision. It signs the receipt in your handwriting.

We are all susceptible to Wetiko.

The work is to catch its influence in its tracks.

The Trade

Wetiko does not want your suffering.

But it does not care about it either.

Wetiko wants your power, and it wants it given freely.

The thing eating you is not trying to destroy you. If it destroyed you, it would lose its food source. The relationship is not predation toward death. It is predation toward maintenance. It needs you to keep walking around.

The life it wants for you is chaotic enough to be sustainable as a feeding ground.

However, there is a rule that organises its influence: It cannot take from you what you do not hand over.

So, it has spent your whole life teaching you how to hand it over.

Through addictions you treat as comforts. Through resentments you treat as insights. Through the small daily acts of self-betrayal you have learned to call self-care.

Option A vs Option B.

Every situation that asks something real of you arrives bundled with an alternative.

If Option A is the correct action, Wetiko wants you to take Option B.

The cleverness of the operation is in the dressing.

Option B looks like wisdom, balance, and discernment.

The vocabulary of the inner life has been colonised.

The Inheritance

Wetiko has been influencing the world for millennia.

It does not arrive in a person from nowhere. It is transmitted. It moves through families. It moves through civilisations. It wore conquistadors and industrialists. It wears wellness influencers and political movements now. It creates problems to feed off.

The costumes change. The appetite is the same.

On a societal level, it creates a world where there is a crisis after crisis.

Energy companies profit when there's an energy crisis. The military-industrial complex profits when there's a war. Pharmaceutical companies profit when there's a pandemic.

Wetiko creates the necessity for ongoing crisis on an individual and collective level, and profits in disguise. Even though humans think they are the ones profiting.

What It Actually Wants For You

Every offer it makes is in the direction of the extreme.

Less of you on the line, or too much of you in the wrong place. The unmade move, or the reckless one made.

The relationship maintained past its time, or the one entered too fast to avoid being alone.

The work taken instead of the work refused, or the overworking that buries the work that matters.

Starving It

You cannot kill Wetiko. It is older than you and not yours to kill.

You can withdraw your attention by refusing the trade at the threshold. You see the elegant reason to take Option B arrive, dressed as your own discernment, and you decline.

You also starve it by refusing the rewrite. When a decision is made and proves wrong, you don’t let the editing function close over it.

You leave the miss visible.

You don’t recategorise the wasted year as integration, or the failed relationship as a teacher, or the missed opening as not the right time. You let the record read accurately.

You begin to catch the sly story at the moment it forms at the threshold between Option A and Option B. The bargain dressed as discernment. The reasoning was drafted before the decision. The thrill that arrives suspiciously fast after the staying, the deferring, the not-leaving.

You learn its taste, the way an animal learns the taste of a poison.

And when you taste it, you spit.

Doing this once feels like nothing. Doing it at every threshold for a long time is what it costs to come home into your own body and to be free from Wetiko’s ensnaring lure.

There are no plant medicines for this and no protocols.

The Meal Doesn’t Need to be Served

Something has been at the table with you your whole life.

It has slowly eaten your years but never made its presence obvious.

It has dressed every meal as your own choice, so that you would not see what was happening, and would not resist, and would keep handing over more.

The day you leave the table, the feast ends, and what was feasting on you leaves the table hungry.

You can blame your father for anything.

But your mother is sacred.

That’s how the trap begins.

Because you’ll never want to question her.

The home ran on her warmth and comfort. You grow up special without ever realising it. Protected. Treated like a small prince to compensate for the masculine vacancy in the house.

Or for the dad who is technically present but psychologically absent.

You may move out, work, travel, and be in relationships with women.

But the umbilical cord that keeps you psychologically young and tied to your mother never gets cut.

You carry your original womb.

A soft atmosphere of permanent welcome that you subconsciously reach for whenever the world hurts or rejects you.

The world for men is partly competition, indifference and strangers who owe you nothing.

The boy trained to expect tenderness from reality is permanently mismatched with what reality is.

He learns to avoid the parts that don’t feel like home.

He calls this preference.

It’s avoidance.

What he avoids.

He pulls back from competition. Losing in front of others rearranges his self-image, and there’s no mother in the room to soften it.

He pulls back from a serious career. A career means walking into the indifferent world and fighting for a place in it.

Or from changing environment.

He wants to stay close to his mum.

He keeps himself a little short. A little stuck. A little dependent.

Solvency would mean independence. Independence would mean detachment. And detachment is the one thing the energetic circuit of emmeshment to his mother does not allow.

Because of the energetic circuit that permeates his existence, things land on him and stay.

Old grudges, dead relationships, half-finished plans.

He doesn’t move through life.

He accumulates it.

Letting go is the skill he was never given because the whole arrangement he grew up in was built around two people who never psychologically let go of each other.

It’s not his fault or hers.

A boy without a father by default becomes a boy with too much mother in his spirit.

The lie.

Search for masculinity online.

You’ll find an entire industry on toxic masculinity and the crisis of men. Psychology has a whole package on attachment theory, the inner child, and narcissistic mothers.

Search for enmeshment between a mother and her son, and you’ll find almost nothing.

The phrase “mama’s boy” is the closest the culture comes.

The reason is not a conspiracy. It’s love.

Motherlove is the archetype of all unconditional positive regard, the one form of attachment the culture refuses to interrogate.

To name what soft, attentive, well-meaning mothering does to a son feels like betraying the woman who showed up when nobody else did.

To betray the one who birthed his very existence.

The censor is internal.

Millions of men walk around carrying a condition with no name. They have the symptoms. Directionlessness. Low ambition.

But nobody knows where to point for the source.

The first lie a boy is conditioned to believe when he is enmeshed with his mother is that the world will treat him the way his mother does.

He spends years discovering it isn’t true.

He never forgives existence for the gap.

And that’s why his heart permanently longs for Neverland - a fictional, magical island from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan where children never grow up.

The work.

The work isn’t to hate your mother or stage a dramatic separation.

You will have to disappoint your mother to break the enmeshment.

And then to live in agony for a time due to the loss.

She raised you to need her and for you to need her.

No version of growing up doesn’t grieve the woman who would have kept you small and innocent forever.

The world is not your mother.

Any boy who becomes a man in his bones has, at some point, accepted that.

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Disclaimer: This piece is written for men.

Every act of masturbation is a small form of self-abasement disguised as a healthy form of relief. Watching porn debases your mind and corrodes your capacity to love.

Both these acts weaken you.

Semen retention looks like the answer. Cut the porn. Cut the fapping. Watch your life rearrange itself.

But the longer you go without playing with yourself, the more your body begins to stim out. You feel things you’ve been avoiding for years. The discomfort is not a malfunction.

It is the bill arriving after a decade or more of numbing and self-harm.

As your streak goes on, you start noticing things you didn’t notice before. The symptoms of an unhealed past show up. Retention strips the numbing neural agents that kept these buried.

It removes the release valve, and the shadow, what Jung also called the disowned self, rises to meet you.

Few things in this life are more valuable than the capacity to see your own blind spots. Semen retention forces this. It helps a man see his shadow with the lights on.

That is the gift.

But it is also what makes the practice psychologically lethal for the unprepared.

Which is why so few can do it.

The semen retention promise.

Call it the retention promise: Abstain and become. Withhold and transform. Cut the act and reap the man.

The promise is one of the most addictive lies. It sells absence as a product. It treats male biology as a slot machine that pays out for restraint, in which the act of not doing does the work.

Semen retention is every man’s natural baseline.

It is the correct use of a biological resource, nothing more. Masturbating and porn go against the natural baseline.

Parts of the online semen retention/NoFap community sell magnetism, the opportunities, the spiritual high, the women noticing you in the supermarket: these are the bait.

The bait sells the benefits as character upgrades. They are not upgrades. Retention did not give you anything new. Masturbation and pornography had been quietly taking what was already yours.

What retention can’t do.

I have not masturbated or watched porn in years. The practice has given me back my natural confidence, energy and drive.

But semen retention hasn’t made me a happier person. Or made my life a dream worth living.

If anything, it’s made me face my darkest shadows. The years I spent doing the wrong things with my life cannot be undone. The cold, hard truths of reality can no longer be numbed away.

Unfortunately, it seems that many young men online believe semen retention is the answer; the hack; the cheat code to their best life.

If only it were that simple. In the modern world, the answer to a good life is complex. It requires several faculties.

Semen retention gives you an edge.

But it is not a panacea.

Finding your purpose and work that’s in allignment with you inside the mayhem of the modern world is the most savagely difficult challenge a man can take on, and the one worth more than anything else he will ever do.

It takes years of problem-solving, false starts, and reconstruction.

Training your spirit to be at peace with itself in an age that’s arguably designed to make your life as noisy as possible is equally valuable.

Improving your health. Finding self-worth. Maintaining discipline. Quieting your mind. Building a community of real, genuine people in your life. These things are important.

The decision to stop masturbating forms part of the equation.

And it can help with all the above to some degree.

But it is not the equation in itself.

The gate mistaken for the garden.

Because most men cannot hold their life-force in for more than a few weeks or months, the perceived value of retention becomes inflated. Naturally, it stops being just a practice. It becomes a status, a flex, a substitute for the construction it was supposed to enable.

The difficulty of the thing gets confused with the worth of the thing.

Masturbation and pornography are vices similar to drinking, smoking, or gambling. When you stop the vices, they stop draining you.

That is all.

The semen retention promise sells itself as the garden.

But it is just a gate - and the road begins on the other side.

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The problem isn’t watching the Champions League final with your dad, or the World Cup once every four years, or a Super Bowl with mates. Or appreciating the skill of some of the game’s best players.

The problem is the tribal neural network running silently in the background while you tell yourself you’re just “watching the highlights/game.”

If the weekend’s result doesn’t follow you into Google searches, meaningless sports news, Reddit rabbit holes, score-checking apps, or YouTube post-match breakdowns regularly, you’re probably fine.

If it does any of those things, you’re in a loop.

Your brain is a narrative engine. It was wired to track position, strategy, and alliance in games that actually mattered. Who holds the high ground? Which rival is weakening? Who to back in the next raid?

Now it tracks whether Arsenal signed a new left-back, whether the Lakers traded a second-round pick, and whether Man Utd’s new manager will finally bring back the glory days. And whether Max Downman will become a first-team starter.

Take it further: the same circuitry built for plotting your life’s trajectory gets rerouted into memorising squad depth and transfer windows. You end up with the strategic thinking of a military strategist spent on the fortunes of strangers in coloured shirts. The circuitry still fires. The rewards still land.

But the ledger is someone else’s.

This is the quiet disempowerment. Not that you’re watching sports. But that the part of you built to strategise is busy running simulations for clubs and players that will never know your name.

The underdog pull whenever you watch a game is the clearest evidence of this - that is the engine, caught in the act, running exactly as designed.

You can point the same algorithm inward.

Sports entertainment is a commercial business designed to hijack your attention, entangle your nervous system with strangers in coloured shirts, and quietly reroute the strategic circuitry that was meant to build your own life for other people’s commercial benefit.

The way out isn’t to hate the game.

It’s worth noting that the whole time you were tracking your team’s season, nobody was tracking yours.

And then to take all of that attention back—and point it at something that has real significance.

In ‘The Ugly Truth Behind the Beautiful Game‘, I explored how sports entertainment cognitively cucks you. But it’s not just your cognitive attention that’s hijacked when you watch a sports game.

Your nervous system is being hijacked.

In any given sports competition, one team wins, and every other team loses. For example, in a 20-club football league, nineteen sets of fans end the season in some hue of disappointment. Didn’t make the 2nd spot. Didn’t win the league. Didn’t get this. Or just got in.

And if your club hasn’t won the title in x number of years, you’ve endured roughly x years of net loss, laced with occasional highs interspersed just frequently enough to keep you hooked.

This is not an accident of the sport.

This is the product.

The hope that your team/player will win is the trap.

The up/down cycle is the mechanism. And it is disgustingly elegant.

What keeps millions of us emotionally hostage is the oscillation. The comeback. The injury-time equaliser. The heartbreaking final. The near-miss that almost makes the loss feel earned. You are not watching a sport.

You are watching a circus designed to take your attention away from the Epstein class. De votre raison d’être. And your expanded potential mind-state.

You are being administered a controlled substance. The dosage is calibrated so you never get enough to feel satisfied. And never so little that you walk away.

The dealer needs you to be functional enough... to keep watching.

If that wasn’t disturbing enough, here is the part that should genuinely disturb you. Through sustained tribal identification with a sports team or player, your nervous system stops belonging to you, at least temporarily.

Your cortisol, your dopamine, your emotional baseline - all of it becomes entangled with a commercial entity wrapped in a bright colour whose statistical fate is to lose more than it wins.

This is not a metaphor. This is, unfortunately, a fact. Walk into any pub on a Sunday morning after a loss and watch the body language. Shoulders down, voices flat. These men didn’t lose anything. Their team did. But the nervous system doesn’t make that distinction. After years of tribal identification, it has stopped trying to.

Researchers (Bernhardt et al., 1998) studying sports fans have documented measurable hormonal shifts that track game outcomes directly, with testosterone dropping after defeats. You are physiologically mirroring a parasitic commercial entity with a losing record, tethering yourself - call it quantum entanglement, call it sympathetic resonance - to a signal that is, by design, net negative.

The zero-sum frame is the quieter poison.

Perhaps you think that by tying yourself to the winners like Real Madrid, Lamine Yamal, LeBron James, Lionel Messi, etc., you’re doing the reverse. But they lose too. And when they win, you’re just outsourcing your own desire for heroism, which will put you in the frame of a 3rd person character in another athlete/team’s journey. You’re the witness. The extra in someone else’s film. You still don’t own the signal. You’re renting it from people who have never heard of you and will never meet you.

Think about what this does over a decade. Or lifetime. Their peak years become your peak years by proxy. Their retirement becomes your quiet grief. Meanwhile, the people who actually share your life get what’s left of you after all the games. This is the quiet demotion. You stop being the protagonist of your own story.

The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between vicarious victory and your own. But the ledger of your life does. And the Epstein class? They understand this perfectly. They don’t watch other men be great. They fund the stadium. They own the broadcast rights. They sit in the box seat while you stand in the terrace.

The real question is, what frequency signal do you want to run on?

A sports circus designed to emotionally entangle you?

Or something deeper?

References

Bernhardt, P. C., Dabbs, J. M. Jr., Fielden, J. A., & Lutter, C. D. (1998). Testosterone changes during vicarious experiences of winning and losing among fans at sporting events. Physiology & Behaviour, 65(1), 59 to 62. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9811365/

The consumption of sports media is the mechanism that makes it easier for the middle class to get wiped out.

People have this insidious feeling that the financial system rewards key professions unjustly, but rewards high-level athletes disproportionately.

Yet all incomes are largely based on supply and demand mechanics. What is worth questioning is the ‘demand’ side of the equation. Why are high-level athletes so in demand?

People have always sought an emotional outlet to help them disidentify from the suffering in their lives.

By watching athletes do amazing things, we get to experience a fleeting imitation of the flow state, as if we were the ones experiencing it.

When our team/favourite athlete isn’t doing so well, and then starts doing well again, we get to experience the drama of the up/down cycle. And with every game being somewhat unpredictable, we’re hooked.

Not only do sports stars mesmerise us into a pseudo-flow state, but they also opt us into a pseudo-tribal identity. A sense of fake belonging takes place. We identify part of our sense of self with the team or player that we support. And the news headlines chirp in. Our friends talk about the game. It all becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.

The opportunity cost of this consensus-based pattern is high. Instead of identifying with a small clan of real people we know on a shared mission, where each person contributes, millions of men prefer to identify with their select clan of men kicking/bouncing a ball on a screen, while they watch as bystanders.

Watching sports is the modern man’s gateway to a false sense of community, drama and belonging.

In porn, the words ‘cuck’ and ‘cuckoldry’ have become well-understood by the manosphere. For those who are uninformed, ‘cucking’ is the act of watching your partner get taken while you watch as a bystander.

With the consumption of sports entertainment, your internal world gets taken over - while your sovereignty watches on the sidelines. The 15 minutes of highlights and interviews, even if you don’t watch the full matches, take valuable mind-space that could otherwise be used for contemplation and other purposes.

Inevitably, you’ll build a useless bank of knowledge about the different players, stats, and tables, as well as future games.

You might get cucked while you watch the highlights. But the most jarring thing to accept is the worthless memories that last days and weeks in your mind’s eye - and in some cases, even a lifetime. The clips you watched will be out of date very soon. The cycle repeats ad infinitum. Nothing is truly learned. It’s all slipstream data that gets more worthless each day that goes by.

Replicate this neurocycle for millions of people around the world, and it becomes very easy to see how the middle class slowly gets disempowered.

There are various forces at work to disempower men.

However, the consumption of sports entertainment is a vital ancillary mechanism to stripping men of their own power.

Because they are being cucked without even realising it.

She said it’s no wonder I don’t want children - I’m a child.

I grinned.

She said I’m in a job with no prospects.

She said that my life is chaos.

I let her emotions play out like the cascade of waves that inevitably rise when the wind is at its nigh.

The words were symptomatic of underlying frustrations that are more about her than me.

When the waves were more still and her interior inventory was smoother, on many different occasions, she was apt to share different words.

She’d say I’m special, that I’m smart, that she likes my eyes, that I’m gorgeous, beautiful, funny, amazing, grounded, intelligent, and that she loves the way I speak.

Those too were just waves.

They would be distressful or flattering - if I took them seriously.

But I no longer take the words literally.

Instead I just witness the waves.

This was my first visit.

As I looked around, I felt a slight tingle of shock combined with dissapointment.

The sign on the wall.

It said: Please put your mask on.

I squeamed inside. I continued walking into the lobby. Another sign. Another. By the time I'd done the tour, I'd seen 4 replicas of paper signs asking me to put on a mask.

The year was 2025.

Weren't we supposed to be done with all this? After I processed the horror of the situation around me, I started to feel a slight panic titilate my nerve endings. Memories of lockdowns and crowds of people wearing masks swept over my consciousness.

I felt like something was coming over me. My heart skipped a millibeat.

I told the lady at the reception: "You have get rid of these signs, it's been four years, we're done with COVID."

She replied with the pretense of misunderstanding in her tone: "No don't worry, you don't need to wear a mask, we just have yet to remove those signs from the COVID days but you don't need to wear a mask."

I told her that I know I don't need to wear one. But why is it still asking me to wear one then? I told her it's been years. She told me to calm down. I sat down.

While she wasn't looking, I started to peel the tape off one of the signs. I felt a slight tinge and stopped.

Why am I being like this? I asked myself. I went back to the reception and said very nicely:

"Listen, I know you work closely with Dr x and I know this is his establishment. I want you to tell him to get rid of those signs. You're the only one that can get through to him because you're clever and smart and he trusts you. If by the time I come back here to collect what I need to collect from the doctor, I'm not going to walk through the door. You're going to have to bring me the stuff to the door unless those signs are removed. I never want to see those signs again because they remind me of a weird time."

She understood. Her eyes looked into mine with a slight apprenhension. Who is this foreigner?

One week later, I walked up the stairs to the establishment.

I stood at the entrance and rang the bell. She came up to the door, opened and said come in. I said: are you sure? She said, yes, yes please.

When I walked in, a basking flow of golden light beamed down through the ceiling. As I looked around, I saw no signs asking me to put on a mask.

The sense of relief and ectasy I felt was so excruciatingly beautiful that I almost shed a tear.

After all these years alive, I finally understood: there is mercy in the world.

I thought I was clever.

I thought I could unfollow most of the accounts. I thought I could curate my feed. I thought I could hack Twitter or X.com so that it became a meaningful experience.

I lied to myself for years.

Although I only followed 10-40 accounts at most, the rapid-fire onslaught of multiple viewpoints from multiple people on numerous days was slowly eviscerating the subtle edges of the neural network inside my brain.

Every post seemed so interesting. But before I knew it, a new post would pop up that was even more interesting. And so the cycle went, week after week.

Slowly, the hues of my mind stream would take on the algorithm of X.com/Twitter - colouring my view of the world with a particular lens.

Years on Twitter will slowly influence your mind from the inside out in a way that's subtle, slow, and smooth - so much so that you barely notice.

A few days ago, I finally deleted my Twitter account.

I’ll take Facebook over Twitter for one major reason. Longer-form text will always beat short-form posts in terms of maintaing a better attention-span. Besides, Twitter is a place filled with influencers and strangers.

At the very least on Facebook, you often connect to people you know.

Goodbye Twitter/X.com.

I'm not coming back anytime soon.

Three texts.

Check your email. Seven emails. Skim through.

Open up Instagram, scroll through stories. Then scroll through new posts. Like, like, like, comment "lol"

Close Instagram, open up Chrome. Check the news, sports, Reddit.

Open up Youtube. Watch a video that pops up on your homepage.

Watch another video. Watch a short.

Close Youtube. Open up Messenger. No new messages.

Close Messenger.

Open email. Respond to an email or two.

Close email. Open up WhatsApp. Respond to a couple texts and group chats.

Close WhatsApp. Look at the clock. Half an hour has passed. Still lying in bed.

Go to work, check your phone every 5-10 minutes for the next 8 hours, check your work email every time it pings.

Play YouTube video or a podcast in the background.

Go home, turn on Netflix, Youtube, cable television, Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Disney+. Done.

Open up your laptop, surf the internet.

Open Youtube, watch a couple videos. One more video, then I'll be productive. One more video, then one more video.

Open your smartphone. Open Instagram. Scroll through stories and posts. Open up Reddit, scroll.

Bored of watching TV, turn off Netflix, and turn on your PS4, Xbox, Switch or PC to game.

Set your alarm and go to sleep.

Wake up and do this again tomorrow.

Do a variation of this every day, every week, every month, every year, every decade for the rest of your life.

Now imagine a whole population living this way.

Dark forces enjoy it and grow when we create pain for ourselves.

One way we create pain for ourselves is by ‘waiting’. Not the normal waiting. But the psychological waiting we create with our thoughts. We somehow think that, in some sort of backwards-logic, that being insistent on getting what we’re looking to get as soon as possible, will somehow help us.

In the psychological sense, we’re beggars waiting for life to give us food, when the fridge is full.

When we believe we need something to arrive as soon as possible, life bends to this belief. We start thinking about why it’s so important for us to have it right now. All these rationalisations subtly justify our anxiety — which grows and grows—until it becomes annoying.

Our trance-based imaginations of what we’re looking for to arrive cocoon us into a sense of angst. We become hypnotised by our delusions.

We injure our inner world to the detriment of God’s desire for us. We become myopic. Blind to what’s on the periphery. Unaware of what else needs to be done and seen. Hyper-focused on our point of attention, we don’t see what’s behind us and to our side.

Our timing and actions then become disharmonious. Because we are ill-at-ease inside. We lose our way and create negative ripples.

To change, we must let go of our OCD thoughts about needing to get x by x time. We ought to just work on whatever needs to be done, without an attachment to the outcome.

We let go of waiting for the thing we want to arrive. Because if we keep waiting, it’ll possess us in a psychopathic delirium.

We already accept the loss. It may never arrive. We accept the emptiness of not having what we want yet and move our attention towards other things.

Ending the habit of ‘mental waiting’ is extremely difficult to do at first. It’s a skill in itself. After all, we’ve built many mental habits throughout our lifetimes.

A key one to recognize is being impatient.

Impatience is implicitly celebrated in Western culture. Never give up! Keep going! While there is some wisdom in pursuing what you want with dedication, being impatient when you’re waiting for something to arrive is a form of ignorance.

We inherited this ignorance from our ancestors and the people around us.

Maybe there’s a different way.

I write this for myself because I’ve been extremely impatient today. I was expecting something to arrive in the mail.

I’ve propped up this package in my mind. I’ve created this idea in my mind that it is ‘very important’.

What’s more important is making the most of the day that’s been given to me.

Today is Day 63 of 2024. It’s the first day of the rest of my life.

There’s plenty to work on and focus on besides the important package I’m waiting for.

I bought someone a gift. I walked outside and saw light.

Despite my impatience, I’m learning a different way of living. My inner peace is more precious than my desired object.

I have other things to do and focus on. Things that are here with me now.

I wrote an article today.

That’s something.

The important package can come when it wants to.

Sometimes I peer into the depths of my past in an attempt to understand the hidden intricate tapestry behind it all.

I ponder and see flashes of years gone by, days of struggle, moments of delight and it all seems so real and unreal at the same, almost as if I was reflecting on a dream I had.

It’s there but not there and yet I know all these memories are indeed real refractions of an experience but their lucidity and transcience beguile.

Dramas, fears, anxieties, hopes, joys, and breakthroughs all coalesce into some pattern that’s known as ‘my life’ — a jukebox of memories that is so transient that it very rarely gets exposed and explored for fear of not being ‘present’ or ‘focused’ on what’s at hand.

But it’s quite nourishing to open the jukebox sometimes and see what lurks within. Because when you do, you’re exposed to things that you can’t experience in ordinary day-to-day extroversion and ‘work’.

You start to see how your unconscious patterns repeat themselves, how certain themes come up again and again, almost as if there’s a unique signature attached to your soul that reverberates into your experience of life whether you like it or not.

It’s through deeply diving into the jukebox attached to our soul’s signature that we get some form of soul sustenance. Daydreaming and revisiting the past in some weird lullaby of a day spent with less structure offers many delightful rewards to those who are willing.

It’s almost as if the Western obsession with working hard acts as a guilt firewall that blocks individuals from deeply exploring their inner jukebox so that they can stop repeating the same old patterns/songs.

Doing more of x, y, and z via ‘hard work’ is the main way by which I can make ‘progress’.

But having a day where I just stop and allow myself to sink into my jukebox of memories, particularly after spending countless days mired in intense work — actually taking the opposite route and diving deep into the opposing modality of life — has much to offer.

Slower-paced days are where maturity begins to unfold and a wiser pattern of existing can be ushered in. I guess it’s days when new chapters begin and old ones end.

Under the pretence of needing to do x,y,z and work all the time, what we’re doing sometimes is running away from doing the other kind of work (whether we can call it work) that needs doing — which is exploring our psyche, our past, and our soul’s signature so that we naturally become re-alligned.

For four years, my life was impacted heavily by the unrelenting fumes of techno smog. My phone use jumped from 15-30 minutes on my old Blackberry (Pre 2016) to anywhere between 1-3 hours per day on the smartphone. That's 365-730 hours/year = 1460-2,920 hours in four years holding a 5-inch device 30cm away from my face.

How much of that time spent was meaningful and intentional?

Perhaps a 1/4 at best. God would be ashamed. 

I suppose the norm influenced me. I suppose that I thought I needed one. But looking back on the period between 2016-2020 (4 years), I can tell you that the cost has been high. 

The First Step in Breaking Free

In late 2020, I bought a Hisense A5 - an eink phone. Although it was still a smartphone, it was of a different kind. The lack of a glowing screen, with the monochrome display, made it easier to put down. With the additional help of Aero launcher, my smartphone usage went down to an average maximum of 60 minutes per day. 

But it was still a smartphone. So there were still some rare days where my time spent counter would be over 2 hours. 

Kryptonite.

In June 2023, something flipped. I was done with the middle way. Using apps to simplify my smartphone experience. Using an eink smartphone. I was tired of the compromising. I needed to be binary. Yes/no.

Smartphones are a no. 

I bought a Doro flip phone. Fortunately/unfortunately, depending on the way you look at things, it has WhatsApp.

Despite shifting to the flip phone, I was still using my smartphone for Spotify, podcasts and audiobooks. Sometimes, internet browsing. 

I was close to escaping. But not quite there yet. For 4 months, my average screen time on the smartphone fell to 27-35 mins/day. Which was a big improvement. My flip phone use was about 5 mins/day.

I was feeling a lot better about my technology use. But I still had some chains on me. I wasn't fully out of prison.

How They Keep Us Stuck Inside Prison

The psychological operation taking place is based on dependency. Once you become dependent on Audible, Spotify, the Podcast app, Instagram etc, then you are beholden. Once you curate these apps with your likes, pins, favourites, and bookmarks, leaving them becomes even more difficult. 

A fragment of your soul becomes tied up in the digital ether. That fragment is tracked, observed, and monetized. With all your data, combined with the collective data of other users, insights are generated. 

Those insights are used as the basis for finding ways to bury you deeper into the digital techno-grinder. Each year, the human-techno enmeshment becomes stronger due to the compounding effect of this techno-social-engineering.

"The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they're too strong to be broken" - Charlie Munger.

Finally Breaking Free

In late October, as I was nearing my exit towards the prison gate, I noticed two guards.

Audible.
Spotify.

I'd already eliminated the Podcast guard. I did this by downloading the podcasts I like on my computer and transferring them to my newly minted MP3 player.

But Audible and Spotify aren't so easy to eliminate. 

I needed help.

Enter: Noteburner and Libation.

With both these tools, I was able to extract my entire Spotify and Audible libraries into MP3 files onto my computer. 

I then ended my subscription to both. A key step to breaking free from prison is to stop paying them to keep you there.

Instead of primarily using Spotify on my computer, I now use iTunes - the OG offline music software. It allows me to organize my music and audio files, including audiobooks, without the internet.

I no longer needed Spotify and Audible on my phone. The audiobooks I had could now be transferred to my MP3 player.

So both those apps were uninstalled from the Hisense A5 Eink smartphone. And now, the only app that's on there is Google Maps.  

I Broke Free

My smartphone usage is now 0 mins/day. I only need to use maps once every couple of months at the most for about 30 minutes. So, my smartphone usage is on average about thirty seconds per day across the span of a year.

• If I need a QR code for travel/returns I print it.

• If I need to listen to music, I'll use my MP3 player.

• If I need to take a picture, I'll use my camera (Canon Ixus 70).

• If I need a torch, I'll use my torch.

• If I need an alarm, I'll use the alarm on my watch. 

I'm now 99% percent free from a smartphone. Which is good enough for me.

The smartphone remains OFF, without a SIM card inside, in an EMF protective sleeve. It only gets pulled out on a day I need Google Maps.

The Effect of this Change and Why I Will Never Go Back

All those hours were reclaimed. All those phones unlock. GONE.

I used to unlock my phone 20-50 times per day. That's 20-50 task switches. At worst, that's 350 unlocks per week. 1400 unlocks per month. 16,080 unlocks per year.

It's now been 2 months without a smartphone. With no unlocks. No minutes were spent. 

My inner world feels cleaner. Lighter. Sweeter. The present moment is less at the periphery and more in focus. My mind is less busy. My attention span has increased massively.

I will never go back to prison.

I have reclaimed something that very few people will ever have the chance to.

It's worth no amount of money. It's priceless. 

I see patterns and connections I never saw before. I feel like I have way more time. I'm less stressed.

I am going back in time.

Marty McFly. The bliss of childhood is slowly returning.

Taking things Further

I was now free from techno-prison. But helicopters and the military-industrial-police complex were after me.

In other words, I was still checking my dumbphone/flip phone far too many times per day. 5-10 or so times to be exact. I was still tied to a phone. 

I also found the 2FA (2-factor authentication) that some online services require extremely frustrating. It meant that I would have to get up and out of my chair to open my phone when I was on the computer. 

The cops are dangerous and know what they're doing. It's part of their plan to make the phone device, even if it is a dumbphone, indispensable for day-to-day life. 

They want to capture me even more now that I'm out of prison. 

I became one of the most wanted men on the planet. With a bounty of 
$1,000,000 on my head, I was on the run.

I needed a way to break free from the chase. The harrowing nights filled with fear. Would they catch me? Put me back in techno-jail?

I needed help. 

I needed to reclaim my sovereignty with the way I use my dumbphone.

Breaking Free From the Police Chase

Enter: LDPlayer9 and Devyce.

LDPlayer9 is an Android launcher-simulator, which runs on Windows. It can install any Android App on a computer.  

With Devyce (android app) launched on LDplayer9, I can have a virtual phone on my computer that receives texts. 
 
Armed with my new weapon, I opened up the settings in all my accounts that require 2FA authentication via SMS.

Natwest. Nationwide. Gmail. AmericanExpress. I changed my mobile number in the 2FA settings, to the newly minted virtual phone number, provided by Devyce. 

BOOM! 

Every time I now login into any of these services on my computer and receive an SMS, I can see it right from the computer, without a phone.

I can't tell you how enlightened this makes me feel. Giddy. 

But how was I going to stop checking WhatsApp on my dumb phone so many times per day? 

Solution: Install WhatsApp on the computer. 

Enter: Coldturkey.

I set up a free block of WhatsApp from 7-9 pm on weekdays (I can't access WhatsApp outside those hours). 

I took the SIM out of my dumbphone, took out the battery and put it in the EMF sleeve with my smartphone so they could rest in peace together. 

I now, rarely ever even need to take out either. I can text/call on the computer from 7 pm daily. 

But what about if I receive a regular non-Whatsapp call/text I hear you say?

Enter: Hullomail.

A voicemail app that captures all missed calls and voicemails. I installed it on the Android simulator on my computer (LDPlayer9) and set up an email notification. Whenever someone gives me a missed call, I have the receipt and can call them back at a later point. 

In any case, most people who do call me, call me on WhatsApp, so that's not that big of an issue. 

But that facility is there anyway - let's say if I receive a call from the doctors, dentist, or the milkman. 

Do I take out and use my dumbphone? 

Yes, I will sometimes put the sim and battery back in case I'm going out somewhere to meet someone and I need to reach them. Perfectly fine. 

What's important is that I am free from the chase. The cops are no longer after me. I am out of techno-prison and the nation of Mediocrus.

I am now in Freeland. 

However, there's a problem. In 2019, Freeland signed an international treaty with the nation of Mediocrus that stipulated: the right for extradition for illegal aliens. 

I wasn't recognised by Freeland as a citizen of the nation. So even though I was now free, there was still a risk of being caught if I say, travelled.  

In other words, although I'd mastered my phone usage and got it down to zero, I was still effectively a semi-slave on the computer.

The algorithms on Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube etc were effectively a dangerous treaty that could send me back to techo-prison any time. Although it'd be a prison on the computer instead of the phone, it'd still be a prison.

Chapter 2

I blocked web browsing on my computer until 7 pm with Coldturkey. Drastic. But there's a caveat: I set up a few exceptions for sites I would need during the day.

This has freed me to only work on meaningful tasks until 7 pm every single day. I can't tell you how liberating this is. Without a phone or dumbphone (for the most part), and without the internet until 7 pm, I feel like I'm a different person altogether. 

I have separated myself from the masses. I have reclaimed even more of my life. 

Before, when I used to work on the computer, I'd get distracted easily.

It's easy to get lost in so many rabbit holes. Check email. Check this. Check that. Check. Check. Checkmate, you lose. The techno-elites win. So much so that your work becomes diluted. Even if I'd start the day with the most important tasks and check email/social media afterwards, there was still this nagging sense that it wasn't quite enough.  

Although I thought I was okay, the truth is, I was comparing myself to people in the state of Mediocrus. 

Here in Freeland, I've met so many people like me who've been living this way for years. They are an order of magnitude above the citizens of Mediocrus in countless virtues. They are more honest, patient, kind sincere, focused, creative, and joyful.

It's almost as if I can see the relationship between heightened techno-use and the downfall of the average human being's baseline state of consciousness. 

In any case, with my newly found freedom from phones (99.99%) and the internet (till 7 pm), the bulk of the work to disentangle myself from techno-prison and the state of Medicorus is done. 

Summary

Considering I spend about 6 hours on the computer per day, and 3 hours on the internet, I am 50% free from internet browsing on the PC.

I have very few email subscriptions and keep inbox zero. 

I am 99% free from phones.

I am a free man.

This freedom influences my inner world. As the quiet in my inner world deepens, I return to childhood more and more. But this way of living isn't a means to an end. It's the opposite. You become more embodied and fulfilled right now.

It's taken me many years of experimentation, trial and error, and addiction, to reach this penultimate point of digital awakening. 

Life mirrors itself in all the different areas. A cluttered digital life. A cluttered home. These all clutter our inner world. When we clean ourselves internally the mess becomes more cumbersome to us. 

Clean mind. Clean home. Clean computer. Clean phone = clean life = clean friends = clean community = clean country = clean world.

If you’d like to learn more and have call on how to extricate yourself from tech addiction, just reply to this email.

I remember when I was 29 years old. The creep and anxiety I felt about turning 30 was palpable.

I browsed internet sites dedicated to over 30-year-olds, just to get a glimpse into their views on getting older.

Some of these guys weren’t faring too well. Some were doing great. All the be it, I was giving a lot of importance to this upcoming milestone in my life.

There was this sense that by age 30 I was supposed to have my shit together. I was supposed to x, y, z. But I wasn’t doing it. Then I began to realise something…

Age becomes less of a concern if you’re exquisitely using your time as you go past your old limitations. But the more stuck you are in the same patterns, the more your age becomes a focus.

Time is a mental conception, but the passage or progress of events within this ever-present-now is seen and felt.

Time or life is drudgery sometimes. And uplifting other times. Time expands for some, it shrinks for others. Time enslaves some, time inspires others.

Time suffocates when we’re under anxiety. Time expands when’re in an expanded state of joy.

Perhaps the past isn’t as fixed as we believe.

Perhaps by changing the future; we can change our past.

Perhaps by changing how we align ourselves with the present moment, we can change more than we realise.

Time compounds good habits. It also compounds bad habits. The benefits of ageing become palpable when we compound the right decisions and habits. But there’s another slight edge, that most people are unaware of.

The quickest way to improve ‘time’ as we know it - is to get a blood test and check your Ferritin, D3, B9, and B12 and then work to get those scores up if they’re low.

They’re most likely not optimal. As an example, a year ago, my ferritin was just 30. It's now over 100 and that shift has made a huge difference. It’s impossible to thrive through the passage of time without the right biochemistry.

Part 1

It sounded innocent enough at the time. However, due to this single feature, the app’s popularity exploded.

By merging the real world with the digital world so intimately such that something experienced could be seen through the lens of ‘let me post this as a story!’ users around the world installed the app onto their brains.

In other words, they started using Snapchat compulsively.

Fast forward a decade, and by now every major communications platform (Telegram, IG, FB, WhatsApp) has integrated the same story feature. What was once a feature for the kids, is now a normalised part of all the communication apps we use.

By linking the real world with an app in such an intimate manner via Stories, more worldwide usage is guaranteed. More attention is extracted by the populace which is then monetized.

Of course, the unfortunate outcome of this is greater global phone addiction. But more subtly, due to the way we now use smartphones, the values of society have shifted towards a greater desire for novelty, vanity and status.

Apps have become interlinked with us

If our phones and computers are extensions of our minds, then every app we regularly use has the potential to become installed into our brains.

If you regularly think about how something would look if you post it on Instagram, then the app is installed in your brain. If you regularly think about whether the person on the street is swipeable, then Tinder is installed in your brain. If you regularly think about a particular news topic e.g. Russel Brand then the news app is installed too.

The app/site is using your mental resources even when you're not using it. Which means it is influencing your behaviour and interactions on a subtle level.

This is a big deal - and something that doesn’t get enough attention.

Cognitive Installation

The single best way to determine whether an app is installed in your brain is to ask yourself: Can I live without the app for a few weeks without withdrawal symptoms?

If the answer is no, then the app is mentally installed. 

Neuralink is already here.

Should we just stop using these apps?

Removing our capacity to access information at ease and communicate with people around the world would be a step backwards. 

The best way to use these apps skilfully is to first recognise that their creators want us to use them as much as possible.

Is it any wonder then, that on the 13^th September 2023, Mark Zuckerberg introduced the world to WhatsApp Channels — a broadcast tool in WhatsApp designed to deliver updates from people and organisations to users.

Once again, it sounds innocent enough.

Now, you can follow any organisation or celebrity updates. Translation: they now have another way to extract more time and attention from you.

The antidote? Avoid the ‘extra-new features’ in social media/communication apps and recognise that they are disguised side apps — apps within apps. 

Mental Residue

When you use an app, the aftereffect of the usage lingers in the background of your mind, kind of like a movie that leaves a bunch of information to process. 

The single best way to minimise most of this residue and mitigate any possibility of installing an app in your brain - is to use it minimally within selected time windows of the day with the primary intent of communicating or creating (as opposed to consuming).

Naturally, any thought based behavioural modification loops, which are dependent on what you consume, will be mitigated. Your mind will become lighter and your ability to have creative independent insights will grow.

Summary

When people say social media apps have mechanisms that manipulate us, oftentimes they say that under the presumption that the manipulations only happen on the app/s. 

However, when we use these apps to the full extent their creators envision for us, they affect our minds and the way we live our lives. They can make us more promiscuous, desire-seeking, and identified with a particular point of view/s.

If we don’t use these apps with skilful balance, we become sculpted by them; as we slowly risk morphing into projectors of a digital world; instead of the independent sculptors of our lives.

If you enjoy reading my work, feel free to send me some sats or buy me a decaf.

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