The Hunger Making Your Decisions
What the Indigenous Knew about Self-Sabotage
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.