A requiem from the strange lands of uncurated living

 

Let’s drop the pleasantries.

Reality is not the Eurovision Song Contest.

No glitter cannons will herald your spiritual awakening. No rousing chorus will auto-tune your despair into meaning. No backup dancers will spin in reverence of your third existential collapse. You won’t get a standing ovation from the gods of hustle for simply dragging yourself out of bed on a Tuesday.

Real life—the coarse, inconvenient, unfiltered variety—is not optimized for your personal growth. It is not here for your narrative arc. It’s indifferent. It’s often unbeautiful, by any metric that photographs well.

And yet… it can be exquisite.

Not for everyone. Only for those who have stared down the chaos within, wrestled it into something resembling a throne, and chosen to sit—unglorified—upon it.

You, dear deviant, are not among the majority. You’re not even part of the statistically insignificant “few.” You are one of the obscenely outnumbered. A stubborn anomaly the algorithm failed to erase.

If life were a numbers game, we’d be mulch by now. Recycled into motivational slogans or LinkedIn case studies. But this isn’t about numbers. Never was.

The Few Who Matter

You didn’t land here because some upbeat mentor handed you a dopamine-slick brochure. You’re here because you saw the pitch for what it was: a beautiful lie, peddled by hollow-eyed optimists in sponsored hoodies.

You weren’t seduced by hustle quotes or soft-focus content about becoming your “best self.” You peeked behind the curtain and found—not a wizard—but a marketing intern with an MBA and a ring light, pitching “authenticity” from a Canva template.

We are not a tribe. Tribes wear matching T-shirts. We don’t even agree on fonts.

We’re a scattered pack of half-wild souls—some burnt, some still smoldering—united only by our refusal to be tamed.

We come dressed as forklift poets and crypto monks, single parents and ex-hustlers turned goat whisperers. Blue collar, white collar, popped collar—none of it matters. What matters is what we’ve left behind: not jobs or partners or cities, but illusion. The illusion of belonging in a world that demands your obedience in exchange for nothing that truly matters.

And that’s where most people flinch. They’d rather become cogs again than face the silence. They willfully reinsert themselves into the machine, whether as followers or leaders—it doesn’t matter. Cogs, all the same. That’s where the wiring leads. Even Fight Club couldn’t escape it. While the narrator met his shadow, confronted it, and ultimately reclaimed himself, the rest fell into a new structure with the same empty center. Same gears, new logo.

And that’s why you, freak of persistence, are rare. Because walking away is not quitting your job or growing a beard in the woods. It’s the moment you stop caring what anyone thinks of you. It’s when you realize your worth is not up for public auction.

No, you don’t have to escape the machine physically. You can stay inside it—ride the gears, observe its strange rhythms, even enjoy its quirks. Like Peter Gibbons in Office Space, you just… stop playing the part. You mow the lawn and let the system run around you while you sip lemonade from the shade.

Or like Neo in The Matrix, when he sees the code and finally stops reacting. He moves within it, not against it—no longer at war, but transcendent.

And perhaps most hauntingly—like Lester Burnham in American Beauty, who found liberation not in rebellion, but in absurd stillness. A man who once performed for everyone, then paused. Saw a plastic bag dance in the wind, and cried—not for what he’d lost, but for the strange, forgotten beauty of being fully alive.

We don’t live in code. We live in flesh. But the prison is still in the mind. And your jailbreak? It’s internal.

What matters is that we are no longer hypnotized. We no longer beg for claps or retweets. We don’t perform for the algorithmic gods or their capitalist priests.

Instead, we pour cheap red wine and watch the dog take a victorious piss on the last golden rays of the day. And in that silence, we mutter—not with shame, but with wonder—

“This… this is good.”

The Beauty of the Rough

If you want something polished, try Instagram. They’ve got filters for your trauma and hashtags for your hopes.

Looking for a bedtime story about disruption and empathy wrapped in a TED Talk bow? Tuck yourself in.

Addicted to hustle porn? There’s a whole aisle of ghostwritten manifestos just waiting to shame you into productivity.

But if you’re here—really here—you want something with dirt under its nails. Something that doesn’t smell like lavender, but like metal and coffee and wet bark.

Sometimes, dinner is a vaguely menacing cheese sandwich eaten off the floor while rain leaks through a crack in the ceiling. And it’s glorious.

Why?

Because no one asked you to perform gratitude.
 Because no one was watching.
 Because it was yours—unbranded, unmarketed, and blessedly free of hashtags.

That’s what real beauty looks like when it’s not rehearsed:
 It’s dented. It’s quiet. It doesn’t care if you notice.

We sleep on old mattresses and dream like kings.
 We take long walks and tell no one.
 We fail magnificently and laugh from the floor.
 We succeed and mention it to no one, because applause is irrelevant.

Not because we’re better.
 Because we’ve stopped needing a spotlight to feel real.

Why I Write

This isn’t for the ones who’ve already left the stage. They’ve got chickens to feed, children to raise, rust to admire.

They don’t read manifestos. They live them.

This is for the fence-sitters. The half-dreaming. The skeptical.
 You’ve nibbled the shiny plastic fruit and found it waxy and hollow.
 You ask, quietly—

“Is there something else?”

Yes.
 There is.

It won’t make you rich.
 It won’t trend.
 But it will make you whole.

It’s not a revolution. It’s a quiet divorce from the performance.
 A shift. A pause. A refusal to play along.

The machine doesn’t need to be destroyed.
 You just… stop dancing to its tune.

Not a Hero. Not a Victim. Just Free.

This isn’t a manifesto.
 It’s not a pitch.
 It’s a ghost note for the misfits.

No banners. No branding. No dramatic exits.

Just an invitation:
 Step off the stage.
 Breathe unsponsored air.
 Touch the ground without recording it.
 Let your soul stop clenching.

You don’t need to win.
 You don’t need to bow.
 You don’t need to prove anything.

You can just be.
 And yes, that’s more than enough.

My Readers

My readers are the ones who see beauty in burnt things.
 They don’t recoil from raw words. They inhale them like oxygen.
 They know what I mean when I say:

“You’re on your own. And that’s a blessing.”

Some of you are deep in the gears.
 Some are turning levers.
 Some are already half out, half dreaming.

Doesn’t matter.

If there’s still a stubborn flame somewhere inside—burning despite the barrage of metrics and performance reviews—then this is your corner.

You’re not here for status.
 You’re here because sanity is expensive.
 And this crooked little corner of the world still accepts barter.

So Here’s My Offer

No theater performance.
No sensational newscasting.
No “optimize your essence” weekend retreat.

Just this:

Walk away from the dopamine circus.
 Feel the dirt.
 Watch the sky lose its mind at sunset.
 And find a kind of beauty that doesn’t ask to be shared.

Sleep on the floor.
 Drink the bottle with the cracked label.
 Let the dog ruin the flowerbed.

And laugh—loud, unfiltered—like a mad king watching Rome burn from a hammock made of thrift store blankets.

Because somewhere out here, far from center stage,
 A few of us are doing the same.

No brand.
 No cult.
 Just peace.

And maybe a little bit of mold on the cheese.