Welcome to the shallow end of the gene pool, where institutions creak, experts preen, and common sense has been labeled extremist. This is the domain of credentialed clowns, procedural necromancers, and moral toddlers in charge of fire exits.
Here I document the slow-motion implosion of governance, education, media, and culture — not with outrage, but with the grim satisfaction of someone who saw it coming and packed snacks. No reform fantasies. No hand-wringing. Just a front-row seat to the theater of the absurd, with the occasional sharp object thrown from the balcony.
Born at the hinge of history, Generation X grew up fluent in both dirt and dial-up. We learned risk before rules, autonomy before narratives, and systems before slogans. As the digital world metastasizes and begins to fail, the skills we absorbed accidentally—through boredom, neglect, and consequence—are no longer nostalgic. They’re strategic.
Hope, in its most popular form, is not courage but sedation. It keeps people docile, compliant, and endlessly patient while the structure rots around them. It promises meaning tomorrow in exchange for paralysis today. No whips are required. The inmates guard themselves, rehearsing grievances and mistaking endurance for virtue.
We worship innovation and despise usefulness. We celebrate vapor businesses while treating plumbers, tailors, and shopkeepers as relics. This is not progress; it is decadence. Entrepreneurship is the horse, innovation the cart. Without people willing to serve real needs and carry risk, economies stagnate and societies rot—quietly, predictably, and deservedly in the end anyway.
We no longer examine reality; we recognize it. Labels spare us the effort of thinking, metrics replace judgment, and expertise becomes a rented shield against responsibility. From contracts to medicine to markets, abstraction has become autopilot. As long as someone still digs for bedrock, the system limps along. When no one does, it collapses—always.
Loss ends stories without asking permission. Careers collapse, identities dissolve, and the future stops negotiating. What remains is not hope, but choice. Not the freedom to escape circumstance, but the discipline to shape one’s interior world when nothing external will bend. Becoming begins precisely there, in the quiet after ruin.
We tell ourselves we need peace and quiet — but the real noise is internal. You can retreat to a mountaintop or delete every app, and still hear the echo of your own unresolved idiocy. Solitude doesn’t save you from fools; it merely introduces you to the loudest one — yourself.
Applause is sugar water for the soul — sweet, empty, and fattening. It feels like food but feeds nothing. The more you taste it, the more it owns you. Build for yourself, not for the crowd. Because when the theater goes dark and the cheering stops, you’ll face one audience only: the mirror.
When Orwell warned us about totalitarian control, he imagined boots and banners. What he missed was the spreadsheet. The tyranny arrived in ergonomic chairs, bearing KPIs and ESG reports. Our new Inner Party doesn’t torture dissidents; it audits them. The manager has replaced the priest, the king, and the tyrant—and we call it professionalism.
We haven’t outgrown witch hunts—we’ve digitized them. The bonfires are online, the sermons televised, the priests replaced by experts clutching data instead of crosses. The liturgy is unchanged: fear the unseen, obey the herd, trust the medicine. And in that obedience, we trade our last wild freedom for the comfort of calm.
We’ve mistaken movement for meaning. The world twitches, scrolls, reacts—convinced that perpetual motion equals life. But the quiet, the pause, the refusal to dance to the algorithm’s drum—these are now acts of rebellion. To stop moving is to start seeing, and nothing terrifies the modern mind more than the possibility of stillness.
We built a world allergic to pain and surprised when it festers. My parents’ generation learned through hunger and war; mine through bruises and burnt fingers. Today’s children learn through hashtags and safety slogans. Consequences—those unarguable teachers—have gone missing. And without them, truth, sanity, and civilization begin to rot from the inside out.
Solitude is never fashionable. The world worships noise—likes, followers, group chats, endless parties where the music is bad and the conversations worse. Yet here’s the secret: if you can endure silence without mistaking it for rejection, you forge an iron frame. To be alone and not collapse—that’s the first taste of freedom.