You force yourself to wake up in the morning, dress up, drive straight to work, drive back home about 8 hours later, watch TV and sleep, only to repeat the same routine next day for almost the entire of your life.

You consider this kind of living as normal and even healthy, but if you stop and think about it, it is not healthy at all.

Life can be immensely beautiful, yet instead of making the most out of it, you choose to waste it because you have been programmed to do so.

Habits, tradition and dogmatic beliefs have turned you into a mindless automaton who does not enjoy life and just follow a predetermined path that was handed to you by Society.

Dogmatic, organized religion imposes on you what to think and what not to, what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong.

Organized religion prevents you from using your critical thinking, seeking the truth, and reaching to your own conclusions. On the contrary, it teaches you to blindly follow a set of morals and rules.

You support politicians who do nothing but lie in order to stay in power, being under the illusion that you are choosing a brighter future, when in reality the options you are given in your pseudodemocratic system are limited.

You allow a small group of people to manipulate you for their own personal gain, believing that they want to contribute to the better of Society.

In our mad economic system, money is created out of debt, and hence is not enough to go around for everyone.

Therefore, people are forced to compete in the market and waste most of their lives working as wage slaves, which inevitably leads to the immense suffering and social conflict that prevails all around the World.

In addition, our economic system is based on cyclical consumption and endless growth, which means that people have to consume without end in order for money to keep on circulating in the economy.

This requires not only excessive extraction of natural resources, but also the production of incredible waste that is poisoning the environment.

Being brought up in a consumer culture, you believe that money can buy everything you need and will bring happiness into your life.

So you choose to buy more and more things without end, but you always end up feeling dissatisfied and hungry for more stuff.

This is not a sane way for people to live. They herd us into classrooms where our minds are pressed into uniform shapes learning lessons which organize clean-cut, authorized thoughts into neat little boxes, then they herd us into cubicles where we turn gears to turn millionaires into billionaires.

We go home and our minds are herded into advertising that makes us want to consume, news media that makes us believe our government is virtuous, and TV shows where paid actors play out scenes which convince us that capitalism is working out perfectly fine. Try to get away from the phoniness by talking to a real person, and it turns out they’ve been processed through the same system.

But the rewards of moving inside their painted lanes are so great, and the penalties for stepping outside them are so severe. The closest most ever come to authenticity is learning how to fake their way through Society while secretly knowing it’s all bullshit.

But we also can’t keep living like this. This machine we keep fueling is filling the oceans with poison and filling the air with greenhouse gasses while killing the trees and driving humanity toward nuclear war. The lanes they have painted for us have formed a funnel into our own extinction.

So those lanes are necessarily going to have to become moot. All the societal structures which have been put in place to incentivize us toward producing and consuming are going to have to fall away. Either because Society collapses or because we changed our ways quickly and drastically enough to avert disaster. Either way, this march away from our own authenticity is about to end.

So why not start now? Why not take off that tight suit and stop acting out this masochistic charade?

Stop marching inside their lines to the beat of their drum. Stop relating to life using dead ideas you were handed by other people for the convenience of the powerful. Start dancing your own dance in your own way.

I don’t know how to dance your authentic dance, so I can’t tell you how to do that. But you do. You know. Underneath all the societal impositions and expectations and pressures and demands and fear and aversion and uncertainties, you know. The instructions are written upon the core of your being, and if you get sincerely curious about them, they will show themselves to you bit by bit, as needed.

Once you move past all the voices telling you you mustn’t and you shouldn’t, you will find that your own inner truth is so much wiser and healthier than society’s dead ideas about how we all ought to live.

Trust yourself to be bravely and defiantly true to the truth, clear-eyed rebel. I trust you. Life trusts you. You can trust yourself.

Climb up over that slaughterhouse rail and go live a life uninhibited by the painted lanes of a servile Society, for the good of our species and for the honor of your own majesty. Leave the cage they built for you in a ditch by the freeway and stride out boldly into uncharted lands beneath the open sky.