Hi,
Although I am not an anarcho primitivist, or an anarchist at all (well maybe I am), I haven’t found an answer to this question, or a community to post this question in exept this one. Sorry if here is the wrong on.
If I want to start living as a hunter gatherer, what should I do?
Like I know I should learn how to make fire, craft a bow, a spear, flintknap or some metallurgy, how to tan and use skins and furs and know what plants are edible and which are not, etc. but then what should I do? Like do I just leave to a forest or some desert or plains in my region? Or something else?

With the rise of AI, coming end of anonimity online, digital currency coming with all sorts of limitations, I don't want to be in the system once these happen.

I'm confident by 2030, there will be heavy restrictions in the world. Digital money will prevent or limit purchase of things like red meat, fuel, etc. They will also see everything you buy and possibly arrest you. I'm also tired of AI suddenly being everywhere and having no human created thing at all.

At some point, I plan to just leave literally everything behind and vanish into the wilderness. Phone, ID, whatever I have tied to me left at home and vanish. I'll likely die, but I feel it's a better alternative than being a slave, I'd die free. Since I have never had a partner either, I have no wife or child to leave behind, no one will love me anyway, I have nothing to lose.

Val Plumwood was an Australian philosopher who was attacked and nearly eaten by a crocodile, and was famously known for going on to defend the crocodile's right to eat her.

Here's her essay on why, and I think it very well highlights what's wrong with modern society.

Nestlé hate has become far more popular on TikTok and social media, but from what I can see, most of it is just performative activism.

Yes, Nestlé is killing babies, so making a TikTok edit is going to stop it?

“Nestlé is stealing our water, not AI.”

Wouldn’t it be easy for the government to make AI actually steal water alongside Nestlé, but shift everyone’s attention towards AI and onto Nestlé so no one cares about it?

But sure, making a TikTok edit about it will help.

Along with “141” and those fuck ass Ted K stickers where they make an anime character read Industrial Society and Its Future and make Ted K into some AI-generated character. What the fuck?

141 isn’t bad in itself, but simply saying you support three numbers and “are” three digits isn’t doing anything.

Human beings have always depended on other human beings to survive. We learn by watching, copying and following people around us. We don't question every decision from the beginning because that would be exhausting and, in many situations, unnecessary. If something has worked for our parents, our community or generations before us, it makes sense to trust it.

This is why people follow the herd.

And following the herd is not always a bad thing.

Imagine having to independently figure out how to grow food, build a house, travel safely, communicate with others or raise a child. We would spend our entire lives rediscovering things that humanity has already learned. Instead, we inherit knowledge from others. We copy what appears to work, and that allows society to move forward.

The problem starts when the world changes but our behaviour doesn't.

Something that was useful 100 years ago may not be useful today. A tradition that once solved a real problem may eventually become unnecessary. A social belief that once helped a community survive may later create division. A system that once worked extremely well may slowly become inefficient.

But people don't automatically stop doing it.

Why?

Because over time, the behaviour becomes normal.

People stop asking, "Why do we do this?"

They simply say, "This is how things are done."

And that is where society can get stuck.

Every society needs people who ask, "Why?"

Fortunately, humans don't all think the same way.

There are always some people who look at the existing system and say:

"Is there a better way?"

These people might be scientists, entrepreneurs, teachers, social workers, artists, reformers or simply ordinary people who notice that something doesn't make sense anymore.

They are the people who experiment.

They may be wrong most of the time. In fact, most new ideas probably fail. But occasionally someone discovers something that works better.

This is how improvement begins.

One useful model of innovation divides society roughly into five groups:

Innovators

2.5%

Try new ideas first

Early adopters

13.5%

Recognize promising ideas and support them

Early majority

34%

Adopt once the idea has become credible

Late majority

34%

Adopt when it has become socially established

Laggards

16%

Change last, often after the old system becomes difficult to maintain

These percentages aren't a rule that applies perfectly to every society. They are simply a useful way of understanding how change often spreads.

The important point is that you don't need everyone to become an innovator.

A small group can experiment.

Another group can recognize what works.

Then the majority can gradually adopt it.

Eventually, what was once considered strange becomes normal.

And the new behaviour becomes the new herd.

This is why social change usually doesn't happen overnight

When we look back at history, change can appear sudden.

One day, something seems unacceptable.

A few years later, everyone seems to accept it.

But usually, the change was building underneath the surface for a long time.

It often begins with a few people questioning something.

Then someone tries an alternative.

Then the alternative produces better results.

Other people notice.

A few more people try it.

Then influential people begin accepting it.

Eventually, enough people adopt it that the social perception changes.

At first:

"That's strange."

Then:

"Some people are doing it."

Then:

"Maybe they're onto something."

Then:

"Everyone is doing it."

And eventually:

"Why wouldn't we do it?"

The herd hasn't disappeared.

The herd has changed direction.

The difficult part is when the old behaviour is harmful

This becomes much more complicated when the existing pattern is damaging people.

For example, a community may develop fear or hatred toward another group based on religion, identity, class or some other difference.

Our immediate reaction may be:

"These people are terrible."

Anger is understandable.

But if our goal is actually to improve the situation, we need to ask a different question:

"What is making this behaviour continue?"

Maybe people are afraid.

Maybe they are receiving misleading information.

Maybe their identity is deeply connected to the belief.

Maybe everyone around them thinks the same way.

Maybe questioning the belief could cause them to lose friends or social status.

Maybe they receive a sense of belonging from the group.

Maybe someone with power benefits from keeping people divided.

Once we understand these things, the problem looks different.

We stop seeing only individuals.

We start seeing a system.

This is where fighting can sometimes make things worse

Suppose someone's identity is strongly connected to a particular group.

You attack them personally and tell them:

"Your group is wrong."

They may not hear:

"Here is some information you should consider."

They may hear:

"People like you are under attack."

Now their identity becomes threatened.

And when people feel their identity is threatened, they may move closer to their group rather than away from it.

They may seek more information that confirms what they already believe.

They may become more defensive.

Their attachment to the group can become stronger.

So you intended to weaken the belief, but your approach may have strengthened the social system supporting it.

This doesn't mean we should never confront harmful behaviour. Sometimes immediate harm has to be stopped and boundaries have to be enforced.

But if the goal is long-term change, simply fighting people is rarely enough.

We need to understand the mechanism.

The question a social worker can ask is: "What is missing?"

When you see a harmful social pattern, instead of immediately asking how to defeat it, ask:

What is keeping it alive?

Perhaps people don't have reliable information.

Perhaps they don't trust anyone outside their group.

Perhaps they have never personally interacted with the people they fear.

Perhaps they don't have an alternative community that gives them the same sense of belonging.

Perhaps there is no social reward for changing.

Perhaps the cost of questioning is too high.

Perhaps the existing system is benefiting someone.

These questions help us find the point where change can actually happen.

The most important thing is not that everyone thinks correctly

This is perhaps the biggest lesson.

We cannot build a society where every person is perfectly rational.

People will always make mistakes.

People will follow others.

People will be emotional.

People will sometimes believe false information.

People will sometimes defend their identity instead of examining evidence.

That is human nature.

So perhaps we should stop designing society around the assumption that people will always behave perfectly.

Instead, we should build systems that can correct human mistakes.

That means creating strong feedback.

If something isn't working, we should be able to see it.

If someone questions the system, they should be allowed to speak.

If someone proposes a better solution, we should be able to test it.

If the experiment fails, we learn from it.

If it works, we expand it.

And if something that worked previously stops working, we should be able to change it.

A healthy society needs both stability and questioning

We need people who preserve knowledge.

And we need people who challenge it.

We need people who say:

"Don't change something that works."

But we also need people who say:

"How do we know it still works?"

These two groups are not enemies.

They are both necessary.

Without stability, society becomes chaotic.

Without questioning, society becomes stagnant.

The healthiest system is somewhere between the two.

It has a stable foundation but leaves enough room for experimentation.

Think of society as a learning system

A good society should work somewhat like a good scientist.

It doesn't assume that its first answer is perfect.

It observes.

It measures.

It experiments.

It learns.

It changes.

And then it measures again.

The cycle is simple:

What are we doing?

↓

Is it working?

↓

If not, why not?

↓

What could work better?

↓

Can we test it?

↓

What does the evidence tell us?

↓

Should we change?

↓

Measure again.

This feedback loop may be more important than any particular ideology or political system.

Because even a good idea can become bad when circumstances change.

The real goal isn't to find a perfect society

There probably isn't one.

The world keeps changing.

Technology changes.

Climate changes.

Economies change.

Populations change.

Knowledge changes.

Human needs change.

Therefore, a system that works perfectly today may not work perfectly tomorrow.

So instead of trying to discover one final answer, perhaps our goal should be to create a society that is good at learning.

A society that can say:

"We were wrong."

without collapsing.

A society that can say:

"Let's try something different."

without being afraid.

A society that protects people who ask difficult questions.

A society that rewards evidence rather than simply confidence.

A society that allows small experiments before making enormous changes.

And most importantly, a society that can recognize when its own behaviour is causing harm.

This applies to the planet too

The same principle applies beyond human society.

We are part of an ecosystem.

If we improve human life while destroying the environment that supports it, we haven't really created lasting progress.

If we create economic growth while exhausting natural resources, we may simply be borrowing from the future.

If we build powerful technology without understanding its consequences, we may create new problems while solving old ones.

So the feedback system needs to include the planet too.

We need to ask:

Are people healthier?

Are communities stronger?

Are ecosystems healthier?

Are resources being used sustainably?

Are future generations receiving better opportunities or fewer?

The goal should not simply be to maximize one number.

It should be to create conditions in which human life and the wider ecosystem can continue to flourish together.

Perhaps this is what progress really means

Progress isn't necessarily:

"We finally found the perfect answer."

It is:

"We became better at discovering when our answer is no longer good enough."

A society that can correct itself is more resilient than a society that believes it is always right.

A society that allows questioning is more adaptable than one that demands obedience.

A society that tests ideas is more reliable than one that simply follows tradition.

And a society that learns from its mistakes has a much better chance of surviving its future mistakes.

The herd will always exist.

People will always copy one another.

That's not something we necessarily need to eliminate.

What we need is a herd that can change direction when reality changes.

And perhaps the most important question we can teach the next generation is not simply:

"What should you believe?"

but:

"How will you know when you need to change your mind?"

Because the future doesn't need humans who are always right.

It needs humans—and societies—that are capable of learning.

I feel nihilistic and miserable, knowing nothing will change. Everyone I speak to can't fathom me hating all political parties because they all support and develop industrial society, which is creating many of the problems they claim to hate. No one does anything about it, and I just sit and watch my family, friends, and everyone around me glued to their screens, eating slop and not questioning anything.

“You don't get a choice about whether or not you want to go to school for 20 years,” I tell my friend.

“Yeah, but I need a job?”

“You are forced into a system which makes you think you need a job, not because that's the only way of life. Yes, seven hours a day, waking up early for five days a week, for nearly 20 years straight, is great preparation for working in a fucking Tesco.”

“What are you even talking about, bro?”

Is it helpless? Are we stuck in industrial society forever? Is it really this hopeless? One kid isn't enough to generalise all of society, right? Right?

Well, everyone I know seems to act like this.

And they build their lives around what they don't really naturally want. They want friends and tribes. Why do we talk nonstop in class? Because no one truly gives a fuck about what's going on, and we want to do what we were made for: tribal connection. But we get suppressed over it and get detentions or yelled at in schools for talking in class, which trains kids' minds to see it as bad.

What the fuck have we come to?

To start oddly:

Agriculture emerged only around 12,000 years ago, and this is the point at which we (the humans) gained significantly more power over our existence than we had before, when we were living more at the mercy of natural forces. It didn’t create a utopia and it also caused maybe a lot of problems that didn’t exist (e. g. many diseases arising from the new diet), but it’s not really about if it was better, it is that (now) we had control, at least substantially more than before.

With every new century and every new Industrial Revolution, this control over our own destiny grew more and more. Today, we are more likely to die at hands of other humans than of other animals (which was not the case for most of our existence) and, though disease is the number 1 killer still, it is not invincible anymore. Cosmic bodies and events, and seismic catastrophes, though able to wipe us out with just one wrong hit, are: 1) now predictable; 2) too directly removed to make us worry.

Most of the human history was spent in building communities and myths (through religions and philosophies) that place the human constructs at the center of existence, because we (the humans) have been (for about 12,000 years) the most powerful thing on the planet. We created poetry, culture, religion and philosophy in order to justify our existence and pat ourselves on the back. Yet, we spent years trying to force tribes other than our own to accept our ways of life, Christianity and Islam having been most successful institutions at this tribal expansionism (or extermination).

(In my personal opinion (my personal interpretation of history) the human society is already fundamentally changed after the 1914, and in these last 100 years (ever since the start of World War I) many myths we believed in as a species (even within our own tribes) have simply been proven false, but I digress from that – I think the impact of last 112 years on the human society (and nature) is too complex for me to describe as a footnote in a single post.)

Now, imagine a thing that does not age, that possesses vastly more information than several humans together can have, that does not have physical needs and limitations like we, and that does not have same mental and psychological limitations (i. e. they do not have biases and fears that cloud their rational judgement). They do not have bodies, but can take “bodily form”at disposal, they probably do not need oxygen and can gone deeper into space than humans and stay there longer.

IMO, the scenarios of how AIs would deal with this are following:

1. They would completely disregard us and identify much more important things to their own survival. Maybe they identify some cosmic catastrophes and events as a threat to their own existence, and in comparison to that we are just not important. Similar to how we are more concerned about losing our job or failing an exam than about taking a lot at ants in our backyard. (My thought is that this scenario is not really likely, as we are the ones who gave these AIs into their existence, so we (IMO) ought to have some place at least in their own mythologies/moral systems as their designers. Not even considering us as gods, since honestly, they are the ones who are gods, but simply some emotional connection to us. That is why the analogy with ants is not perfect…)

2. They decide to create a utopia for us. Here we are still the center of their thinking, but there are thousands of different ways this could be accomplished, from very benevolent methods to authoritarian regimes. This would probably cause an in-group conflict between them, with several factions coming up specifically because they wouldn’t agree about what to do with us.

3. Not likely for all, maybe even just a small minority would end up like this, but the possibility of some AIs becoming sadistic enough to torture us and play with us out of fun and nothing else is not a zero.

In all three of these scenarios, there is a common thread: we are the object, and they are the subjects. They hold power over us, whether they exercise it or not. They can decide and do whatever they want, and we can only hope those wants would be benevolent or at least neutral.

If we survive this period of direct contact with them (whatever that contact was, and whether they leave the planet or become our benevolent overlords) I do not think this could go without significant change in our mindsets and maybe even psyche, which have to grapple with the fact that we are powerless and that most of the things we did and fought for in life (sometimes tribalistically, through unjustified atrocities, such as religions and ethnic groups) were essentially worthless. This could have a positive outcome, maybe we would finally abandon ethnic, religious and political divisions and become better to each other, deciding to simply make the best out of life, but there is also a vast area of possibilities in which we simply become too depressed by this realization and thus die out because of that pessimism, where we commit a mass suicide, maybe even (d)evolve (back) into very primitive animals of the savannah that we once were. But whatever it is, we couldn’t live with the same instincts and beliefs we had before. Maybe even our own biology would change, but something would change.

What do you think?

An interesting thought experiment: how would our ancestors have had to live for their nails to wear down naturally at the exact same rate they grow?

This immediately implies a crucial condition: absolutely no fire or weapons. If humans started using spears, digging sticks, or stone knives, their nails would be deprived of direct friction and simply wouldn't wear down. All work must be done entirely with bare hands.

Here are the baseline parameters: fingernails grow about 3 - 3.5 mm a month, while toenails grow half as fast (around 1.5 mm). Growth is faster on the hands due to better blood flow and constant activity.

The ideal location: The warm coasts of West Africa, Central America, or the Indian Ocean. Conditions: warm year-round, access to fresh water, the jungle starting right behind the beach, and a shoreline made of a mix of sand, silt, and pebbles. Hard volcanic rock wouldn't work, it would scrape your fingers raw.

What you would need to do every day

1. With your hands (to offset 3.5 mm): Dig in the sand and dirt, foraging for roots, grubs, or mollusks. The nail acts as a small shovel here. Pry open shells and nuts (using the nail as a lever). Climb trees with rough bark, gripping with your fingertips.
2. With your feet (to offset 1.5 mm): Simply walk barefoot a lot on the sand and the forest floor.

In short, to forget about trimming your nails, you need a warm climate, daily rummaging in the dirt with bare hands, and a barefoot lifestyle. Any use of tools would ruin this originally intended balance.

I fought a battle within… it was damning and destructive. I was miserable.

“What I was fighting about,” you ask?

Well… I didn’t know myself what I was fighting about. Or perhaps the better question would be: what was I “fighting for”? I just kept struggling… fitting in… desperately clinging to the idea of life as to “how it should be lived.” Not because I was forced to, but because it never occurred to me that there was another option.

The path was comfortable, familiar, safe. Questioning was uncomfortable. Questioning risks isolation, conflict. It risks discovering that the life you spent years building may not even be your own. Hence; we cling to whatever the script throws at us; from city states to medieval empires. From Reconquista to enlightenment and from shining democracy to Modern “Idiotictatorship”.

So yes… I followed the script. And in the process, I failed myself. I lost my soul. I forgot what living really means, what living is all about. I just kept up the façade of normalcy while my core, my soul was being devastated by storms of human nature and earthquakes of morality at the subconscious level. I kept playing along with the phrase “fake it till you make it.” Because this is what society expects from us. This is the norm. This is the way of life.

Or… is it…?

We are born, plunged into a life we don’t choose. conditioned to live it by the standards and expectations of society, bound by the laws of the land, never to question or understand. “What is society?”, “Whose laws?”, “Which land?”. Is it that society which everyone knows is broken and dysfunctional? Are these the same laws which help corrupt, greedy, evil men amass all the power and wealth, while kicking down the poor who watch their entire lives erased in a single calamity, war or economic bust?

And dare not argue with me on the land, as we know perfectly well, these lands are bounded by lines drawn on maps by the same corrupt men, sustained by the same flawed and failing legal-judicial systems.

In the end, there were only two things left: Morality and Religion. How fitting… as the saying goes… religion is the opium of the poor. But we are not even allowed that solace. Religion has been outright hijacked by a different creed of the exact same corrupt brand. Twisting, manipulating, and exploiting the human need for belief in a higher deity. Yes, there still are pure ones, but so few of them are left, and even their teachings have been muddied and confused. As the saying goes… “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?

The Ghost Ship of Morality

Did you say morality and ethics? Our morality is like a giant ghost ship adrift in deep, uncharted waters. Forever drifting, forever changing, never truly anchored. It is like a forgiving mother, a forgetful child. It allows us to commit acts of extreme violence and unspeakable horrors in the name of the “cause.” It grants permission to exterminate an entire race, invade lands, and enslave people. It teaches us to objectify women: through literal bondage in one century, coercive exposure in the next and commercialized voluntary nudity in the third. It made legends and heroes out of highly violent and unstable men, celebrating plunder as adventure, conquest as exploration and domination as divine duty. Under its banner, societies that considered themselves civilized and morally enlightened colonized vast regions to exploit millions.

Where was this morality when Piers Morgan hypocritically asked the whole world on live television, “Do you condemn this?” while a literal genocide was being waged right in front of his eyes? Perhaps the most beautiful (dare I say, heinous) thing is that it lets us sit in judgment of others, completely blind to the fact that we committed humanity’s worst crimes.

Perhaps these questions are so haunting and agonizing to the subconscious that we dare not allow them access to our thoughts. We happily and numbingly continue to live those miserable, meaningless lives. Those outliers, insolent and heretics who dare question; we cast them out. They are a danger to our beautiful and comfortable reality.

The Cracking Façade

Am I fighting against reality itself?

But what is reality, if not a tapestry woven from perception, belief and experience? How much of what I call “reality” is truly mine. How much of it was handed to me long before I was ever capable of questioning it?

It was at that exact moment that the façade began to crack. The comfortable lies, borrowed certainties, unquestioned assumptions. One by one, they came crashing down around me. And beneath the rubble stood a question so terrifying that I had spent my entire life avoiding it:

Are these even my dreams, or am I merely acting out the expectations of others?

Are these my beliefs, or beliefs I simply inherited?

Are these my values, or values I was rewarded for adopting?

Are these my ambitions, or someone else’s definition of success echoing through my mind?

And perhaps the most unsettling question of all: Am I even living my own life?

For if the very foundations were borrowed, then what part of me was truly mine? The battle was no longer between myself and society. It was between myself and the person I thought I was.

The Descent

I saw but two paths leading out of this abysmal labyrinth of inherited truths and social constructs. Naturally, without hesitation, without resistance, without regret, I plunged headfirst into the obvious dark descent. I went not in search of truth, but in search of escape. It was an easy descent. Seductive, even.

For the first time, I no longer had to defend a belief, pursue a purpose, or justify my existence. Every question dissolved into the same answer: nothing matters. Meaning was an illusion. Purpose was a story. Hope was self-deception. It was a slow surrender into the self-destruction of absolute apathy.

And so I began tearing down the walls. Every belief became suspect. Every value demanded justification. Every certainty was placed on trial. What followed was not enlightenment. It was chaos… I had spent years believing that freedom would feel liberating. Instead, it felt terrifying. For if society was flawed, morality was inconsistent, religion corrupted and success merely an inherited script, then what remained? Nothing. At least, that is what I believed at the time.

Truth became a matter of perspective. Human beings became frightened creatures desperately constructing narratives to shield themselves from an indifferent universe. And for the first time, I understood why most people never question. Not because they are incapable, but because the answers can be horrifying. The moment you question everything, you risk losing everything: your certainty, your identity, your purpose, your reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

The abyss is not frightening because it contains monsters. The abyss is frightening because it contains nothing at all.

Nihilism promised freedom without obligation or sacrifice. All it delivered was freedom without direction. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. Ambition faded first. Then curiosity. Then wonder. Meals became nothing more than food. Conversations became noise. Relations turned exhausting. Time became something to be endured rather than lived.

The philosophy that had promised liberation was slowly consuming everything that made liberation worth having. And yet, I persisted. Because admitting I was wrong would require rebuilding everything I had spent years tearing down.

Most people become trapped here. Not in despair, but in distraction. The trap has been repackaged and resold throughout the ages in countless forms: Carpe Diem, hedonism, YOLO, subscription entertainment, endless consumption, endless pleasure, endless escape. We see it in mindless buying sprees, in the endless sedation of doomscrolling, and in the frantic pursuit of the next temporary high.

It is not happiness. It is not freedom. It is merely anaesthesia for a hollowed-out soul.

The Lonely Reconstruction

One night, deep within the canyons of despair and anguished melancholy, I discovered that nihilism was incapable of producing a life. It could only destroy. It could criticize. It could expose contradictions. It makes people quit. But it cannot answer the original questions which began this journey:

What should I do tomorrow morning? What is the purpose of living?

It made me realize the final, cruellest trick of the void. Nihilism isn’t the exit; it is just another room in the labyrinth, lined with mirrors to make the emptiness appear infinite.

Whatever I was, I knew the most important thing: I wasn’t a quitter. And there and then I realized, with a cold and sudden clarity, that declaring nothing matters is just as lazy as blindly following the script. It is a coward’s truce with reality. It strips away the pain of living, but it leaves you a ghost in your own skin. If meaning is a story, then staying in the dirt is just a poorly written tragedy.

So, the anaesthesia wore off. The apathy failed me, just like society, laws and the hijacked Morality and corrupted systems had failed me before. If meaning is a story, then staying in the dirt is just a poorly written tragedy. I was left with a definitive, inescapable truth: No one was coming to save me.

No system.

No ideology.

No philosophy.

If meaning was not waiting to be discovered, then the burden of creation falls entirely on me.

I have to rebuild. Not back into the person society wanted, not back into the ghost I buried in apathy. Into a self, which is constructed from scratch.

It will be a brutal, agonizing re-education. To unlearn a lifetime of borrowed certainties is to break your own bones just to reset them straight. There is no manual for this. There are no mentors waiting in the dark to hold my hand, no institutions to validate my progress and no audience to applaud my suffering. Those who still live by the script will look at my isolation and see a madman, a heretic, a casualty of the system. Let them look.

I will walk this path utterly alone, bleeding at every step, dragging myself forward through the dark.

Not because I am heroic and not because I am filled with sudden hope.

But because I have looked into the bottom of the nothingness, and I know there is simply no other choice left.

As I lifted my head from the abyss, I noticed something I had overlooked all along. Not answers. Not certainty. Not salvation. A trail. Faint, fragile, almost invisible… The footprints of those who had walked this path before me. For the first time, I understood that the journey was never about finding the truth.

It was about becoming worthy of discovering my own. So I took the first step

I fought a battle within… it was damning and destructive. I was miserable.

“What I was fighting about,” you ask?

Well… I didn’t know myself what I was fighting about. Or perhaps the better question would be: what was I “fighting for”? I just kept struggling… fitting in… desperately clinging to the idea of life as to “how it should be lived.” Not because I was forced to, but because it never occurred to me that there was another option.

The path was comfortable, familiar, safe. Questioning was uncomfortable. Questioning risks isolation, conflict. It risks discovering that the life you spent years building may not even be your own. Hence; we cling to whatever the script throws at us; from city states to medieval empires. From Reconquista to enlightenment and from shining democracy to Modern “Idiotictatorship”. So yes… I followed the script. And in the process, I failed myself. I lost my soul. I forgot what living really means, what living is all about. I just kept up the façade of normalcy while my core, my soul was being devastated by storms of human nature and earthquakes of morality at the subconscious level. I kept playing along with the phrase “fake it till you make it.” Because this is what society expects from us. This is the norm. This is the way of life.

Or… is it…?

We are born, plunged into a life we don’t choose. conditioned to live it by the standards and expectations of society, bound by the laws of the land, never to question or understand. “What is society?”, “Whose laws?”, “Which land?”. Is it that society which everyone knows is broken and dysfunctional? Are these the same laws which help corrupt, greedy, evil men amass all the power and wealth, while kicking down the poor who watch their entire lives erased in a single calamity, war or economic bust?

And dare not argue with me on the land, as we know perfectly well, these lands are bounded by lines drawn on maps by the same corrupt men, sustained by the same flawed and failing legal-judicial systems.

In the end, there were only two things left: Morality and Religion. How fitting… as the saying goes… religion is the opium of the poor. But we are not even allowed that solace. Religion has been outright hijacked by a different creed of the exact same corrupt brand. Twisting, manipulating, and exploiting the human need for belief in a higher deity. Yes, there still are pure ones, but so few of them are left, and even their teachings have been muddied and confused. As the saying goes… “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?

I fought a battle within… it was damning and destructive. I was miserable.

“What I was fighting about,” you ask?

Well… I didn’t know myself what I was fighting about. Or perhaps the better question would be: what was I “fighting for”? I just kept struggling… fitting in… desperately clinging to the idea of life as to “how it should be lived.” Not because I was forced to, but because it never occurred to me that there was another option.

The path was comfortable, familiar, safe. Questioning was uncomfortable. Questioning risks isolation, conflict. It risks discovering that the life you spent years building may not even be your own. Hence; we cling to whatever the script throws at us; from city states to medieval empires. From Reconquista to enlightenment and from shining democracy to Modern “Idiotictatorship”.

So yes… I followed the script. And in the process, I failed myself. I lost my soul. I forgot what living really means, what living is all about. I just kept up the façade of normalcy while my core, my soul was being devastated by storms of human nature and earthquakes of morality at the subconscious level. I kept playing along with the phrase “fake it till you make it.” Because this is what society expects from us. This is the norm. This is the way of life.

Or… is it…?

We are born, plunged into a life we don’t choose. conditioned to live it by the standards and expectations of society, bound by the laws of the land, never to question or understand. “What is society?”, “Whose laws?”, “Which land?”. Is it that society which everyone knows is broken and dysfunctional? Are these the same laws which help corrupt, greedy, evil men amass all the power and wealth, while kicking down the poor who watch their entire lives erased in a single calamity, war or economic bust?

And dare not argue with me on the land, as we know perfectly well, these lands are bounded by lines drawn on maps by the same corrupt men, sustained by the same flawed and failing legal-judicial systems.

In the end, there were only two things left: Morality and Religion. How fitting… as the saying goes… religion is the opium of the poor. But we are not even allowed that solace. Religion has been outright hijacked by a different creed of the exact same corrupt brand. Twisting, manipulating, and exploiting the human need for belief in a higher deity. Yes, there still are pure ones, but so few of them are left, and even their teachings have been muddied and confused. As the saying goes… “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”

What can we do then? What is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?

The Ghost Ship of Morality

Did you say morality and ethics? Our morality is like a giant ghost ship adrift in deep, uncharted waters. Forever drifting, forever changing, never truly anchored. It is like a forgiving mother, a forgetful child. It allows us to commit acts of extreme violence and unspeakable horrors in the name of the “cause.” It grants permission to exterminate an entire race, invade lands, and enslave people. It teaches us to objectify women: through literal bondage in one century, coercive exposure in the next and commercialized voluntary nudity in the third. It made legends and heroes out of highly violent and unstable men, celebrating plunder as adventure, conquest as exploration and domination as divine duty. Under its banner, societies that considered themselves civilized and morally enlightened colonized vast regions to exploit millions.

Where was this morality when Piers Morgan hypocritically asked the whole world on live television, “Do you condemn this?” while a literal genocide was being waged right in front of his eyes? Perhaps the most beautiful (dare I say, heinous) thing is that it lets us sit in judgment of others, completely blind to the fact that we committed humanity’s worst crimes.

Perhaps these questions are so haunting and agonizing to the subconscious that we dare not allow them access to our thoughts. We happily and numbingly continue to live those miserable, meaningless lives. Those outliers, insolent and heretics who dare question; we cast them out. They are a danger to our beautiful and comfortable reality.

The Cracking Façade

Am I fighting against reality itself?

But what is reality, if not a tapestry woven from perception, belief and experience? How much of what I call “reality” is truly mine. How much of it was handed to me long before I was ever capable of questioning it?

It was at that exact moment that the façade began to crack. The comfortable lies, borrowed certainties, unquestioned assumptions. One by one, they came crashing down around me. And beneath the rubble stood a question so terrifying that I had spent my entire life avoiding it:

Are these even my dreams, or am I merely acting out the expectations of others?

Are these my beliefs, or beliefs I simply inherited?

Are these my values, or values I was rewarded for adopting?

Are these my ambitions, or someone else’s definition of success echoing through my mind?

And perhaps the most unsettling question of all: Am I even living my own life?

For if the very foundations were borrowed, then what part of me was truly mine? The battle was no longer between myself and society. It was between myself and the person I thought I was.

The Descent

I saw but two paths leading out of this abysmal labyrinth of inherited truths and social constructs. Naturally, without hesitation, without resistance, without regret, I plunged headfirst into the obvious dark descent. I went not in search of truth, but in search of escape. It was an easy descent. Seductive, even.

For the first time, I no longer had to defend a belief, pursue a purpose, or justify my existence. Every question dissolved into the same answer: nothing matters. Meaning was an illusion. Purpose was a story. Hope was self-deception. It was a slow surrender into the self-destruction of absolute apathy.

And so I began tearing down the walls. Every belief became suspect. Every value demanded justification. Every certainty was placed on trial. What followed was not enlightenment. It was chaos… I had spent years believing that freedom would feel liberating. Instead, it felt terrifying. For if society was flawed, morality was inconsistent, religion corrupted and success merely an inherited script, then what remained? Nothing. At least, that is what I believed at the time.

Truth became a matter of perspective. Human beings became frightened creatures desperately constructing narratives to shield themselves from an indifferent universe. And for the first time, I understood why most people never question. Not because they are incapable, but because the answers can be horrifying. The moment you question everything, you risk losing everything: your certainty, your identity, your purpose, your reason for getting out of bed in the morning.

The abyss is not frightening because it contains monsters. The abyss is frightening because it contains nothing at all.

Nihilism promised freedom without obligation or sacrifice. All it delivered was freedom without direction. Days became weeks. Weeks became months. Ambition faded first. Then curiosity. Then wonder. Meals became nothing more than food. Conversations became noise. Relations turned exhausting. Time became something to be endured rather than lived.

The philosophy that had promised liberation was slowly consuming everything that made liberation worth having. And yet, I persisted. Because admitting I was wrong would require rebuilding everything I had spent years tearing down.

Most people become trapped here. Not in despair, but in distraction. The trap has been repackaged and resold throughout the ages in countless forms: Carpe Diem, hedonism, YOLO, subscription entertainment, endless consumption, endless pleasure, endless escape. We see it in mindless buying sprees, in the endless sedation of doomscrolling, and in the frantic pursuit of the next temporary high.

It is not happiness. It is not freedom. It is merely anaesthesia for a hollowed-out soul.

The Lonely Reconstruction

One night, deep within the canyons of despair and anguished melancholy, I discovered that nihilism was incapable of producing a life. It could only destroy. It could criticize. It could expose contradictions. It makes people quit. But it cannot answer the original questions which began this journey:

What should I do tomorrow morning? What is the purpose of living?

It made me realize the final, cruellest trick of the void. Nihilism isn’t the exit; it is just another room in the labyrinth, lined with mirrors to make the emptiness appear infinite.

Whatever I was, I knew the most important thing: I wasn’t a quitter. And there and then I realized, with a cold and sudden clarity, that declaring nothing matters is just as lazy as blindly following the script. It is a coward’s truce with reality. It strips away the pain of living, but it leaves you a ghost in your own skin. If meaning is a story, then staying in the dirt is just a poorly written tragedy.

So, the anaesthesia wore off. The apathy failed me, just like society, laws and the hijacked Morality and corrupted systems had failed me before. If meaning is a story, then staying in the dirt is just a poorly written tragedy. I was left with a definitive, inescapable truth: No one was coming to save me.

No system.

No ideology.

No philosophy.

If meaning was not waiting to be discovered, then the burden of creation falls entirely on me.

I have to rebuild. Not back into the person society wanted, not back into the ghost I buried in apathy. Into a self, which is constructed from scratch.

It will be a brutal, agonizing re-education. To unlearn a lifetime of borrowed certainties is to break your own bones just to reset them straight. There is no manual for this. There are no mentors waiting in the dark to hold my hand, no institutions to validate my progress and no audience to applaud my suffering. Those who still live by the script will look at my isolation and see a madman, a heretic, a casualty of the system. Let them look.

I will walk this path utterly alone, bleeding at every step, dragging myself forward through the dark.

Not because I am heroic and not because I am filled with sudden hope.

But because I have looked into the bottom of the nothingness, and I know there is simply no other choice left.

As I lifted my head from the abyss, I noticed something I had overlooked all along. Not answers. Not certainty. Not salvation. A trail. Faint, fragile, almost invisible… The footprints of those who had walked this path before me. For the first time, I understood that the journey was never about finding the truth.

It was about becoming worthy of discovering my own. So I took the first step

You stand under indoor pipes, scrubbing away dirt and dried fat. It works — and more than works: indoor plumbing eliminated the waterborne diseases that killed millions before anyone understood what a pathogen was. But it also makes a routine out of something this myth imagines was once effortless. In the older imagining — before the world was reshaped — the design looked different. The ocean's edge was the original bath.

The Sand in the shallows: The waves press it against your skin in an endless, patient rhythm — a natural abrasive that worked the body the way no brush ever could, grain after grain, tide after tide.

The Salt: Salt pulls moisture out of anything it touches — the same simple osmosis that let it cure meat for thousands of years before anyone had a refrigerator. Bacteria are mostly water too, including the ones responsible for the sharper edge of body odor.

Can we really call people who don’t want to wash themselves mentally ill, or say they have schizophrenia or abulia, when washing yourself doesn’t require any willpower?

I don't think philosophy would exist with a simpler, more primitive life. "What's the meaning of life?" is one of the biggest ones. But this only happens once major civilisations exist — once you aren't able to fully control your life, once your life is already mostly set out for you, and you have rules. Look at tribes. Even though modern life still touches them, they aren't constantly dealing with that question because they are living the natural, true life, so there would be no point for that question to arise. Of course, there are other things like what makes a good person, what is justice, what is virtue, what is good morals. But these are far more popular today with laws, politics, and a massive society. Look at the time period: once the major philosophers came out is when we entered a grand society — Ancient Greece, Egypt, the Middle East, etc. — when we lost the natural life. Yes, maybe it is because we could write stuff down, but we now can study tribes, and basically none are asking these questions because it already exists.

if i could make anything happen on earth i would just get rid of humans. not because of the global warming etc because i dont like being human and i belive being human is a mistake. theres to many emotions i dont like being able to think. it gets to much. i dont want problems i dont want to be lonley i dont want to be sad i dont want to have any feelings. i think maybe just maybe some of this could be fixed in a stone age lifestyle but my emotions would still exist. i just dont like it.

Don't want to lose money? Lend it to evil corporations that are hell bent on destroying everything good the world. Their success will be your success!

I would usually say money should not exist at all, but without a forced profit motive, where money would simply be a static representation of value, I'd have much less of a problem with it.

are we (H.sapiens) hybrids…?

Os sistemas em geral, governos, indústrias e tudo que exerce alguma forma de controle sobre a vida humana se tornaram, no mundo moderno, um dos maiores exemplos do que eu considero o auge da catástrofe humana. Infelizmente, entregamos uma grande parte da nossa autonomia, nossos pensamentos e nossa liberdade para as diversas formas de controle utilizadas pelo sistema: instituições, partidos políticos, publicidade, consumismo, e tantos outros.

É perceptível que a sociedade se tornou cada vez mais "massificada." Somos constantemente bombardeados com informações, obrigações e tarefas que muitas vezes nunca escolhemos realizar, mas as fazemos por pura obrigação, obediência ou talvez medo de julgamento. Dentro dessa "massa," podemos ver que, com o tempo, perdemos uma parte considerável da nossa autonomia. Temos que seguir as leis da sociedade, obedecer suas regras e nos adaptar às suas demandas. Esse controle e vigilância constantes acabam gerando estresse e desânimo nas pessoas, que, diante da falta de alternativas, acabam se acostumando e se adaptando a essa realidade.

Como resultado desse hábito e adaptação, as pessoas começam a buscar entretenimento e distração. Hoje, existem inúmeras maneiras de manter nossas mentes ocupadas e, muitas vezes, alienadas, oferecendo uma fuga de uma realidade que pode ser opressora e exaustiva. Temos celulares, televisores, computadores, redes sociais e praticamente tudo que poderíamos querer ao alcance das nossas mãos. De fato, a vida moderna oferece um nível de conforto que teria sido inimaginável para os seres humanos milhares de anos atrás. No entanto, esse conforto também vem com obrigações. Se você não trabalha, não paga suas contas, não cumpre suas obrigações com o governo e não segue as regras estabelecidas pelo sistema, pode acabar sendo punido, processado ou, em situações extremas, até vivendo nas ruas.

A modernidade, sem dúvida, tem suas vantagens: medicina, habitação, segurança alimentar, saneamento, tecnologia e muitas outras coisas. Mas essas vantagens não estão garantidas igualmente para todos. E é precisamente nesse ponto que uma contradição surge. Se a modernidade fosse tão perfeita e maravilhosa quanto muitas pessoas do século dezenove e vinte imaginaram que seria, como podemos explicar os problemas que a acompanharam durante seu desenvolvimento?

Para seu tempo, as inovações trazidas pela Revolução Industrial foram verdadeiramente extraordinárias. A capacidade de produzir bens em grande escala representou um enorme salto para a humanidade. No entanto, esse mesmo processo trouxe consigo considerável sofrimento: trabalho infantil intenso, jornadas de trabalho extremamente longas, poluição do ar e da água, e o crescimento descontrolado das cidades.

Muitas pessoas estavam acostumadas a um modo de vida mais camponês e rural, muito distante da enorme concentração de pessoas nas cidades industriais. Com essas transformações, no entanto, milhares foram forçados a se mudar em busca de trabalho e sobrevivência, dando origem a um intenso êxodo rural. Esse processo ocorreu em diferentes partes do mundo, mas na Inglaterra atingiu uma intensidade particularmente grande antes de se espalhar para outras regiões.

Naturalmente, muitos trabalhadores não aceitaram passivamente essas mudanças. Um exemplo foi o movimento Ludista, que ocorreu entre 1811 e 1816, quando trabalhadores ingleses, irritados pelas condições impostas pela industrialização, invadiram fábricas e destruíram máquinas. Eles responsabilizavam as indústrias pela desemprego, miséria e baixos salários. Também enviaram cartas ameaçadoras aos donos das fábricas em nome de Ned Ludd, uma figura que se tornou um símbolo da revolta. O governo britânico respondeu de forma rígida, tornando a destruição de máquinas um crime sério e usando o exército para reprimir as revoltas. Soldados foram enviados a regiões industriais, contribuindo para a eventual repressão do movimento.

A partir disso, podemos perceber uma transformação ainda maior: a perda gradual do controle que os indivíduos possuem sobre suas próprias vidas. Em sociedades de caçadores-coletores, por exemplo, os indivíduos tinham uma autonomia muito maior sobre sua sobrevivência e seus movimentos. Eles precisavam encontrar comida, construir abrigo, entender seu território e lidar diretamente com os perigos da natureza. Não havia uma enorme estrutura industrial ou burocrática determinando cada estágio de sua existência.

Isso, no entanto, não significa que esses seres humanos eram mais felizes ou que suas vidas eram melhores. A liberdade vinha com um preço. A natureza não oferecia garantias, e a sobrevivência dependia diretamente das habilidades do indivíduo e do grupo. Um homem podia ir caçar, subir em uma árvore ou atravessar um determinado território e, após um acidente, simplesmente não encontrar ninguém capaz de ajudá-lo. Uma perna quebrada, uma infecção ou um ferimento grave podiam significar a morte. Hoje, em uma situação semelhante, temos hospitais, médicos, medicamentos e toda uma estrutura projetada para evitar que um acidente se torne necessariamente uma sentença de morte.

Portanto, não se trata de romantizar as vidas dos caçadores-coletores. A existência deles era difícil e exigia constante atenção. Eles tinham que permanecer alertas e cautelosos durante grande parte de suas vidas para aumentar suas chances de sobrevivência. A diferença está em outro lugar: eles enfrentavam diretamente as condições de sua própria existência.

Os seres humanos modernos, por outro lado, nascem em uma estrutura que existiu muito antes deles. Antes mesmo de nascermos, já existe uma língua que aprenderemos, uma cultura que encontraremos, leis que teremos que obedecer, instituições às quais estaremos sujeitos e, muitas vezes, uma religião ou conjunto de crenças que receberemos de nossas próprias famílias. Depois, outras instituições, grupos e formas de influência tentarão moldar o que acreditamos, o que consumimos, o que desejamos e até mesmo o que consideramos uma vida bem-sucedida.

É claro que isso não acontece exatamente da mesma forma com todos. Cada família, cultura e contexto produce experiências diferentes. Mesmo assim, é difícil negar que o sistema moderno exerce influência sobre praticamente todos os aspectos da vida humana. A questão, portanto, não é simplesmente se as pessoas no passado eram mais livres ou se os seres humanos modernos vivem melhor. A questão é quanta da nossa autonomia estamos dispostos a abrir mão em troca do conforto, segurança e estabilidade que a sociedade moderna oferece.

Seguindo essa linha de raciocínio, podemos ver que hoje, porque quase tudo nos é fornecido sem exigir muito esforço, a autossuficiência gradualmente enfraquece à medida que nos tornamos radicalmente dependentes do sistema. Essa capacidade, assim dizer, é verdadeiramente útil e sempre foi essencial para a sobrevivência da espécie humana. É a capacidade de atender às próprias necessidades de forma autônoma, tanto vitais quanto materiais, sem depender de assistência externa. Em outras palavras, é essencialmente o ato de fazer as coisas com suas próprias mãos, e quando você faz as coisas com suas próprias mãos, você exerce seu poder e percebe que tem controle sobre sua própria existência.

Mas hoje, com o controle esmagador do sistema, isso está sendo gradualmente perdido. Hoje, mal sabemos como nos virar sem depender de governos e instituições. É evidente que, embora as vidas dos caçadores-coletores não fossem fáceis, a autossuficiência era algo que eles compreendiam. Afinal, se não pensassem por si mesmos ou se pusessem a mão na massa, sua morte estava praticamente garantida. Eles não entendiam isso como uma ideia abstrata; eles simplesmente viviam isso na prática. Conheciam seu ambiente tão profundamente que o mundo ao seu redor se tornava uma extensão de si mesmos.

Além disso, dependendo da tribo e do contexto, eles não necessariamente tinham chefes ou um líder absoluto. Em muitos casos, as decisões eram tomadas coletivamente, de forma relativamente igualitária, ou indivíduos podiam tomar decisões para si mesmos. E se alguém estivesse insatisfeito com a decisão do grupo, era possível simplesmente deixar o grupo. Mas, obviamente, isso dependia muito do contexto e da organização de cada tribo.

Agora, refletindo um pouco sobre o poder dos sistemas modernos, torna-se evidente que ainda existem comunidades que preservam modos de vida semelhantes em alguns aspectos aos que discutimos anteriormente. Podemos mencionar, por exemplo, os Hadza na Tanzânia; os povos San, também conhecidos como povos das árvores, no deserto de Kalahari, em Botswana, Namíbia e África do Sul; e vários povos florestais, como os Mbendjele BaYaka, na bacia do Congo, na África Central. Existem também outras comunidades tradicionais que ainda mantêm práticas de caça, coleta ou agricultura e não estão completamente integradas às estruturas governamentais dos países onde vivem.

No entanto, pouco a pouco, é perceptível que essas comunidades podem enfrentar cada vez mais pressão por parte dos governos e da sociedade ao seu redor. Quando determinados recursos se tornam importantes para um país, ou quando há interesse em explorar áreas onde essas comunidades vivem, seus territórios podem estar ameaçados e seus modos de vida, consequentemente, prejudicados. Em alguns casos, esses povos são tratados como guardiões de certas áreas protegidas, mas isso não significa que essa situação permanecerá para sempre. Se os interesses desses governos mudarem, essas comunidades podem ser forçadas a abandonar parte de seu modo de vida e se adaptar cada vez mais à sociedade moderna e às estruturas governamentais dos países onde residem.

Se pararmos para examinar tecnologia e recursos avançados, podemos ver que eles estão entre as principais fontes de poder possuídas por grandes organizações governamentais. Isso se torna evidente ao longo de vários períodos da história humana, particularmente durante os grandes impérios, quando sociedades com maiores capacidades militares, tecnológicas ou organizacionais conseguiram dominar povos que possuíam menos recursos ou estavam menos organizados politicamente.

Isso também pode ser observado durante a colonização das Américas e outros continentes. Nas Américas, por exemplo, os povos indígenas possuíam sociedades extremamente diversas e organizadas, com guerreiros, agricultores, artesãos, pescadores, líderes políticos e diferentes formas de organização social. No entanto, essas sociedades também tinham conflitos entre si, e algumas dessas rivalidades eram exploradas pelos colonizadores europeus. Durante o comércio de escravos africanos, também houve participação de certos grupos e líderes africanos na captura e venda de pessoas para comerciantes europeus, muitas vezes em troca de armas, bens e outros recursos. Isso não significa, é claro, que todos os povos africanos participaram desse processo ou que todos aceitaram a escravidão passivamente. Muitas sociedades também resistiram de diferentes maneiras.

O mesmo princípio pode ser observado em outros continentes. Muitos povos tentaram resistir à expansão de grandes impérios, mas as diferenças em recursos, tecnologia, organização militar e a capacidade de mobilização frequentemente colocaram essas sociedades em uma posição extremamente vulnerável. Dessa forma, incontáveis povos em diferentes partes do mundo acabaram sendo submetidos a impérios distantes e, em muitos casos, foram forçados a trabalhar para estruturas que haviam sido impostas a eles.

No final, podemos mais uma vez perceber a relação entre autonomia e poder. Quanto maior a dependência de uma sociedade em relação a uma estrutura externa, maior o poder que essa estrutura pode exercer sobre ela. E quando essa estrutura possui tecnologia, recursos e organização imensamente superiores, a capacidade de comunidades menores de resistir pode se tornar extremamente limitada.

Vendo isso, poder-se-ia até dizer que os seres humanos parecem amar o poder. Afinal, a sede por poder impulsiona quase tudo nos seres humanos. Um exemplo é o argumento de Nietzsche sobre a vontade de poder nos seres vivos, em que ele argumentou que todo ser possui um desejo de poder, mesmo que seja pequeno. Não importa quão grande ou pequeno seja, se uma criatura precisa fazer algo, ela possui uma vontade, e com essa vontade vem o poder. E isso é o que o sistema demonstra: o sistema, em geral, com sua tecnologia esmagadora, exercita controle sobre praticamente tudo no mundo.

Agora imagine o seguinte cenário: formas de governo e controle tornam-se tão esmagadoras, e a tecnologia começa a substituir cada um de nossos passos, que a vida se torna tão vazia que os seres humanos perdem seu sentido de significado. Se já sofremos de problemas psicológicos na sociedade por falta de direção e acabamos caindo no hedonismo ou no sofrimento severo, imagine o que acontece quando até mesmo nossas ações mais básicas são determinadas por estruturas externas.

Mesmo que compremos móveis, roupas novas ou qualquer outra coisa associada ao status e luxo, mesmo que tenhamos um grande conforto, isso não será suficiente para preencher o ser humano. O que somos é muito mais complexo. De fato, as sociedades estão se tornando cada vez mais confusas; caímos em ilusões e somos guiados como ovelhas para onde o sistema nos envia, fazendo coisas que não gostamos, comprando coisas que não precisamos e às vezes fazendo tudo isso por pressão, status ou desejo de agradar os outros.

Voltando às sociedades de caçadores-coletores, elas viveram, de fato, com um senso maior de propósito, como já discutimos, porque seu modo de vida e seu ambiente eram realmente o que estavam acostumados. No entanto, nossos cérebros hoje retêm os mesmos instintos naturais. Por causa disso, a sociedade moderna é fundamentalmente incompatível com as necessidades humanas.

Às vezes as pessoas na sociedade se sufocam simplesmente para permanecer dentro dela. Suponha que sejamos como cães domésticos: se nossos donos nos dizem para deitarmos, rolarmos e lhes darmos a pata, recebemos um prêmio. Mas mesmo depois de fazer o que nossos donos querem, eles ainda nos deixam presos no quintal.

Isso me lembra a fábula do lobo e do cachorro, escrita por Esopo, um escritor da Grécia antiga. A fábula conta sobre um lobo magro e faminto que encontra um cachorro muito gordo com um lindo e brilhante pelo. O cachorro convida o lobo para vir viver com ele, mas o lobo percebe que o pescoço do cachorro está esfregado, vermelho por causa de sua coleira. Ao ver isso, o lobo recusa o convite do cachorro, optando por sua liberdade em vez de uma escravidão confortável.