GET / OUT

“You’ve Got No Discipline”

I raised six thousand dollars to fly to Greece to be told I had no discipline.

Let me back up a bit…

It’s July 2024. I’m 38 years old. I’ve spent four years waking at 5am to practise music. I’ve taught myself traditional instruments by ear. I’ve run twenty-two events across Western Australia playing what I called “traditional-inspired” music — which is code for “I have no idea what I’m actually doing but it sounds mystical and people seem to like it.”

I believe music is spiritual communion. That my subconscious is divinely guided. That there’s a universal music language and I’ve got access to it through self-intuitive trust (a self-affirming feedback loop). I’ve previously spent seven years as an international street musician.

I know what I’m doing. (Note: the certainty.)

My Australian music circuit agreed. They loved the “culture” I brought: Sufi sema sessions, multi-collaborative storytelling concerts, kirtan, raga vocal workshops — the works. I got validation for styles of music no one really understood, including me.

I learned theory and stanzas from YouTube videos and books, partially guided by friends in the disciplines. Even though my knowledge was partial, I did it confidently enough, knew just enough, that most people in the culturally sanitised West didn’t know the difference.

Then I fundraised six grand in two months: community crowdfunding and a small government grant. Everyone’s rooting for me to study with masters at a school in Crete, to get “proper training” so I can keep doing this spiritual music thing I’m clearly so gifted at.

I arrive with a painted kemence — essentially a prop — and a sarangi I’d trained on using YouTube recordings of raga, a notoriously difficult instrument, with loose guidance from a musician I’d collaborated with. I needed validation, but I came to learn.

I was expecting to be small. Expecting pointers that aligned with my intuitive edge. Warmth, guidance, maybe “ah yes, I see your potential.”

The reality is multiple five-day intensive workshops where I can’t read the thirty sheets of music the teacher hands out — I’m an intuitive ear-trained musician, remember? Everyone else is there for different reasons: status through traditional revival, academic study, family roots rediscovery. I don’t fit. I don’t even want to fit in such groups. I keep trying to connect but somehow end up performing “arrogant overstated Australian” despite actively trying not to.

I interrupt the teacher’s seminar when he’s talking about Sufis to tell everyone I’m here because of a 114-day Sufi sema I attended in Turkey in 2017 — for an organisation which also has questionable status within its own discipline. The politics of authentic this or that can be unbearable even in secular traditional culture. During a break from class, I go out of my way to play a difficult traditional song — self-righteously, I realise later then also only in my own non-polished, non-traditional technique – and only just wanting my potential to be seen.

No one is there to carry me.

Some history I didn’t know: the teacher had spent decades reviving this instrument’s classical tradition. He used to play it professionally. Here I am with my painted factory kemence with violin transducers stuck on it — an insult and a joke.

I’m sitting next to him by chance at a dinner one night. Restaurant owners buzz around him demanding selfies. Musicians start an impromptu concert and a student plays performative violin at frequencies that seem to irritate him. I can feel what he’s feeling — I’ve always been good at this, the hyperadaptivity thing, sensing what’s happening in a room.

The concert feels unwelcome though tolerated. I ask if this happens a lot. He says yes.

I’m trying to connect through understanding his position. One thing I do sense is the gap between how he thinks and the way I’ve used music. A kind, patient and generous man, but his mind is pragmatic, analytical, operating from a completely different framework. No spiritual romance. Just discipline and precision.

I’d argued after class for “the right to express myself,” asking why I should “put myself away when it took this long to find me.” (Dear God).

My as-yet Western entitled individualist wet dream needed validation.

He said to me, gratingly, after class when I accosted him: “You can do what you like with the kemence. But you’re not playing traditional music.”

I pushed. In a moment of frustration uncommon to him, he finished: “You’ve got no discipline.”

My heart fell back into my body.

Maybe this is what I came for. Looking for some honesty, for a reference point.

Four years of 5am practice with self-taught systems. Traditional music learned by ear. I built my courage and focus on my ability to build my own systems, then calling it ‘traditional’. And yet he’s telling me – I. have. no. discipline.

I used music in this way to prove my autonomy to myself. This was a very private kind of nervous system regulation. Now sharing it in public with these events, as though everyone should just magically understand – because I assumed my inner world was my outer world to be.

This man saw exactly what I was doing. He didn’t have the cognitive energy to culture me or to adapt my incentives towards new and more pragmatic aims, his energy clearly at a threshold. Seeing through the performance to the thing I couldn’t see yet: all my sophistication, all my spiritual framework, all my intuitive understanding, built on a mythology which I simply used to as a self-therapy — without referencing what’s out there in the real world – assuming intuition was leading me to the right place.

I’d been operating from what feels like advanced awareness while actually sitting in total mythic immersion.

I had to put my spiritual music identity away. I became even smaller and had to hide my self-loathing while I tolerated the rest of this “wonderful publicly funded trip” which I needed to complete to show the world that I appreciated their belief in me.

Two months later, I returned to Australia. Finally time to unpack and deal with what happened, which I had to repress to get through the experience. I’m in a tiny home on a truck in a friend’s parents’ backyard in Perth, watching fourteen hours of anime a day, then later working at a dairy farm, developing a nihilist “voidist doctrine” with a chatbot because the alternative is joining another belief system and I just won’t do that again.

I’m struggling to regulate without the drug of revelation and “authentic identity.”

Four months later, I delete all social media, all public presence as this identity. I’m ashamed and I need to clear the slate and stop future disruption to the true appreciation of these forms.

My tower’s been broken... again. I’ve done this particular pattern maybe nine times in my life. This time the spiritual music neo-traditionalist dream was revealed as Orientalist fantasy. The divine guidance thing was clearly revealed as selection bias with mystical seasoning left over from earlier ideological days. The whole identity — storyteller, spiritual musician, coach, driven guy with the message — turned out to be a kind of high-functioning possession.

I was faced with a choice: continue as the lie, do a U-turn publicly and engage with traditional music on the culture’s terms, or retract. I chose the latter because there were also deeper scars of needing to be seen, to be famous, to be Jesus in a sense — that I was through this path trying to realise an overpowered sense of autonomy to compensate for either my past or for the lack of real autonomy I’m aware that lacks in ‘free’ society. It’s an idea of it, within a mental construct, not true fluid free-will and choice.

(The existence of which, we can save for another discussion.)

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had your own version. Maybe not literally in Greece with a painted kemence appropriating a culture for your spirituality, but the structure’s the same: you had a belief system. It was working. You were functional, maybe even sophisticated. Then something — a person, an event, a collision you couldn’t absorb — revealed the whole thing as mythology and it came crashing down.

The rug’s been pulled.

And now you’re in freefall.

This guide is for that freefall. Not to stop it (you can’t), but to navigate it without:

Joining another totalising system when your redemption arc clicks over.

Hating yourself for needing mythic comfort while you rebuild.

Mistaking the identity you rebuild for another objective truth.

I’m sixteen months post-collapse as I write this. Still regulating my nervous system. Still building structural foundations. Still catching myself when the exceptionalism pattern tries on new clothes.

I’m not teaching from the mountaintop. I’m in the valley with you, holding a map I drew in crayon while broken. I got sick of climbing back up to the podium and conveniently forgetting why I fell.

I’ve actually done this a few times now — I realise the value in sharing. It’s also a kind of therapy for me to get it out and see it separate from myself. So welcome to my personal self-help lab.

A necessary caveat before we begin:

Everything here is a snapshot of one person’s trajectory and not a template. If you find resonance — the resonance is yours, not evidence of universality.

It’s tempting to think it is universal. It’s just not.

There’s no “right” way for a worldview to fracture, no correct duration. There’s no virtue in suffering for the sake of it. Nothing here implies collapse is a prerequisite for clarity. It can be, but it just as easily isn’t.

Part One: Where You Actually Are

You’re not broken. You’re in neurological crisis.

Your brain built an entire operating system around a belief structure that just got demolished. The mythic infrastructure is gone, but your neural pathways are still trying to run the old programs. It’s like someone ripped out the foundation of a house while you’re still living in it. The walls are cracking, the floor is tilting, and you’re supposed to just... keep making breakfast?

This is why it feels like dying. Because parts of you are.

Maslow First, Self-Expectation Later

If your housing situation is unstable, that’s your only job. Not figuring out what happened. Not building new ways of thinking. Just: stable place to sleep.

If money is running out, get a mundane job with a good person. Not a job that “means something.” Not one that “aligns with your purpose.” A job that pays rent and doesn’t require you to be a whole person yet. Dairy farm. Warehouse. Kitchen. Whatever puts money in your account with a boss who won’t punish you for being a zombie.

If you’re not eating or sleeping, that’s the work. No fancy psych framework. Just: eat something. Sleep when you can. Fragmented sleep is fine. Nut bars covered in chocolate are fine. You’re in survival mode.

What’s Happening in Your Body

Here’s what’s actually going on while you’re lying on that couch watching your seventh hour of anime:

Your brain was getting neurochemical hits from certainty. Dopamine when the belief system provided answers. Serotonin when you felt aligned with the group or the path. Oxytocin when you belonged to something bigger than yourself. Those chemicals aren’t pumping anymore. The meaning-making machinery is offline.

So you feel: lethargy. Numbness. Dissociation.

Observe what’s actually going on in your body — read somatic cues while you feel this flat grey nothingness.

You may have just enough energy to do your job, if you have one. You listen to audiobooks or podcasts while you work because being alone with your own thoughts is unbearable. When your survival needs are met and you have free time, you don’t want to be productive. You don’t want to think. You want to not exist.

This is not personal failure. This is what nervous system collapse looks like.

Why You’re Reaching for Mythic Content

You’re probably watching anime. Or playing video games. Or reading fantasy novels. Or doomscrolling. Something with narrative structure that isn’t your life.

People will tell you to “do something productive.” Read philosophy. Go to therapy. Work on yourself. Journal. Meditate.

Fuck them.

And fuck the piece of yourself that gets out the whip and demands anything.

Here’s what the mythic content is actually doing: it’s how you don’t exist for a while. Not comfort. Not escape. Non-existence. Your cognitive architecture was optimised for mythic operation — living inside stories, frameworks and meaning-structures. Those structures are gone, but your brain is still wired to process reality through narrative. So you give it narratives that aren’t trying to eat you.

Anime worked for me because: multiple story arcs, visual plus narrative, characters with clear motivations, worlds with rules that make sense, problems that get solved, zero demand that I figure out my own life. I made a conscious decision to allow it. I knew the habit would eventually need breaking, but fighting it in month one would just create more chaos.

I watched anime for a year. Then I replaced it with reading. Then I stopped entirely around month fifteen. There were withdrawal symptoms. But I didn’t try to stop until I had something else — writing, instrument making, studying, a new job — that felt meaningful without demanding I join a new belief system.

Timeline Expectations

If you’re in month one wondering “when will I feel normal again,” the answer is: not for a while. Just get through today.

It’s ok. And it’s ok that that’s enough.

Part Two: The Two Traps

I can name two ways off the bat you’ll mess this up during freefall. Not might. Will. Everyone does it.

The good news: if you recognise them early, you can course-correct before you’re back in another collapse wondering how it happened again.

Trap One: The Redemption Circuit

What it is: Joining a new system because the neurochemical drive for certainty/purpose/belonging kicks back in.

What it feels like: Relief. Clarity. “Finally, something that makes sense.” You’ve been in the grey nothing for months and suddenly there’s colour again. A framework. A community. A path. A teacher. An ideology. Something that explains what happened and promises it won’t happen again if you just follow the method.

The worst thing you could say to yourself: “Ah, all this suffering, this life path, it led me to here — there’s a reason why I went through that, to get here to this new system, just like there’s a reason for everything.”

Why it’s so compelling: Because it works. Temporarily. The dopamine comes back. The serotonin stabilises. You feel like a person again instead of a ghost. Your nervous system is screaming “YES, THIS, MORE OF THIS” because it’s getting the meaning-making chemicals it’s been starved of.

An entertaining, endearing fancy on my way to sanity: Months 3–6, I started building something called “voidism” with a chatbot. Made a priest. Generated a doctrine. The whole thing was about how meaning is inherently ephemeral and I trained an LLM to be the priest of this.

I was building a belief system about the end of belief systems.

I was looking for the epitome of meaning and defining the essence of meaninglessness — in worship of the void. This developed into something I called Inevitable-ism. Eventually, I lost my sense of meaning to continue with it (mind the pun). Although my drive for a revelatory truth is what got me there, it was not practical to remain in such a headspace — my neurology demanded more solid sustenance than looking at reality as though nothing meant anything. It didn’t matter how true I could rationalise meaninglessness to be — if I wanted to live and live with some level of quality of life, I had to figure out a way to be a generator of my own meaning. I had to design a meaning that meant I lived with others around me. I needed to admit I live in a diverse world with many meaning structures and truth is not as simple as being rational.

Trap Two: The Guilt Spiral

What it is: Hating yourself for needing comfort. Thinking whatever you’re using to survive means you’re failing at recovery.

What it feels like: Shame. “I should be doing something productive. I should be processing this. Everyone else who goes through collapse seems to come out stronger and I’m just... watching anime in my underwear eating nut bars.”

Why it’s so destructive: It turns your functional coping mechanism into another source of pain. You’re already in neurological crisis. Now you’re also beating yourself up for the thing keeping you from completely fragmenting.

The puritan fallacy: You think recovery means immediately eliminating all “unhealthy” coping mechanisms and replacing them with meditation, therapy, exercise, journaling.

That’s not recovery. That’s trying to skip the emergency room and go straight to physical therapy.

You can’t think your way out of nervous system collapse. You can’t journal your way out of neurochemical withdrawal. You can’t meditate your way out of identity dissolution.

You need transitional supports. Things that hold you while your brain rewires. For me it was anime. For you it might be video games, romance novels, true crime podcasts, scrolling, cooking shows, building model trains — whatever gives your brain something to process that isn’t your own dissolution.

As long as it’s not causing serious physical harm or destroying your future capacity to function, it doesn’t matter what it is.

What to do: Stop calling it procrastination. Stop calling it avoidance. Call it what it is: functional support during neurological crisis.

You’re not avoiding the work. You’re doing the work. The work is: staying alive, not joining a new system, keeping your body functional enough to eventually rebuild.

Whatever you’re doing is keeping your conscious mind occupied while your background mind sorts out the gears. Let it.

When to worry: If you’ve started substance abuse that’s destroying your body — heavy drinking, drugs causing physical deterioration. If you’ve completely stopped functioning — can’t work, can’t feed yourself, can’t maintain basic hygiene, haven’t left the house in weeks. If your coping mechanism is creating new major problems — serious debt, losing your housing, burning all your relationships. That’s clinical intervention territory. Get professional help.

But if you’re going to work, eating enough to survive, maintaining your living situation, and spending all your free time in whatever comfort mechanism works? You’re doing fine.

How to recognise you’re in the guilt trap: You’re comparing yourself to other people’s collapse narratives. You’re thinking “I should be over this by now.” You’re forcing yourself to do “healthy” things that make you feel worse. You’re hiding how you spend your time. You feel like you’re wasting your life.

If you’re doing these things, stop. You’re adding suffering to suffering.

Part Three: Why This Keeps Happening

You’re not stupid. That’s not why you keep falling into belief systems.

Intelligence doesn’t protect you. Pattern recognition doesn’t protect you. Being burned numerous times before doesn’t protect you from the latest one.

The thing that keeps pulling you in isn’t about the content. It’s about what the belief system promises underneath all the surface content — and how it’s an update from your last one.

The Superiority Promise

Every system I fell into — from childhood religious fundamentalism, to new age psychedelia, to a high-demand group that claimed direct communication with other dimensions, to self-created experimental communities, to anarchism, to Sufism, to spiritual music neo-traditionalism — promised the same thing beneath different packaging.

Let’s cover a core few that had the greatest fallout:

Religious fundamentalism: Superiority over my previous situation as a teenager, elevated into a metaphysical domain where I was chosen.

The high-demand group: Superiority over consciousness itself — they had their own theory on how it all worked, channelled through a leader who saw what no one else could see.

Anarchism: Superiority over capitalism and wage slavery, aligned with the people who actually understood how society worked and behaved above and outside the system while within it. (The oppressive laws of your authoritarian state don’t apply to me, but call me an ambulance when I need one.)

Spiritual music: Superiority over Western appropriation through “authentic” traditional practice and divine guidance via intuitive music creation and a belief in the power of vibration as a core modality to change the world.

Different content. Same promise: You are above/beyond something through special knowledge or position.

The belief system changes. The superiority circuit stays constant.

Where It Comes From

I’ve honestly felt entitled to a higher path for most of my life.

One parent spoke highly of me — told people I had gifts or did things in special ways. The other was oppressive. Those two forces together created a specific formula:

Gifted + Oppressed = Entitled to the Righteous Path That Will Liberate the World from Oppression.

That’s a hell of a mission to carry as a kid. And it’s been running in the background of my head for every system I’ve joined since.

I was going to be special. You’d better believe it. I was going to see what others couldn’t see. I was going to find the path that would make the suffering meaningful and the oppression end. And each new way told me the pain I had experienced was necessary to bring me to that point.

Every belief system I encountered offered a version of that mission. Every one positioned me as someone who could access truth others were blind to. Every one gave me a role in a larger story about liberation or enlightenment or awakening.

I wasn’t looking for content. I was looking for confirmation that I was supposed to be on a higher path.

The Closed Loop

Here’s a mad feedback loop that makes it impossible to see while you’re inside:

“I’m here, therefore this is right for me.”

I assumed each system was correct simply because I was in it. Because “that’s how I would have designed my reality” — a logic I’d developed inside one of the earlier groups, which promoted thoughts as overtly creative forces.

My presence became evidence of correctness. If I was drawn to it, if I ended up there, if it resonated — that meant it was my path.

This logic worked going in with total certainty. But it didn’t work the same way coming out.

What actually broke the certainty while I was inside each system? Probably the habits of a mind that looks for holes in things if it sticks around for long enough. Probably because the rug was pulled from me when I was vulnerable and there’s a part of me looking for the rug all the time.

For too long, that hole-seeing brain was muddied and confused with other childhood trauma reactions. The pattern wasn’t clean. I’d see a hole, but I’d also be triggered, defensive, reacting to and performing a role which contaminated my ability to separate hole-seeing from personal shit-storm.

As time progressed, the hole-seeing process got much cleaner. I could separate “this system has a structural flaw” from “I’m having a trauma response to authority.”

Woohoo! Development! Open the drinks!

By the time I got to Crete, the hole-seeing was pretty clean. I’d gained enough meta-awareness devoid of trauma contamination to feel where the rug was being pulled from. A part of me was like, not this again. I fell for it again. I developed my mind around another conveniently free, open, totalising ideology of music-based spirituality which I harboured as a personal truth and maintained in isolation. Another lovely self-homogenising self-centric cult.

Why Intelligence Doesn’t Protect You

You’d think after enough collapses I’d have learned. You’d think pattern recognition, analytical capacity, meta-awareness would be enough.

They’re not.

Because the exceptionalism circuit operates beneath cognition. It’s neurological. It’s an innate drive for superiority, significance, special purpose. It’s the feeling that you’re entitled to a higher path — that’s kind of a hardware response; the software interprets it as a software response.

The mind is clearest after collapse. Something about it, just clears up all the mud mixed up in the water. But you’re still in water.. you’re a fish and because the mud has gone you get used to the water – that water is your natural inclinations and drives, which come back again and again. It can’t be seen or sensed except post polarization.

Intelligence just makes you better at justifying why this time it’s different, why this time you really do see clearly, why this framework this time is actually structural instead of mythic.

I can explain the mechanics of exceptionalism while simultaneously being driven by the exceptionalism of being the one who has created a totalising definition of it and finally solved it. I can map how belief systems capture people all the while this map being my own capture system and being captured by it. I can write guides about avoiding totalising ideologies while making my frameworks into a new totalising ideology and being totalised by them myself.

The circuit doesn’t care that you understand it. It keeps running underneath and attaches to whoever and whatever you’re doing at the time.

So this time, I sort to build a system of provisional thinking that would cause me to reset reflexively at will. The start of that is a small e-book called EQUALS.

So What’s Actually Possible?

If the circuit doesn’t go away, and intelligence doesn’t protect you, and you’ve been through it nine times and you’re still vulnerable — what’s the point?

Immunity isn’t possible. Claiming you’re immune to the pattern is itself a mythology. “I’ve transcended exceptionalism” is just exceptionalism wearing transcendence’s clothes.

But earlier recognition is possible. Faster defusing is possible. Redirection is possible. Smoother transitions are possible. Dialogue about such things is possible — which promotes healthy relationships.

I simply got better at spotting when things are sliding. I can catch the circuit activating earlier now. I’m not certain of this ability — certainty would be another trap — but I’m aware of how to defuse the circuit when I notice it firing.

It’s not a permanent state. You don’t “achieve” this and stay there. But you can train yourself to return to it faster when you drift.

Each time you tell yourself, I want to remain more aware for next time — you learn a little better each time.

The Redirect

Here’s a redirect that actually works (well, for me — you can try your luck, maybe work on your own):

True exceptionalism — when taken to its logical extreme — requires reality to exist. Seems rational, hey?

Ideologies not based in provisional truth models are not based in reality. Basic: if your truth-model can’t update, it’s not tracking changes.

Reality is constantly changing according to perceptual boundaries. Perception is all we’ve got, by the way — nothing exists outside of it. If you want to be truly exceptional, you have to operate in reality. And operating in a provisional reality that is allowed to change means… a healthy dose of humility.

Humility becomes the only valid “superiority” possible moving forward. Because humility is what keeps you grounded in reality.

This gives potential to defuse what was previously dangerous exceptionalism. You can’t be superior through special knowledge if you accept that that knowledge is provisional.

But — and this is critical — the neurological circuit remains usable. The exceptionalism drive doesn’t disappear. The energy is still there. It just gets redirected.

Humans use exceptionalism for lots of things — it’s about veering away from pathological exceptionalism which occludes the capacity to be ordinary. To eliminate all exceptionalism is to stop being human. You’re in a body and your perspective from within it is indeed different to others — that’s a level of acknowledgement that requires at least a slight exceptionalism.

Instead of: “I’m exceptional because I have the answer” — turn this into: “I’m using this drive, which allows me to maintain a separate awareness from others, toward cooperation, harm reduction, community betterment — and I actively diffuse it in provisional thinking and being humble.”

The same circuit now powers assistance instead of superiority.

But you have to stay vigilant.

“The person who helps people escape mythologies” can easily become a new mythology. The mind is a slippery fish — someone once said to me, you never really change, you just rearrange what’s there.

Side story: You could be picking up a wheelbarrow of dirt to fill up a garden bed and become convinced that your particular way of shovelling the dirt with a specific wheelbarrow orientation is the most efficient and then attempt to get everyone to do it like that because it would theoretically save everyone time and energy, therefore more happy.

You go out of your way to show people, thinking they just don’t get it.

WRONG — you’ve just imposed your exceptionalism on a simple duty. It’s fucking dirt in a wheelbarrow and by imposing your senseless control on a mundane task you’ve effectively also removed the other people’s autonomy — their very private personal bodily non-negotiable autonomy.

Effectively sapping the satisfaction from community work by turning it into a strict regimented task which you control.

Let them move dirt. Their own way. It’s just fucking dirt for god’s sake. Let’s just be grateful the dirt is getting moved. Wow, people moved dirt together. Happy fucking days.

If it is indeed the “truth of dirt moving with a wheelbarrow” — then be a simple beacon that doesn’t need to advertise and truth will find its own treading.

You can lead a horse to water but you cannot force it to drink. But who are you to say you’re leading? And with what “truth”? The leader must always be questioning… am I actually the sick or lost one here?

The Test

How do you know if you’re operating from redirected exceptionalism (functional) versus building a new mythology where you’re the exceptional helper (captured)?

Can you stop, and that be ok?

If stopping “the work” creates panic, loss of identity, or feels like giving up something important — you’re captured.

If you can stop and feel nothing — it’s truly provisional.

(When we do work for the collective that truly assists, it’s about filling a genuine need, and that need doesn’t go away. Exceptionalism and urgency driven by our personal self-importance, does, however.)

Joined another ideology? No problem. Just keep meta-awareness about you, so you have markers to reflect on when the ideological rug gets pulled — and it will, it’s basically guaranteed at some point. All good ideology can tolerate provisional reality. If it can’t, it requires more isolated exceptionalist thinking — which is what you’re getting away from.

Example: Month 10 post-collapse, I wrote a book draft. Convinced myself I was going to publish it. An important and necessary work with complete critical thinking frameworks. I drove myself to finish it.

Then in moments of lucidness I saw my framing of reality dip into this demon again and I decided to give myself a month off the laptop, cold turkey. Distance myself from the work.

In doing that, the motivation to touch the book evaporated. I saw my frameworks were provisional. Had I published them in the heat of the moment, they would have been incomplete. They probably would have made the epistemic commons worse — added more noise, more annoying certainty, more mythology dressed as structural clarity.

When I stopped writing the book for long enough for my neurology to balance and attach to other things, the urgency died. That’s how I knew it was provisional.

If you can’t stop for a while, and reflect on something without it losing its value — question that.

What You Actually Need

If you’re recognising your own pattern — the cycling through systems, the feeling of entitlement to a higher path, the drive toward irrational significance — here’s what actually helps:

Find key core people who are happy enough with their lives that they don’t need any overt belief system to keep themselves stabilised besides solid community, or craft, or a skill.

Spend time with them. Copy their neurology by being with them. They’re stable. You need reference points. Learn to like their company and hopefully they’ll tolerate you for long enough for something to rub off.

Not people who are “enlightened” or have “figured it out.” Not teachers or gurus or framework-builders. Just: people who are content without needing to be special. People who can hold jobs, maintain relationships, enjoy ordinary things, and aren’t constantly seeking the next level of understanding. Who understand that life is not meant to be figured out.

Those people have something you need: neurological stability that doesn’t require mythology.

You can’t think your way into that stability — not with those patterns of specialness which run like endless noise on repeat. You have to absorb it by proximity. Let their nervous systems regulate yours. Let their ordinariness show you that you don’t need to be on a higher path.

And if you can’t find this — find the closest thing and work from there. Check up on yourself every now and then and ask: is this ok?

Oh, and basic mindfulness practices help too. Nature, grounding, breathing, all of that. Not all of it is exceptionalism-feeding enlightenment candle smoke.

So get out there. Join a community garden, get your hands in the dirt. Do mundane tasks with ordinary people, achieving mundane goals. Tell yourself it’s enough. And it’s ok that that’s enough.

Part Four: This Text Is Also a Trap

I still wake up some mornings convinced I’ve finally cracked the code…

Maybe I have.

But then maybe humans are a code that needs to remain uncracked in order for life to remain meaningful.

I still catch myself drafting save-all revelations that sound like a prophet who discovered the cheat-menu for life.

I didn’t.

I still have the reflex to turn this document into the grand final scripture of the people who got out of their own mind fuck.

Hear me! Hear me!

That reflex is the same circuit that once made me a religious fundamentalist who went to preaching school, then the poster boy of a high-demand group, then an anarchist with the full political truth about civilisation praising collapse with no mass population logistical concerns… and then and then… and then.

This impulse didn’t die. It just learned new vocabulary. I adapted old lessons to new systems. I upgraded. My faux reasoning became more advanced while retaining the underlying structural flaw.

So before you print this, before you send it to your friend who just lost their religion/politics/startup/whatever, before you quote me in your online discussion group, read this next part very slowly.

Here’s a test: Can I put this “urgent work” down for three months — no reading it, no talking about it, no thinking through its lens — and feel no loss of identity? No “get back to the work”? No “the world might miss out”? No subtle superiority that I’m the one who wrote and understands the escape hatch?

When I tried that at month 10 with an earlier draft, I couldn’t honestly continue. The urgency, the need to scream, be heard and have it have meaning — came roaring back. So I allowed the urgency to dissolve. I shelved it.

But then we must ask: why write anything at all? Why put anything in public? Why express, full stop? Why seek to be understood? Why even breathe?

No. We must not discard being human when we use rationality to stop being “special.”

At some point, we have to decide what means anything. That’s a point of absolute autonomy — it’s also a great let-down. Because you’re not part of some special path or born from some star seed race and you’re not chosen by some mystical authority. You’re just ordinary and you decide how ordinary or not ordinary you are, and what that means to you.

You decide how much smoke and mirrors you participate in, in this game of life. You make the call. And if you’re honest, maybe you’ll find, actually... being “special” ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Society Re-entry Checklist

Ask yourself once every couple of months. Be brutally honest.

Can I miss two weeks of my comfort crutch without physical withdrawal or identity panic?

Do I have at least one healthy relationship that is not about collapse, ideology, or “the work”?

Can I care about something — a person, a project, a place — without needing it to be part of a grand, all-encompassing narrative?

If the answer to all three is “yes,” you’re probably ready to re-engage with life at normal intensity.

There is no rush. Put on the brakes. Urgency is exceptionalism’s fuck buddy.

Last Thing

This document was useful to me mostly because writing it forced me to look directly at my own bullshit and discard my saviour complex — ironically, it might just promote that if it spreads.

If it is useful to you, great.

Either way, I release all claim on how you use it.

The tower is cracked. You don’t need this map to work it out. Don’t build a new tower with the rubble.

— Monty