Taking Control of Your Life as the World Unravels

Hi! How’s everyone? Apologies for being away for a bit. I needed a couple of weeks to…rest. Just think. It’s been quite a while since I took a break. I spent time with a few friends who needed me. Here’s what we talked about.

I want you now to learn how to take control of your lives. As things around us unravel, it’s going to be crucial that you master this skill. I’m going to teach you how to. But first I want you to understand what I mean.

We are living in a world that’s slowly going mad. It is being driven out of its mind by failed systems and paradigms. Dehumanized, alienated from themselves, their spirits dismantled and sold off far parts, people have resorted to something worse than merely giving up. There’s no shame in giving up. People are now buying in.

Into the very collective delusions that are the illusions woven by the systems which prey on them.

I want you now to take control of your life. Sometimes, I call this existential agency, and today we’ll drop that term, so we can just explore it together. It’s going to be even tougher than it already sounds, but it’s also going to be easier and simpler. I’ll come to that.

The very first step is to let go of the illusions around us. Now, you must be very, very careful not to join the collective delusions that are going to continue ripping our world apart. That’s a bad way to put it. They are internalized forms of failed paradigms and systems, introjections, if you like. They will hurt everyone who ingests them very, very badly. They’re lethal poisons.

Let’s talk about them.

When we speak of collective delusions, there are many forms. The first is a kind of collective mania. Think about the economy. There are many, many people who will tell you that they’re against Trump, or even Trumpism, and yet will happily throw dollar after dollar at the stock market.

Don’t be foolish. When you see an obvious form of collective mania before you, you should never really join it. Unless, I don’t know, it’s at a nightclub, that might be OK, even fun. But when it’s about your life savings? You’d better think twice. And when the conductor of this mania is a figure renowned for malignancy and narcissism? You had better back away.

People are not thinking straight in this day and age. You know that much. You think you know that much. But do you really enact the lesson? You are going to have to take control of your life, and of course, that’s about money. Don’t throw yours away. Be consistent. Consistency is a quality of integrity. If you don’t believe in authoritarianism, are you literally putting your money where your mouth is? I start with this one because it’s the simplest of all. It’s literal.

Most people aren’t putting their money where their mouth is, not just financially, but existentially, as we’re going to discuss. I find that sad. Not tragic, which can be a good thing, but just…the cheap version. Folly ends in ruin. This time will be no different.

When we speak of collective delusions, we also mean mass psychosis.

The world is horrified by what’s happening in America because it’s a crystal clear case of mass psychosis. The clearest since the 1930s, at least for the rich parts of the world.

And yet in America, there’s very little understanding whatsoever that what’s happening in society, and to people, is precisely mass psychosis. In Europe, it’s a topic of daily discussion: have Americans gone mad? That’s because the American way of thinking doesn’t allow for collective anything. It’s steeped in individualism. The collective doesn’t exist. But of course this is precisely how mass psychoses develop.

In this case, we have a classic form. The masses developing an infantile-parental bond of wish fulfillment with an all-powerful father figure. And in that, sadism is a natural consequence. How else do you prove you’re all powerful? How else are you to prove who’s one of the chosen, and who’s undeserving? Herein lies the psychosis: malignancy spreading like an infection of violence, cruelty, and rage.

I want you to take control of your life. See all this clearly for what it is. Be calm and be still with me. Episodes of mass psychosis are some of the most lethal events in human history. You are amidst one. Don’t underestimate it, minimize it, or shrug it off. And if those around you do, understand that they are devaluing you.

We’re talking about existential authenticity now, and this is where it begins, how you choose to exist in the world, and relate to it. Psychosis is a lie that seduces, bewitches, consumes the mind, until it fractures it, and in that sense, we’re dealing with questions of existence and authenticity, at a collective level.

Your relationships probably will not survive unless you have a consensus on this. A relationship can hardly survive if one party is dancing on the edge of the psychotic, and the other is trying to back away. It’s that simple and that serious. The time for pretending like there’s some kind of softly-softly-approach to this is over. Either your partners and loved ones understand this, or you can lead them to understand this, or they are not capable of loving you in an authentic way that rises to the moment. That sounds hard, and right now, that’s how you need to be.

When we speak of collective delusions, we also mean collective euphorias. And here, too, a strange thing is happening. I see many collective euphorias at work. There are those over AI. Over cryptocurrencies. All euphorias are transcendent, and in these, there’s the futile, lonely hope of liberation from striving and feeling. There are euphorias over concentration camps. These are sadistic euphorias. I could go on.

Euphorias erupt all around us every day, and that’s what makes this age so strange. Because of course there’s a stark contrast between them, and the dystopia we actually live in. These euphorias are dark ones. Every euphoria celebrates the idols of its age, but the idols of ours are cracked vessels leaking madness and machine gods offering us the cheap imitation of flesh.

Stay away from the euphorias. Wherever you see a euphoria, run. Think of 1929, 1932, or even 1937.

The appropriate mood of this age? It’s many things. But none of them are euphoric. It’s somber. Funereal. Tinged with remembrace. Laced with grief for all that will never be. It aches like midnight.

A person who cannot feel the appropriate emotions for the moment, in all their complexity, depth, and power, will forever remain stunted. A child. They are arrested in terms of moral development, because that challenge is the approach towards adulthood in its most profound forms.

Some ages deserve to be celebratory. They are rare. For most of human history is a tragedy made of self-deceit and violence. Our age deserves our contempt, if we are intelligent people. It deserves our scorn. Not even our pity. We have failed it, and so it, in return, has failed us. If you reject the sting of moral culpability, then by all means, drink from whatever cup you like. But I find it hard to believe that any mature, adult human mind would feel much but sorrow for times like these.

And that is the measure of a person. Not to mope, or to sulk, but to feel correctly. Burying yourself in foolish euphorias? It will lead you to mistake after mistake in times like these. You will waste your money, energy, and time. Your relationships will never come to fruition. You will never really fully love, or even feel alive. All of that depends on existing within the human condition. And so where and when you see a euphoria, see what it truly is: minds failing to mature and develop into adulthood.

This is what we have really been talking about. In superficial ways: money, relationships, choices. Now let me lay it bare, the existential truth of what we’re discussing.

You must now become an adult. Not just for your sake, but for the sake of all. Too few of us are taking on this challenge. Younger generations are already failing at it, lost in the infinite dopamine scroll of the screen. You must become an adult existentially, which is the most difficult, painful, agonizing, but also rewarding, beautiful, and transformative step of all.

Adultood, the mature form of the human spirit, psyche, and mind, is our challenge now. All of us. As societies, as a civilization, as people. Few of us ever rise to this challenge, and of course the outbreak of fascism and so forth is a sign that regression to an infantile form of violence and spite is taking place, and so fewer and fewer are. The challenge now is singular: to be among the fewest of the few that rise to this challenge. If you embrace this, the rest will fall into place. If you don’t, you’ll get swept along, like the masses, in the collective delusions that are already ripping lives and societies apart.

Don’t accept the pathetic, tawdry imitations of adulthood that this age obsesses over. It bellows at us to be “alphas” on one side, or pallid, safe weaklings, on the other. Neither of these, and nothing on this entire spectrum of juvenile power, passivity, self-satisfaction, and preening rage presented to us today, really, is about adulthood. The existential spectrum of now feels so cheap, idiotic, and impoverished because all that it offers us is infantilism, whether in economics, culture, society, or politics. That is whywe are awash in fascism, ruin, and self-destruction, howling and stupid. We are told that is all life is. Just the choice between different infantile narcissisms, helplessnesses, reductions to nothing. Re-read that until you get it, because then you will understand a great deal.

You must take control of your life now.

But now you know what it means. It doesn’t mean anything petty, trivial, superficial, or small. It isn’t the choice between what’s offered to us, but the rebellion against it. It means the single greatest existential challenge there is in a life, which today is greater still than ever: adulthood. Step by step. There is no threshold. It doesn’t happen suddenly one day. Be still and be calm with me. The tree is already in the seed. The seed just lets go. The adult is already in you. But now you must let go, too.

As always, if you need advice, just reach out.

Umair (and Snowy!)

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