Why Every Obvious Move Feels Wrong
Notes from inside a system that’s breaking
The world is changing fast and there’s a lot of pressure right now to do something - act, fight, organize. And I’m still on the precipice, the potential energetic space before the plunge. And I’m writing this because I don’t want to give false inspiration. I don’t want to pump myself or you up. I want to be honest to where I’m at, why I’m here, and why every obvious move feels wrong.
This is an attempt to describe that experience from the inside, without pretending I’m ready to resolve it.
Misalignment is a nervous system experience
I’ve always felt that the world was worse than it could be. For me, misalignment isn’t just a moral or conceptual issue. It has a profound effect on my nervous system. Living inside incoherent systems feels destabilizing, exhausting, unsafe.
I can and have always felt incoherence everywhere: systems that don’t line up with human needs, incentives that reward harm, structures that feel brittle and distorted. For a long time, I assumed the problem was me. The world told me, over and over, this is just how it is. Learn to survive.
So I learned to gaslight myself, and suppress or ignore those sensation coming from my body.
What the prison looks like from the inside
The prison doesn’t look like bars. It looks like a remote job I can do from anywhere. Most of my relationships happen through screens. I wake up and scroll, absorbing what’s happening in the world without responding to it. I buy most of what I need from Amazon. I know I should cancel it. I don’t want to go grocery shopping. Grocery stores feel chaotic, full of people even less present than I am.
Driving feels the same way. The neighborhood feels increasingly enshittified, not because people are bad, but because everyone is distracted, dissociated, elsewhere. One day it struck me as I looked at a random corner of the U-District in Seattle at people from different walks of life waiting for a bus. Everyone was staring at their phone.
So just choose differently…
Anything that would meaningfully change this costs more: more money, more energy, more decisions. CSAs. Meetups. Mutual aid. Organizing. All of it requires executive function I don’t have to spare. I have ADHD. I’m already managing my life. I don’t even have kids. I can’t imagine how people do.
And the uncomfortable truth is that I like parts of it this way. I like my space. I like not talking to strangers. I like video games and movies. I like not performing extroversion the way I used to, back when I thought that’s what successful people did.
The insidious nature of the prison is that it works - or at least appears to - because it meets me where I am, and slowly narrows what feels possible.
The double bind
There are two warring parts of me that respond to this.
One still believes that even though the system doesn’t works, that I’ve finally figured out how to live inside it. That it’s only a matter of time, until I come up with something brilliant, then it will catch, change my life and finally make me free. That part of me was forged inside the system. It learned to internalize the myth of the modern world well.
And there’s another part of me that knows this can’t continue. That this whole modern world is a facade propped up by extraction. Escape fantasies are part of what keep the machine running. We were meant for something else entirely - community, land, care, structures that make regeneration inevitable. I talk about that more in this essay.
Living inside that double bind every day - while parts of the world keep pretending everything is normal - feels unreal. It’s like watching a dystopian black comedy, except I’m inside the screen.
I don’t know what will happen with the economy. I don’t know when hunkering down is wisdom and when it’s denial. I hold deep fear and connection to something more ancient and trusting in equal measure.
Why write this at all
People say paralysis is the problem. If you’re not fighting right now, you’re told you’re complicit. But projecting wrongness onto each other fractures us further. The way out is not more division.
Right now, shadow work matters more than ever. Without it, we’re easily manipulated - our fear, rage, and unmet needs weaponized against us. That’s how we ended up here. A critical mass of people doing enough inner work is necessary so we aren’t endlessly steered by our shadows.
And yet - shadow work alone will not change the system.
The world is destabilizing by design. The constant pressure to unplug, to withdraw, to disappear. That inertia is not a personal failure. It’s structural. Trying to escape the prison often reinforces it, because escape becomes just another loop, another thing to consume to remain complacent. Another thing to be “not good enough at” that causes me to remain in place.
If I knew how to get out cleanly, I would have already.
So instead of trying to escape, or thinking I should and then judging myself for not doing it, I’m trying to understand the architecture. To name it without demanding immediate resolution. That awareness releases tension I didn’t know I was holding.
Maybe the way forward isn’t an escape route at all.
Maybe it’s learning to see the walls clearly enough that they can no longer pretend they’re permanent.
I certainly resonate with many of your points here, the introversion, the isolation, the repetition, the outrage, the questions. I've been asking myself what can I do right now, and the example the city of Minneapolis has made shows one thing over and over again and that's the power of community. Sure, its taxing to haul yourself out of the prison and put yourself bodily in front of others, whether they may harm you or hug you, but it needs to happen in some measure. It's the only way we get out of this in one piece. I'm donating monthly & financially to Food Not Bombs, signed myself up for a narrator / author "snippet recording" charity teamup and applied for my local Meals on Wheels ( I have yet to hear back). While I'm not protesting in the street ( I certainly feel a level of guilt for not doing this as I have time and opportunity) my PTSD and anxiety around it are a giant blocker that's hard to work myself out of. I bought my childhood home this past year and its showing its myriad levels of age and disrepair (another layer of stress) but upstairs, in the hallway, there are noticeable grooves and wear from my father's old bedroom to the upstairs bathroom that over the years, his shuffle cut into the floor. This house was his own kind of prison too, and I am adamant that I don't make it my own in kind.