Via Stulti

For most of my life, nothing about this society made sense.

I don’t mean that in a poetic way.
I mean it literally.

I watched, I listened, I learned what I was told to learn, and I tried to apply it.

I showed up, reluctantly, to the buildings they bussed me to, I tried to follow the instructions. I wanted to be liked, to be good, to be a part of.

I wanted to belong.

So I tried, I showed up, I failed, I showed back up and I tried some more.

And yet everything felt strangely vacant.

Like I was participating in a world designed for someone else, it was something others seemed to understand instinctively but no one could quite explain in a way that made sense.

For 37 years, it felt as though I was standing in front of a painting.

I knew it was a painting.
I could see that clearly enough.
I could tell it meant something.

Other people stood beside me nodding, pointing out details, reacting with admiration or outrage.

They seemed to understand what they were looking at.

But to me, it was just a blur of color and noise.

I could not make out the subject.
I could not understand the form.

And that inability produced a steady undercurrent of frustration and anger, sometimes quiet, sometimes boiling.

From early childhood, I carried a kind of constant anger I couldn’t explain.

Therapy was tried.
Sports were tried.
Structure was tried.

Nothing resolved it.

Because the problem wasn’t inside me.
The problem was my perspective.

The Tribal Experiment

The first time life made sense to me was in the military.

Which is ironic because very little in the military makes sense.

The military is a strange social experiment.

It takes individuals from every corner of the country, different races, backgrounds, politics, religions and throws us all into this blender and attempts to turn us into one form.

And it works.

Not because everyone agrees.
Not because everyone likes one another.

Some of us down right hated each other.

It works because the mission is shared.
The identity is shared.
The risk is shared.

When things go bad, the uniform matters more than your opinion.

The tribe matters more than your differences.

You move as one because survival depends on it.

It is the closest thing modern America has to communal cohesion.

Historically, many indigenous cultures understood this.

The term tribe was not a buzzword, it was infrastructure.
Belonging was not sentimental, it was structural.
Your identity was interwoven with responsibility, with reciprocity, with mutual survival.

When Europeans settled here, they dismantled that structure and replaced it with radical individualism.

We then called it freedom.

The military preserved the tribal instinct, but only within its walls.

Step outside of it, and you return to the marketplace.
And the marketplace is not a tribe.

The Return to the Blur

After more than a decade in uniform, I stepped back into civilian life.

The anger returned almost immediately.

The shared mission was gone.
The tribe dissolved.

In its place was competition without cohesion.
Incentives without loyalty.
Identity without community.

The vile maxim.

We have professed values in this country.

We talk about unity.
We preach equality.
We claim freedom.

But our daily behavior tells a different story.

We are incentivized to maintain a system that works exceptionally well…
for a select few.

The rest of us are encouraged to chase proximity to that success.

We are told that if we work hard enough, grind long enough, sacrifice enough, we too might cross the invisible threshold.
But the threshold is not evenly distributed.

The “rat race” is not truly a race.

A race implies comparable starting lines and a plausible chance of winning.

What we have instead is a hierarchy masquerading as meritocracy.

Advancement often requires compromise, sometimes moral, sometimes personal, sometimes existential.

We have seen enough public scandals to know this is not conspiracy thinking. It is structural.

Power protects itself.
Institutions insulate their own.

The incentives reward loyalty to the system over loyalty to principle.

And in the meantime, we are encouraged to aim our anger at our neighbors.

We divide ourselves by skin color, by religion, by sexuality, by party affiliation. We turn tribalism into a weapon instead of a bond. We worship personalities who promise to rule on our behalf, even as we claim to be a people who bow to no ruler.

We call ourselves a free nation. Yet many live functionally enslaved.

To debt, to survival anxiety, to economic structures they did not design and cannot meaningfully influence.

The painting begins to come into focus.

The Shift in Perspective

One day, I stopped staring straight at it.

I don’t know why I did this
I don’t know how it happened

It happened while I was crying and texting my wife having a pity party.

But I stepped to the side.

From that angle, the blur resolved into something more visible.

This was not chaos.
It was design.

A system optimized to perpetuate itself.
Incentives structured to maintain continuity.
Individuals functioning as interchangeable components in a machine that must keep running.

Regardless of who benefits most.

For a brief moment, clarity felt exhilarating.

Confusion dissolved.
Anger cooled.

Understanding replaced both.

But clarity carries a cost.

When you finally see the painting for what it is, you cannot unsee it. And what replaced anger was not peace.

It was disgust.

Disgust at the distance between our professed values and our expressed ones.
Disgust at how easily we sacrifice one another for status, attention, profit, or ideological victory.
Disgust at the normalization of exploitation disguised as opportunity.

Most of all, disgust at the quiet acceptance of it all.

Opting Out

When I say I am opting out, I do not mean self destruction.

I am not rejecting life.
I am rejecting a particular version of it.

The white picket fence.
The performative normalcy.
The wake up, grind, return, repeat cycle framed as fulfillment.

The dream that was implanted so early it feels self generated.

Our version of Inception.
An American version.

It was never my dream though.

Yet participation in this structure is treated as mandatory for survival.

Opt in, or be marginalized.
Compete, or be discarded.

But I am no longer confused by it.

I understand that this system was built by the rich, for the rich.

I understand that mobility exists, but not in proportion to effort alone.

I understand that incentives shape behavior more than ideals do.

So I will just not chase the carrot.

I will not measure my worth by proximity to wealth or institutional validation.

I will not trade my humanity for advancement.

Opting out, for me, means redefining participation.

It means choosing community over competition.
Meaning over accumulation.
Sovereignty over conformity or in many cases, institutionalization.

It means building smaller, realer structures of belonging instead of trying to climb larger, hollow ones.

It means refusing to mistake the machinery for the meaning of life.

What Comes Next

I am still curious about life.
That curiosity never left.

But now it is untethered from the script.

The painting is no longer a blur.
I see it clearly.

And because I see it clearly, I am free to step away from it.

Not in bitterness.
Not in defeat.
But in refusal.

This version of society may continue as designed. It may reward those who master its incentives. It may punish those who resist.

But I will not participate.

I think I will just build elsewhere.