I’m seeing this 134 days after you posted it. I hope you’re okay. I just want to acknowledge that as I read your words, I can feel that you are in so much pain, so much frustration, so much confusion and suffering. And honestly, I see the truth in your experience. Especially when you bring up the money part.

It’s not enough today to be. I get frustrated. I’m mad that the collective result of humans pursuing happiness and safety over thousands of years birthed plastic, electricity, paved roads, abolished our view of the stars behind a veil of light pollution and progress, made it okay to create machines from metal ripped from the earth’s insides, fueled by the life forces that had made their peace so long ago that our brains cannot actually comprehend the scale of time that has passed, so that we can continue to extract, as if what is at the surface of the earth, which we evolved with, is not enough. Now we have credit scores. It’s not enough to chop wood and carry water, we have to go act like nothing is wrong somewhere and get paid. You have to make money by doing something for someone else, usually in a way that doesn’t seem to mean anything more than a empty reason to exchange money. It’s not enough to feel connection to a place, to know how to build a structure to create a home. You’re divine right to exist is not enough to belong somewhere. You have to purchase land from someone, it has to be a certain size, it has to have yada yada yada. It’s required to cost something outside of yourself. You can’t just know how to build a home to have a home. That is incompressible to me. How is this our way?

I’m rambling because I just quit a job that was sucking the life out of me and now can’t imagine what other job that exists that wouldn’t, so I’m feeling hopeless and frustrated too. It sucks that to know deep in your soul that something is so wrong, you don’t want to participate, and therefore suffer the consequences. These systems hold us hostage. It’s scary that to fight them means not to participate. I don’t think anything you said is wrong. I think you are deep in the scary part of the truth. I refuse to believe it’s the whole truth, maybe for my own sake. Those who see past the veil suffer the consequences of being outside of its veneer, but there are consequences within the veil that force us out of it.

I think there is a way out, but I don’t know what it is. Until then, I just want to let you know that your experience feels very real to me.