This world we live in isn’t made for you and me.

It’s not made for human beings with minds and hearts.

It’s not made to give us what we need most: connection, engagement, fulfilment, purpose.

It’s made to make us keep making it, to enslave us to its making, to keep us too busy to notice that we have been enslaved and have lost our freedom and our power and our humanity.

It is made to make us keep begging for food and water and shelter and safety, so that we are too busy and too tired to think about wanting real connection, meaning or engagement.

It is made to keep us emotionally and mentally stupid, retarded, because when I haven’t eaten properly or slept properly or laughed properly, I feel darkness come over me. Rage descends and my compassion for other people depletes and I become the kind of person that I thought has never had the benefit of education or privilege, a person controlled by their survival instincts, wild and untamed and defensive and insecure.

It is made to keep us believing there is scarcity even while we see abundance around us all the time, except this abundance is used against us like a carrot on a stick, dangling in front of us to remind us of what will never be ours unless we keep selling our body, mind and soul to the highest bidder. The harder you work and the deeper you sink into your voluntary slavery, the less bandwidth you have left over to have generous compassion for others.

To most people, ten days in silence sounds like an unreasonable challenge, because we are addicted to being hostages.

There’s a sense of comfort and false safety in what is familiar, the feeling of struggling every day, of fighting to stay alive and then telling your fellow woman how hard you fought or even better, pretend like you breezed through it all.

But the truth is, it’s not the silence that’s scary, it’s the prospect of not having access to the numbing agents we are all addicted to, all the things that keep us asleep and dreaming of a life we will never have because we are busy making this one that someone put us to task to.

And who on earth is this someone? God or some divine force, a being that knows more or better than us? A country or an economy, a force greater than us put together? None of these things exist without our consent, but we have signed away our agreement in our sleep, drunk on the so-called rewards of working hard and earning the right to be free to choose our poison to numb our souls.

Work hard, but what for? Work hard to get where? To have what? To be what? Work hard to live alone and die alone and suffer from mental health issues or physical health issues or addiction or pure and simple despair? Be with someone only to feel completely alone, raise children only to feel completely … well, I won’t pretend I know what it feels like to raise children. But in a world that claims to be so technologically advanced, where we have come far enough to collectively speak against giving into the basest of our natural animal instincts that keep our from rising fully into our power and potential as beings, raising children cannot still be the only way to feel meaning and purpose and fulfilment in this world.

I don’t want to change the world, I want to remake the world.

I don’t want to make incremental changes, because this is all too little too late, moving from vegetables covered in pesticides to organic is not going to make the world a better place to live in. This is just distraction, masturbation, a way to feel good about wanting to do good but in the end, doing nothing.

Better than this is to do nothing. Do absolutely nothing. How can you make the world a worse place if you do nothing? Leave no trace, no footprint, no mark. Over time, you’ll want nothing and then you’ll be nothing, until one day, when we all get there, perhaps we will stop destroying the very nature that sustains us.

But we want more because we want to be more than we feel we are, and the world is made to make us feel we aren’t enough. We aren’t enough until we prove our worth to humanity, and even when we do, even when we become the king of pop or the saviour of the oppressed or the guru to the great, even then, not a single one of us will go by untainted, no matter who we are, we will be loved and we will be hated, but everyone will only talk about how we were hated and not really worthy of the love we once had.

Because this world is not made for us, it is made to consume us while we believe we are consuming it, sitting at the top of the food chain. But nothing we consume will ever make that empty feeling go away, because that empty feeling has been planted in us from the bottom up and it will grow in us like a parasite until it kills us, from working too hard or from giving too much or simply from feeling like we can never have enough to fill it.

The connection we crave to fulfil us, to refill us, isn’t to each other.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but mostly, being around other people only serves to remind us of how we are all floundering trying to make meaning out of the emptiness, running towards a flag in the distance that moves as fast as we do. In the race to the end, we are not alone in being completely alone.

The only way to feel fulfilled is to leave, to escape, to quit, to abort. To not buy in and stop participating. The only way to win the system is to stop letting it seduce us with its too little too late numbing agents made to make us feel good for a minute only to make us feel worse for a month, until our next pay check. The only way to stop feeling empty is to become bottomless, so the empty can fall out and stop hanging out inside. No more stagnant swamp within.

After all, everything that goes in can come out, and while we may not feel that we get to choose what stays and what leaves our bodies, if we stop consuming shit, we can stop shitting altogether. After everything poisoning our insides comes out, that is.

Revolt.

There is only one way to be free, and that is to be free of dependencies, no matter what they are. To be free of the need for anything from the outside world, to just have no need and no want. To be free of the seduction that this world is using to keep us enslaved, addicted, empty and disconnected. Most of all, from ourselves.

Fast. Be silent. Don’t consume anything, sight or sound or concept. Feel what’s already inside. Embrace it or excrete it. Edit it down to only what feels truly you. Remove all alienness from within. Don’t just have an essence of you inside, be all essence. Essentially you. Pure, unadulterated, uninfluenced. Not a sponge but a diamond, clear, hard, brilliant. Impenetrable. Yet, completely transparent. Porous only to light, which enters as one and leaves as a spectrum of seven. A rainbow. The beauty of diversity.

It’s not pressure that makes diamonds. It’s the expulsion of everything that is not diamond-like that makes diamond. Not even air or water stuck within.

If this world was made for us, we would not be told to want things and to not feel things.

We were made to feel things, and number one on that list of things we want to feel is free. Free to be, free to choose, free to fulfil our hearts desire, because our heart’s desire tells us what we want to feel, and most of all we want to feel love. Love is abundance, and in the absence of love we will always feel scarcity, and scarcity makes us all scaredycats and that turns us all into the hissing scratching hair standing on our backs defenceless little creatures we are, when all we want to be is soft, innocent, curious, cute — just like the cats we obsessively watch on the internet because that is what our heart wants, to be that lovable and to be that loved and so entirely pure in our beings that there is no room even for air or water, just us. Pure, clear, brilliant.

This world is not made for me, it is not made for you. It is made to keep us making it, to keep us from being me and you, to keep us from being.

To be radical is to feel all the feelings, to be sensitive, to be fierce, to be unapologetic, to be more human than we ever thought possible. To be utterly completely essentially — like cats.