Don’t take instruction on how to live your life from a stark raving mad society. This civilization is sick. It is genocidal. It is ecocidal. It is omnicidal. We are ruled by psychopaths, while the best among us are relegated to the fringes of the fringe. We are hurtling into totalitarianism and armageddon at breakneck pace while our attention is aggressively pulled toward the vapid and the inane. You should share none of the values and priorities of this freak show. You should not let any aspect of this dystopia inform your decisions regarding who you should be and what kind of life you should live. In this warped and twisted madhouse, we are trained to believe that “success” looks like making a lot of money, earning large amounts of esteem and adoration, having a certain body type, living in the right kind of neighborhood in the right kind of house full of the right kind of products to impress the right kind of people. We are trained to believe we need to rack up all kinds of accomplishments, academic achievements, promotions, impressive stories, social ascendence. We are trained to believe we must attract a certain type of partner who will be approved of by everyone whose approval we crave. If we cannot achieve these goals, we are trained to believe we should feel bad about ourselves. That we don’t deserve happiness. That we should either spend our time stressing and striving for worthiness as defined by our crazy civilization, or go and join the ocean of miserable failures who couldn’t win the capitalism game and sedate ourselves with alcohol and entertainment waiting for death to carry us into the nothingness where we belong. This is clearly insane. It’s a stupid game with stupid prizes. The only reason anyone takes it seriously is because we were raised and taught how to live by people who take it seriously. Our parents have been indoctrinated into the power-serving worldview that has been forcibly imposed upon the denizens of the empire, and we want to make them proud. Our friends, families and acquaintances have been likewise brainwashed, and we want to impress them. But to do so is to take lessons on how to live from a collective disease that is pointed at misery and dysfunction. It is impossible to lead a truly fulfilling life while also trying to live the way the people around us think we should live, because the society which shaped their ideas about how we should live is insane. If you want to really live an awake and inspired life, you’ve got to blaze your own trail. You’ve got to unlearn everything you’ve been told about what a life properly lived would look like, and write your own rules. Because the rules everyone else has been playing by were written by madmen. Find your own truth. Set your own values and priorities. Define your own idea of success. Define your own idea of sanity. Consider the possibility that just being present for the beauty of each moment on this wonderful planet is worth more than anything the imperial insane asylum has to offer you. Consider the possibility that your very next breath, deeply relished, would be enough. We are destroying our planet and driving every living organism toward annihilation. The status quo has failed as spectacularly as anything could possibly fail. The old ways of doing things plainly do not work. So try some new ways. Be different. Be strange. Be a freak. Do everything the wrong way. Disappoint your parents. Fail to live up to your potential. Transgress your family doctrine. Anger whatever gods you were taught to believe in. Nothing anyone has done has worked. It is therefore necessary to travel off the beaten path. The world won’t get better until humanity changes its ways. Humanity won’t change its ways if it keeps insisting on trying the same failed approaches over and over again. Our survival as a species depends on diverging from our patterns. Maybe we’ll succeed in surviving, and maybe we won’t. But at the very least we can rescue ourselves from spending one more day on this amazing blue world trying to live by the rules of lunatics.