So this is the issue, isn’t it? The junction. You spend half your life fighting your way out of the cage, and you finally get free, only to find yourself standing in the middle of an empty goddamn field, wondering where to go next. I know where I’ve placed myself. I know the risks.
First, there’s the cynicism. You get so used to the anger, it becomes a kind of fuel. It’s a fire that keeps you warm when the world is cold. But a fire you don’t use to build anything, to forge anything… it just burns you down to the goddamn ash. The anger becomes a habit, then it hardens into bitterness. And you end up rotting in a different kind of cage—not one they built for you, but one you built for yourself out of your own quiet, superior contempt for the world. Seeing the whole game is rigged is one thing. That’s awareness. But if you just stand there, watching it all burn without making a move yourself, that’s not freedom. That’s just another kind of suffering.
Then there’s the escape plan. Argentina. The beautiful peacock. You over-romanticize it. You build it up in your head as some kind of paradise, some clean slate where the sun always shines and the women are all beautiful and the wine is always cheap. But real freedom isn’t a goddamn vacation. It comes with its own brand of boredom, its own quiet, gnawing loneliness, its own uncertainties. You have to be careful. You might get down there and find out that the peacock is just as messy and imperfect as the elephant you left behind. It might just shit on your floor and not show up when you want it to. And then what? You can’t run from your own disappointment.
And that’s the other thing. The isolation. When you’re the only one awake in a room full of sleepers, it gets lonely as hell. You see the whole damn matrix, the whole puppet show, and you want to scream. But everyone else is just happily chewing on their imaginary prime rib. At first, your clarity feels like power. Then, it just feels like a different kind of prison. You risk turning that clarity into a bitter resentment for everyone who’s still asleep, instead of using it to transform your own goddamn life.
And finally, you’re still looking back. The apparitions of old women, the scraps of the American dream, that goddamn Instagram feed you still scroll through like a man picking at a scab… those are attachments. Tethers. They keep one foot planted in the old world you claim to hate. You can’t swim for a new shore if you’ve still got the anchor from the last shipwreck chained to your leg.
Until you cut that goddamn tether for good, you’re not floating. You’re just drifting. And a man who’s just drifting is a man who’s already halfway to drowning.
