You saw it in high school, didn’t you? The first, beautiful, and completely fraudulent lie of the American Dream. The moron kids, sixteen years old, with their one, desperate, and all-consuming prayer: “I want a car, I want a car.”
And the second they got the keys to that beat-to-shit Nova, the second they tasted that one, beautiful, fleeting moment of “freedom,” the trap snapped shut. Because now they needed insurance. They needed gas. And in this beautiful, capitalist machine, that means they needed a goddamn job.
So you watched these kids, in the prime of their beautiful, stupid, and completely useless youth, willingly chain themselves to a ten-hour-a-week job bagging groceries. They weren’t kids anymore. They were “in the grind.” And that’s it. That’s the whole goddamn American experiment, right there in a high school parking lot. They sell you a dream of freedom, and they hand you a lifetime sentence of maintenance.
That’s all this life is. Ninety-five percent of your paycheck, gone. Fifty percent to the government, to the quiet, respectable, and completely invisible machine that owns your ass. The rest? It goes to “maintaining.” Maintaining the car, maintaining the house, maintaining the shitty food that’s quietly killing you.
We’ve been force-fed a diet of bullshit. They told us wealth was the car, the house, the big-screen TV. The “materialistic trophies.” These aren’t gods; they’re the fake, plastic idols of a dying religion. They’re the Durashell batteries you burn your whole goddamn life out for, just to keep their cheap toys running. And you call that a “mid-life crisis”? Christ. That’s not a crisis. That’s a goddamn fact.
And you want to know what real wealth is?
Real wealth is the ability to get up in the morning without a goddamn alarm clock screaming in your ear. It’s walking to a beach, in a country you don’t belong to, and sitting down with a two-dollar coffee and your laptop. It’s hearing the quiet, beautiful, and completely honest sound of the goddamn waves, and knowing that’s the only boss you have to answer to today. That is wealth. That’s the real, honest-to-God paycheck.
I saw it back in Bend. My cousins, fresh from the Southern California rat race. They show up at my ranch, and they’re still… vibrating. A quiet, toxic, and completely insane hum from the machine they just left. My cousin, he couldn’t get off his goddamn phone for the first day. The digital leash was yanked so tight he couldn’t even see his own kids, right in front of him, playing in a goddamn pond.
But the kids… the kids knew. They were decompressing. They didn’t have their toys, their hovercrafts, their iPads. They were playing in the dirt. In the honest-to-God mud. They were remembering what it was like to be a beautiful, dirty, and completely human animal. It took the adults two days to wash the city out of their brains.
And that’s the beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary promise of the escape.
You get out. You go somewhere that isn’t America. You go to Vietnam, to Argentina, to some goddamn place that hasn’t been completely pasteurized, sterilized, and corrupted by corporations and quiet, respectable desperation. And you decompress.
Our lives in this country, they’re predictable. That’s the real, ugly, soul-crushing sin of it all. The job, the traffic, the 9-to-5, the quiet, stupid, and completely insane ritual of Daylight Saving Time. It’s a goddamn rerun of a show you never wanted to watch in the first place. And we just… accept it. We numb the pain with a new TV, a new laptop, a weekend in Vegas, all of it just a quiet, desperate, and completely bullshit attempt to forget that we’re in a goddamn cage.
But when you travel, when you have your real apocalypse and burn the old life to the ground, you’re forced to be new again. You’re surprised every goddamn day. The new cultures, the new food, the new rules… you’re so far out of your element that you have to open your goddamn mind. You have to see things again, not just react to them.
You have to start questioning the programming.
”Why do I believe this shit? Where did this opinion come from?”
You find out you’re not your own person; you’re just a beautiful, ugly, and completely predictable echo of the machine. Was it your parents? Your teachers? The goddamn news? You go to these other countries, places that aren’t so wound-up in the materialistic bullshit, and you see people who are… different. They might be poor, but they’ll invite you into their home, feed you, take care of you, all without a goddamn invoice. A quiet, unconditional, and completely honest act of human connection. It’s unheard of here.
That’s the quest. That’s the whole goddamn point of the journey. To get uncomfortable. To get lost. To purge the programming.
I want to be able to find myself overwhelmed by a sunset in a strange country. I want to be able to stand on a beach, in the middle of a beautiful, ugly, and completely honest rainstorm, and just… cry. Not for sadness, but for the sheer, beautiful, and completely brutal purity of it all.
I want to laugh again, that stupid, ugly, and completely honest laugh of a child who hasn’t been taught the rules yet.
I just want to be myself, whoever the hell that bastard turns out to be.
