There’s that scene in the movie, The Matrix. The traitor, the rat, he’s sitting in a fancy restaurant, cutting into a thick, juicy prime rib. And he says it, the whole goddamn philosophy of the modern world in one perfect, ugly line. He knows the steak isn’t real. He knows it’s just a signal being fed to his brain while his body is floating in some alien goo-pod. He knows it’s a lie. But it’s such a good lie. It’s comforting. So he makes a deal to go back to sleep.
That’s the choice, isn’t it? The steak or the truth. And most people, they choose the steak every goddamn time.
They choose the illusion of the house, the illusion of the car, the illusion of the whole damn infrastructure that’s built around you. They swallow the constant, social peer pressure of self-development, self-action, self-preservation. They care about what everyone thinks, so they put on the makeup, the push-up bras, the fake smiles. They’re all just floating in the goo, chewing on their imaginary prime rib, and telling themselves it’s delicious. It’s easy. It’s comfortable. It’s the feeling of just letting go, of letting the struggle leave your body as you float along with the status quo, talking like them, believing like them.
It’s the oldest story in the book. Adam, in his garden, everything handed to him. All he had to do was obey the rules. Then the woman comes along with the apple, with a taste of something real, and suddenly everything becomes dirty, shameful. A struggle. Most people would have stayed in the goddamn garden.
Every now and then, you get a glimpse of the other side. You see the ones who took the other pill. You see the artists, the musicians, the ones who are lost in their passion. You watch a man play a guitar, and you don’t even listen to the song; you just admire that he’s in a bubble, with himself, for himself, completely present. You see it in people who do real work with their hands, people who have found their purpose. There’s an energy that comes off them. And you think, “My God, that’s what I want. I want to get lost in something, something that’s real.”
But then you look back at the matrix, at the Instagram feed, at all the happy, smiling people with their elephants.
Yeah, their elephants. That’s what most relationships are, aren’t they? You get to a certain age, you’re lonely, and there’s an elephant available. Maybe it’s not what you wanted. Maybe you were always a peacock man. But the elephant is there. It’s convenient. Maybe it helps pay the rent. So you take it. You get this wild, magnificent, and completely inappropriate animal, and you spend the next ten, twenty years of your life trying to tame it.
You teach it tricks. You housebreak it. You have it host Christmas and Easter. You parade it around for your friends. “Look at my elephant! I’ve trained my elephant!” And you dedicate your whole goddamn life to taking care of this thing you never really wanted in the first place.
And while you’re busy shoveling elephant shit and teaching it how to sit, you see it out of the corner of your eye. A beautiful peacock, strutting by, magnificent and free. And you know, deep down, that’s who you were supposed to be with. But you can’t. You’ve got the elephant. You’ve put too many years in. You’re trapped.
I look at my own Instagram feed sometimes. I see the pictures pop up, the ghosts of women from my past. And they all look so happy. “Look at me, I’m on a jet ski! Look at me, I’m camping! Oh, look at me, I’m in the Bahamas!” Sometimes with different men in each picture. And for a second, you feel that pull, that prime rib desire. You think, “My God, I miss that.”
But do you? Do you really miss it? Do you miss logging in with somebody you have nothing in common with, other than a little surface affection and a shared desperation not to be alone?
I’ve been single for a while now, playing this rotisserie game, jumping from one orbit to another, trying to find myself. And in that process, I’ve had to pass up on some quality people, some real peacocks. Why? Because I was driven by this deep, gut feeling that I don’t belong here. That I’ve already played this song, I’ve already seen how this movie ends. There’s a reason you’re single at fifty-something. And me picking up the scraps of your last failed relationship, wasting the next six years of my life just to find out that I’m miserable with you? I’m not hungry for that anymore.
I’m tired of training elephants.
I want to find my own goddamn passion. I want to be the one lost in the music, the one who isn’t looking over his shoulder to see who’s watching. The ones who are really alive, they’re not working a 9-to-5 where fifty percent of their soul gets taxed away. They’re working online, scrambling for maybe two thousand dollars a month, and it’s enough to pay for a beautiful life on a beach somewhere, because they’re not paying for a goddamn elephant.
I look back at my own life, at my corporate achievements, my entrepreneurial ventures. And you know what they are? They’re scraps. Just scraps in the scrapbook of the American Dream, that grand delusion.
So you have to make a choice. The steak or the truth. The elephant or the peacock. The cage or the goddamn unknown.
Most people choose the steak.
But it’s the ones who choose the truth, the ones who are brave enough to walk away from the elephant and go looking for their peacock, even if they never find it… those are the only ones who ever really live at all.
