Waking up (10/1/2025)

Most people live on autopilot. They follow the scripts handed to them: get into a good school, find a respectable job, keep up with the social rituals of their peers. It’s not stupidity - it’s just how the human brain works. Conformity is safe. It saves you from having to constantly reinvent the world for yourself.

But sometimes you break out of it. You realize the default path isn’t designed for you. Maybe you chased status or money, got a taste of it, and found it hollow. Maybe you hit a wall and had to improvise. Whatever the cause, you “wake up.” And once you do, you can’t unsee it.

The moment you wake up is both exhilarating and lonely. Exhilarating, because you’ve stepped outside the dream most people never question. Lonely, because now you see how few others are truly awake. The people around you keep playing their parts, and they look at you with suspicion when you stop. They’ll even criticize you: You’re too intense. You’ll regret not going out more. Why can’t you just relax?

The criticism stings until you realize what it really means. Your difference unsettles them. If you take life seriously, their own unseriousness looks flimsy by comparison. If you work while they coast, it forces them to confront their drift. So they try to pull you back, not out of malice, but out of self-preservation.

The crowd is not evil. It’s just unconscious. Fish don’t notice water. Most people don’t notice culture. They mistake noise for purpose because noise is easier. They confuse comfort with happiness because comfort is easier. But easier doesn’t mean better.

When you wake up, you realize your life is an experiment. You have maybe 4,000 weeks, if you’re lucky. That’s not long. Drifting through them on default settings feels like the real failure. The only way to avoid regret is to run your own experiments, even if they look crazy to everyone else. Especially if they look crazy.

History’s outliers were always criticized in their own time. They were eccentrics, obsessives, fools. Only later were they called visionaries. The line between foolishness and inevitability is drawn by persistence.

So if you feel lonely because you’re not doing what everyone else is doing, that’s not a bug. It’s a feature. Loneliness is proof you’ve left the crowd. The question is what you’ll build with that freedom.

The temptation is to sneer at the herd. But that misses the point. Your job is not to despise conformity - it’s to resist falling back asleep yourself. Stay awake by writing down what you notice. Stay awake by building things, even small ones, that anchor you against drift. Stay awake by finding the handful of people who also refuse to sleepwalk, and sticking with them.

You are not here to be normal. You are here to create, to risk, to live deliberately. Most people exist, but only a few are awake. And once you wake up, you can’t go back.