the mustang

in 2018 i dropped out of highschool and made my hair longer. family, friends, god ridiculed me. i was under high pressure from every angle to COMPROMISE.

I REFUSED.

and that decision caused me great pain and suffering. no education. jail. broke motherfucker buried in debt. the overwhelming cold at night with nothing to sleep on. starvation, humiliation, fear, doubt, depression, the gross feeling. the eerie feeling of looking at the train passing through the window of a jail cell.

i was doomed. at least that's what i thought, and what everyone around me was saying. by logic, i was fucked. zero chance of success and a 100% chance of going to hell. using the normal thinking of society, i shouldn't even be average, let alone successful.

but living outside the grid taught me every single fucking thing. the wilderness is the best fucking teacher in the universe. nothing but pain, suffering, and real-world consequences. it forced me to think in unconventional ways. learned to hunt on my own. found my own people. learned to forage food and water. learned how to thrive.

for the first time in my life i could feel the moist cold wind blowing my face. i'd become a mustang. a spirit roaming the free earth. earning at least 100k a month, three income streams, a year of expenses saved. living outside the grid let me understand the grid better without dogmas.

in 2018 i decided to drop out of highschool. and that… that changed everything.

there's something i didn't understand until i was out.

you can only truly know something from the state of not knowing it.

a fish swimming in water has no fucking concept of water. it's just there. it's everything. it's invisible. only when you yank the fish out does water become a thing it can finally see. you've been breathing the same air your entire life and you've never once noticed the air, until the day you can't.

the prophets and founders and weirdos who actually changed something all figured this out. they left first. moses, buddha, jesus, nietzsche. different centuries, different continents, same move. they walked out into somewhere empty and sat with it until they could see.

the matrix works because it's invisible from inside. it's the water you swim in. the only way to make it visible is to climb out, even briefly, even painfully, and look back.

here's the part that should fuck you up. every single belief you have right now was given to you by someone who was also inside. your parents, the teachers you trusted, the friends you grew up with, whatever religion got assigned to you at birth, every professor and every textbook, the news, the algorithm that's been feeding you for ten fucking years. every one of them was broadcasting noise as truth because noise was all they had. nobody ever handed you a single belief from outside the matrix. you've been taking dictation from the dream your entire life and calling it your worldview.

when you actually sit with that, the floor goes out from under you. it lands in your chest as a physical fucking sensation. your body registers it before your mind catches up. because if every input you've ever taken in came from people who were also asleep, then you don't actually know who you are, what you want, what's true, or what's worth doing. you have to start over from zero, on every single one of them.

the vast majority of people will feel a flicker of this and shut it down inside three seconds. too destabilizing, too fucking much to look at directly. so they bury it under more noise and go back to scrolling. that's why the matrix runs forever. your own nervous system flinches away from the thing it most needs to see, and the matrix doesn't have to do anything to keep you. you do the work for it.

and here's why most people never figure this out. the system actively pulls you back in. constantly. notifications, scrolls, hot takes, paychecks, deadlines, the news cycle, the algorithm, your boss, your family group chat. all of it engineered, accidentally or on purpose, to keep your attention inside the bubble. to keep your eyes glued to the screen, not the sky.

you don't fucking slip out of the matrix. you have to claw your way out. and then you have to keep clawing, because the second you stop, it sucks you back in like a drain.

that's why the wilderness works. the trees, the cold, the stars are just scenery. the medicine is the absence. the silence that lets your own thoughts get loud enough to hear. any spot works. as long as the system can't reach you. long enough that the noise stops ringing in your skull.

and most people never get out long enough to find that silence. they live their whole lives waist-deep in noise and die without ever hearing themselves think.

here's how you do it.

1. get out of the noise. for real.

before any of the rest of this works, you have to physically separate from the system long enough to hear yourself think. no phone for 48 hours. a weekend somewhere with no signal. a long drive alone with the radio off. a week in the woods. doesn't matter what you pick, but it has to be real and it has to be regular. you can't think clearly inside the same noise that programmed you. your own thoughts won't get louder than the algorithm until the algorithm is out of the room. skip this and the next three steps will just decorate your conditioning with smarter words.

i started doing this in jail because there was nothing else to do. you can pick a weekend instead of a sentence.

2. read like you're starving.

tons and fucking tons of books. documentaries. go wide. stay curious about every fucking thing. i spent my teens and 20s reading 30 minutes a day minimum. hundreds of books, probably past a thousand by now. psychology, history, economics, biology, human evolution, spiral dynamics, politics, art, wars, basic physics, human cultures, zoology, cosmology, spirituality, mysticism. all of it.

(i've got a list of what's actually worth your time. but that's for another letter.)

3. live it.

a book gives you the framework. the real world makes you understand. farm exp in the real world, then sit with those experiences and think.

the only way you learn business is to start one. just start. even if you're not ready. you learn by falling on your face a hundred times. if you want to learn to swim, get in the fucking water. yeah, you'll gulp water. yeah, you'll fuck up your eyes. yeah, it won't feel good. but you'll learn faster than the motherfuckers in a classroom getting hyped about the "different forms of swimming," waiting for the professor to hand them a piece of paper after 4 years of studying in a room.

heartbreak in my early 20s rewired everything i thought i knew about love. nothing in any book taught me what one person walking out the door taught me in an afternoon.

being buried in debt taught me what money actually is. not what economists say it is. what it does to your sleep, your decisions, your spine. you learn faster broke than you'll ever learn rich. it's not even close.

jail taught me what freedom is. you don't really know what freedom is until you've watched a train pass through a window you can't open. i learned more about what i actually wanted out of life sitting in that cell than i did in any classroom in my life.

no classroom on earth could teach you what those three things teach you in a year.

you give up comfort and you get compression in return. you give up the illusion of control and you get real understanding. nobody tells you that's how the trade works because most people never make it.

your first move tonight, delete the three apps you reach for most. don't redownload them for the next 7 days.

then pick a date in the next 30 days. 48 hours, fully offline. take a notebook. tell whoever needs to know, then fucking disappear.

that's how it starts. you in a room with yourself, with no escape route, for the first time in years.

the cost is real and i'm not gonna fucking sugarcoat it. it's lonely. you'll be broke before you're rich. there are seasons where you have no idea what you're doing and nobody to call. people you love will look at you like you've lost your mind. some days you'll wonder if they're right. and i'd still take this life a thousand times over the slow fucking death i was walking into if i'd stayed.

here's what's actually waiting on the other side. three things, and they're the only ones that fucking matter.

1. mastery of survival, and the ability to thrive anywhere.

you can hunt, forage, cook, fix, build. you can drop into a country you've never been to with $500 and figure out food, shelter, and money inside of a week. you've been ass broke and you've been comfortable. you stared down both. money finally makes fucking sense because you know what it actually does and what it can't. your body stops lying to you because you finally started listening to the fucking thing. if the power grid went down tomorrow you wouldn't be one of the millions screaming. you'd be the motherfucker people came to.

2. pure understanding of how the world actually works.

everything i listed at the top of this letter? religion, politics, economics, wars, money, business, spirituality? none of that shit fucks with your head anymore. you see who's lying and what they're getting out of it. you see what each system is actually optimizing for versus what it claims to be optimizing for, and you see the gap between those two things. you stop arguing with idiots about the surface because you can see two layers under it. the news doesn't fucking move you. trends pass through you without sticking. fear cycles run their course and you don't even feel the wind. you watch the matrix run from outside and you understand exactly why it's doing what it's doing. once you see it you cannot fucking unsee it, and that alone is worth every cold night and every broke morning you went through to get here.

3. a deep life.

a life where you stopped outsourcing the core of your existence to motherfuckers who were never qualified to decide it for you. what you should want. what's worth doing. what love actually is. why you're alive. what you owe other people. how to die. every single one of those was answered for you before you could fucking walk, by people who inherited their answers from people who inherited theirs, all the way down the line. a deep life is when you take all of those back. you ask them raw. you hunt the real answers in the real world for as long as it takes. and you land on something that is actually yours for the first fucking time.

and because you did that work, the simulation drops. you're in an actual life. finally. shallow conversations make you want to stab your own ear with a fork, and the people who can't handle anything deeper drift away on their own. good. every ordinary moment starts to have weight. a sunset actually lands. you catch the friendships while they're happening. a quiet morning goes a mile deep. you read the same book six times because each pass shows you shit you couldn't see before. time gets texture again. seasons. density. an afternoon can hold more than what used to be a whole year. you feel the fact that you're going to die, and it clarifies everything. cuts the bullshit out of your choices. nothing that doesn't matter gets your hours anymore.

most people on the grid will never touch this. they live through thousands of sunsets and remember none of them. every real conversation in their life happens with someone who's half somewhere else. the grid hands them a trance at birth and they die in the same one, and they don't even know what they missed because the missing never made it to consciousness. this is what you walked away from when you walked out of the grid. and that alone is worth everything else you gave up.

i wake at four

and think about

the sixty seven thousand motherfuckers

asleep beside their wives,

dreaming of promotions

and cleaner garages.

the coffee is old

and so am i.

the gut gives me hell.

the hands shake.

somewhere a dog barks

at exactly one thing

and won't stop.

i fucked a woman on friday.

she was thick, a beautiful bitch/

she cried afterward

and asked me if i loved her.

i said i didn't know.

she left in a grab at 3am

took sixty dollars from my wallet

and a bottle of wine.

i don't blame her.

this is more than most people will ever have.

i mean it.

the men in the offices

will die inside their own chests,

clean, undisturbed,

in the middle of a thought about nothing,

never having set a single fucking thing

on fire.

i sit at the window.

the light is coming up.

it is the only thing in this stupid city

that is not lying to me.

i raise my coffee to it.

i am going to die.

so are you.

and this, this right here,

me and the light and the brown piss

and the eighty dollar hangover,

is what the motherfuckers

kept from you

your entire fucking life.