Not Crying at a Funeral

The drug I’ve been missing lately isn’t the pills. It’s NPR.

Not the news itself, but the ritual of it — the soundtrack of civility, the soft cadence of morning hosts reading the day into order. Those gentle voices were a form of anesthesia. They framed chaos as commentary, outrage as programming, and routine as salvation.

Where pills offered an extension — a chemical blur softening the nervous system’s static — radio offered something subtler: predictability. It made uncertainty feel managed. That was the true high — the illusion of control dressed up as calm.

The hum of order is the most addictive drug ever sold.

There was something ceremonial about it. The coffee pot clicked. The headlines hummed. The world was on fire, but the tone stayed warm, articulate, reassuring. That’s always been my favorite drug — the hum of order, the illusion that someone, somewhere, was managing the chaos. Religion works the same way. It offers membership instead of meaning — belonging as sedation. Time, of course, was the real dealer. We were taught it was a currency: spend it, save it, waste it, kill it. Every phrase another charm of control. “Time is money” was never a metaphor. It was a leash. And “time off” was only moral if you prepaid for rest.

But time isn’t a line.
It’s a tower.

We’re told to play Monopoly on the basement floor while the real game happens in the penthouse. The ones below debate fairness; the ones above move the walls. Once you see that, you stop trying to win and start learning how to exit the board.

Winning, losing, right, and wrong are just measurements of how large you believe your cage to be.

Moral Revivalism™

Control doesn’t care about symbols. It only requires submission. Every system — religious, political, digital — eventually learns this: you don’t have to convince people, only exhaust them. The same machinery that once sold vice now sells virtue. The snake oil just changed its packaging. Moral Revivalism- A full-service rebrand of sin into spectacle. Confession as content, redemption as retention.
The audience stays loyal because someone else falls first.

“Was lost, now found” is the algorithm’s lullaby.

The influencer weeps on cue. The crowd feels cleansed by proxy. It’s emotional laundering disguised as faith. Confession became currency, forgiveness became format. And the system purrs with the piety of a televangelist: Your shame keeps the lights on.

The Western Catechism says sin is “any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God.” Which is to say: sin is redirection — deviation, curiosity.
And religion will tell you that redirection is rebellion — the edge of your cage. That’s how control sustains itself: by moralizing curiosity. You don’t need guards when the prisoner polices their own imagination. Moral Revivalism runs on guilt monetized through relatability. “I used to be blind but now I see” is the new clickbait catechism. But nothing changes because true redemption would require dismantling the system that profits from your confession. Control doesn’t want you free, it wants you forgiven — and forever dependent on the forgiver.

The Beautiful Collapse

“Bones sinking like stones, all that we fought for.
Homes, places we’ve grown, all of us are done for.
Yeah, we do, yeah, we do,
We live in a beautiful world.
Oh, all that I know,
There’s nothing here to run from.”
— Coldplay, “Don’t Panic”

We are attending the funeral of our own illusions. And yet — it’s beautiful. Grief and grace braided into the same breath. The first lines sound like ruin; the last like revelation. Maybe awakening is realizing that destruction and beauty were never separate things. Bones sinking like stones isn’t tragedy, it’s gravity reminding the body where it belongs. A reclamation, not a loss. What we call collapse is often just truth returning to the surface. Homes. Places we’ve grown. We cling to them like relics, but nostalgia is a museum gift shop — selling replicas of the world that no longer exists. This isn’t prophecy; it’s perspective. Endings are only brutal when you mistake them for punishment. Collapse isn’t wrath, it’s recalibration. Every empire falls the same way: not with fire, but with faith misplaced. We believed order was safety. We forgot that obedience is entropy in disguise. And when the towers tilt, when the programs glitch, when the polite morning voices go silent —
that isn’t the end of civilization. It’s the start of consciousness. Civilization was never built to make us conscious, it was built to make us compliant. To keep the tower running. To keep time ticking. To keep the basement full.

The real awakening isn’t enlightenment — it’s remembering who profits from your exhaustion.

Not Crying at a Funeral

I’m not crying. I’m observing. When you realize you’re at civilization’s funeral, the only sane reaction is awe. The collapse already happened — quietly, bureaucratically, algorithmically. We’re just watching the highlights in syndication. Every institution that promised safety has become a mausoleum. Politics. Religion. Medicine. Media. All embalming the same corpse: control. So I stand in the back row, hands unclasped, listening to the eulogies. They keep saying “restore,” as if the body might wake. But I know better. We don’t need resurrection, we need awareness.

The systems are dying. You don’t have to die with them.

When you can stand at that funeral — dry-eyed, heart open, mind clear — you’ll see the truth the mourners can’t: death was only ever a transition of code. The new world doesn’t begin with mourning. It begins with observation. The refusal to confuse decay for doom.

Watching from the Higher Floor

The collapse isn’t coming, it already happened. The system failed quietly, like a battery running down in a room still pretending the lights are on. What you’re witnessing now are maintenance rituals of a dying machine — politics, religion, media, medicine — all rebooting their code with the same corruption. They call it innovation, they call it revival. It’s really just panic. And the ones who see it clearly are the ones who’ve stepped outside of clock-time — who no longer measure their worth in minutes or metrics. You’re not late. You’re early. And what comes next isn’t apocalypse. It’s awareness.

You’re just watching the replay from a higher floor.