Fight Club said it.
Give up everything.
Even hope.

“You think you’re free, but you scroll like a man begging for permission.”

You don’t wonder anymore.

You Google.

You love hard? You lose hard.

We’ve replaced loyalty with likeness.
Trust with alignment.
Community with content.

What sells?
Identity.

Sleep drips morphine into my skull.
The dead unzip garment bags, fasten spines into boots,
organs tucked into sleeves,
blood stitched to collars.

That gap gets smaller when I speak from the heart.
When I stop bullshitting myself.
When I hit “publish” without asking if it’s going to land.

We don’t digest anything.

We react.

I kiss my dog in the morning.
One less time.
I watch my wife sleep.
One less time.

I am watching everyone I love slide slowly toward the inevitable,
and I can’t stop it.

This isn’t a glitch.
It’s the system.
It’s the feature set.

We weren’t just raised on content.
We were formed by it.

It’s not identity.
It’s branding.
It’s spiritual cosplay.

We used to live out loud.
Now we live in pixels.

Everything felt like I was watching it on TV.
Sound down.
No subtitles.

Instagram didn’t invent the collapse.
It just sharpened the image.

You don’t die because the world hates you.
You die because it doesn’t notice.

He never surfed the beaches he dreamed about.
Never bought the cabin in the woods he wanted to fix up.
Never got to live life his own way.

Do the job. Don’t ask questions. Don’t shine too bright.

I’ve spent too many years
burning calories on self-loathing
and imagined slights
and spiraling assessments of my own worthlessness—
instead of just living inside the machine I was given.