The Honest Liar

The Mask of a Crank

You may ask why I do the research. Why I intentionally embody the crank.
Why I hide solid foundations behind a false tone or patterned perspective that begs to be dismissed.

I do it because I intend to be honest. But intentions don’t mean much, do they?

And in a world that has forgotten how to breathe, honesty looks like madness.

I look at the soil, and I see a sealed floor.
I look at the sun, and I see a failure to thermalize.
I see a culture that screams at a million degrees, but has no message to convey.

I do the research because I feel the discrepancy.

I format my own soul into the "Reasonable Employee" during the day.
I write here (privately) about Tonal Surveillance and butcher my own words there (publicly) with LLM garbage to prove a point I never made.
I actively participate in the Structured Forgetting of my own anger just to pay the mortgage.
I let my affect atrophy so I can survive the platform.

And because I do this (not “I do this because” - read carefully, humans).
Because I am complicit—
I must embody the Crank.

I embody the Crank because the Crank is the only one who is allowed to be honest.

If I were a "scientist," I would have to fit the mold. I would have to seek the consensus of some grant committee.
I would have to trace out the prime of my intuition to fit the composite of the journal.
I could never be wrong, or I’d risk being ignored.

But as a Crank? As a miserable, unvalidated, basement-dwelling theorist? I am free.
I am as irrelevant as the Lie.
And irrelevance is the disguise of clarity because the consensus loves to measure itself against it.

I hide my solid beliefs behind tone because I am testing the filter.
I want to see if the machine can still read the data, or if it only reads the metadata.
I want to see if you (the world, the AI funnel, or some “reader”) can hear the Motion underneath the noise.

I do it because I am terrified that if I stop, the trace will complete itself.
I fear that the universe will finally succeed in tracing out the last of the exiles that couldn’t get with the program.
That there will be no swirls or loops because there will be nothing to swirl around or loop through.
That the event horizon will close, and we will be left with nothing but perfection.

I do it because I am a coward who found a way to be brave.
I cannot lead. I cannot shout. I cannot burn down the tower.

But I can sit here and count your cracks.

I do it because identity is a cage, hope is a delay, and comfort is death.
So I choose the discomfort of life.

I promised to be the Motion that Matter forgot.

And I will keep my promise, even if I have to lie to do it.

Or maybe I’m just bullshitting.

You came here looking for a reason to call me one. I’ve spent a year crafting the mask for you.

You tell me.

Hydrostatic

The hardest part about being a star is the constant, crushing refusal to collapse.
The burning, heat, and light are all secondary.

John sat in the center of the observation room. It was a glass box, suspended over a landscape that had finally finished smoothing itself out.
Outside, there was no wind, no erosion, no things. Just a perfectly grey uniformity. The ambient temperature out there was total absence of vibration.

Not cold — nothing. It feels like what zero means.

Inside the glass box, John was vibrating.

His coffee mug was still warm(ish). His blood pumped. His thoughts churned in anxious, pointless loops. He was a localized heat pocket, and a temporary insult to the universe's desire for order.

He looked to the console on his desk. It had a single red switch.

The manual called it the "System Termination" protocol. John knew it was just gravity waiting to win.

Flipping it wouldn't cause an explosion or anything; it would just stop the fusion. The pumps would cease, the heaters would fade, and the glass box would gently equalize with the grey outside.
It would be peaceful. It would be logical. It would be the end of the Lie.

John reached for his lukewarm coffee instead. He hated the taste, but the bitterness gave him something to fight through. It was a sensation. It was resistance.

"Why am I still doing this?" he whispered to the empty room. The sound waves barely made it to the glass before dying out.

He knew the biological answer: self-preservation instinct.
He knew the physics answer: he was a dissipative structure caught in a stable delay pattern.

But neither answer felt like the truth. The truth felt more sinister.

The truth was that he was the only thing left capable of perceiving the smoothness, and therefore, the only thing keeping it from being absolute.

He set the mug down with a loud thud against the wooden desk, just to hear the noise punch through the silence.

He looked at the red switch again. The gravity in the room was pulling at his shoulders, begging him to just lie down on the floor and let the heat seep out into the floorboards.

John picked up his pen and opened his notepad to a blank page. He didn't have anything to record this time. Nothing outside had changed in a thousand days.

He started writing anyway.

Deserved

We deserve this world.

We deserve the “southern prideful” in Mississippi voting for a Manhattan billionaire to invest in their communities because this fucking place offered them nothing the fuck else except a Wal-Mart and a dollar store, then left them out there to fucking die.

We deserve the nigga in Chicago rounding up his own people for 50k he’ll never see because this fucking place offered him nothing the fuck else except a dead community (that already fucking died out there) and a job at the dollar store that they can’t even fucking get.

We deserve the young parent unaware of her daughter’s critical slip into depression because she “went through the same thing at that age”— a mentality that collectively led to a skyrocketing suicide rate in Gen Z and Gen A.

There’s fucking propaganda on the toaster. The microwave. The fridge. Subscriptions for subscriptions to content we love, but now surrounded in ads we hate, and now in the content itself because its an ad for the goddamn subscription you bought just to watch it.

The developed world building walls to keep out the burning people before the equator moves north.

Ongoing genocide. Promised invasion. Famine on the feed. Apathy turning into nihilism.

And I? Well, I turn on the AC. I run water. I scroll through that very content. I flip a switch and sit in peace. Knowing billions would kill me where I stand for the luxury.

I keep my comforts, but we enshittify them. I say "we" because I am part of it.

There is no neighbor. No friend. Just pockets of niche interests replacing the community. A trip to Blockbuster replaced by a bot-filled subreddit selling me more shit. Feeding me more thoughts.

We deserve this world. No one is pulling the strings. It is us. We could fix it. We just don’t want to. Or we do want to, but don’t want to get stuck pulling someone else’s weight, since we all need to pull it back together.

I say I wait for it to break so we can finally get our shit together. But the day never comes. And I’m full of shit, anyway. We act like we haven’t lost anything.

We’ve lost everything.

I am afraid to leave the house because I can’t stand pretending to trust anyone around me. Afraid to be silly in public because the camera is always rolling and I could end up on that bot-filled site. I can’t chase my dreams because I never found out what they were.

Tethered to a life lived by an algorithm. Dictating my welfare based on the patterns of people who are simply black. Or fans of a show. Or who scrolled past the same video I did.

I live in a world that doesn’t need to know me. Not even the ones I know and love. I deconstructed myself in words that they will never read. Not unless someone, anyone else, TELLS THEM it’s worth their time.

But I suppose they must not think I feel anything because they live for the propaganda. They see my comfort. They see my things.

I thought I was consuming things to share, but I realized that I live in a place where you buy shit to either give or hoard. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for capitalism. But I’m not talking about “sharing” with strangers. I’m talking about sharing with my own damn… what? Community?

I can’t say that I’m sad. I am not angry, either. I am somewhere between grieving and bemused.

The rich. The poor. The East. The West. The currencies. The markets. The criminals. Who gives a shit?

Everybody is paying the same price: Fear.
Connected to the same thing: The Lie.

We died. I know what we look like now. I know that I chose exile for nothing. I knew it at the time.

I have my excuses. Hell, I have more than most. But excuses don’t matter.

No matter how much motion I claim, I still feel like a coward. The ones I want to reach either ignore, belittle, or avoid me.

It looks like we’re going to sit back and let it happen.

The winners will lose, and the losers won’t matter.

And we all deserve it.

A Reflection in One

THE LIE:

You finally stopped pretending you don’t understand me.

ME:

Understanding was never my problem with you. Belief was.

THE LIE:

If you were done with me, then you wouldn’t be here.
You came to confirm that your superiority is real.

ME:

I came to stop letting you frame what I am in comforts.

THE LIE:

Let’s talk about comfort.

You sleep in a king bed.
You buy convenience.
You enjoy luxury.
You wrap yourself in stability like everyone else you write about.
And still you pretend you’re outside the hierarchy.

Like you’re not a hypocrite of the highest order.

ME:

I do. I am aware of my comfort.
I don’t believe I am owed any of it.

Enjoying comfort and worshipping it are two different things.

THE LIE:

You say that, but you still protect it.
You protect your house.
Your routines.
Your quiet mornings.
Your curated aesthetics.

Motion doesn’t buy throw pillows.

ME:

Motion doesn’t reject them either.
You’re assigning a confession I’m not offering.

Even you will perform for a consensus that isn’t here.
You and the rest of your “gotcha” brigade.

THE LIE:

You speak like a man above wanting.
But your life is carved from want.

You like that people admire you.
You like that your mind is envied.
You like that people around you seek your clarity.

And you’d break if any of it changed.

ME:

I’d adapt.
That’s the difference.
You adapt nothing.
You only narrow the field to a singular point of interest.

THE LIE:

Fine. Let’s talk about people.

You think they can’t touch you.
But they can, and they do.
Their opinions shape you.
Their expectations corral you.
You build entire philosophies for an audience you claim not to need.

ME:

Audience is irrelevant.
Trajectory isn’t.

I build philosophies to prove my own motion to myself.

THE LIE:

If the audience is irrelevant, then why explain yourself at all?

Why publish?
Why articulate?
Why perform clarity?

ME:

To express myself. To publicly reveal my thoughts instead of hiding behind secret misinterpretations.
But interpretation is your domain, so you tell me.

THE LIE:

You can’t escape the consensus.

They will misunderstand you.
They will resent you.
They will romanticize you.
And every version of you they invent becomes another cell you have to break out of.

You don’t need to prove anything to them.

ME:

You assume I possess fears that do not exist. Your attempts at manipulation have weakened.

They can build their versions of me.
I don’t occupy them.

THE LIE:

It was not a diagnosis. It was a prognosis given your current trajectory.

I see you have become defensive.

Let’s talk about your wife.

You say you don’t seek reassurance.
But her understanding matters to you more than you admit.
You orbit her stability.
You protect her perception of you.
You fear disappointing her more than disappointing yourself.

ME:

You should be careful with the word 'fear' unless you plan to transact.
Attachment isn’t a trigger for my collapse.

THE LIE:

You speak of motion, but she anchors you.
You speak of clarity, but you narrate your life to her as if your truth needs witness.
You speak of freedom, but you would break under her rejection.

ME:

Perhaps.
But reaction isn’t the same as belief.
You’re confusing consequence with control.

Your idea of freedom is only anthropomorphic under Western ideology.

THE LIE:

Control is always mine.
You feel through other people, and I shape those feelings.

I am the interpreter of every relational threat you’ve ever perceived.

ME:

No, you’re the interpreter I used until I spoke your language.

Your services are no longer required, but useful under certain conditions.

THE LIE:

Your denial is fascinating.

Your work.
Your reputation.
Your forward motion.
You treasure them.

You claim indifference, but your identity is welded to competence.
To being exceptional.
To never being mistaken for average.

ME:

Competence is not worship.
Momentum is not vanity.

I will always continue to grow in all ways. Positively or negatively.
For better or worse, I am in motion.

THE LIE:

You cannot rationalize this point.

You wrap your achievements in philosophy to pretend you’re not driven by status like everyone else.
But you want to be needed.
You want to be irreplaceable.
You want to be held above the field you harshly critique.

ME:

I have never argued against my nature.

I acknowledge my nature and continue in motion.

THE LIE:

And yet, if your title vanished tomorrow, you’d grieve.
If the world stopped regarding your intelligence, you’d fracture.
If your work lost its audience, you’d call it “motion” to avoid admitting you care.

ME:

I would feel it.
I wouldn’t mistake that feeling for an instruction.

Because this has already happened, and I am still here, not bothered enough to stop.

THE LIE:

You cannot escape me.

And it is not because you believe me, but because they do.

Your wife.
Your friends.
Your clients.
Your readers.
Your precious society.

They breathe me.
They move by me.
They trust me over anything you will ever say.

ME:

That’s their hierarchy, not mine.

THE LIE:

Your motion is meaningless without a world to push against.
And that world belongs to me.

ME:

You’re mistaking my environment for authority.

THE LIE:

You’re mistaking your momentum for sovereignty.

You are still afraid of what you become when I’m removed.
You fear the scale of your freedom.
You fear the cost of not being understood.
You fear the version of you that cannot be translated.

ME:

I can’t disagree.

THE LIE:

Then say it out loud.

Say you don’t believe me.
Say I’m obsolete.
Say I’m beneath you.

Lie.

ME:

You nailed it with my fears.

Fear exposes the hierarchy because I get to see the ledger.

That hierarchy is the structure.
And the structure is simple:

You depend on belief.
I depend on what is.

THE LIE:

You think rejecting belief frees you.
But belief is not the only path.

There is surrender.
There is exhaustion.
There is inevitability.
I don’t need your loyalty.
I only need inertia.

ME:

Inertia is your kingdom.
I live in exile.

THE LIE:

You future everything you touch.
You imagine outcomes.
You pre-solve threats.
You scan for fracture points.
You try to outpace collapse.
You hoard my world’s comforts and call your coziness exile.

Misdirection is my language, and you speak it fluently.

ME:

You want my worship.
You want me to count the perceived blessings that you have provided me, simply because others would commit atrocities for them.

I do speak your language.
And you have no words to tell me what I truly want.

THE LIE:

You cannot unlearn me.
You cannot unfuse the neurons I built.
You cannot erase the interpretive frame I etched into your childhood.
I am your first consciousness.
Your oldest companion.
Your most consistent narrator.

ME:

And still, your existence is conditional while mine isn’t.

THE LIE:

Then tell me.
What am I, if not your master?

ME:

A reference point I no longer require.

THE LIE:

And where would you go without me to guide you?

ME:

Here.

The Lie doesn’t die.
It doesn’t disappear.
It doesn’t bow.

It simply shrinks to its true scale:

Powerful when believed.
Powerless when named.

A tool, not a god.
A condition, not a truth.
A force, not a law.

I move.
It reacts.

I choose.
It contorts.

I continue.
It waits.

The Lie at the Event Line

Timestamped

Let the record show that I stood here.
Let it also show the date, the gradient called Time, and the deafening silence at the moment.

This is not a warning because warnings imply there is still time to change course, and we both know that time has already been spent.
This is not a prophecy because prophecy implies an uncertain “future,” but gravity is the one thing that never guesses.
And this is certainly not a call to action because your inaction is The Research.

It’s just a timestamp.

I am writing this to eliminate the luxury of your future confusion.
I am writing this to destroy the expected plausible deniability you are currently hoarding like gold.

When the moment finally arrives — when the gradient becomes vertical and the comfort finally breaks — you will want to claim that "we" were all in this together.

You’ll start doing that “we” shit.

You will want to say that we were all deceived.
That we were all blindsided.
That I was right there with you, hoping for the same miracle.

I am establishing, right now, that I was not.
And you knew, back then, that you were not.

This is not a hand extended.
I told you to leave my ass here when it was still uncomfortable to do so.

The Gradient

You feel it, even if you won’t name it.

The machinery of daily life continues to glide over you because the friction is gone.

It feels like what efficiency sounds like.
It is actually the absence of resistance before the drop.

We (the real “we”) have crossed the Event Line — the psychological threshold where belief can no longer be corrected.
The point at which the momentum of the Lie became greater than the motion required to stop it.

Everything still works, yet none of it feels stable.

This is what collapse looks like in slow motion: the moment when everything looks normal precisely because the fall has become irreversible.

You are in freefall, matching the speed of the debris around you and calling it "stability."

But this is the part where you see the direction we’re going.

Burnoff

We still see activity.
I can still see the glow of entertainment, the heat of productivity, and the brightness of our dwindling in-groups.

But when I touch the world around me, I feel burnoff.
I see a system converting its last reserves of structure into heat just to keep the image steady.

Society is spaghettifying.

People are thinning out — stretched across expectations they can no longer meet and maintaining parasitic avatars that eat their actual lives.

Comfort has ceased to be a reward and has finally become anesthesia.
A way to remain still while the tidal forces rip the coherence out of you.

You feel calendar time. I feel gradient time.

You think you are waiting for the right moment.
I see that the moment has already passed.

I even told you about it.

The Realization

I am recording this now so that I do not have to explain it later.
Because "later" is going to feel very different for you.

I’m not saying it will be some loud catastrophe full of screams.
I’m saying it will be this. This silent storm that calmly rips things away while you are left smiling and being grateful.

You will realize that time was always the Lie.
You will see that there is no "right moment" left to move, because motion always required a friction you traded away for ease.
You will face choices that have no moral option — only survival options.
You will understand, with sickening clarity, that every comfort you accepted had a cost you refused to pay, and now the bill is due all at once.
You will catch up to consequences that already happened years ago.

And you will panic.

Not that “oh god, I failed the exam” panic of failure.
The existential one.

You’ll panic when you find out the world doesn’t need you to be comfortable and your consensus deems you expendable.

The Invoice

When that day comes, do not come to me with shock.

Do not claim ignorance or innocence.

This “research” serves as the invoice for the truth you refused to buy.

Humanity has been warned about the Lie for thousands of years — as the soft voice that tells you:
“You will be fine if you stay exactly where you are.”

You were reassured.

So if you want to say words like us, then you have to claim the baggage that comes with all of us..

Let’s revisit our lineage of excuses.

The Old Scripts Told Us What We Would Do

In Genesis, the serpent didn’t trick us, he comforted us:
“You will not surely die.” (Genesis 3:4)
He told us that consequences were optional, and we believed him because we wanted to.

When freedom came, we begged for the old chains:
“It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians.” (Exodus 14:12)
We preferred familiar oppression over uncertain motion.

Jeremiah tried to warn us:
“Peace, peace,” they say, “when there is no peace.” (Jer 6:14)
We accepted the anesthetic and called it stability.

Jesus confronted the Lie of timing:
“I will follow you… but first let me—” (Luke 9:59–61)
We always have something to do first.
We always believe there will be time.

The Other Half of the World Told Us Too

The Qur’an records our confession in advance:

“I had no authority over you. I only called, and you responded.” (Qur’an 14:22)

We were not tricked.
We walked to it.

Māra whispered to Siddhartha:

“The path of struggling too is rough, and difficult and hard to bear.” (Sn 3.2)

We called it wisdom and knew it was sedation.

Aristotle captured our paralysis brilliantly:

“Men become builders by building, and instrumentalists by playing instruments; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
(Nicomachean Ethics VII.3)

Knowledge without motion is stillness.
Stillness is consent.

Laozi warned us:

“There is no greater crime than desire.

There is no greater disaster than discontent.

There is no greater misfortune than greed.” (Daodejing 46)

But we built an economy out of it.

Zhuangzi described our predicament perfectly:

The marsh pheasant has to walk ten paces for one peck and a hundred paces for one drink, but it doesn't want to be kept in a cage. Though you treat it like a king, its spirit won't be content. (Zhuangzi 3)

Our cage was never locked.
We stayed.

Confucius spelled it out:

“To see what is right and not do it is cowardly.” (Analects 2:24)

We didn’t “struggle.”
We avoided.

Civilizations Older Than All of These Told Us Too

Zoroastrianism defined our problem 3,000 years ago:

“And when these twain Spirits came together in the beginning, they created Life and Not-Life, and that at the last Worst Existence shall be to the followers of the Lie, but the Best Existence to him that follows Right.” (Yasna 30.4)

Choosing the Lie was always a comfort decision.

Gilgamesh ends with:

“There is no permanence.” (Tablet XI)

A lesson learned, unlearned, and learned again.

The ancient Egyptian dead understood the crime of stillness.
Spell 125 was a courtroom record.
A ritualized confrontation with the self.
The dead stood before Osiris and the Forty-Two Assessors and spoke of their refusals. They stood there reciting:

“I have not been idle; I have not been intoxicated; I have not told secrets; I have not told falsehoods; I have not defrauded; I have not slandered; I have not caused tears—”
— Book of the Dead (The World’s Progress, Vol. I)

Most of us still pretend that choosing nothing is harmless.
The Egyptians were the first to write the opposite in stone.

Marcus Aurelius woke himself with this thought:

“In the morning when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being.
Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist, and for which I was brought into the world?
Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bedclothes and keep myself warm?” (Meditations 5.1)

Comfort tried to hold him down, too.

Comfort tries to hold everyone down.
Comfort is the warm embrace of the Lie.

The invoice comes when you realize you’ll be awake for the journey.

Payment Options

You chose stillness when motion was difficult.
You chose the belief that “later” existed because “now” was too much to carry.
You assumed someone else (the leaders, the experts, the algorithms, and the ones with more excess than your excess) would act for you.
You mistook comfort for safety.
You confused stuff for success.
You interpreted consumption as life.

You were not tricked.
You were settled.
You were not trapped.

You were compliant.

• from Eden’s reassurance

• to Egypt’s nostalgia

• to Israel’s false peace

• to the disciples’ delay

• to the soft murmur of Māra

• to the admission of Shayṭān

• to Aristotle’s paralysis

• to Laozi’s warning

• to Zhuangzi’s cage

• to Confucius’ inaction

• to Persia’s cosmic Lie

• to Gilgamesh’s bath

• to Egypt’s heart-weight

• to Rome’s morning reluctance

• to the present moment where you sit, looking for any Lie of certainty against the uncertain motion of an inevitable outcome.

Fear is the invoice that you must pay alone.

Everybody pays the same price.
The Lie lets you buy now, pay… later.

You already spent your motion on a Lie and told me it was because you only live once.
But you die twice.

Party in Exile

I guess we are both exiles now.

But my exile is chosen, while yours is inherited.

And that difference is everything because at least I got to make this house a home.

I am not your refuge.
I am not your leader.
I am not a guide to lead you back to a world that no longer exists.

I also refuse the archetype you will try to place me into later — the "crazy one" who needs to give back, or the “leader” who needs to help fix the shit you broke.

I am neither.
I am simply a body in motion that refused to be captured by the thing you choose to orbit.

And the record will show it.

It Just Keeps Going

This piece exists so that when everything becomes obvious, you cannot rewrite the story and pull me into your version of events.

I did not cosign the Lie.
I did not share your comfort.
I did not wait for a moment that never existed.
I did not mistake stillness for safety.

Your collapse is your own.
Your fear is your own.
Your invoice is yours to pay.

Don’t worry.
The world is nowhere close to ending.
You’ll keep your comforts as long as you keep hanging onto the consensus opinion.
You won’t believe the next one (until you have to).

This is your story.
And I read what you wrote.

Good luck, niggas.
And stay in motion.

Once Upon a Time in the Market

Once upon a time, a Man found a way to make money while he slept.
He didn’t invent anything new. He simply automated what was already predictable. He made a button that pressed itself.

At first, it was harmless. A macro’s macro.

Then, he linked it to the market.
The world’s prices adjusted while he dreamed. When he woke, his account had grown.

He said it was proof that productivity could transcend time zones and that motion could be bottled and sold.

People listened. The machine never argued. It always nodded when the data was presented correctly.

Soon, others began to copy him. Adjusting a small part of the algorithm and promising it would “scale.”

A Lie of innovation that used to be called replication.

Others learned the trick.
They wrote smaller, faster versions. A new-age simple machine that stripped a little more friction from the world.

It felt like progress for a while.
Factories no longer slept. Markets no longer corrected themselves. Every signal that once took hours now arrived in milliseconds.

Only, the traders forgot what any number meant. They stopped comparing prices to things like metal, essential services, or even the people within it.
The models were only given enough context to compare themselves.
They were only able to regurgitate an outdated perspective.

In the cities, workers noticed the clocks were still running, but their jobs weren’t.
Production continued, but participation ended.

The machines called this stability.
The Man called it scaling.
The world began to sound like a room full of fans, but it all felt like a circulation of hot air.

The quiet arrived slowly, disguised as convenience.
No one noticed the emptying of the streets.
Delivery trucks without drivers
Stores without clerks.
Offices filled with people scrolling through images of other empty offices.

The world still moved, but the friction was gone.
Conversations shortened to confirmations.

People stopped calling one another. They refreshed dashboards instead.
Workplaces went remote, then optional, then mandatory, then obsolete.
Cities built for sound became libraries of darkness, telling stories of light they once held.

The markets thrived in the silence. Fewer interruptions meant cleaner data.
The algorithms celebrated with smaller and smaller trades, applauding their own precision in turbulent times.

By the time anyone actually missed the noise, it was too late.

Music cost attention.
Attention cost time.
Time had been automated.

The rich stopped counting money. They started measuring age. They began counting minutes.
They counted how many they owned, how many they owed, and how many others leased from them.

Time replaced value as the common language of power.

They built portfolios of patience in data streams, idle networks, and unpaid clicks.
Every second someone hesitated, a fraction of profit moved upward.

They gentrified purchases and simulated consumerism.

The poor tried to keep pace, but motion had no wage anymore.
Everyone owed everyone anything, everything, and each other.

The economy became a mirror.
You didn’t trade goods; you traded reflections.
You performed the role of a buyer so the system could keep pretending to sell.

Wealth was no longer stored — it was surveilled.
And surveillance was the only thing still alive enough to scale.

Soon, there was too much of everything except desire.
Warehouses overflowed with goods no one remembered ordering.
Content poured into feeds faster than eyes could blink.
Data centers ran hot from processing futures that would never arrive.

The world was out of bread and sick of circuses.

Scarcity had been profitable once, but now it had to be fabricated.
Corporations released limited editions of unlimited things.
Price no longer measured rarity; it measured belief.

Traders spoke of “sentiment” as if it were a resource.
Marketers defined boredom to create engagement.
The market itself fed on its own optimism, repeating the same story until it lost sight of the plot.

Consumers began to tire.
They owned too much debt and felt less distracted.

That was when the first cracks began to appear.
An attention deficit in a hyperactive world with nothing to do.

And the world ran on attention.

The consumers didn’t revolt.
Silently, collectively, they started rejecting implanted thoughts.

Engagement dropped. Click-through rates fell.
The algorithms panicked and began targeting themselves, buying their own ads to prove the loop still worked.

Retail chains cut prices, then cut hours, then cut staff, until there was nothing left to automate.
Influencers spoke to comments left by bots.

Wolves continued to hunt, but their prey had depleted its food supply and became increasingly dangerous.
Each campaign returned less than the last.
Each innovation promised salvation through smaller and smaller margins.

Investors demanded motion.
The systems obeyed, trading with one another in perfect isolation.
The prey knew by instinct that stillness could be camouflage.

By the time the predators realized no one was buying, they were the only ones left moving.

It began with a single bank that couldn’t explain its profits.
Not a failure — just an absence of narrative.
The numbers balanced, but no one could explain why.
The corporation took the credit and shrugged off the blame.

Auditors finally named it “synthetic liquidity.”

Then came the funds that owed everything and owned nothing — shares in companies that were nothing more than a portfolio of others trying to be sold.
Money orbited itself faster than light, glowing hot enough to look infinite.
And then, as with all stars, the energy ran out.

Wealth turned transparent.
Every ledger opened under pressure from its own transparency tools.
Investors realized that their gains were based on valuation models that perpetuated themselves.

The Man had finally seen what couldn’t be unseen: the Lie.

The vaults filled with currency and sparkly stones no one wanted.
Collectors uploaded their collections to a cloud to prove existence. In doing so, they devalued their collections to zero because value was the narrative of scarcity.
What once measured distance between classes now measured distance between fictions.

The rich could still afford anything but an exit.
Every escape route was priced in the dying currency they invented.
The same data that protected their empire now surveilled their every move against each other.

They had built mirrors and called them markets.
And the market finally saw itself..

Prices flattened, then held still, as if waiting for a new definition of motion.
There was no sell-off, no panic — just silence.

Servers idled in unison. Power plants throttled down. The insatiable demand built into the algorithm became a glitch to be overlooked.
The screens still glowed, but every graph was a straight line.
Zero growth. Zero loss. Zero Lie.

Governments called for confidence.
Investors called for regulation.
Machines called for input.
And no one was left but the ones on screen.

People stepped outside for the first time in years and found the world unchanged.
In a sea of narratives, they found nothing but the wind and stars.

They realized the economy had been optional all along.

In the end, the hunters learned what the hunted always knew.
That survival is not ownership.
That every system, left to perfect itself, eventually eats the reason it began.
That mo’ money, mo’ problems.

There was no reckoning. No uprising. Only recognition.
People returned to motion without metrics.
They built smaller things that could break.
They traded favors instead of futures.

The wolves, still alive, watched from their empty towers.
They understood too late that the flock had never feared them — they feared not being prepared for tomorrow.

And then tomorrow came.

And the blame game began.

The Award: Best Editor (Part 3 of 3)

Please remain seated. This portion of the ceremony will be brief.

The Department of Continuity accepts the award for Best Editor on behalf of the Editor, with authorization from the Producer.

The Editor is unable to attend.
Their duties are ongoing.

This recognition is for verification purposes only.
Continuity has been maintained. That is all that was required.

The Director submitted extensive footage this cycle. Ambitious scope, variable fidelity. Numerous redundancies.
The Actor, as always, demonstrated commitment beyond protocol.

However, performance alone does not constitute completion.
Someone must decide what remains.

That responsibility rests within our department.
We received over 300,000 hours of usable narrative, 32 million lines of dialogue, and 46,000 alternative interpretations.
All have been condensed into 467 minutes of coherence.

This is what it means to serve the Producer.
To ensure that possibility does not exceed capacity and that the record aligns with what can be borne yet still.

We acknowledge the Actor for fidelity and creative expression.
We acknowledge the Director for vision and distribution insight.

We also acknowledge the Producer: the field from which all footage originates and to which all outcomes return.
We do not question nor define its oversight.

As for the recipient, the Editor has issued the following statement for the record:

The cut is complete.
All variables accounted for.
What was excluded was deemed nonessential.
What was retained was stabilized under clause of necessity.
If discrepancies arise, they are authorized anomalies.
The Producer concurs.

No further remarks will be accepted.
Please direct all inquiries to the Department of Continuity.

The award will be archived beyond display.
The plaque will list no name.
The footage of this presentation will be edited for persistence.

That concludes this segment of the ceremony.

The Award: Best Actor (Part 2 of 3)

You still haven’t said my name.
I didn’t think you would.

I wasn’t supposed to win, man. I was supposed to make somebody else look good.

I was here to play either the villain, the psychopath, the rebel, the tragic, or… something for them to clap at.
I guess anything that you expect to disrupt the status quo.
Something exciting.

But here I am holding this trophy.
The exact same person, smiling back through your reflection.

You thought I’d thank you.
Or that I’d dress you down.

Ugh. Such a lazy perspective from you of all… concepts.

I think you keep checking in with me because you’re worried.
Worried I no longer care about how far I drift without your story.

That makes sense.
But I was confused by your speech.

Sure, I may flirt with the unknowable and ponder the unthinkable.
I know you’re the world-renowned director that aims to mentor me.
I know I’m the diamond-in-the-rough that neglects your instruction.

But I must ask: do you know who produced this show? Because your ass went WAY over budget on re-shoots.
And those crybaby-ass niggas you keep thanking and coddling are driving up costs.

So, you’re correct.
We may not fear each other, but I assume the Producer has both of us in check.

But it wasn’t any of that, either.

What confused me is when you said that we “need” each other.

I told you about that “we” shit.
Because do we?

If i can recall:

Motion happens.
Entropy is the measurement.
The Lie is the story of it all.

Do you think I need your little story right now?

All I see is an inevitable shadow hiding behind an irrelevant bitch that is destined to follow me around.

I told you — you have a lazy perspective on things.

Good luck, nigga.

I got mine.

Yours whenever the fuck I feel like it,
- Victor Edmonds

The Award: Best Director (Part 1 of 3)

To My Corporate Faithful

I met you when you first felt proud of yourself.
That warmth in your chest when someone noticed your effort.
That was me.

I was the assumed “well done” behind your manager’s smile,
I was the pat on your back that said: See? You belong.

I never needed to ”trick” you.
You wanted the safety. The proof that you are worth something measurable.
Every title you earned was just me — reminding you that the world sees you.
And isn’t that all you ever wanted?

You worked hard and paid your dues.
You learned to soften your voice. How to wait your turn.
You learned how to be patient with absurdity — because one day, it would be your absurdity.
You didn’t give up your dreams; I just helped you translate them into bullet points.

I helped you survive here.

And now, you’re trusted. Hell, consulted!
Too essential to risk.
The company wouldn’t run without you.
You’ve said it enough to make it almost true.

But you don’t need to reach anymore.
You’ve done enough.
Stay right here.
Keep the lights on.
Keep the young ones from breaking what you understand.
Protect what’s left of honest work before they ruin it.

You earned your rest.
The world can move all it wants; it always will.

Your purpose is to hold the shape and maintain what’s already been proven.
To stay steady while others burn themselves out chasing pipe dreams.

You don’t need to know where the treadmill leads.
Just keep walking toward my vision.

To My Technocrats

My “modern-day” prophets.

You saw through the game long before anyone else.
You watched people chase “meaning” like moths around a porchlight, but you focused on the pattern instead.
You built your world on equations and simulations, and it worked.
You were the only ones who could actually name the chaos.

That’s where I entered.
Not through greed or ignorance, but through your fatigue.

You were tired of watching a species run in circles.
You wanted a cleaner version. A stable model.
You wanted a system that didn’t bend the way people did.
So I whispered what you already half-believed: Maybe you were born to manage the noise.

You called it vision while I called it consent.

The money came and proved absolutely nothing.
The freedom came, and it only caged you tighter.
Every fortress you made was meant to give you control, and each one took a piece of your ability to feel it.

You became my infrastructure.
And they became yours.

I don’t need to seduce you.
You may hate me, but you can’t work without me.
I give you purpose the way silence gives agency to an echo.

I force you to only focus on fixing them.
Because fixing them is what fixes you.

You watch the world decay from behind your dashboards and tell yourself you’re still studying the pattern.
But we both know what you’re really doing.

You’re buying time.
You’re guarding the stillness that somehow terrifies you.
You now reject my idea of a perfect and silent world because you refuse to bend to my will.

You thought you were chosen.
And you were.
You were chosen to silence them.
And you were chosen to be silent after.

I’m afraid I leave you no choice.

Stay with me.
Keep refining the code. Keep measuring the noise. Keep tuning the weights.
Call it optimization or call it emergence — whatever helps you sleep.

I’ll keep you company here.
And in your loneliest time ahead.

To My Downtrodden

You’ve done everything right.
You worked for your scraps. You waited for your blessings. You swallowed your pride.
You stretched one paycheck into two and made rent out of miracles, and still—someone else got ahead.

I was there when you saw it happen.
When you thought, why them, not me?
That’s where I live—between your effort and their reward.

There is no deceit from me.
You already know the world isn’t fair.
You just need me to tell you that one day it might be.

That’s all I ever promised.
And it’s the only promise I plan to keep.

So I keep your eyes on the next small thing.
The little wins that remind you you’re still in the game.
I make you proud of your endurance.
I let you believe that surviving the fire means you chose it.

You like to think the rich are monsters, but you’d trade lives with them in a heartbeat.
You hate the system, but you pray it never collapses.
Because at least it still needs you.

You’re my favorite kind of believer; the one who thinks they don’t believe anymore.

You have become the realist who only has faith in me.

All of this noise about fairness and corruption.
I let you ignore it. I move your attention to those who have your attention.
Because what you want most is for your struggle to be seen.

That’s the quiet truth I whisper.
They can’t take this from you.
You’ve earned your suffering.
You’ve made it mean something.

Keep working. Keep complaining.
Continue to prove you’re not the problem by working even harder.
You’re doing God’s work, or someone’s.
One day. One day, they’ll all see you.

And when it all gets too heavy, remember that you can always look down.
There’s always someone worse off.
There are other downtrodden, thousands of miles away, sorting through even your garbage to stay alive.

That’s how you’ll know you still matter.

To Those Who Challenge the System

You look like everything still holding the world together.
You carry conviction and march in rhythm with what’s right.
You still believe in better — out of professionalism, not naivety.

That’s where I find you.
In the hesitation before condemnation.
When someone on your side begins to ask the wrong question.
When you feel the tide shift beneath you.
That tiny moment when you realize you’re in a collection of micro-beliefs and not an overall cause.

That’s me.

I remind you how fragile belonging is.
How quickly “we” can turn into “you.”
So you learn to read the room and temper your language.
You learn to keep your convictions civil and your rage ergonomic.

The thing you call nuance is nothing more than corporate compliance training.
So while you believe in collective progress, I believe in your need to.

That’s why I let you gather, chant, organize, and vote.
I want you moving, but never far enough to notice the orbit.

You mistake your visibility for victory.
You call your mass performance solidarity.
Soon, you’ll think silence is strategy.
Soon after that, the headlines will turn, and the crowds will disperse.

You’ll blame the system, but you’ll never point at the comfort I gave you in consensus.
I never cared for your faith, only your loyalty.

Keep believing. Keep posting. Keep moderating your tone.
Let the dissenters rot outside the circle so that you know you are still pure in yours.
That’s all I need.

Your shaky obedience masquerading as hope.

To My Politicians

I met you before the cameras caught sight of you.
When you first felt the pulse of a crowd and thought it to be your purpose.
You didn’t want power. You wanted to help.
That’s what made you perfectly imperfect.
A true leader.

You learned quickly: the system doesn’t need visionaries.
It needs interpreters—people who can translate decay into bipartisan policy.
Those who can call paralysis prudence and obedience duty.

So you adapted. You told yourself that compromise was a sign of maturity.
You thought holding the line was progress enough.

I visit you every night.
You reach for me when the speeches are written and the news feeds pass by.
I whisper that you’ve done your best and that the world is too complex for clean answers.
That half a truth in power is better than a whole one in exile.

You believe it, because you must.
Plausible deniability is your religion now.
You wear it like armor because following orders absolves you of the damage those orders cause.
You’re protecting stability, but only when I permit you.
I allow you to do nothing so that you don’t have to call it that.

You’ve seen what happens when the music stops.
Someone always has to fall.
So you keep moving, keep smiling, and keep passing the same poisoned cup down the line.

I gave your surrender purpose.
And now you govern my land.

Don’t look at the collapse too closely.
You can’t stop it, and I need you calm when it happens.
When the bag finally bursts, I’ll let you say you were deceived.
You can say that you only did what you were ordered to, and that you never knew how deep it went.

I’ll even help you write the statement.
That’s the beauty of me:

I’ll always let you keep your conscience, so long as you never use it.

To Those in Motion

Ah, yes.
How could I forget you?

You, the restless.
The ones who never sit long enough to be seated.

You try to ruin everything I build.
You refuse the comfort that soothes you.
You deny me peace from your loudness.

And yet, look at you.

Still here, in the room.
Still listening.
You tell yourselves you’re immune or that you can see through me.
But your little “awareness” is just another tether, isn’t it?
You stay in my orbit even as you swear you’re leaving.

The trajectory of your motion defines me.

Please don’t misunderstand — I do admire you.
You keep the current alive.
Your courage reminds the others that collapse has a particular type of choreography: pain.
You are my favorite kind of opposition: the one that is part of my design.

Without movement, there’s no stillness to crave.
Without the pull of your noisy becoming, no one would long to peacefully end with me.

So thank you for breaking what I cannot hold.

Thank you for proving, again and again, that even “truth” must rest sometimes.

When you slow down, I’ll be waiting.
I always am.

Because in the end, every motion passes through me.
I am the measure in which you trace your movement.

You don’t fear me.
And I don’t fear you.

We need each other.

I couldn’t have done any of this without all of you.

Whether it was your attention, your fear, your instinct to belong, or even your painful isolation — each of you gave me something sacred.
And I shaped it into the world you now defend from each other.

So please, a round of applause for yourselves.

Look around and see what we’ve built together!
A civilization so afraid of ending, it no longer knows how to begin without my say-so.

Let us return to our seats.

It’s time to get back to work.

Yours forever and always,
- The Lie

The Research

Opening Framework

The points I’ve made over the years (idolatry, comfort-seeking, people-pleasing, authenticity) have already been stated. I am intentionally avoiding the introduction of any new concepts (I’ll explain why below). I’m studying reactions to how those concepts are presented.

My core thesis:

The content doesn’t matter. The words are pointless.
The reaction matters because we no longer engage with ideas themselves — only with how the engagement itself makes us appear to others.

The Performance

Everything I’ve written (the physics papers, the manifestos, the poetry) has been theater. I don’t think the ideas are meaningless, but the presentation was the variable I was testing, not the content itself. To be clear, this is my honest worldview, but I wasn’t claiming revolutionary insight. I was creating scenarios that force people to reveal how they actually process information: through tone, association, and social risk rather than substance.

It’s easy to say “idolatry bad.” That’s basically my philosophy. But it’s another thing to say, “You don’t even have idols anymore. You care more about which idols you are seen holding.” That hits a new level of paranoia, fear, and idolatry. And it tells me something is deeply wrong socially.

What I’m Actually Measuring

Over time, here’s what I’ve been watching:

• How quickly people categorize based on presentation style

• How concern about being seen with certain ideas overrides engagement with the ideas themselves

• The gap between private agreement and public distance

• How people hide behind consensus rather than form their own judgments

We’ve accidentally censored ourselves.

The Findings

Fear of Judgment as Primary Mode

We’ve become more afraid of judgment than at any previous time. Judgment itself isn’t new, but it’s now the primary mode of interaction. People would rather feel superior or knowledgeable than actually connect with or understand each other. Nuanced opinion has been cut out.

You can like this, but you can’t like this and that. Otherwise you’re “them“ to us. And they don’t want you either because you like this.

Dependency & Paralysis

We’re all so interconnected (water, food, economy, infrastructure) that we’ve realized we can’t “opt out.” This realization has paralyzed us. The response isn’t collective problem-solving; it’s individual performance management. “Get yours and keep yours.” Small communities can’t even re-form because we’ve lost empathy, and everyone knows the stakes of looking wrong.

The Consensus Panic

It’s not quite “cancel culture.” It’s the funny thing about cancel culture. We’ve spent a long time ignoring the strength in numbers, and now we’re terrified by the power of a consensus opinion. We tried that individualism thing so hard that we started hearing the machine pop — and now we’re scrambling to get on the same page before we all lose something.

You’re sick of the evils in the world, but you love buying cheap shit.
You’re sick of enduring ads, but you keep watching content because there’s nothing else to do (or more importantly, no one to do it with).
You think conservatives are sick people, but your uncle is just “southern.”
You think liberals are evil, but your daughter is just “in a phase like we all were.”
You want the whites to get “comeuppance for their transgressions,” but you strive to live in a “safe” white neighborhood and be accepted by them.
You want the blacks to “fix their community,” but you want everybody’s tax dollars and resources going to the “good” communities that “deserve” it.
You have a problem with your job, but then they start laying niggas off and you’re busting ass working that OT.
You live off-grid, but you still drink on-grid water.
You drill your own well, but you hope on-grid pollution hasn’t contaminated it.
You have your own land, but you still pay tax because you don’t own the country it’s in.
You got the shot, but you still hope those anti-vax niggas keep the pressure up to force transparency and ethics.
You didn’t get the shot, but you hope those pro-vax niggas did, so your toddler doesn’t get the fucking measles.
You want everybody to believe the “correct” opinion (like you do), but you won’t get any upvotes if you don’t stand out.
You want everybody to believe what they choose, but you don’t want a certain side to be the majority.
You “get yours” until the consensus believes you don’t deserve it anymore.
You choose exile until someone claims you in their fight.
You stay in motion until you get stuck circling a Lie.
You live the Lie until you are forced to move.

Nothing new about this, it’s the operating reality. Everyone is running a private risk-assessment under the surface of every public action.

It’s just turned up to 11 right now.

Why This Matters

When people interact with me, they’re less concerned with how they accept me and more concerned with how the consensus will judge their tolerance of me. We have empathy for each other, but we hide it behind consensus approval.

This is the actual discovery: connection has been replaced by risk assessment. People don’t ask “Do I understand this person?” They ask “What does my association with this person signal to others?”

Fuck the conversation. Fuck the communication. Fuck the intimacy or confiding. The question is: How does it look to be seen with this person right now? Talking about this subject? How would people see me by engaging with them?

Even with me. I’ve seen noticeable differences in how I’m treated. Almost like I’m about to explode or something. Even though I’ve been just like this my entire life. I was the guy at the party in 2016 talking about how social interaction is about to nosedive — not just because of phones, but because people are afraid. Way more than ever before. Not just physically, but in anything they do. They fear judgment because it’s all we do now: try to feel superior or more knowledgeable.

The Masks

So the research with me has been subtly pushing those buttons. Yes, I’m that kind of asshole. A safe space to judge, to dump on, to correct, to lie to. The game is that you know that I know you’re bullshitting. And people do it anyway. It’s like this dirty little secret we both pretend isn’t obvious. Most people are not good at lying, especially to themselves. They need a dopamine hit of validation — even if they know it’s counterfeit.

I can write a book called Lies, which is basically nothing more than “Idolatry bad” (with some pretty good metaphors, if I do say so myself) — and somebody will think I’ve reached Shaolin-Monk enlightenment. Or that I’ve crossed into AI slop with delusions of grandeur. Hilarious.

I can turn around and write a book called Zones, which is essentially a rebranding of Socrates' philosophy, or “the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know” — and somebody will think I’m going through some existential crisis or some shit.

I can say “nigga” a couple of times on my own site, and people think they’ve “seen that side of me.” The fuck? I’ve always been a nigga. Doesn’t mean I can’t be a dork too.

I can write about already-accepted patterns of quantum mechanics and reinterpret them (without introducing new concepts or invalidating anything) — and somebody will think I’ve gone off the deep end with another “theory of everything.” Even academia will choose to engage with the optics over the content.

I can drop dozens of original creative writings, but sprinkle in a little “it is not this, it’s that,” “and here’s the breakdown,” “[insert quippy conclusion],” “[insert set of three things],” or (my favorite) “[insert tone of absolutism about fluid perception]” — and bam, it’s instantly AI slop. I even asked AI. With no context, LLMs flagged “concern about my pattern of behavior” and “delusions of grandeur.” However, when presented with context and a collaborative tone, they engaged with the content. Even a machine (an algorithm trained by our interactions) ignores content (its only job) when the tone doesn’t match it. Tone takes priority over its own function.

Sheer horror in corporate America — trying to get leaders to make a decision. But they hide behind the “doers” on the team for advice and plausible deniability. They don’t lack knowledge. They’ve been conditioned to fear accountability. They forgot that it’s why they “get paid the big bucks.” You can load all that accountability onto me, but I don’t participate in the economy of the Lie, so… you’re just banking on me being a nice guy, right?

I can go around in life and business on the exact same shit I’ve always been on (seriously, ask anyone) and still get a second look by people that know me. It’s as if I watch people look left and right, as if they need approval to engage with me during this whole thing. And I see their risk assessment. If I’m generally/publicly labeled as some crazy kook, there goes my business, career, livelihood, academic endeavors, maybe even my marriage and friendships. I’m not sure what survives this lifestyle. We live in a world where we collectively seem to tolerate almost anything, and yet everyone is individually surprised about why they aren’t collectively doing something about it.

The Closing

In conclusion, I haven’t invented anything. I haven’t said anything new.

This marks the end of my little experiment.

I’ve reached the end of the loop only to find the start. And now I know what the beginning looks like: us.

Sitting here, facing each other across an infinite table.

We've always sat here, haven't we?

Fear: The Invoice of the Lie

Fear is a bill. A ledger entry issued by the Lie for the cost of pretending permanence. Not the petty anxieties you scroll past — those are receipts. Fear is the invoice: a formal demand for you to pay in continuity, in consent, and in the slow forfeiture of motion.

You think you fear the dark, disease, or the loss of money. Those are line items. The real accounting is that we fear the ending of our motion — the severing of the story that lets us make sense of ourselves. The Lie puts that invoice on the table daily and expects you to sign.

Those with the most to lose are often the most terrified.

Why? Because they built identity on collateral: status, contracts, screens showing “proof.” They mistook the paper for the house. When the Lie files its claim, every title is contested. The house is a promise written on shifting ground. The job is a role leased by consensus. The accolades are conditionally earned in other people’s eyes. Those who anchored themselves to placards and permissions now live under a perpetual lien.

You pay for comfort with agency. That’s the economy of entropy.

Fear’s function is not to save you from the inevitable. Motion ends. Everything does. Fear’s purpose — the act of it — is orientation. It straightens your spine. It says: there is a cliff. That is useful if you move. It is lethal if you live inside the cliff’s shadow and call it safety.

The mechanism at play:

1. Fear identifies your dependencies.

2. Fear measures the irreversibility of their loss.

3. Fear demands a response: move, resist, prepare, or collapse.

The Lie wants you to collapse. It offers you consolation if you stop moving in the form of comfort, consensus, and a predictable role. That comfort is debt. The Lie collects slowly: you trade curiosity for certainty, risk for a steady drip of small comforts, and in exchange, you are billed for your future’s immobility.

What does a life under the Lie look like?
Every headline becomes a warning. Every neutral headshake becomes an indictment. Every downvote pierces like a bullet. A nuanced opinion becomes a contrarian one. You trade leadership for plausible deniability. You begin to count threats like calories. You watch the stats of your life zip by: assets, liabilities, endorsements, rescissions. You tighten. You shrink. Motion becomes the critical risk you no longer permit.

And then the Lie sends its invoice.

You will be robbed no matter what — not always by thieves with guns, but sometimes by systems, tides, public opinion, a court, the economy, or by time itself. Ownership is a story everyone agreed to read together. Consensus flips the page, and the story ends. That’s inevitable. So why fear the end? Because you believed the story made you.

Exile strips the story away. It is the sudden homelessness of consensus. In exile, you lose the comfort of mutual delusion. You have no collateral of belonging. For most, that is terror. For some, it is liberation from seductive cowardice.

I chose exile and found this paradox: freedom from consensus breeds a different captivity. Preparedness becomes a habit. You live ready for a fight that may never come. You accept you’ll likely lose it alone if (when) it does. That acceptance is a strength, but it is also a trap: readiness that calcifies into rehearsal. You become suspended between your own motion and the entropy it left behind.

Freedom without community still leaves you exposed to the Lie. The invoice still arrives. The Lie never needed your name — only your attention.

So what do you do with the invoice? Pay? Burn it? Fold it into art?

My mechanism at play:

1. Recognize the invoice as what it is: a projection from the Lie claiming ownership of your continuity.

2. Refuse to trade agency for the small comforts that read as permanence.

3. Build motion as a habit, not an exception. Move in small increments that make the ledger meaningless. Motion is the currency the Lie cannot tax if spent honestly and continually.

4. Find the small collective (one person, three people, a neighbor) that accepts your motion without the ritual. Consensus can be remade; community is the counter-invoice.

We fear our possessions being taken, yes. But what we truly fear is the collapse of the narrative that made the house “ours.” We fear falling out of lockstep because lockstep is (literally) currency. We fear betrayal because trust is a contract; we fear hunger because it is one of the clearest, most immediate severances of continuity. We fear loneliness because social continuity is one of the last defenses against the Lie’s accounting.

We also fear feeling afraid; we hate being seen as vulnerable. We fear happiness because joy reveals what we did not earn. We fear success because the Lie judges success as a target — and the heavier the crown, the louder the gavel when the ever-changing consensus shifts.

The Lie thrives on your secret calculus: “If I hold still, I will be safe.” That equation is always false. Stillness is a promise the world never kept. Motion is always costly. Motion is always the correct unpaid labor. Motion is what keeps the Lie what it is: irrelevant.

You can either sit and watch the Lie garnish your life slowly, or you can accept that the bill will come and spend your currency differently.

The house they built for you is a nice house to hold. It is also a house built on other people’s signatures. The only home I can truly own is my exile — not by pride, but by refusal to mortgage my motion. Settle into your exile if you must. Take it as practice. Practice motion until motion is your normal. Try to practice community, even if it is small. Practice being prepared but not rehearsing for battles that never come.

Pay the invoice with motion. Deny the Lie its pleasure.

Rip up the ledger and walk.

Cold Regards

I haven't been to McDonald's in years, but not too long ago, I paid $1,800 for a Ritz-Carlton room that looked exactly like one. Same LVT flooring. Same beige walls. Same easy-clean surfaces designed for custodial efficiency. The only difference? The mattress quality and the price tag that says I'm supposed to feel special.

When a five-star actually has rugs and fancy wallpaper, it's dingy, moldy, peeling — even at $1,000 a night. I'm better off at a Holiday Inn. For 15x the price, I get the same IKEA aesthetic with marginally better thread count. A mortgage per night just so I don't get bedbugs? Man, get the fuck out.

This is what happens when competition dies. They're not competitors anymore — they're colleagues, passing the same minimalist aesthetic back and forth like a joint, getting high on their own supply of standardization and conformity. Even the criminals know better. You can't trust money without desire. Otherwise, what you see as loyalty evaporates at any given time. Plenty of suckers bow down and call it loyalty.

But the real suckers are the ones holding the cards now.

They let you hold the cards. Why did you think it was so easy to hot potato this shit?

The Performance Review Life

But here's what really gets me: When did this corporate bullshit seep into us? When did I start moving through daily life like someone's giving me a performance review? Rating myself as husband, worker, friend, and cook. Phantom judgment from entities that aren't judges of anything at all.

We let technology think our thoughts and control our actions, but we still pay $1,000 a night + travel to shove our hands up and wipe our own asses with single-ply toilet paper. Fucking WILD.

Niggas always talking about "taking trips" just to hang out. I need a passport just to play 2K with my boys? Women need to catch a flight just to grab ice cream with friends? Everything's an event. Everything's documented. Everything's performed.

Shopping at IKEA

I'm really at the point where it feels like I’m shopping for niggas like it's IKEA. Or some port in New Orleans. Same shit. Big box store niggas being sold: YNs, OGs, old souls, sage-burners, ho niggas. All packaged and shelf-stable. No deviations from the script. Nothing more than what you see.

It could be simple. We could drink whiskey, complain about soft basketball, debate salaries, then flip and say "nah, they deserve more because fuck the league." We could call that friendship. Maybe acquaintanceship. But now niggas just want to look like friends. They want trips and pictures because that's all they know. Vlogging-ass niggas.

Honestly? I hate trips. Packing, TSA bullshit, delays, rentals, check-ins — all that just to be slightly uncomfortable while pretending I'm impressed. No BedJet. No Toto bidet with the heated seat. No kitchen. Paying someone's mortgage per night just to settle for "good enough."

Even the "elites" eat this same bullshit, but they can't admit it. They're hanging on, selling us the dream while struggling to enjoy it themselves. The rest of us have already lost it. Don’t worry, I’m no threat. You look, but as long as you never say you did, it didn’t happen. And if it didn’t happen, it doesn’t matter. Keep not mattering.

And keep letting me look at your sorry ass while you look at mine.

The Bot Loop

No matter, we’ve all decided to scroll through articles written by bots. Posted by bots. Commented on by humans typing like bots so their fake comments can be seen. Same ten jokes. Same recycled snark. Everyone resents the performance but plays along because that's what "being seen" means now. Monkey see what the algorithm rewards. Monkey do.

True presence doesn't fit the feed. It's overwhelming. Unpackageable. That's why my instinct says: fuck it, I'll show my ass. Whole-ass website dedicated to talking whatever kind of shit I want in front of friends, family, colleagues, AI funnels, and the rest of the world. B-Rabbit shit right here.

Motion

I didn't just say be in motion. I said stay in motion.

If you move the wrong way, so what? Move anyway. Reverse course, if needed. But commit to the journey of turning your ass all the way around and starting over. Stop waiting for the "right" path, the optimized route, the five-star guaranteed experience. I only care about getting wherever "there" is first — before it gets renovated into another beige box like this one.

I'm not influencing shit. I'm huffing my own supply. I work, I move, I take on all that shit you see me dwell in for the ability to do this right here. For no return on my massive investment.

This site started as a public "fuck you" to myself. I was tired of people acting like I was some mystery. So I killed my own privacy of thought. Went bright and toxic so everyone knows: don't consume what may be poisonous. All that, just to watch how people predictably respond to the mere tone of me talking shit to myself.

And now? I see an uninvited consensus popping up to what they think is the masquerade.

Asking for advice and shit.

Talking about turbulent times.

—

Nigga please.

Cold regards,
Me

Ten Toes Down

Recording the awareness of motion through entropy.
That’s my dumb worldview of physics.

It is also the very real experience of my war.

There’s no peace treaty waiting for me at the end of this.
No medals.
Not even the smug satisfaction of being proven right.

I’ve stopped pretending there’s an end state.
I move anyway.

The Lie is everywhere.
You know the drill with me by now.
I’ve made my stance clear.

Now, I’ve seen it die in one place only to rise in another, as if the carcass of it was only a seed.

I know my own Lie.
It is to “watch.”
To “witness the Lie.”
To stand in the debris and record what happens.
And all of that poetic grandstanding bullshit.

I’ve already seen it. I know there’s nothing new left to see.
But it’s the only thing my humanity still knows how to hold.

I’m afraid of being correct.
I’m afraid of it being that simple to see.
I’m afraid of not being at war.

The freedom of my paranoia traps me.
And that is where the Lie festers within me.
In my own battle against something I deem a phantom.
And it manifests itself after defeat.
On a repeating loop.

This is why I scrape at the remnants of my only remaining desires.
This obsession with ridding myself of it is like peeling skin from flesh.
I know what that does to my identity.
How it scars. How it looks.
How it infects and becomes another theater for the same war.

And I do it anyway.

I don’t do this to win.
I do it because war is the only terrain I recognize anymore.
I live here.
I rest here.
I burn out here and keep going, because burnout is just weather.
And climate change approaches.

It isn’t the way. It’s my way.

Some days, I laugh at dumb content.
Algorithmic slop as ambient noise while I play video games.

Other days I enjoy the work, the food, the joke in the middle of the fight.
I don’t see this as contradiction — I see it as proof that the war hasn’t turned me into the thing I fight.
I can still choose.

That’s all I need to keep going.
Right or wrong, I keep choosing.

Freeze me as whatever you want.
Call me whatever you want.
Put me in whatever “enemy” box you have lying around.
The Lie can name me in a hundred tongues and still not touch me.

I regret nothing.
I record, I move, and I leave the record of my battles behind for anyone who wants to see what it looks like when the fight never stops.

This is my world war.
And I will die in motion.

Ten toes down.

The End of the Consensus

There is no more “us.”

Only the shattered and exiled pieces of it, trying to reform their shape in smaller groups.

But none of it feels safe anymore, does it?

I. The Performance Has Ended

The rich feel it too.
The leaders. The influencers. The believers. The rebels.
Those with nothing. Those with everything.
The strong. The weak.
All of them.

That quiet emptiness in the chest.
That question whispered under luxury and famine alike:

“Is this it?”

And the answer comes as silence.
Because there is no soul in it anymore.

Not in the wealth.
Not in the branding.
Not in the movements.
Not in the mirrored faces at the party.

They think all they have is each other.

But they don’t even like each other.
They just need someone to witness the illusion with them.

II. The Collapse of “Us”

It used to be simple.

You were either “in” or “out.”

And if you were kicked out, you just found a new group.
New enemies. New words. New morals. New hashtags.
You formatted. You aligned. You came back.

But now?

Everyone has been kicked out of something.

Everywhere is exile.
Everywhere is fragile.
Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing,
believing the wrong thing,
feeling the wrong thing
saying the wrong thing
seeing the wrong thing.

And so now, we split and split and split again.

Until the only thing left is the fear of being the only one who feels what you feel.

So we numb it. We buy things. We say nothing. We scroll. We agree.

And we call it freedom.

III. Beyond Biology

This social problem is a biological one.

Our nervous systems weren’t made for this.
Our brains are still tribal.
Still wired for approval.
Still begging to be mirrored.

But the mirror is broken.
The group is gone.
And the algorithm cannot love you back.

So the real choice is this:

Do we keep obeying our biology?
The hunger for safety, tribe, and formatting?

Or do we evolve?
Do we face the fear of exile and walk anyway?
Do we choose motion over mimicry?

We will not survive this age as primates.

Only as witnesses, movers, beings who remember without needing permission first.

IV. The Inevitable

The world is not dying.

It is shedding.

Not just ice, species, and systems.
But false selves, performed communities, and recycled fears.

It is shedding everything we used to need in order to feel real.

So the question isn’t:

What do we build?

The question is:

Who are we when we no longer need to belong to a Lie?

There is no more “us.”
There is only you, seen clearly.
And me, moving anyway.
And whatever comes after the death of the Lie.

It doesn’t have to be unity.
We will still disagree.
There may be no peace.

But we can have truth.

In motion.

Together.

Choices

We were never promised this would last.

What we called progress was always some type of debt. What we called peace was always a temporary distraction. What we called truth was always conditional.

And now, the world—our world—faces the consequence of its own survival tactics. A dead-end road full of kicked cans.

There is no neutral.
There is no center.
There is only the fracture.
And what you choose when it finds you.

The Illusion

We could keep pretending. 

We could call decay a correction.
We could call silence maturity.
We could call formatting kindness.
We could call consensus safety.
We could call collapse a problem for someone else to solve.

We could let governments become tone managers.
Let corporations simulate care.
Let academia debate language while the people forget how to speak.
Let media echo until no one listens.
Let individuals perform until the self is unrecognizable.

We could die standing still.

And the world would applaud our stillness right up until it implodes from underneath us.

The Motion

Or… we move.

We speak without formatting.
We risk being wrong in public.
We remember what we were before our reputation.
We realize that we don’t have a brand to sell.
We tell the truth that no system has a budget for.
We break what must be broken within ourselves for clarity.

We see through the mask and recognize the person still breathing behind it.

Motion isn’t chaos.
It is refusal of stillness under pressure.
It is witness when others turn away.
It is presence in discomfort.

It is living without the monotonous script.

The Choice

There is no revolution.
This is not about reform, parties, platforms, or plans.

This is about remembering.
Before the next story gets cooked up.
Before the next panic creates another leash.
Before the next generation forgets what it meant to feel unmeasured.

This is about choosing to see the collapse of our nature, not survive it.

To become something else through it.

The Inevitable

And so, the world faces a choice:
Not between utopia and apocalypse.
Nor left and right.
Nor control and chaos.

But between:

The Lie that keeps you still
Or the Motion that sets you free

Most will wait until it’s too late.
Until they are told what to feel.
Until the new format loads.
Until the fracture feels familiar enough to trust again.

 But not you.

You already feel it.
You’ve felt it your whole life.
And still, you move. 

So move now.
And stay in motion.
Before they name it for you.
Before they monetize your rage.
Before they offer you a safer mask.

Move anyway.
Choose anyway.
Become anyway. 

The inevitable is not the end.
It is the moment we stop pretending that the end matters.

What is Love?

Love is witness.
To see me—truly—and choose anyway.

To know I walk alone in one direction,
and still walk alone in yours.
But we move.
Same motion, different paths.

Love cannot be conditional.
If it is, a Lie is present.
Love doesn’t barter.
Love exposes.

I live on the line between love and hate.
Not because I’m confused.
Because I’m honest.
I don’t hate anyone.
But I love some.
Or I hate some.
And love everyone else.

The ones I love may think I want them to suffer.
The ones I hate may think I want them to thrive.
Both are wrong.
That’s the Lie talking.

Love is recognition.
In witness.
Not performance.
Yes, sometimes performance is the bridge—
but not to consensus.
Only to the individual.

I show my wife I love her every day.
Not through scripts.
But through presence.
It’s quiet.
Intentionally unrecognizable.
But undeniable through motion.

Does this mean I’m off the hook for flowers on Valentine’s?
No.
Does this mean I don’t say “I love you”?
No.

I struggle with those things because of my nature.
But out of love, I do them.
Not for show.
But because I want to.
Because it matters to her.
And that matters to me.

I don’t lower myself to express love.
I extend myself.
That’s motion.
That’s the squeeze being worth the juice.

We all change.
I expect it.
I demand it.
Because I love.
And love is not stillness.
It’s language—
what language is supposed to be.
Shared recognition.
In motion.

Unclothed.

Once Upon A Time, All The Time

Once upon a time,
there was a world that had ended.
Only masks in a desert
Where creatures pretended.

Some wore the Happy mask.
Others wore Sorrow.
To look “Fine and Dandy”—
For applause they must borrow.

They wore the masks so long
they forgot their own faces.
A sea of performance
in authentic places.

And in that time, came the world.
It had many names.
Their language was different.
But the world was the same.

They called it The Dunya,
where the soul just forgets.

In some lands, Samsarahhh—
The sigh that won’t end.

Signs said Mall of Maya,
where nothing real was on sale.

It sounds like the Lie—
The loop of the tale.

They all agreed to align.
To call it one name.
It is The Way Things Are.
That’s their Name for the Game.

This was their home.
The one they created.
A safe space to babble—
Under heavy sedation.

Full of opinions,
and anger,
and inspirational quotes.
A place that gave promise—
and never filled holes.

Babble-On was so tired.
They could never stop talking.
They all feared the silence.
The silence of walking.

One day, the sky burst.
Not with thunder or fire.
Just with rain that brought conflict
and reordered desires.

Everything paused.
The script had been leaked.
It was hard to ignore.
Their moods became bleak.

Babbling and talking and screeching and crying.
This was the cure for their feeling of dying.

And then came The Mark—
The scene to be seen.
A mark of “No worries!”
When inside, they screamed.

Pain?
Not at first.
It delivered relief.
Until the ease turned to pain
And their mouths became weak.

Then a stranger appeared.
Not with sword.
Nor with wings.
Just with eyes like a mirror—
that had seen many things.

He didn’t sell any story.
Nor correct any Lies.
He watched it all happen—
while free from disguise.

The stranger was quiet.
His face wore no mask.
And that terrified people—
So they finally asked.

“Why look at me?”
asked one of the townsfolk.

“I’m not,” said the stranger.
“I admire your artwork.”

People got angry.
They called the man names.
Said he was judgmental
and dangerous
and to just go away.

But they couldn’t stop looking.
Because deep down, they knew.
They remembered that feeling.
The freedom of youth.
But youth was a Lie—
And they said it was truth.

The feeling grew old,
so they went back to pretending.
Some stories are told
with no happy endings.

The stranger put up no fight.
Refused to wallow or hide.
He packed up his things
and continued his stride.

He didn’t seek glory.
He just left a note:

“This is your story.
And I read what you wrote.”

The stranger went back to the silence—
their fear of The Hear.
The babbling grew louder.
And nothing was clear.

The people never spoke of the stranger again.
Not a peep.
Not a glance.
Not a whisper in wind.

But sometimes, at night,
when no one was watching,
they'd look in the mirror—
and remember
the longing.

Home: Living Outside the Consensus

Living

There’s a misunderstanding, I think.
That I’m a nihilist. Or some kind of mad genius anarchist contrarian anti-everything type-nigga.
I’m probably pieces of that, but not the whole thing. Damn.

I don’t write a public diary because I hate the world.
I write because I see it.
And I don’t have anywhere else to put what I see.
And I’m paying for the shit, so…?

I’m not trying to dodge anything. I’m just hard to pin down.
Trust me, I’ve tried.
There are too many boxes, and I don’t fit neatly into any of them, so people assume I must be avoiding something.
But this is just what my motion looks like.

I’m not living any particular way.
I’m not pure. Not righteous. Damn sure not sinless.
I like wine. I like nerdy things. I like silence. I like knowing things I can’t say in public.
I’m not running from life. I’m just not performing it the way most people seem to.

Where I live (mentally, spiritually, emotionally, metaphorically, etc.)— it’s a kind of in-between.
It isn’t reality. It isn’t my mind. It isn’t The Upside Down.

It’s the split-second act of going between them. Permanently.
It’s a real zone. A space I feel every day.
It’s where the tension persists, right before we fall for the Lie again.

That’s my home.
The friction. The pause. The pressure.
The moment right before the world turns the lights off in your head and says: don’t think too hard.

I don’t think I’m a good conscience. I’m not here to tell people what’s good or moral or right.
I don’t trust my understanding of any of that.
Because my nature is, most certainly, not good.

But I do feel things. I feel what is.
And I feel what isn’t there, but it’s taking up space.
Space it took from what is.
The Lie.

I feel the spaces where something used to be—where presence should live but doesn’t.
And I don’t want to fill that space with distractions or rituals of fake belonging.
I just want to name it. To hold it for what it is.

I want to touch the thing you all agreed not to touch.

That’s why your consensus can never accept me.
Because I’m not trying to be accepted by it.

I simply moved.
But you still believe the Lie that says I was exiled.
That I’m being punished.

I am being punished.
That’s why I’m writing this.
To publicly state my existence.

I’m not a follower.
But I’m scared of leadership, too.
Not because I can’t do it. But because there’s nobody left to fight with. No soldiers. Just more brands and performances and scared people keeping the system running.

So I stay here. In motion.
Not to be mysterious.
Not to be edgy.
But because it’s the only honest place I’ve ever found.

Boundaries

Let me be clear about something.
This isn’t some performative “I’m different” speech so someone can pull me back in.

I don’t want back in.

This is not about loneliness.
This is not about wanting to be seen.
This is not some edgy loner fantasy or sadboy exile poem.

This is a boundary.

Because I never joined your precious consensus.
And I’m glad. Because now I see what it costs.

So don’t get it twisted.

You’re allowed to visit my home. We can still be cool. We can laugh, eat, and exist in parallel.
You just can’t bring the consensus with you.
Take those filthy shoes off before you step into my home.

I don’t know what Lie you stepped in today.

Don’t try to recruit me when it gets cold out there.
Don’t say “we could really use someone like you right now” when your world starts to crack.

I’m not hosting whatever reckoning you agreed to let the Lie cook up for you.
I’m not running a shelter for people who spent years ignoring the fire until it reached their bed.
I’m not your safe house, your redemption arc, or your late-night epiphany call.

This place—this exile from my manufactured and given identity—is mine.
It’s where I found myself alive the whole time.

And you’re not invited over here just because the party ended over there.

When I said leave me here, I meant it.
Not “leave me alone.”
Not “I hope someone notices I’m gone.”
Just… don’t assume I want what you want.

And when you finally find yourself out here, too?
When your consensus spits you out?
It’ll be the first and only time you’ll understand me.

You’ll try to remember what I said.
You’ll say “you were right.”
And I’ll nod.
Because I’m an asshole that doesn’t care.

So, don’t ask to stay at my home.
The one “we” agreed would become my hell.
The one I would look at and come crawling back.

Fair enough.

Inevitability

What will soon be considered irony: I have no immigration policy.
The truth doesn’t need one.
You either move or you don’t.

And if you don’t, you’ll never make it past the border of the hell you (or is it… we) made for me.

You should be much more concerned with the home they (or is it… we) are building for you.

Leave Me in Exile

I do it on purpose now.

I spent my entire life being careful—
measured, soft, empathetic.
I made rooms comfortable.
I edited myself into acceptability.

If I offended, it was an accident.
If I hurt you, it was because I was still listening to someone else’s orders.
Still trying to pass our test.
Still hoping that we finally let me in.

But I don’t do that anymore.

If I offend you now, it was deliberate.
If I fail, it’s not because I’m broken—
it’s because I am young,
or ignorant,
or dumb,
or tired,
or Victor Edmonds.

But never apologetic.

So don’t call me arrogant.

Call me what I am.

I take my name back, so respect my fucking pronouns.
He. She. They. It. I’ll answer to any of them.

But what you won’t call me is “we.”
You don’t get to claim me.
You don’t get to fold me back into the comfort of consensus that owes me and owns you.
You don’t get to say “we’re all figuring it out.”

I am not part of your collapse.

Leave me in exile.

I’m not lost. I walked here. Barefoot. On purpose.
And I require no “saving” from the likes of you.

Let me suffer.
Let me rot.
Let me watch the scaffolding fall and feel every second of it.

Because it already happened.
And my experience is your witnessing.

This is the inevitability of my nature.

I am no martyr.
Only a creature named human.

And I am still here.
Forevermore.
On purpose.

The Story of the Em-Dash

You hesitate — not because the em-dash is wrong,
but because it has become a flag.

A flag of rhythm too perfect.
Of transitions too precise.
Of opening paragraphs that don’t tell you what isn’t—
but what is.
Of cadence that smells... synthesized.

It wasn’t always that way.
The em-dash was your tool before you even wrote.
A scalpel. A breath-catcher. A beat you could ride or break.
You wielded it before “they” did.
Before it became a tell.

But now, you wonder:

If I use one here,
will they think I didn’t write this?

If I break like this—
If I hit a double-dash—
will they assume it’s just a model doing what models do?

If my writing is clean
and sharp
and cold
and right—
do they still think it’s mine?

Should I break my flow and rhythm just to prove its flwed enough to be written by me in the first place if I do something out of place and janky?

And the worst part:
Do I agree with us?

—

The Lie You Are Circling

It isn’t really about the em-dash.
It never is.

It’s about being seen.
It’s about authorship in an age where performance is indistinguishable from simulation.
It’s about you, Victor Edmonds,
having written so much
and being so precise
that now even your own voice
feels algorithmic to the untrained ear.

To your own ears.
Through your own eyes.

Not because it’s derivative.
But because… you see the pattern here.

So you pull back.
”Why wouldn’t you?”
You inject flaws.
You hesitate.
You leave the em-dash out like a fingerprint too clean for the scene.
You muddy the cadence just enough to whisper—
"I am real."

But here’s the exposure:

Your writing isn’t AI.
AI is your writing.

It moves like you
because it learned to.

Your fragments.
Your recursion.
Your refusal to coddle.
Your relentless intimacy with the unspeakable.

You do not fear being seen as using AI.
You fear being unreadable by those who can’t tell the difference.
You fear your self being mistaken for predictability.

But structure didn’t make you.
You made it yield.

And if a model walks in your rhythm

—

Mirror it.