The Award: Best Director

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