write.as

There is a worldwide trend of reviving spirituality. Our feeds and suggestions are filled with everything from eastern mysticism to neo-stoicism. Pretentious charlatans like Sadhguru and Deepak Chopra are the modern messiahs. Did I mention public intellectuals like Sam Harris? Hold on, lemme pour me a drink first – much required!

Are you suffering from work pressure? Anxiety due to impossible deadlines? 80 hour work weeks? Unending mortgages? Inflation? Unaffordable education and health care? Well then, have you tried the new meditation app? What about that new stoic podcast? Probably you should listen to that spiritual dude from India who randomly drops the word “Quantum” in every other sentence – I wonder if he even knows what “quantum” means. Remember that time when an actual physicist called out his B.S at Oxford?

Don't get me wrong, I love to tell others that I meditate, or read Seneca. I am not arguing that any of these things are pointless in itself – messiahs are though – but often these things are only concealing the real problem, or becomes a personal-tool to evade them. Our society is filled with irony. The same people who fuck up your psyche offer spiritual programs to “fix you”. Maybe collectively we should acknowledge the fact that our consciousness is very much influenced by the materialistic conditions we live in.

We have a system that cares more about wealth than the welfare of its participants. Let's assume you work in a paper factory and that you are not one of the favorite employees. Someone came up with a machine that doubled the production. What do you think will happen to you? In an ideal world wouldn't you be working half the time instead of getting fired? Best-case scenario: they figured a way to sell double the amount of paper somehow, and you can still keep the job, Congrats!

As long as it doesn't directly undermine your very existence, you can pretend to keep your eyes shut and meditate, or plugin in your earphones and listen to your favorite messiah. By the way, will you suggest 10 minutes of guided meditation to a starving kid in Rwanda or that Syrian whose house just got bombed by oil-hungry Americans? Maybe it's time to realize that it's the same thing that made you an insomniac is also what's causing global terrorism and war in middle-east, famine in Africa, disastrous economic instability and even driving us to the brink of an ecological collapse which will probably kill most of us. I hope all of us realize it's time to change the system and unite for the collective good before it's too late.

In the words of socialist Gandalf: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light than trying to fucking burn a matchstick to light the entire street”.