The Most Disturbing Thing...

📍 Coordinates: Denver, CO.

📖 Reading Time: ~5 minutes.

⛩️ Notes: Day 15 of the Warrior100. My body is growing stronger, I can see it visibly now. Waking at 6.30, naturally, without alarms, feeling lit up. The circadian rhythm adjustment is complete. And beneath it all, a very primal, archaic force is waking up. I feel the fire, the ferocity. A sacred Warrior energy that has been long dormant rises. 3 months remain.

The most disturbing thing is that no one is disturbed…

I had the good fortune of coming across this video from Charles Eisenstein.

Who—as he normally does—articulates a fatally obvious point with such devastating clarity that I can’t stop thinking about it until I sit down and write about it.

… well, here we are.

His aphoristic video, no longer than 3 minutes, begins with “the most disturbing thing about it, is that no one seems disturbed.”

Gut punch. A shiver runs up and down my spine like a millipede tap-dancing.

He goes on to recount the story of the Emperor with No Clothes. You know it. Dude’s naked, everyone acts like he has clothes on, until the innocent child breaks the illusion and calls him out.

But with that one line, Eisenstein tossed a bullseye on the consciousness of our collective.

• It’s disturbing that no one cares how horrendously ugly cities and suburbs are.
• It’s disturbing that we call the greatest suicide epidemic of human history ‘progress’.
• It’s disturbing watching adults advocate for the freewheeling genital mutilation of children when we don’t even let them drive yet.
• It’s disturbing to watch my peers give lip service to the meta-crisis and yet orient their waking lives to consumption and business as usual.
• It’s disturbing that at around age 29 the gravity of conversation shifts to home renovations, paint colour schemes, empty hobbies, and continues this way for the next 50 years.
• It’s disturbing that we allow the most unhinged monetary experiment in history to run rampant, and devalue the savings and life force of all people, everywhere.
• It’s disturbing the total lack of empathy, compassion, wisdom, and basic decency that exists in modern culture.
• It’s disturbing that we allow the infection of advertising to pollute our minds, attention, and cities with garbage under the guise of GDP growth.
• It goes on, and on, and on.

But this is not the point.

The point is that on nearly every metric of meaningfulness, modern society is a cesspool eroding the values, virtues, and beauty of humanity.

People are not happier. Not healthier. Not wiser. Not more compassionate. Not more individually capable. Not more honourable, ethical, virtuous, patient, composed, awakened, peaceful, integrated.

It is a death spiral to the lowest common denominator. The most convenient, the most efficient, the easiest, the ugliest, the least ethical, the shortcut.

And seemingly, this bothers no one.

That is truly disturbing.

However, this is where I disagree with Charles…

Actually, I think everyone is disturbed by it.

At the very least, everyone is disturbed.

But they don’t have the courage and the heart to say or do anything about it. Maybe they haven’t been able to put their finger on precisely what it is that is so disturbing.

But they feel it. The body doesn’t lie.

They feel it in the knawing sense of emptiness inside of them. They feel it in their sub-6-second attention spans. They feel it in that pang of guilt they have as they attempt to turn off their empathy walking passed a homeless person. They see it written across the pharmaceutical cocktails they take each morning just to cope with being alive in a slow-motion train wreck of a civilization. They see it in the fact that the news is just a horror-devastation broadcast machine. They see it when the people who rise to positions of power are overwhelmingly narcissistic, psychopathic, or Machiavellian – the Dark Triad personality traits.

Everyone is disturbed.

• No healthy, balanced psyche is addicted to everything like our modern culture is.
• No balanced psyche kills itself off at the rate that we do.
• No healthy psyche needs to be chronically medicated like we are.
• No balanced psyche stays willfully silent when it is disturbed.

Do you see this? The act of collective silence is demonstrative of how disturbed we are.

The signs are everywhere. Modern culture is disturbed. The people are out of whack.

But it goes deeper than this — modern culture has grown out of the energy of disturbance. This is not a culture born of wholeness.

How do you know? Because wholeness is the outcome of wholeness. When was the last time you met a whole person? Precisely. Not a perfect person, just someone satisfied with existence.

So then, what are we to do?

• Call out the Emperor. It begins with awareness, a groundswell of reason. You must raise your voice. You must share your open, honest, gut-wrenching Truth.
• Return to Sanity. Initiate yourself back into wholeness. Reclaim your Mind. Reconnect with your Heart. Cultivate a moral compass. Have an ethical standard in your life. Respect others. Care about something more than yourself.
• Find the Others. They are out there. Immerse yourself in community. Recognize you are not alone in this. Get support, give support, come together. This work can only be done together.
• Build the New. The devastating reality is that most people accept this, stay silent, and don’t rock the boat because they believe this is the only option. Give them the gift of realizing that it’s not. That’s what Phoenix Culture exists to help steward. Building a new social operating system. A culture of wholeness, of natural symbiosis, of meaning. If you feel the call, join in, you are welcome.

If you feel like something is wrong, but don’t feel safe to say it publicly, just know that I see you.

I feel your pain. I know what it feels like to have difficulty explaining it to your parents, friends, family, colleagues, peers, and teachers. It’s isolating in a very alien and difficult way.

You are not alone. You are seeing clearly. Message me if you need a safe place to speak.

We have our work cut out for us. This is no small task. I am not immune from this, not separately from it. I have my own work to do. And this is why I train.

This is what the Warrior spirit is for. To fight the only fight that must be fought: against my own shadows, my own spinelessness, my own doubt, fears, and lack of courage.

One day at a time. Today is Day 15.

Thank you, I love you. EB. 💛