You think you’re living a perfectly normal life. You wake up, get dressed, and slip into the steady rhythm of existence. You go to work, meet friends, scroll through social media. Everything feels fine. Ordinary. Real.
There’s comfort in the routine: the espresso machine, smell of the morning coffee, the news headlines, a quick scan of misfortunes of others. You head to work, swap polite jokes in the elevator, shuffle through tasks that don’t seem to leave a mark on anything. Evening comes , dinner, Netflix, maybe a little more Instagram scrolling before bed.
It’s comfortable. Predictable. Safe. But beneath the warmth of that familiarity is something colder: a way of living with eyes closed.
SEEING
Then one day, something happens. You notice a friend talking about how blessed and grateful she is right after spending an hour complaining about how miserable her life is. Maybe you notices your co-worker's fake enthusiasm during a team meeting. Or you see people's smile never reaches their eyes. You notice people nodding along to an opinion they don't actually agree with just because it's easier that way.
Then you see more and more... Your female friend who changes her personality depending on who she's talking to. Sweet and innocent with her parents. Wild and rebellious with her party friends. Professional and ambitious with her co-workers. You see, your successful buddy, who is driving an expensive care but who's drowning in debt, desperate to maintain the illusion that he's got it all together.
And it dawns on you: everyone is pretending. Everyone is lying. Everyone is wearing a mask and the worst part is, most don’t even realize they’re doing it.
Then you start really listening to what people say versus what they do. You notice the gap between who people claim to be and who they actually are.
You see the patterns everywhere, the same scripts, the same desperate performances, the same hunger for validation wearing different masks, the fake concerns that's really just for gossip.
Social media becomes a parade of people competing over who can look happiest, most successful, most fulfilled while privately feeling anxiety, depression, and existential dread.
Your work place becomes theater where everyone pretends their meaningless tasks matter. The meetings about meetings. The reports that nobody reads. The busyness which accomplishing nothing.
Your friendships become exchanges of rehearsed opinions and borrowed thoughts. Political outrage, sport events, intellectual curiosity, whatever gets them the validation they're desperately seeking. The same performance, different stages.
WITHDRAWAL
When you see these things you try to go back to your normal life, you try to enjoy the same conversations, the same activities, the same social rituals that used to feel natural. You want to belong, be connected, you want to stop seeing the performance and just enjoy the life like everyone else. But something is broken.
You can't do it anymore. The same world, completely different experience. You try to play along. To laugh at jokes that aren't funny. To nod at opinions that make no sense. To care about drama that's completely manufactured. And every time you do it, something inside yourself dies because you are not participating in the performance anymore. Actually you're betraying yourself.
Here's where the your isolation starts. You realize you're living in a completely different world than everyone around you. They see connection, you see pretense.
You're alone in a crowded room, and the worst part, you can't explain it to them because to understand what you're saying, they'd have to see what you see. And if they could see what you see, they wouldn't be them anymore. They'd be like you. Awake, aware, and alone.
Then What?
CONTROLLED FOLLY
Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He, so to speak, vanishes and yet he’s there. I would say that this is the time when a man can be or can get anything he desires. But he desires nothing, and instead of playing with his fellow men like they were toys, he meets them in the midst of their folly. The only difference between them is that a man who sees controls his folly, while his fellow men can’t. A man who sees has no longer an active interest in his fellow men. Seeing has already detached him from absolutely everything he knew before. ~ Carlos Castaneda, Separate Reality
To get out of this social mad house, don't be too conspicuous, don't make a big fuss about seeing things as they are. Don't draw the attention of the other people, pretend that you're a normal being, pretend that you care.
What may happen when seeing things as they are is that you may stop caring, not because of a lack of empathy but because of a lack of artificiality. You're not artificial anymore, you're not bound to norms and rules anymore.
More and more you're free of all this social baggage, programming and brainwashing of worthless, pointless, aimless and useless things. But this freedom is not what you expected to be. In order to function you need to continue pretend to be a normal human being and pretend to care, that's controlled folly: pretend to care, pretend to enjoy, pretend to laugh, pretend to cry.
You have to be honest in your pretending and convince not only others, but yourself too, that you genuinely care, enjoy, laugh or cry. In that regard, your performance is all that matters.
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