EVERYTHING IS TRYING TO KILL YOU

People have their guard down, man. Americans are walking into the octagon of life with their hands by their sides, not even aware they’ve stepped into the arena to fight for their vital existence. There are no safe spaces, there are no neutral grounds. The mind, body, and spirit have been drafted for combat. What are they up against? Everything.

And everything is shooting to kill.

I.

Consider the grocery store. The typical shopper might say, “fluorescent lights, some veggies, maybe a cashier with a flat affect, what’s so dangerous about that?” The reality is, the moment you set foot in an American supermarket you are entering a carefully crafted psychological experience designed to overwhelm your senses and bludgeon you into buying food you don’t need, especially junk.

In 1990, there was not a single US state with an obesity rate above 20%. As of 2022, there is not a single US state with an obesity rate below 20%. Seventeen states are above 35%! These are staggering numbers with huge implications for society, from healthcare costs to population growth, to say nothing of the physical, mental, and spiritual costs of obesity borne directly by the individual.

Back to the grocery store. You walk in, let’s say to get something healthy like eggs. Guess where they are? Tucked away in the very back of the store, so you have to walk past aisles and aisles to get to them. Before you’ve paid for your eggs or even put them into your cart, you are paying for them mentally, being advertised at by hundreds of unwanted food products trying to tempt you with a colorful label, The Right Buzzword, or a flash sale. 

Nothing about the experience is coincidental. Grocery stores strategically place higher-margin items at eye-level, putting the lower-margin items or generic brands above or below. You know what’s a typical high-margin item? Heavily processed food with a long shelf-life, full of preservatives and weird chemicals that our bodies aren’t meant to deal with because how could they have evolved to process something that didn’t even exist until sixty years ago?

Is Trader Joe’s really your friend? Or is there a cost to the convenience of all those tasty frozen meals, each one cleverly marketed with a quirky name but riddled with seed oils? 

By the way, if you don’t think seed oils are trying to kill you, just look at this graph of the history of cooking fats and oils in America, think about when the obesity epidemic started, and then splash your face with cold water over and over until you have forgotten the phrase “correlation doesn’t equal causation!” (the single stupidest thought-terminating cliche championed by the American education system).

(H/t Simon Sarris)

Even exiting the grocery store is dangerous – they know that the check-out line is a fertile ground for impulse buys, so sweets and junk food are never more than an arms length away while you’re standing and waiting. Temptation, temptation, temptation…

I still remember when I first realized what was going on, when I thought about the supermarket as an experience and what the strategical implications of its design were. It felt like suddenly seeing the lines of code in the Matrix, waking up to the cold fact that something I was unassuming about had been taking advantage of me for decades. I looked at the long fluorescent aisles and I saw them as tunnels, part of the lair of a giant, invisible spider, ever listening for vibrations in her web. 

Tread lightly and move swiftly.

My face when I step into a grocery store.

II.

Man, all this nutrition and food talk is stressful. How about unwinding with something safe, like a little television from your couch? Ah ah ah. When you watch TV, you are exposing yourself to advertisements, which create an illusory model of the world in which BEAUTIFUL and HAPPY people HAVE PRODUCTS and the PRODUCT is what makes them BEAUTIFUL and HAPPY. If you BUY THE PRODUCT, you too could be BEAUTIFUL and HAPPY, surrounded by ADORING ONLOOKERS just like those people in the ads. 

“But what if I don’t pay attention to the adverti—” Not an option. Even perceiving that something is an advertisement has already exposed you to some portion of its message. Your subconscious mind works far faster and runs far deeper than your conscious mind is aware of (like, that’s kind of the point). The existence of a phrase like “retail therapy” as a universally understood concept speaks volumes about the massive—and massively successful—psychological operation that advertisers have run on us. I am not speaking out against materialism, for the record, I am speaking out against something much deeper and more dire, the cravings and needs for both things and validation that advertisers hardwire us to desire.

Advertisements use people in the most inhuman and unnatural way to create a false social reality which has a real effect on viewers. The typical American sees somewhere between 100 and 1,000+ advertisements daily. You have been seeing advertisements since before you could process language. Humans are social animals—biologically wired to understand social behavior—and you’ve been exposed to social situations in advertisements before you could understand that they were not natural or real. Advertising got to your brain before it ever had a chance to fight back. 

Sorry to be the one to tell you.

III.

If reading this gives you pause, you should hold onto that feeling and turn your skepticism way, way up, because there are a thousand more everyday things that are trying to kill you. DoorDash is trying to kill you. Netflix is trying to kill you. Psychiatrists, video games, college loans… happy hour, dating apps, celebrities. McDonald’s, sports gambling, news anchors… schoolteachers, standardized tests, ‘the curriculum’... pesticides, microplastics, fluoride in the water… none of them give a single fuck about your wellbeing. They just want something from you, be it money, attention, or to suckle on your vitality like a vampire of the mind, body, spirit.

So this is my unhinged love letter to paranoia as an mf virtue. Paranoia is oft portrayed as a state of deep unwellness, but it is precisely the right attitude to have when dealing with systems that are aligned against your wellness. You might accuse me of being overdramatic—trying to kill me? really?— but if anything I’m understating the situation: what else could you call a food store trying to trick you into buying food that is bad for you? It’s definitely not making you live longer. Or advertisements that make you feel psychologically inadequate, no, worse, incomplete. How many suicides do you think have occurred because some poor sap craved a level of social validation impossible to achieve in reality, just because he had seen it a million times in ads?

We are born complete, but raised to feel incomplete. Tragic.

So why should you trust something that doesn’t acknowledge your humanity? If your answer is, “Because paranoia feels cognitively expensive,” congratulations! That is the exact impulse that all of these systems and forces have been exploiting for decades.

IV.

In the year 2024, we all have the information now to make choices that push us towards growth or decay, towards life or death. There are no more excuses. Nobody is coming to save you—not the supermarket suppliers, not the advertisers, not the pill-pushing psychiatrists. Your spiritual salvation lies in the hands of God, but the salvation of your body and mind? That lies with you and you alone.

If you’re not at least a little paranoid, you’re being taken for a ride. Time to think twice about everything you do in life, including the things you take for granted. Especially the things you take for granted. The things the default culture tells you you’re supposed to do, whispering, chanting:

Everybody does it… it’s safe, everyone says so, see… behold our shining consensus… you’ll be weird or unhappy if you don’t… come on man, just take the mood-pill, or the focus-pill, hell, take ALL of the pills. And eat the easy food, watch the easy TV. Life is supposed to be easy.

We just want you to be happy. Don’t you want to be happy?