Make me forget what I have learned. I never wanted to take the red pill.
OK, not really, but there are times when I consider the character of Cypher from The Matrix. The traitor, the guy who makes a deal with Agent Smith to give up his compatriots all because the stark reality of the truth was less appealing than living a lie. Could I or would I slide back into my zombie life, content with running the rat race, working long hours to accumulate shit I don’t need? Buy things a wife and children would demand of me because they can’t differentiate between wants and needs?
No, it is not possible to go back to being the way I was before. Even if I wanted to. There is only going forward. Conversations with those who daily accept the blue pill have taught me that they would rather I accept their world view than upset their apple cart. I can close my eyes and see the shocked look on my parents faces when I open the door just a crack on the current dystopian milieu and the adaptations necessary to get ahead.
My parents are part of the locust generation. Those who believed that everything that made the west great must be torn down in order to make a better world. Most people, my parents included, see the world through the lens of their formative years. They decry the pornification of our culture without understand or trying to understand it’s root causes. They don’t believe relations between the sexes are any different now than when they were in college. The goals for their children are to find a ‘nice’ girl or boy and settle down, get married, buy a home, raise a family, and continue the cycle.
Before the red pill I accepted my roll in this cycle. Get good grades in high school. Get into a good college, take on a crap load of debt. Get a job. Go back to graduate school, take on even more debt. Meet a girl and get married (granted by graduate school I was sliding from greater beta to lesser beta so getting married was going to be a difficult proposition at best). Have some kids. Buy a house and two cars, and be so far up to my eyeballs in debt that I was a slave to the system until the day I died. No wonder there are so many zombies in this world.
Yeah, sure, I want to go back to that. What’s not to like?
