Before I even get to the central idea behind all of this, I’d like to mention that my goal is not to present anything absolute. Don’t expect a text in the style of “this is what’s wrong with the world” and “this is how to fix it,” or “we live in a society…” or anything similar. I don’t even think I’m in any way better or wiser than the people who enthusiastically surrender themselves to the madness I’m about to criticize. And I don’t even think I myself am free from that madness. I don’t think it’s possible to escape it at all. No matter what happens, one thing is certain — we’re all in this together.
So you don’t need to read this text while imagining me feeling deeply philosophical, intellectual, or fundamentalist about it all. In reality, it’s the exact opposite. I’m not even entirely sure whether I should continue writing these lines, because I honestly don’t know to what extent any of this is actually “meaningful” and to what extent it’s just some strange emotional outburst from someone who hasn’t fully integrated certain thoughts in his own mind. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter in the end. In any case, I’m fully willing to accept that everything I’m about to ramble about may be nothing more than my own subjective impression with no connection to reality whatsoever.
So what is this all about? What made me sit down at a desk and write such an absurdly long introduction without artificial intelligence helping me with even a single word?
Well, I have this theory that keeps returning to me, and lately it’s been manifesting itself in my life more and more. The idea is that once people are no longer in nature, they remain completely disconnected from the natural environment they evolutionarily adapted to. I’m not talking about the fact that we lack movement and our spines are bending into the shape of the chairs we sit on. I’m talking purely about the mental sphere, where something in us seems to have broken as a result of this process — this “theft” of our natural environment. I don’t know exactly what it is, and it’s difficult to describe, but I hope that throughout this article I can help you at least somewhat “feel” what I mean.
The reality is that our bodies, nervous systems, and perception itself expect something entirely different from what we’re receiving. Variability. Silence. Genuine sensations and stimuli. All of that was stolen from us. Instead, we live here — inside something artificial, repetitive, synthetic, and overstimulating.
And whether we realize it or not, this situation creates a certain discomfort inside us, one that we all try to regulate and compensate for. If you’re one of the few who are aware of it, you may feel as though this text is opening something in you that you already vaguely suspected yourself. If not, that’s okay too. Not everyone is ready to understand this particular kind of discomfort, and not everyone automatically interprets it as some sort of signal from the body. And so the compensation begins.
And we all do it. Consciously or unconsciously. We have no choice.
So how do we compensate for the loss of the natural environment that we miss so deeply in this frustrating reinforced-concrete desert?
Everyone does it differently.
Most often, however, we devote enormous amounts of energy to socialization — though not in a simple, grounded form. It’s not about sitting in a circle with close people and engaging with them deeply. Instead, we move among crowds — events, conferences, festivals, lectures. The more people, the better. After all, it’s more stimulation, more noise capable of drowning out our discomfort.
Then we add social media and messengers. We constantly check something, glance at our phones over and over, make sure others see what we’re doing. We stare into phones, books, screens, listen to music. And if that’s not enough, we love drugs too. Caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, or something else. Stack everything together, ideally combined with music. Isn’t that right?
Some people find another system instead. They dislike crowds, so they tend a garden, flip through architecture magazines, or knit socks.
Or we sit in quiet depression somewhere alone. We try to pretend we enjoy what we’re doing, occasionally post something on social media, read something, make a little money so we can continue doing the same thing again later on. Or we write a text like this and feel good because we created something “valuable.”
Maybe every now and then we go to a café or organic food store where we can enjoy a decaf coffee with a gluten-free, lactose-free, sugar-free cake…
But wait. What about productivity? What about creating something meaningful? Ah, fuck, we already talked about that…
What is productivity even for? So we can afford more of the things we already have too much of?
There is no escape from it. No matter what we do, and no matter how good we feel while doing it, we are all playing the same game — living in an environment we do not truly want to live in, wanting to escape, yet having no idea how.
I don’t know about others, but honestly, it makes me feel sick. For a while I can pretend that I enjoy it here, but most of the time I genuinely feel that something smells wrong. I’m not talking about unhappiness. What even is happiness? We are all happy for a while, and then not happy again. Personally, I’d even consider my life fairly fulfilling. What I’m talking about is something entirely different from ordinary happiness or unhappiness. It’s a kind of smell of falseness in this environment, something leaking through everything that appears entertaining, interesting, or worthy of my energy. Everything feels real yet unreal at the same time, and my interest in this world keeps decreasing, becoming increasingly limited to practical aspects of life — questions of survival. Somewhere in all of this, I’m losing the thread.
The substances other people enjoy feel too strong and irritating to me, and the same goes for the people I’m apparently supposed to befriend and socialize with. Music feels strange and empty. The only music that feels meaningful is the kind I hear in places where steel and concrete do not grow, where you can still see the horizon.
But in the reinforced-concrete jungle there is only desert. And when I’m there — especially when surrounded by large numbers of people — I genuinely don’t understand why I’m there. There is no clear reason. Only momentum.
Soon, for example, I’m supposed to give a lecture at a Bitcoin conference, and honestly, I don’t even want to go. The only thought I have is that maybe I’ll meet someone there, maybe some collaboration will happen, maybe I’ll gather some human connections from it, and maybe at some point in the future I’ll make some money from those connections. If I didn’t need money, I definitely wouldn’t go. There would be no reason to. That is my real motivation, and I’d say it speaks volumes.
But if I’m somewhere near the ocean, or in the mountains, everything changes. Yes, civilization is still there. But some natural phenomena are still “strong” enough to overpower the steel and concrete. Everything becomes simpler. The air feels less dense and easier to breathe. The pressure becomes lighter, sometimes almost nonexistent. I don’t know exactly why, but that’s how it feels to me. The ocean, the forest, the jungle, the mountains. Maybe this is the stack that actually works. In those moments I even forgive the world for the village where I stay and survive. I forgive the people I meet there too. Suddenly it all feels worth it and meaningful. I feel more aligned with something I can’t fully describe.
In cities — especially cities like Bratislava — everything feels dead to me. Not poetically “empty-dead” or anything like that, but dead in a structural sense. Organized. Functional. But lifeless. Like some system whose machinery keeps running even though the meaning behind it died long ago.
If I tried explaining this to someone, they’d probably say I’m exaggerating or being dramatic. Maybe. But personally, I’d rather fully trust my feeling than ignore it. Because ignoring it would mean adapting to something that feels fundamentally wrong.
But what if I actually found a place in this world where I truly felt I belonged? A place I’d have the courage to fully enter and surrender myself to. A place where the environment itself made sense to me. A place where I understood how to move and how to survive. Maybe I’d learn how to hunt, how to find food, how to exist without all these structures surrounding me. Maybe I’d even be good at it. Maybe I’d feel more like myself there than anywhere else.
I don’t think it’s realistic, though. I don’t know whether I would actually do it. But what matters is that maybe I don’t need to completely abandon civilization in order to get rid of this strange feeling telling me that the world we live in is not life itself, but merely some cheap reinforced-concrete substitute for life in which we compensate for our traumas. As I said before — the ocean, the mountains, the forests… all of it softens me somehow. Maybe it’s enough to simply minimize movement here and maximize movement there.
Maybe.
Anyway, if you made it this far, congratulations. I wrote these words in one uninterrupted flow over the course of twenty minutes without any software assistance, and I hope it’s at least somewhat readable 🙂
I simply think the life we live in cities is sick. I don’t believe anyone can truly be happy in it, no matter what they claim — it feels to me like someone stuffing themselves with sweets every single day insisting they’re healthy and fulfilled.
However, people are not the problem. The problem is our environment, our civilization. And the older I get, the more civilization turns me into a cynic and a misanthrope, and I assume it will only get worse. Which is exactly why I have to do something about it. Whether radically or only slightly.
So if you feel something similar, I invite you into an opt-out. But not an opt-out from the state, the banking system, or anything like that. Rather, an opt-out — even if only a small one — from civilization itself and its compensatory mechanisms. Let’s get the fuck out, live simple lives, and leave things alone for a while. Our bodies deserve a more alive place than the one we currently inhabit 🙂