I See You

And so do you.

We are living in the upside-down.

For as long as I can remember, (and more times than I’m comfortable admitting), I’ve had to complicate what was simple to be taken seriously. I wrapped my basic creativity in jargon. Added philosophy, theory, and intellectual scaffolding. To make it palatable — for them.

I’m not proud of it, and worse, by implication, they were saying that creativity alone could never solve their problems. Bullshit.

Imagine if I’d called it art.

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.” — Charles Bukowski

Everything we knew and trusted is inverted.

What’s declared as valuable is whatever serves the few. What’s now defended by laws and institutions is increasingly worthless to the rest of us. We’re told it is progress, but it is poison.
And the trick works, because those seriously affected are repeating it back as if they are benefiting. Bonkers.

This is gaslighting on a civilisational scale. They say it’s for our good. It isn’t. It’s for theirs.

Politics. Pharmaceuticals. Food. Energy. Media. Technology. Social platforms, you name it. Everywhere, the story is the same. We are told to worship what harms us. We are told to trust what exploits us.

And we’re told this is normal.

The ‘new normal.’ The phrase itself is a weapon.

Normal is how collapse sneaks in. Normal is where lies harden into truth. Normal is the lullaby that keeps us docile.

We are already half-asleep. The danger isn’t merely that we’re being deceived. It’s that we’re beginning to deceive ourselves. That’s how normal the brainwashing has become.

The next move cannot be more policy, more platform, more profit. It has to be to put our imagination to use. The last human resource not yet strip-mined.

If we don’t reclaim creativity as survival, the gaslighting wins. We will keep confusing comfort for wisdom and distraction for meaning.

Imagination is not entertainment. It is a defence. It is a refusal.

It is how we write a script that isn’t theirs, before the lights go out. Stop mistaking our creativity for GDP growth. It isn’t decoration. It isn’t an economic stimulant. It’s oxygen. It’s survival. And it can be ours.

We don’t need more shit content.

I can’t face another wave of AI slop. We need new ways of living and experiencing. And by the way, that can mean what we had before—you know, actual thinking, reading, creating art, writing and being humans.

Rant Over

We need new rituals that swap extraction/fleecing for meaning and that can scale naturally because they make us feel better again. We can reassure ourselves. That’s because our imagination isn’t a corporate asset. It can be considered a public good.

Like clean water. Like shelter. Like breath.

We can create spaces where ideas aren’t strangled by economics, even in our living rooms. A world where risk-taking is treated as a civic duty, not career suicide.

Markets reward what sells. Communities need what serves. Gaslighting tells us the opposite.

Creativity must break that spell by giving people the power to choose what matters. Forget brands, build movements. Symbols anyone can carry. Stories anyone can retell. Authorship open. Boundaries porous.

Endless growth is a death spiral.

We need economies of ‘enough’; economies that repair, replenish, and redistribute. Economies that measure value in health, access, resilience - not profit. And they dismantle themselves when they’re done.

History’s leaps were never orthodox. They came when opposites collided. Disciplines. Cultures. Worldviews.

Gaslighting thrives on monoculture. Creativity thrives on collision.

If collapse is coming, resilience must be decentralised. Forkable. Copyable. Remixable. Tools and knowledge that outlast platforms, companies, and governments. Movements that survive the loss of leaders or funds.

From creativity as decoration, to creativity as demolition and re-making.

Refuse the scripts. Break the spell. Imagine what they tell you is impossible, and build it anyway.

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