You're Not As Stupid As You Think

but you will be.

Rat Brain is Winning

You think like a rat. You probably don’t even realize it.

Am I being watched? Can they see me? This corner feels safe, I’ll stay here. What was that noise? Should I run for it? What will I eat? Crumbs are enough. I will hoard everything I can to survive and then never use it. Am I too far from home? I should only leave my den when it’s dark and quiet. Are predator’s close? Is that cheese safe?

And above all: My existence is tolerated, not welcomed.

Schooling paired with religion did this to you. Both are designed to condition you into a thing that cannot decide for itself and instead looks far above it, to established authority and qualified professionals, for the right to piss and speak. Your parents, bless them, only reinforced this power structure. Feeling out mini power trips thinly veiled as parental authority.

Eventually, it no longer required these external enforcers. Eventually, the conditioning sunk in. Your warden lives in your own head now.

How long have you heard it in the back of your mind? The voice that taunts you, each day. Telling you no one likes you. No one is curious about you. That your dreams are foolish and that you’re only safe when you’re alone. But even then, you’re a fraud and everyone knows it. They know that you’re hiding. Playing small. That you fear nothing so much as them knowing what you suspect they already know: That you are a stupid, weak, rat-brained idiot. And unlovable for it.

There is no comradery in this shame, though so many share it, because to speak about it is to make yourself a nuisance. To saddle others with the responsibility of soothing your insecurities. And, anyway, bringing it up would shatter the façade of cleverness you’ve so carefully spun for them.

If you continue living like this, every vile thought you think about yourself will become true. And much sooner than later. I wrote this to break you and to heal you. We must reset the bone together.

Are you ready?

Tell me, what does the voice sound like?

Maybe it’s your mother or father’s. A cruel teacher. A nun, for my Catholic school survivors. A grandparent, perhaps? One who wanted to love you, but only knew how to give you the same toughness they survived by. Maybe it’s whatever you imagine God sounds like. Maybe it’s your own.

That voice is and always has been lying to you. Your mind is infinite as the cosmos—ever expanding. Your heart is a brilliant organ of divine intelligence. Your body knows every truth about survival and agency that your consciousness was broken into forgetting. You are powerful enough to be your own master. You are wise enough to create your own laws. You are humble enough to turn to others with you fail. You are smart enough to know that all of this potential slips further away from you each day. There will come a day when you are no longer able to access it.

Unless you make some changes very soon, I am truly sorry to say: that voice will be right about you.

If Everything Matters, Nothing Matters:

Every headline and viral story is detonated like a flashbang, aimed to scatter you.

The last six months of Trump’s second term have been nothing short of a psy-op on the average thinking, feeling person. Be you unfortunate enough to have a shred of integrity, a half-baked sense of justice, and a working conscience, your mind is mush from all the horrors. The endless horrors. The endless think pieces about the horrors. The think pieces about the think pieces about the horrors.

I would never accuse you of being average. Unfortunately, being “above average” makes you even more vulnerable to these onslaughts of rage bait and fear mongering disguised as information.

Over three centuries of revolutionary, Democratic American Journalism was distilled into the most vile, inescapable mouthpiece for the modern Fascism in under a decade. Media has never been as pervasive nor as political as it is now. It has never been easier to disseminate and simultaneously, harder to control. Along with the added challenges of a perceptibly democratized media landscape, the algorithms and monitors have gotten smarter.

And now, with AI teaching and training these algorithms, media has also never been so capable of making terrified, obsessive, isolated animals out of sovereign human beings.

This is a war of messaging and we, the people, are losing, George Orwell is rolling in his grave as you scroll through MSNBC’s Instagram stories. The manipulation is well beyond large, corporate news outlets.

From your favorite “unhateable” centrist podcaster to the soft-voiced therapist on TikTok, the ex-McKinsey-guy-turned-political-commentator to the uber-relatable Instagram comic with monthly merch drops—every piece of content you consume is laced with subtle, ambient manipulation.

Even activism is reduced to merch. Weaponized tone. Weaponized relatability. Every influencer sounds reasonable. Every curated feed feels safe. But it’s all still content. And content is not neutral. This was summarized perfectly in an IG reel (of all unlikely suspects):

“The scariest part of Joe Rogan’s podcast is two hours in, when it starts making sense.” - Dan Harumi

The algorithms were designed to extract. You are being mined for data, for money, and for agency.

They’ve mapped your nervous system, coding your outrage fatigue and moral panic. They force feed you stories that activate your empathy just enough to keep you online, but never enough to radicalize you into action. You are shown old money aesthetic content while you delay the auto-pay date on your credit card.

You are in a finely tuned behavioral lab, and whether it’s NPR talking head or Twitch-streamer, they speak directly to the part of you that wants to be informed, not overwhelmed. Righteous but not too radical to maintain your sanity. Awake but not in pain. And it’s your fault, the gurus add. It’s your fault that you’re sad and broke and both horrified and paralyzed all the time.

This is late-stage capitalism, breathing heavily on its death bed as data centers whir, sucking down our freshwater quicker than even we could waste it.

Is escape even possible? Maybe we’re all cooked. Maybe nothing matters anyway. Maybe this is as good as it gets.

Or maybe those are the thoughts of someone in active addiction.

Escape is so simple it’s unthinkable. Hiding in plain sight: The best and easiest method to escape the media prison is to change your habit. Not quit cold turkey, but make a decisive, calculated set of changes that force the algorithm to work for you, not the other way around.

Feature or Bug?

The first step is recognizing that, in the exact same way that what you eat determines your physical health, what you consume determines your physical health. Some media is more addictive than others and must be consumed in moderation. Stop hardlining the content equivalent of coke straight into your brain first thing in the morning and then wondering why you feel so out of sorts lately. Right?

The effects are only so reversible the longer you continue. And it’s not just about your health. It’s about the strength of our communities. The value of our careers. The significance of our relationship to God or the divine. The integrity of our governments.

Yes. It is in fact that deep. It’s time to on a media diet.

I’m not telling you to touch grass (though you should), I’m not telling you media diets are the next wellness trend, or that having social media is a mark of poverty (though they will be and it is…). I’m not even telling you to burn your phone. If we learned one thing from the LA protests its that the news has really strong opinions about the immorality of setting fire to lithium ion batteries… but not Palestinian children.

What I am telling you, with absolute conviction, personal experience, and data, is that your brain is addicted to this suffering. You have a media problem. To heal yourself, use a little discernment, strategy, and discipline.

When you tailor your media consumption to your goals and interests, curating a diet for yourself that FEEDS you, rather than extracting and exhausting you, the world gets lighter, brighter, better, and vastly more inviting. You’ll realize your own thoughts are safe to sit with. No need to constantly drown them out when they aren’t being regularly terrorized.

The days will stretch. Suddenly, you will have time to accomplish all of those desperately held dreams. They’re not rotten yet. They’re still waiting for you to want them the way you used to. Once you take one step toward them, you’ll start feeling restless. You’ll want to replace media with mediums of experience; local concerts, pottery classes, book clubs, dinner parties. Your friends call you again. You don’t make excuses this time.

We are designed to move. To mesh with other people and to learn about ourselves as learn about life and how other people navigate it. We are calibrated for curiosity and thrill. When your brain is too fat and feeble to even conceptualize activities beyond the doomscroll, it’s easy to forget. But the moment you start a media diet, you’ll remember.

To make this experience less of a chore and more of an Anime Training Montage, I’m designing media diets for different goals. You should create your own, specialized for you. But I’ll make you a nice framework.

Do you want to level up your career or build a business? Do you want to start creating art? Do you want to get sexier and more interesting? Do you want to find God? Do you want to hold your own in debates? Do you want to optimize for learning? Do you want to figure out how to build yourself a community that pulls you away from your phone and into beautiful places with silly, fun people?

You should create your own, specialized for you. But I’ll make you a nice framework. I have a little something for each heart’s desires.

The first one drops this Friday, July 4th, 2025. The perfect day for you to blow up all the shit that is making you into a data slave rather than a dream-chasing sex god(dess) of undeniable magnetism. Stay tuned.

My goal is to push you toward becoming absolutely all you wish to become. These releases will be my single greatest contribution to ensuring that you get there. I’ll be right there with you the whole time.

Thank you for reading.

xx

-Sky.