I was recently drawn to rewatching the movie The Matrix, the late 90s classic depiction of life inside a simulation.
The premise that we are living in a massive, computer-generated virtual reality is not new and certainly now, it feels more pressingly possible that we are indeed, mere pawns in the code of an increasingly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. And while amusing, it does not feel right in my bones.
We are in a Matrix, of that, I am sure—but it does not feel like the dystopian futuristic hellscape where machines pacify and control humanity while harvesting human bodies for bioelectric energy as the movie depicts.
Yet, it also does not feel that something is not harvesting our energy through pacification and control, all the same.
What is actually true matters less than what I am going to do about it. And what I am going to do about it is transcend the Matrix by progressive disidentification, deconditioning, and disenchantment until I dissolve my dependency on it.
In short, I do not plan on ‘escaping’ the Matrix, I plan on outgrowing it. And of course, I am going to share every step along the way.
The Matrix movie raises mind-twisting questions about free-will and freedom. It challenges us on what it means to be free; on whether freedom is actually possible; and even on if human beings even know what to do with freedom when they encounter it.
I wrestled with this extensively in How much of “you” did you actually choose?On cause and effect, free will and the source of choice. I personally do not think ‘being free’ requires me to somehow exit the Matrix or exist outside of cause and effect.
The movie, however, is heavily weighted in the idea of freedom as something that only exists outside the Matrix, once you escape and are awakened.
But what if freedom isn’t about escaping the Matrix at all? What if it’s about becoming so deeply rooted in reality that the Matrix simply loses its relevance?
Whether you believe that we are in a literal simulation or a more organic one of our mind’s own making, the uncomfortable truth is that none of us can experience a universal reality - at least consciously - because there isn’t one.
Which means reality is up for interpretation, and reinterpretation, which raises a more interesting question:
If reality as you believe it to be and know it as such turns out to be fundamentally different from what you experienced, how does that change what it means to live a meaningful life?
When you change your relationship to reality itself, there is nothing to rebel against, wake up or unplug from. There is nothing to reject. Maybe I am just lazy and unwilling to ‘go to war’ against the machines, or simply taking a woman’s perspective here, but I will not be fighting my way out of the Matrix to earn my freedom.
I will softly and quietly disengage until the abstract dimensions of a world that requires my performance gradually dissolve, yielding to my embodied experience of participating in the feeling of real life.
But how can I trust how I feel to be true, especially when all my senses are mere electrical signals interpreted by my brain, so vulnerable to manipulation?
Because I still know how to feel, for real.
I have felt the subtle shift from aliveness to the dull humming ache of daily living. I have dismayed the fading flavor and weakening pulse of real food, clean water, and restful sleep. I have stirred under the increasingly restless and disruptive experience of peace and quiet. I have sensed the ever growing disconnect and distrust among people. I have even traced inside by body changes in alignment, polarity and electromagnetic frequency of the very Earth beneath, above and around me as it changed.
Maybe the simulation is getting so bloody good at faking it, but for now, I can definitely still feel the difference between the real thing and the simulated one—at least for now, which is why this message arrives on time, not with any particular urgency or rush, but also without need to hang around and see how this unfolds further before I make my move.
Here, I invite you to ponder how this feels inside your own living biological intelligence:
If you no longer needed the Matrix to tell you who you are, then who are you? What still exists? And what is possible when you return to simply being alive?
Try to think about the truth of who you actually are when you’re not organizing yourself around the systems of the Matrix. Not only does this simulation we call modern life define your identity by your labels, but it also determines your fears, ambitions, perceived limitations, and beliefs of what’s possible, as well as what’s not.
I remember the exact day that I decided I needed to leave Toronto. It was a city I had never dreamed or even wanted to live in, but as so often happens in life, I found myself excelling through the city’s progressive hierarchies with a wild proficiency until 5 years later, I was living inside a hypnosis of someone else’s dream life. But it was not mine.
I had become fixated on buying a CELINE handbag. A smooth dual-tone calfskin Phantom, to be exact. Ten years later, I revisited this ambition and bought the damn bag—which I wholeheartedly adore and consider a fabulous investment piece—but I did it because I genuinely love the bag, and not simply because it was the piece-du-jour trend. To be frank, I didn’t even know it existed until every it-girl in the city had one on her shoulder, which to our Matrix analogy, is the woman in the red dress.
The day I decided it was time to move out of Toronto was the same day that I realized how much of what I desired was inherited from a world that taught me what was worth having, who was worth knowing, and what a successful life looked like.
I built a life that looked beautiful on the outside, but the feeling never registered because none of it was really of my own.
I wish I could say that I left the city and immediately or even easily reconnected to a more authentic nature. I did not. Instead, I became exceptionally good at performing the requirements of a good and successful life while growing increasingly estranged from the experience of genuinely living one, which I’ve explored deeper in asking Have You Been Living Someone Else’s Life?
I know I am not alone in this feeling otherwise there would be no market for the booming culture of midlife crisis.
From our earliest existence, we inherit ideas about ourselves and the world, internalize them, and structure our lives around the pursuit of certain ideals and achievements. We reach one milestone after another without stopping to consider whether satisfying such goals actually makes us feel any more alive, never mind aligned or whole or authentic.
Over and over, across generations and cultures, the very fulfillment of attaining these milestones is found to be not just unfulfilling, but in fact, full of deeper and more disturbing questions about personal contentment and truth.
The irony of the midlife crisis is that even the attempt to liberate ourselves becomes another performance. We swap one measure of success for another. A new partner, a new job, a new location, and of course, a new car—our new labels define our new sense of self and we call it freedom because we slap a new coat of paint on it and call it self-improvement or optimization when really, we are just on a different course of the same track following a rather exhausting pursuit of becoming the most healed, conscious, regulated, disciplined, and free version of ourselves.
We have exchanged one set of Matrix codes for another without thinking to ask if maybe the issue isn’t what we are striving for but that we feel we need to strive at all.
So we resist and we rebel and we try to escape the Matrix. But the only plausible escape from reality as we experience it is death, and I’m not rushing toward that exit.
Besides, as one of the more interesting questions raised by The Matrix movie reminds us: even the apparent freedom of choosing resistance and rebellion against the system has been anticipated and accounted for and is itself, part of the simulation.
If my freedom becomes another objective to achieve, then haven’t I simply built myself a different, albeit slightly more attractive prison?
I suspect this is why I have become increasingly uninterested in the prospect of escaping anything. I have no desire to spend my life in opposition to a world I am simultaneously trying to remember how to live within and love. I would rather withdraw my allegiance from the things that no longer deserve it and redirect my lifeforce toward those that do.
And I am curious what happens when we begin doing this deliberately, not through some singular or grand renunciation of modern life, but through the rather ordinary business of being alive.
I explored this more deeply in a recent musing about turning my life into a self-improvement project that led me to become Optimized and Unwell.
In addition to taking off my smart tech and re-learning how to trust the sensations of my body, I have also disabled my Meta accounts and begun investing more into things that make me feel more alive. I didn’t announce it or do it in protest or even plan it, to be honest. One day, I just decided that it was no longer an interesting place to be or a good feeling in my life, and I disengaged.
I guess that is just what happens when you begin to notice the difference between what genuinely nourishes you and what merely keeps you occupied, or rather, pacified.
At least, that’s how it happened for me. Or is happening, I should say, as it’s more accurate to acknowledge that my own senses, desires, and interpretations are not immune to the conditioning I am trying to understand. The Matrix will find me in other places and meet me other ways.
I might lose myself to some, of that, I am aware. But along this journey of growing into myself by outgrowing these systems, I suspect I will discover just how deeply some of these patterns have become embedded in my thinking, behavior, and sense of self. And that awareness will hopefully help me to disidentify with, decondition from, and disenchant myself from the abstractions that have come to govern so much of my life.
Although my departure from social media was rather abrupt, I do not plan to abandon everything I know, own, use, or participate in, but instead, I want to start questioning how much of it I actually need, what purpose it serves, and whether my continued participation is bringing me into a more coherent relationship with life, or further away from it.
I plan to do this not by any protocol that measures for progress, but simply an experiential little game I am calling Outgrowing the Matrix.
With my good old fashioned pen and notebook, I will start exploring small ways of interrupting and challenging familiar patterns that keep me dependent on the Matrix. There is no end goal, final destination, or idealized version of myself.
I will almost certainly change my mind, contradict myself, and discover that many things I was sure of are now entirely wrong. That is, I think, part of the game and if there was one, the whole point.
My only objective is to keep inviting myself back to the tangible, relational, sensory, and rather miraculous feeling of being alive.
And I would love for you to join me. We can compare notes along the way.
You don’t need to believe that we live inside a simulation. We do not have to agree with my interpretation of freedom, or on anything for that matter. In fact, I would encourage you to question all of it, including what I have written here.
I am simply proposing your participation as an invitation to explore your curiosity and perhaps hone your ability to notice the difference between the life you are living and the one you’ve been taught to pursue.
I don’t know. That’s why I want to play.
I’m not interested in escaping the Matrix any more than I am interested in proving that I’ve escaped it and that I am now ‘free’.
I am interested in feeling more of what feels real to the extent that I might hopefully even forget this entire game because it all becomes unnecessary once I remember how to belong to life again, embodied in a reality of my own making.
I am interested in what it feels like to outgrow the Matrix by growing into something so coherent that the Matrix simply loses relevance.
Feeling my way through the darkness with you — SJT
If this resonates, I invite you to come and play. Ambitiously, I plan on positing my ‘daily’ explorations inside The Studio: an actionable practice to navigate your own guided self-inquiry available to paid subscribers. It begins with DAY ONE: Catch the Code.