Bottom Out

I don't even know why I do it. Why do I write these pieces? Why do I work on a social media site I created that no one visits? Why do I make music that no one in their right mind wants to hear?

No one is listening. I'm feedback in the microphone at a 3AM 80s hardcore show. My hate can't be measured in human words.

The words “I don't know” raise the dead within my mind. All it does is cause me pain, but isn't that what the Buddha said it was all about?

The things I push out into the world are met with silence, apathy. Even if the response would have been rage, my confidence wouldn't be this evaporated.

To be or not to be, that is the question. It's a question I ask myself everyday. What's the point of going on when you're not going to make a dent in the world's delusions and idiocracies?

I'm no better than anyone else, just another person who thinks he can see the truth when he clearly can't. If he could, he should have given up.

I'm a fool. That's all I've ever been. That's why no one cares. I'm a filler track on the album of life.

www.shockingthesystem.com

Margin
of Doubt

17%. That's the percentage of chance that a God exists. Kinda strange though. If you're an atheist, it doesn't make you feel too at ease. Even a slightly higher number would make you feel better. There's just something about that 17% that feels off.

I can almost see God peering from the 16 positive numbers before. Then I see its infinite eyes scrolling backwards through the negatives to a silent oblivion.

Their eyes had followed me through the TV screen, the voices of a thousand clones inside the space between my ears.

Flipping the shit in the other direction gives you 83 reasons to keep looking.

The void is a densely layered jungle underneath a canopy of longing. Questions of meaning fall like summer rain into the universe’s oil drum, slowly drifting under.

If you spend too much time in this stretch, you will go under.

But I'm looking at you 17%. You got me thinking. And just like that, I'm unsure of one more thing.

The Madness of Crowds

Your grandparents never should have been allowed on the Internet.

Cruel? Maybe. But the evidence is overwhelming. Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Twitter followers were bots. Fake accounts. Manufactured noise.

And yet, people followed.

That’s the thing about humans. We’re wired to trust momentum. The more something appears popular, the more it becomes popular. It didn’t matter that the Trump wave was artificially inflated. Enough people saw the noise and mistook it for a signal.

Worse, this wasn’t just some organic mess. It was calculated. Trump’s own team pushed the hype, yes, but so did the Democratic establishment. Through a strategy they called Pied Piper, they deliberately elevated fringe candidates like Trump, thinking it would make Hillary Clinton look more reasonable by comparison.

But the joke was on them.

What started as a puppet show became a stampede. The fake movement metastasized into a real one. The crowd roared. The machines amplified. Millions fell in line, especially those too trusting or too unfamiliar with the new rules of the information age.

It was always a circus. The clowns just took over the tent.