Living Outside The Machine

It feels as if I woke up one day and realized I was living inside the construct of a corporation. That my concept of life—as a precious, beautiful journey of self-discovery and purpose—had been bound and caged, like a gazelle captured and thrown into a zoo.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" The quintessential coming-of-age question. A question that follows you from the moment you can speak until death, in more ways than one might imagine. But it serves a deeper purpose than we've acknowledged—or perhaps even realized. It subtly teaches us to frame our existence through career pathways, as if the meaning of our lives could be measured by job titles and LinkedIn profiles.

But how can you find true fulfillment in a system designed not for meaning, but for maximizing shareholder value?

We teach the younger generation to prove their worth—not to society, to community, or to themselves, but to a boss. To an institution. And our reward systems reflect this.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" This question doesn't just inquire about dreams; it dictates fulfillment. It plants an empty space in our future—a puzzle piece we must contort ourselves to fit. But that piece is rigid, predefined. And what happens if you are formless, like water or air? If you refuse to be molded, you risk being cast out altogether.

And what happens after years of bending and shrinking to fit, only for a handful of billionaires to come together and change the shape of the puzzle itself?

This system was built for the few, leaving the rest of us scrambling in its wake. And yet, we are bound to it—trapped by the need to survive within it, to meet the very real financial pressures that capitalism imposes. The constant tension between survival and the pursuit of a more meaningful, liberated existence fuels mental health struggles and existential crises.

But this isn’t new. Those of us who exist at the margins—Black, brown, immigrant, queer—have always known how to create meaning outside of systems never meant for us. We’ve built worlds in the cracks. We’ve found joy in community, art, storytelling, and care. We’ve practiced rest as rebellion and imagination as survival.

So what if, instead of endlessly contorting ourselves to fit into a broken system, we leaned into these alternative ways of being? What if we looked to ancient modes of living that prioritized connection over consumption, craftsmanship over productivity, and collective well-being over individual gain?

I'm not calling for escape—bills still need to be paid, survival remains necessary. But perhaps the true act of rebellion isn’t in rejecting work entirely, but in quietly reorienting ourselves toward something more human. To create for the sake of beauty. To build for the sake of community. To redefine success not as upward mobility, but as freedom from the grind itself.

We cannot wait for the system to collapse to begin living. We have already been living in the in-between. The work now is to make that in-between more expansive, more sustainable, more whole.