The Cost of the Spectacle

What happens when our nervous systems reject the structure we’re forced to live within during late stage capitalism? To navigate a “mature” country in the final stages of colonization and capitalism, one must train their nervous system to bypass reality. Your body must accept the violence of the infrastructure you live within, on a minute to minute basis, or you will have to eject from society all together.

Enter The Spectacle. The system of oppression created the Spectacle to keep us all deluded, distracted and compliant and journalists and philosophers like Guy Deborg and Edward R Murrow named this clearly and without apology in the last century. Most of our favorite dystopian stories are grounded in the narratives of “let them eat cake” and serve as both a warning and a balm for our suffering nervous systems. Apocalypse as entertainment. Meant to be cautionary tales for society yet are now being weaponized as playbooks for the billionaire class and their political play things.

I rejected the traditional paths in my 20s. I write about it often on this site. But up until recently, my nervous system was still able to play the game of the violent oppressors. My system was strong enough to participate in the false constructs I was trained to work within in order to pay my bills and “contribute to society”. My art was never able to make that contribution, only my physical production abilities to produce art for other people– on their terms and to meet their creative briefs to sell their product or mission to the masses. And most artists, dare I say “all” (at least those who don’t have generational wealth beneath them) do some form of selling their talents into the violence itself in order to put food on the table.

Ever wonder why photojournalists made such fabulous wedding photographers? We’re trained to document raw human emotions to hopefully tell a story that will force systemic change. Well, in the collapse of our industry, we turned to documenting the events of the elite and privileged to pay our bills. I did this for years, as did most of my photojournalism colleagues. Every few years we had to find new ways to adapt our skills. Not to document the collapse of our communities and our society, but to serve the elite and privileged classes who have hoarded the wealth so that we could survive.

Imagine all the true art that simply was not produced because the artist was trying to eat and stay housed. Or all of the powerful, necessary stories that never were told because the journalist had to stay in the studio and produce television commercials to put their kids through college. All of the voices who never connected with a witness to share their pain with the world because the person trained to bear witness had to build websites for a corporation that was exploiting the land those voices were being abused upon.

Those previous paragraphs summarize the struggle of most of my journalism colleagues who’ve watched technology and billionaires consume every aspect of their art and profession to extract full profit for shareholders in a board room. Not speculation. Fact.

Fast forward to now. We are living through a time of accelerated collapse and we are being forced to normalize all of it. Now almost everyone's job is disappearing at record paces, not just targeted industries like the media. We must internalize the violence of the system itself in order to pay rent and buy food. By design.

And for some of us, our nervous systems fully tapped out under the abuse. I know, because that’s what’s happening to me in real time. No need to unpack that again, the story is all over this site. What I want to note, because I have the data now to make such a statement, is that once your nervous system burns off the layer of protection/insulation that allowed you to pretend everything is “normal” and fully bypass the violence of it all by diving directly into the Spectacle, the ensuing destabilization is earth shattering.

My nervous system no longer has the protective membrane that allowed me to walk into a networking event dripping in privilege and wealth and pretend like this is normal. The mechanism that allowed me to pivot from post-conflict documentary stories to wedding gigs is gone. I can no longer handle situations where I have to place a professional mask on my face and say the things that people say to climb the ladder of acceptance toward resources or status.

I was never good at it to begin with, now I simply can’t participate at all. Here’s what happens.

• My sympathetic nervous system shifts into fight or flight. The lights, sounds, voices and activity in a busy room designed for networking and socializing overwhelm my system.
• Once fight or flight kicks in, my autonomic nervous system begins firing. Hard. White spots, dizziness, cognitive impairment, increased heart rate, accelerated speech, ringing ears, headaches. Until I physically leave the room, my ANS fires off trying to warn me of danger.
• I leave. My system resets and calms down. Instantly.
• I spend hours, or days, recovering from the event. Once I get home, the ANS then sends pain signals through my compromised cervical discs and I have to mitigate it all until I can function again.
• What was once a normal occurrence for me is now an event that carries such a high price that engaging at all makes no sense.

I’ve literally turned into a barometer for the violent situations of the Spectacle that the capitalists use to keep us all playing the games of productivity and advancement of society. I can no longer pretend to play these games. Which is ironic as fuck, because as a professional community builder, it was my job to program those games in the first place. I built the containers, along with my teams, so those networking and building events could happen in technology spaces.

But here's a secret– the beauty you seek lies in those ashes.

Amongst the devastation of it all lies something absolutely beautiful that we all have access to and can work with once we burn off the layer that allows us to bypass. Stillness. Presence. Release. Joy. Love.

I’m not talking about the wellness theatre version of this little story. There’s no “release attachments and achieve enlightenment” in my words here. That’s a line Deepak Chopra sold the world while he was emailing Epstein about exploiting young women and fleecing his flocks. Much of that language and the entire wellness industry is the appropriation of wisdom traditions designed to keep people within the system of violence itself by pushing the emotional labor of survival onto the individual. Just master your nervous system with this yoga sequence or this meditation hack and you can be more productive and stay in a society designed to extract your life force.

I’m talking about the beautiful and insanely messy parts inside of all of us that just exist, buried beneath the programming of a society that only ever saw us as cogs in their wheels of extraction. The version of you that existed in innocence and trust before the world placed its violent membrane and expected roles upon you. The version of you that didn’t know how to play the capitalists board games of indoctrination like “LIFE” and “Monopoly”. The version of you who existed before entering an educational system designed to make you a stooge for the Rockefellers or a syncophant for the JP Morgans of the world.

I’m talking about a radical thing here that is also so simple it's almost tragic. Once your system burns off its protective layers, you slow down– dramatically. Large rooms of strangers hold no real value anymore, but small rooms of humans who cultivated their roots hold everything now. Slow living becomes the norm, not the exception.

Depth is the goal, not breadth.
Resonance is the objective, not consumption.
Co-regulation is the purpose, not performing professionalism.
Deep listening is the joy, not ego stories and bravado.

When your nervous system finally rejects the violence of our institutions, you realize that the small, intimate containers that hold true human connection are the entire point. Containers where deep listening fuels the co-creation of ideas that move listeners towards a better version of themselves. We need these now, more than ever.

But first, we must exit the Spectacle. We must learn to sit with the silence and stillness and see the thing we’ve been running from for years. For while we may indeed be bypassing the violence of the system in embracing the Spectacle, we are also bypassing a part of ourself and the life we built that we fear the exploration of. It’s easier to keep running and enjoying the sunny weather than it is to sit in the ashes and stillness and tend the roots that keep us anchored in a world collapsing.

And until we learn to stop and dig into our roots and see what actually exists beneath the soil, we will keep spiraling through masks and the situations that require them, put in place by the billionaires who benefit from our acceptance, and we’ll never know what’s possible in the liminal spaces of our own lives. That type of deep excavation is not for the faint of heart, but it is truly necessary if we, as a collective, are going to stand up to the colonization we find ourselves trapped within and say “Enough.”

And if I could be so arrogant as to share some hard earned advice here, please do not wait until your nervous system fully rejects the violence you’re forcing it to function within. Begin to work with your system now and start excavating your own root system today. Start small and unpack something. Slow down and learn to listen again– to humans, your loved ones, your somatic and wild knowing, and Gaia itself.

The oppressors are hoping you don’t have enough self-agency to do the hard work and reject the systems they’ve built because if you did, they would have no power to control your actions and keep you in a position of submission.

Learn to sit with your own silence and find joy in the moments that reject the Spectacle. Because we’re all about to learn what a world without a Spectacle really means. And if you haven’t cultivated those roots on your own terms, you’ll like be sucked into the tornado of whatever weather the billionaires engineer next.

Keep the writing flowing forward– share it with someone who needs to read this and contribute to the artist's espresso fund. ;)