No, I mean true-self apathy. I mean, who the fuck are you if you take the “online” part of your brain out?

Hello? Is anyone home?

Do you have your own sense of style or was it bought on the Internet?
Do you know what you stand for or did a Reel pre-program it into you?
Do you feel anything the Internet didn’t tell you to feel?
Do you understand your childhood trauma or did the Internet tell you it exists?
Do you think for yourself or do you outsource it in the scroll?

Based on the behaviour many people engage in all over comment sections of perfect strangers, I think we know the answers to each of the above questions. Nothing is our own. This is true culturally as well as spiritually as well as intellectually. We have learned nothing through any sense save for see, and what we see is a screen.

Influence existed before social media. Pre-internet. There was television and movies and music and art and theater and fashion. There were supermodels and celebrities and radio show hosts. But because we could only consume these categories and these people in small doses, at certain periods of time, we were still required to fill in the gaps with our own thinking.

But more importantly, we wanted to.

We sought out books and newspapers and magazines and albums and we spliced it with buying art supplies and getting high and going to school and trying to summon demons and gossiping with friends and protesting and thrifting and we never once posted about it online because online, in the way we view it now—as a part of us—did not exist.

Online was a place. Usually in a designated corner of our home with temperamental internet connection that may or may not work and we were more indifferent to that than our own tastes and thoughts and feelings.

We had aspirations and dreams and they included getting rich and being beautiful but in a much less crushing way than those two things do now. They didn’t sit on our shoulders and carve our cheekbones into the same shape as everyone else’s.

We were not afraid to be alone with our thoughts because it never occured to us to fear such a thing. It was a time to cultivate style—of not only clothing but patterns of problem solving and charting our own paths and how we’d fuck up our relationship (which we did differently than we do now).

But we no longer care about true self, by which I mean, what do you really want?

No, “true self” isn’t only made up of desire, but it is a crucial part of who we are. And if we all want for the same things in the exact same shades and shapes and psyops, are we unique or are we a conglomerate?

Ultimately, we all want some iteration of the following:

• beauty

• sex

• fortune

• health (which can tie into all of the above)

In many ways, we are the same regardless of the uniformity of social media and the Internet, this is true. These desires are deep-rooted throughout history. Think of every war.

But true-self is in how you want these things, and how you express yourself to get them. Think of a line graph starting at zero, but billions of lines expand out into billions of directions. This creates depth in the world as a whole—imagine how vast the graph itself must be to hold all of these lines—and novelty is within each line (/human). Imagine the lines communicating with one another in a look what I found! way, smiling and high-fiving even though the line below me is not taking the path I want and the one above me is interested in a destination I couldn’t care less about.

Now think of reality. We are all crowding along one single path, jostling and competing and murdering one another for the same destination that social media has sold us as true happiness. Instead of high fives, imagine a typical Threads comment section bubbling up above each line.

Lol she thought she ate.
I don’t give a F*** about your newborn. (I saw this on Threads just this morning)
Yall make up any excuse to be whores in public (another one I read with my own eyes)

But what is the path? I hear you ask.

Mediocrity. Mean-spiritedness. Complaint. Lack. Judgement.

No, you say, the path on social media is actually pointing toward overconsumption, plastic surgery, and tropical vacations with designer bags.

You are incorrect. This is a common “advertisement” for a life you’re brainwashed into believing you should want, yes. That is true. But take out the influencer posting the content and you have millions of comments all leading to what I described above: mediocrity, mean-spiritedness, complaint, lack, and judgement.

Do you understand the difference?

Does this mean the influencer is enlightened in some way the commenter is not? Perhaps. Perhaps they are on the upper threshold of the graph metaphor used above, although they are, for the most part, all congealing into the same line, if in a different stratosphere. This is not my endorsement for the influencer or to imply my personal belief is that the influencer is “above” the average commenter. It is merely to state what society is teaching us, and we are passively agreeing by not having our own self-expression. By not adjusting our own desires.

By leaving negativity and forsaking tearing others down online for the sake of a temporary high and instead replacing this with the more sustainable pleasure/contentment of pursuing our own true-self.

Enough of the metaphors. How can you pursue selfhood? In real, practical terms, which are really all that matter. No amount of preaching or philosophizing or intellectualizing helps people in need of solutions today.

Here are seven extremely specific ways I pulled myself from the rock bottom of depression, low self-worth, and copy/paste expression, into delusional confidence, unique pursuits, and independence.

1. Contradiction time: I put someone else’s identity on like a costume. Hear me out. It wasn’t a specific person I found on social media or in my real life. No. It was the vibe of Catwoman. Sexy, slinky, stealthy, stubborn. An anti-hero who would never let anyone stop her from doing precisely what she wants to do precisely when she wants to do it. This persona frees you from the terrifying apathy you pretend to cling to because you don’t want to be seen as a person trying (read: you don’t want to be seen as a person failing). When you are apathetic, nothing bothers you because you want for nothing. You cannot fail because there is no attempt. When we let the algorithm dictate our desires—which, as we discussed, becomes our true-self—we don’t care much what happens with them because our achievement is either in the “influencer” as metaphor (if you’re reading this, that is not you; that’s the harsh reality), or the judgemental commenter who takes solace in not achieving by being nasty online. Most of us are the judgemental commenter. In order to transcend that line on the graph, you need to feel bullet-proof. Invincible. And so, you adopt a persona. Catwoman, Batman, Mr. Rogers, Madonna, black cat, fairy girl; there is an endless list. Find one you want, or, maybe even better, one you feel jealousy towards. Convince yourself you are her. How does Catwoman react to a man’s disinterest? How does Catwoman dress? What time does she wake up in the morning and go to bed at night (this gets dicey, but you get me). Pretend.

2. Scroll through your algorithm on your social media of choice (this should be relatively easy) and watch ten short-form videos to completion. On every video, speak out loud something you like about the person in the video. They’re hot, they’re rich, they have a nice voice, they’re in shape, they have good skin, their makeup is flawless. What you’re not going to do is say, Oh, that’s a filter. Oh she has implants (negative connotation; positive/admiring is fine). Oh she’s too thin/fat/curvy/emaciated/whatever. No. The opposite of that. You have a crush on these people (if you didn’t, they wouldn’t be in your face in the first place). You want to be like them in some form. How? Be honest with yourself. Once you’ve named the thing you secretly crave, it makes adhering to the next step exponentially easier.

3. Make a list of everything you want, and pretend no one—maybe not even you—will ever read it. Obviously, this is hard to do when it comes to hiding your own desires from Self on paper, but remember, you do this every single day anyway. You pretend not to care, not to crave, and not to want. Or when you decide to, you realize you’ll never get there doing the things you’re doing now (scrolling the internet) and so you become jealous commenter. You thought you ate commenter. So for once in your goddamn life, give into the fact you actually want something. Write down at least ten specific things you want, and make them as cringe as possible: I want the body of a supermodel. I want ageless skin. I want one hundred thousand dollars lying around in my chequing account. I want to date a rockstar. I want to fuck a pornstar. Whatever it is, write it down with embarrassment. Do not throw it away.

4. For 24 hours, each time you want to criticize an aspect of The Internet, recall steps two and three above, and flip the criticism on its head. Remember that the Internet can give you what you crave. You’re seeing it there, in the flesh, and you’ve got a desire, in your head. Social media is one of the few tools that can make all of that possible for next to nothing. So instead of lashing out at the Internet, or me, or this platform, remind yourself, this is it. The things I want can be achieved here. The point of this step is to change your relationship with the Internet. I lamented a world before it in the introduction to this article. What I’m really mourning is our ability to use it as the tool it is to give us our own unique desires.

   Below the paywall is the doing, because reading alone does fuck all. Plus you’ll find the one way to actually reach me. I'm notorious for ignoring DMs on every platform I have, but paid subscribers can reply to me on Substack directly, and I read every single one of those. Consider that the first test of whether you want something badly enough to act on it, because below you’ll see what a DM can get you.

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Most of us move through the world asleep, and I don’t mean the word in the opposite vein of one like “woke.”

What I mean is much simpler: We have hidden what it is we really desire from even ourselves. Thanks to religion, societal conditioning, our parents who shamed us for our desires in order to keep themselves on this side of normal, being mocked by our peers when we express our inner essence, and rejection, we do not know what we want.

We say we do, but what step have you taken lately to getting your most pressing desire? Or have you, like most of us, moved through the world doing more or less the same thing you do day in and day out?

If nothing has changed from the date you first stated your most sacred desire, do you even want it?

We casually make comments about what we want every day, oftentimes tucked away in bitter, throwaway remarks like, “Must be nice.” Or “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” or, “I can’t afford that,” when the latter is oftentimes false. The difference is stark: You don’t want to spend your money on it. There is no shame in that, but the little lies emphasize our lack of knowledge on bigger truths: Namely, our desire. If it “must be nice,” why have we not pursued it?

Desire in itself is treated as if it is something to be ashamed of. We must be grateful for what we have and if we want more, perhaps we are not grateful enough. If we reach beyond our circumstances, we can be seen as greedy. If we want wealth for the sake of having wealth rather than something more noble like “changing the world” (most people, when pressed, have no specific answer to what, exactly, this would mean), we are selfish. If we want beauty for vanity’s sake, we are shallow. If we want sex for pleasure, we are loose in morals. If we want revenge for injustice, we are controlled by our emotions and should turn the other cheek (as if we could ever be Christ).

We are, in other words, punished for what we want.
In this iteration of the world, this will likely always be true.

And yet… want anyway.

Want clearly, strongly, and with hope.

Do not expect to hear the truth from others, nor to see it, or read it in books. Look for the truth in yourself, not without yourself. Aspire only after the impossible and inaccessible. Do not believe in external miracles, except miracles only within you.

PD Ouspensky

Many people you know and interact with daily are secretly—or loudly—miserable. If you would like to stay among their ranks, do nothing differently. Day in, day out, trudge, remembering as you tell yourself, “This is not that bad; others have it worse,” that others, also—very few—have it better.

What do these very few do differently? Of course, some may be born into wealth and immense privilege, but that does not make them content or fulfilled. So what does?

Money helps. Let’s not kid ourselves. But acting on your desire as if you have permission to does too. This need not be grand: We all want something different. Some lust after money, fame, beauty, or power. Others want gardens to tend, holidays in a tent, sleeping whenever you’d like, raising many children. We do not all want the same thing, which is more argument for why we should all pursue what we do want.

We are miserable in similar ways, but contentment takes many forms. There is enough room for each of them.

If you are one of those who want the sky and beyond, you likely feel even more uncomfortable naming it.

I want money.
I want fame.
I want beauty.
I want incredible sex.
I want a life without financial burden.

Do these feel uncomfortable reading? Here’s a dare: If any is true for you, speak it, but be so specific it makes you feel embarrassment.

I want to be lusted after, obsessed over, and idolized.

How does that taste leaving your mouth? Until you can write it or say it without squirming, the chances of having it are slim. But if you wish to try anyway, pick one want. Specific and honest, but you don’t need to know the means of how it comes. That is not, at the moment, your problem. Not for this exercise.

Write it down in a journal you’ll return to.
Every morning, for thirty days.

I don’t promise that in thirty days you will be living the life of your wildest dreams (although you very well may). I do promise, however, that if you complete this as I wrote it for a month, you will be much closer to what you want. And at the very least, if only do this exercise for a day, at least you’ve put a name to the thing you crave.

Find more of me here. Book a reading here—I’m all caught up on these and the last few have been emotionally draining in an incredibly positive way. I hope to continue the trend.

Dialog is a private, invitation-only club that meets at least annually, and its membership runs from the co-founder of Palantir to Ted Cruz to a roster of other government officials and tech billionaires. For nearly twenty years it kept its members secret with a private website using private email (no official government emails, which means no reporting needed). It’s been frequently compared to Bilderberg.

Then a hacktivist named maia arson crimew found everyone chilling in the website’s source code, and Wired independently verified it.

Wow.

Let’s get into it.

What do they actually do in these meetings?

Well, they attend sessions called “Bring Back Nuclear” and “Navigating WWIII.” There’s also one called “Build-a-Cult,” which is moderated by the founder of the Christian website Pray.com, an app built to grow religious community.

Sit with that for a sec.

There’s even a companion session, “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official, in case you were wondering if any of this is used on, I don’t know, the entire nation.

So what do Christian app founders, senior government officials, and tech billionaires have in common? For one, they often overlap as they become one and the same. The categories are no longer as separate as they once were. But the common thread holding all of these members together, running straight up to the society’s founder, Thiel, is a fixation on longevity and AI, alongside the near future.

Listen, we all have our hobbies. I don’t begrudge anyone joining a secret little society. In fact, I love secret little societies. But when tech billionaires and White House officials are quietly gathering to discuss nuclear war, how to grow a cult, and their sex lives—yes, “How’s Your Sex Life?” is a session too—alongside the future of humanity itself, we might want to pay attention.

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This is one of many points where government and Big Tech stop being separate entities. The latter is too wealthy and too influential to be meaningfully checked by the former, so instead of being regulated by power, it simply becomes power. This year, that techno-capitalism conglomerate is meeting in a hotel outside of Dublin in August.

That should concern every one of us.

Now there’s an interesting throwaway line buried in the Wired article I got all of this information from that’s not expanded on, but I find the most unsettling. The group’s own forecast for the future of the species includes the line that societal degeneration will continue to accelerate. Obviously they’re referring to you and me, and not themselves, because the 1% have never been too concerned with fitting in with the masses.

But isn’t it the algorithm, their algorithm, that manufactures the division, the chaos, the degeneracy in the first place? Is this why so many of them want to colonize the Moon or Mars? Because they can’t stand to live in the world they’ve spent a decade poisoning? I don’t know. Maybe.

I don’t want to leave you with just a summary of the article, though. That’s too depressing, honestly, if not also mildly comedic.

My entire thesis underlying Kali Ex Machina is using the occult and technology to work for you, because the reality is, anyone can.

Magick Works.

When you strip off the tech-bro varnish from the society and look at what’s buried underneath, you find cult-building, community-creation, longevity rituals, and matchmaking (yes, the society hosts a matchmaking tool as well). There’s also Thiel himself, a man who gives lectures in Rome and San Francisco about the “Antichrist,” or his version of it (which is, essentially, anyone wanting to put a check on Big Tech and accelerationism).

All of this spread among the most powerful people on Earth to discuss the future of humanity and the future of them, which could be two different futures.

This sounds a lot like a coven meeting to me, under the guise of hard tech and enterprise.

But really, this is not all that surprising, particularly not when you consider the source.

Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One compares the best startups to “slightly less extreme kinds of cults.” Technological know-how isn’t what alters reality. Instead, it’s story, myth, symbol, ritual, and the sacred, even if it is manufactured. He understands that building a company or a movement is building belief.

None of this is new.

Secret power and hidden knowledge is ancient. There’s Freemasonry, the Golden Dawn, and Bohemian Grove (where actual presidents attended ceremonies in literal robes). The world runs on symbols and stories. Why? Because they keep and hold attention. Whoever gathers the most attention and creates captivating stories can manufacture reality.

The word “occult” just means hidden. That’s all. But it wasn’t hidden because it doesn’t work.

So this is the good news side of this story. The part that is applicable to you reading this right now.

If the most powerful people alive are gathering in secret to ritualize longevity in a wealthy brotherhood, then they have just given you a form of empowerment.

These things work, and not just for them.

The technologies of the occult are not patented. You don’t need to be wealthy to access them. There’s no invitation you have to wait on or net worth you need to acquire.

A candle can be a dollar. You can find a tarot deck right now on Amazon for twenty bucks or so, and you can use it again and again and again. It’s a mirror anyone can learn to read. I’m not saying Dialog is doing tarot readings or candle magick (although I’m not saying they aren’t), but what I am saying is that the magick of the hidden and the occult basis of ritual is available to every one of us.

They’ve seen the capability of spellwork—the algorithm is proof of that. It captures your attention, redirects your will, preys on your fear, and feeds you a curated reality engineered to keep you reactive, divided, and consuming. It enchants you away from your own power and creativity. It takes your mind without consent. You have, essentially, been enrolled in their cult without realizing it.

So what is the counter-spell? Using the power yourself.

Reclaim your focus and use technology for your own good—to start a business, find like-minded people and grow community, reach out to elders, puzzle out your destiny. The algorithm might be a spell cast on you, but once you become aware of this, you can use it to do the casting.

Now, if you continue to think this is nonsense, or simply aesthetic, or reserved for the people in those shadowy rooms, that’s great for them. You diminish your own sovereignty. This can be a silly little “weird girl hobby” as the internet dismisses some forms of occultism as, or it can be something you understand billionaires are practicing on you as we speak.

Take this leak as an omen, but one of your own power. This is permission.

It works for them. There is no reason it won’t work for you. And you don’t need 222 members in your club to begin (numerology works for Dialog, too).

All you need is a candle, or a quiet space, or a wish you’re not afraid to speak out loud.

if you enjoyed this, please like it, subscribe, or forward it to a friend! you can find more of me here, and book a tarot reading here.

You’ve been taught to believe the material world is the real one. Your body, your bank account, your circumstances are the facts, and your wishes are the silly dreams floating over them.

You have it backwards.
Everything you can touch is only the beginning.

A wish is immaterial, existing beyond that boundary of what we can see, taste, and touch. But so, for that matter, is a decision, and we know the latter gets us somewhere. What is the difference? How do you turn the wish into the decision in a way that gets you to where you want to go?

Start with the word itself. Decide comes from the Latin for to cut off or to slice away. Decision has the same root as the word incision, which means a clean cut. A decision is not simply the act of choosing something. With every choice to go after or pursue, we must give up. Cut off. Slice away. Deciding is the act of killing everything else you might have chosen. A wish feels immaterial without a decision that will propel you in the direction of your dreams by leaving the dead things behind.

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A wish could open a plethora of doors, but the decision will force you through one.

The difference exists, but not because “wish” is immaterial and “decision” is not. They both are but one takes aligned action. You hear the phrase constantly, so much it’s become meaningless, but you know that feeling when you decide between two agonizing options? Both incredibly good or both fucking terrible? The sensation of relief that surges through you because you’ve made a choice is the aligned action. Now apply it to your wish.

If you want something, and you want it badly, you must grieve what does not go with it. If you’re not prepared to do that, you don’t really want what you say you do. Or, as is often the case, you simply don’t have the nerve yet to walk away from what is keeping you held down from floating toward your wish.

This is where magick begins.

We all know talking over a decision with an extremely trusted friend or advisor gives us that same relief I mentioned before, albeit in a smaller dose. Balancing action in your head is a circus, forcing you onto a tightrope. Talking it out in a space full of complete confidentiality is an exhale. A secret shared doesn’t keep a noose around your neck.

But what if that’s not enough? What if you aren’t prepared to speak on it just yet (the Occult Law of Silence is real, too)?

Give it a form.

Pull cards. Force yourself to see the choice you will either walk away from or crawl to.

Light a candle and make a deadline as it burns.

When you make a decision with your hands—bringing the immaterial into form—the human mind is able to better comprehend it. Better able to arrive at that too immaterial thing that precipitates action: A decision.

This is a spell. There is much I don’t know about the mechanism of magick. But I do know in order to pull a dream out from the sky, you must make it real down on earth. Deciding, and making it physical in a ritual or a spell, is part of that process.

This is what I mean by magick is decision-making technology.

The cards, the bones, the candle, the salt are instruments for turning a wish you have been carrying into a decision you have finally made.

Once the immaterial moves—once you decide and cut loose—the material starts to shift, too. It looks like magick, doesn’t it? Who is to say it isn’t? You have created your own reality in the most concrete way imaginable. You made a choice.

And the world responds.

You notice a door you’ve walked past a thousand times. You say yes even when you’re afraid. You say no without explanation or guilt. The world gives way for you.

This is what I have been trying for years to write about and finally have the vocabulary and experience to try. In other words, you are reading my decision. Tarot is part of it, ritual is too. I use the occult like other people use Claude. Not to base my entire life on, but rather as an assistance that propels me.

I’m not here to make empty promises, but I do know, after years of watching it happen, what gets results.

If you are tired of carrying a wish you have never let yourself decide on, stay. We are going to find out what you are afraid of. Then we are going to cut.

if you want more, find me here.