282: Addiction and Homelessness

February 13, 2026

Addressing Alienation and Expected Emulation

When I was young I was convinced my future would involve addiction and homelessness.

Not because I lacked ambition, quite the opposite.
Not because I was broken, which I most definitely am.
Because I could see.

I could see the people we were told to admire. The politicians. The business boys. The cultural stars. The academic knobs. The air-head athletes. The perfectly packaged humans floating across screens.

They were empty. Often immoral. Basic. And to me, boring.

And the culture insisted I look up.

I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I don’t.

It was always easier for me to identify with the person outside the frame. The one sleeping rough. The one unraveling. The one getting high. The one who didn’t fit the script. I could feel their gravity. Their honesty. Their refusal, whether chosen or forced.

That’s the irony.

Capitalism trains you to aspire upward.
I was drawn sideways. Downward. Outward and outside the frame.

I grew up in the most significant media expansion in human history. From Saturday morning scarcity — when cartoons were rationed like sugar — to algorithmic abundance, where you can conjure entire worlds on demand by typing a sentence.

And in all that spectacle, I found no one to look up to.

Every era offers heroes. Our era kills them.

Our era offered brand ambassadors for power.

And now the Epstein files ooze into the light and everyone pretends to be shocked. As if the rot wasn’t always visible. As if glamour wasn’t a laundering operation.

I didn’t want to become that.

So I did my own thing. Thought my own thoughts. Spoke them publicly. Performed them. Provoked with them.

That’s how I try to survive the alienation.

By walking the path less travelled and focusing less on the destination and instead on the moral imperative of each step. The result is a kind of dance, a hustle if you will.

Occasionally that hustle creates demand. An audience. Sometimes even money. But never understanding. I’ve never been understood.

Which is fine.

The fool doesn’t need comprehension. The fool needs timing. The fool destabilizes the court by laughing at it.

Still, the alienation remains.

Because in a culture built on emulation, the refusal to emulate is effective exile.

AI makes sense in this context. For those excluded from the media entertainment complex, AI is a translation machine. It lets you turn private thought into public frame. It lets you bypass the gate. It lets you render your interiority legible.

In a society built on spectacle, legibility is survival.

But none of this touches the deeper fracture.

We are living inside accelerating authoritarianism wrapped in convenience. Industrial time, industrial heat, industrial decay. The climate is breaking and we’re still demanding people drive two hours a day to return to the office so as to reduce their productivity and happiness.

Adaptation is what we ought to be doing.

This winter I started training myself to wake between 2 and 4am. Not for productivity hacks. For survival. By May the heat will already be rising before most people open their eyes. Industrial circadian rhythms are factory relics. They were never designed for a burning planet.

The schedule is broken.
The institutions are broken.
The air is broken.

At what point do you just say: I’m out.

Not in despair.

In clarity.

Addiction and homelessness hover in my imagination not as tragedy, but as exit. As a refusal to continue performing stability for a system that is collapsing in slow motion.

Van life. Tent cities. Camping wherever you can. The edges are growing. More people arrive there every year, whether they intended to or not.

It doesn’t feel absurd anymore.

It feels ambient.

Everything under fascism is precarious. Work is precarious. Speech is precarious. Climate is precarious. Belonging is precarious. Legality itself becomes elastic.

Illicit becomes normal.

When legitimacy rots, the margin becomes honest.

I was told to aspire upward.

I have always felt the gravitational pull of the outside.

Maybe that’s pathology.

Or maybe it’s perception.

Maybe addiction and homelessness are not the destination.

Maybe they are the cultural hallucination of what happens when you refuse to worship corruption. (Farming is the antidote to the hallucinations as it literally keeps you grounded in soil and surrounded by friendly animals).

In a world built on illusion, the person outside the illusion can look like collapse.

But sometimes they are simply not participating.

And in a collapsing empire, non-participation feels illicit.

Good.

Let it.