In the grand bazaar of late-stage big capital corporatism, especially in the US of A which has had decades of Edward Bernays style Public Relations trying to make minds only more individualistic and trained to poo poo social sharing and cohesion, one is encouraged to market oneself as either a flawless product for women or a tough it up bootstrap hustle culture man. With robot A saying "How ya doin?"... and Robot B responding "good good"... the modern worker must be endlessly “optimized,” emotionally frictionless, smiling through precarity like an airline stewardess on a crashing aircraft. Anxiety becomes a personal failure rather than a rational response to a deranged economic order. But speaking of one’s struggles is not weakness. It is, in fact, an act of rebellion.
At this time/space vector, one of our personal greatest struggles is trying to get anyone to listen to us. We create films that are ignored by gatekeepers that very few people know exist, have two podcasts, one being a gen AI venture called "Artificially Resurrected", resurrecting evolved minds from the past to speak on the imbalances and injustices of the present... and provide solutions, along with "An Infinite Path" podcast consisting of narrated essays and these shorter on camera insights related to self-development, both to help de-condition those with ears to hear from imperial programming, all of which get 1/1000th the listens and views they deserve. But years of creating obscure content is not a big problem in the grand scheme of the world. We could be an unhoused single parent having to live in their car with two kids where each week is a struggle. Who's supposed to be out of sight, and out of mind, and that's not even as bad as being a child trying to survive in the Congo or Palestine. All of whom, for imperial monsters, have no compassion given toward.
Suffering is compartmentalized if not outright privatized. The system depends upon isolation. It survives by convincing each exhausted, indebted, overworked person that their misery is unique and therefore shameful. The minute people begin speaking honestly — about mistakes, burnout, loneliness, fear, addiction, financial desperation, despair — the façade cracks. And this is even worse in the supremacist hate churches of big religion. When one starts going through any spiritual development (meaning evolution of self) and thus realizes they are in an authoritarian cult, they are said to be the problem, not the nest of fundamentalist dark sorcery they are in... and should leave in droves.
There is also something profoundly humanizing in confession - in the genuine admission that one is frightened, overwhelmed, burnt out, or feeling permanently wounded. Unless your the 1/3rd to 1/4th of America who are Fasch Theo faux Christian Psychos cheering on the end times for fake white Republican Jesus, the 2/3rds to 3/4 majority of the American people right now are in a mental health crisis over the 6 regressives on the supreme court trying to roll back most if not all of the 20th centuries progress, ongoing threats to our voting by the stratospherically corrupt MAGA cult who hate truth, the AI job apocalypse, Palantir surrvailence menovolence, and that's not even getting into the potentially upcoming self-aware Skynet, global financial world war Epstein crisis, and climate crisis that these Fasch Theos think is a liberal hoax cause they hate science, and such honesty restores moral proportion in a culture addicted to narcissistic competition. The cutthroat capitalist ethos whispers: conceal your weakness lest you lose value. But human worth is not stock price. A person is not a startup seeking investor confidence. We are social creatures who are not just only commercial traders, and there is dignity in acknowledging that fact openly while living inside an empire which seems content on destroying itself at the expense of its middle class.
To articulate suffering requires courage because vulnerability risks judgment. It risks rejection. The coward’s route is concealment: to maintain the illusions or polished LinkedIn version of oneself while quietly deteriorating inside like a condemned building with attractive signage. Strength, meanwhile, consists in refusing the performance altogether. Solidarity cannot emerge from silence. Human beings do not unite around curated perfection. They unite around recognized pain. Every spiritual, environmental, pro-democratic, or labor movement, every civil rights struggle, every meaningful collective uprising began when people stopped pretending they were individually failing and realized they were being systematically crushed for greed.
The truly weak often are those incapable of admitting vulnerability at all. Observe the puffed-up titans of industry and their political puppets, forever cultivating myths of invincibility while medicating themselves into oblivion and requiring oligarch money through lobbying, publicists, and propagandists to maintain their illusions that their Emperors have clothes. While the strong person says plainly: “I am struggling. This system doesn't work. Or more accurately said, works amazingly well for the richest .01% and screws over the 99.09% and will only begin to be fixed with fundamentally progressive reforms such as passing a constitutional ammendment which says ""Artificial Entities Such as Corporations Do Not Have Constitutional Rights" and "Money is Not Free Speech"” And by doing so, permits others to do the same. So honesty becomes a revolutionary virtue.