Modern societies whisper a dangerous lie: that being alive is the same as existing. It's not, and I feel it in myself—this slippage between states. When I cycle through meaningful tasks, reacting, adjusting, doing, I exist. When stripped of purpose—cut off from resources and responsibilities that let me nudge my little part of the world toward better—I vanish. Alive, breathing, yet not here.

We’ve become meat sacks with screens. Society herds us toward this half-life: doomscrolling, consuming, floating in digital ether while corporations harvest our attention and wallets. We grant them rights to repurpose our money, our time, our will. In return? A hollow proxy-purpose. No chance to feel the friction of real work—the kind that roots us in existence.

The Apartment Test

I walk home to silence. No children’s laughter, no partner waiting. I cook for one—an act of rebellion. Aligning resources (food, time) with responsibility (sustaining this body). A simple equation for existence.
But society scoffs: “Why cook? Tap an app.” GrubHub, DoorDash, bars shimmering with false communion.
After eating, choices hover:
• Wipe glasses to crystalline clarity
• Sweep floors into Zen order
• Design, write, create —or— Drown in the scroll.
Instagram’s curated bliss. YouTube’s doomsday economics. Twitter’s war-drums. Ads promising health without effort, purpose without struggle.

The Jackhammer Truth

Purpose demands two things:
1 Action (the jackhammer’s roar)
2 Awareness (knowing where to break ground)
Modern life sabotages both. It floods us with distant crises—problems we can’t solve, wars we can’t stop—while starving us of agency. We’re fed a diet of digital soda: sweet, addictive, nutritionally void. It tricks us into believing consuming news is engaging with life.

But here’s the rot:
You cannot borrow purpose from algorithms.
Every minute spent judging faraway wrongs is a minute stolen from:
• Scrubbing your kitchen into dignity
• Writing one true sentence
• Leaping a manhole because your legs remember they can

The Way Back

Existence isn’t grand. It’s:
• Chicken sizzling in your pan
• A broom finding dust in corners
• Muscles relearning trust after a fall

Resist the vortex. Cook when they say order. Clean when they say ignore. Choose the weight of your own hands.
The meat sack becomes human only when it stops consuming ghosts— and builds something that couldn’t exist without you.

A Practice for Existence:

• Notice when you are consuming without purpose.
• Reclaim small acts: cook, clean, create, care for something or someone.
• Align your resources—time, energy, attention—with your responsibilities, even in small ways.
• Pause, act, reflect, and repeat.
• Let existence become a practice, not a default.