You Cannot Fight Evil with Evil

THE VRILL BOARD

Aesthetics to increase your Vrill

VRILL INSIGHTS

THE WORLD DESERVES YOUR VIBES

For almost a decade I believed I was one optimization away from being whole.

Not one big change, but a continuous implementation of all of them. The perfect morning routine. Quitting social media. The most evolutionarily aligned diet combined with the most ridiculous bio hacks. The final straw to break the camels back and allow me to rest was always around the corner but never came.

I pursued wisdom like an obsessed maniac. Convinced that if I kept going one day I'd finally be who I wanted to be. I outlasted every friend who started the journey with me.

The problem I never admitted out loud was this: I had to trust that my version of the ideal was correct, while simultaneously knowing I didn't have enough information to be certain it was.

Every optimization, every decision, every activity required justifying itself against a moving target I had defined myself.

The burden was not the discipline. The burden was the constant self-referential loop of justification. I prided myself in my "self-awareness". In the beginning I even looked down on others for not having it. But, I was not becoming more whole, I was becoming more elaborate.

The reason I am thinking about this is because we've been reading Ted Kaczynski's Industrial Society & Its Future in our book club. He named what I was doing cleanly:

Surrogate activities.

They are goals you pursue not because they connect to something genuine, but because the pursuit itself fills the space where purpose should be. The optimization was never going to make me whole. It was designed to feel like it might. That is the only way it keeps working.

What broke the loop was not a better framework. It was a conversation about God.

Last year, for the first time in my life, I used God in a sentence referring to my own personal concept of God.

I spoke about deep things without first constructing the entire philosophical apparatus required to defend them.

Thousands of layers of conceptual complexity, gone. Not because I had finally thought my way through them. Because I had stopped needing them to protect me.

This made me realize a distinction that changed it all: the difference between belief and faith. Belief is something you hold in your mind. Faith is something you act from before proof arrives.

Faith requires acting from an internal signal you cannot fully justify. The optimization project was an attempt to eliminate the need for that signal. If I had the right information, the right framework, the right routine, I would never have to trust something I couldn't prove. I would know.

This year I went back to the same place where the first conversation happened.

I met people I had met the year before. A Thai woman we had crossed paths with in the sauna. A man who runs the coworking space, not naturally social, not the kind of person who opens easily.

What I noticed, for the first time, was the difference in how these interactions went. Not what was said. How it moved and felt.

Within two sauna sessions we were planning for her to teach us freediving. She was bringing us gear and equipment, for free.

The coworking man and I spoke about his projects, his relationship with his health, the things he cares about quietly.

The reciprocal nature of humans is extraordinary when you stop managing the interaction from inside your own head and simply show up to it.

What I had spent years trying to construct through discipline and frameworks was available the whole time, on the other side of getting out of my own way.

This is a friendly reminder to get out of your head. To start trusting that internal sense of what you ought to be doing, not because you can justify and rationalize it.

You have to be crazy. You have to be a little strange. You have to be one of one.

The world deserves your vibes.

BY @MJ