We Thought We Were Free. Turns Out We’re Just Comfortable.

The Train

Every morning the ritual repeats.
A river of bodies moves through the station—heads bowed, faces lit by tiny blue suns. No hymns, no incense, just the hum of engines and the gentle throb of data moving through millions of hands. It looks like prayer. Maybe it is.

Everyone is inside their own world: stock prices, newsfeeds, private dramas measured in likes. You can feel the invisible pulse of information in the air, a digital heartbeat syncing strangers who will never meet. Nobody speaks. Nobody looks up.

This is what modern captivity looks like—quiet, efficient, self-regulated. No chains, no guards. Just the story that this is normal.

The train moves, and with it the myth: we are free.

How the Story Began

Once, before glass screens replaced horizons, myth was our way of surviving chaos. We needed stories to explain thunder, hunger, and death. They gave the mind a map of mystery.

But somewhere along the line, story learned it could rule.

In the temples, priests discovered that whoever shaped the story shaped the people. Heaven and hell became management tools; guilt became currency. Myth hardened into law, and obedience became the price of belonging.

Centuries passed. The robes changed, but the psychology didn’t.
When the gods grew quiet and the markets grew loud, a new priesthood rose behind the counters.

In the marketplaces, merchants inherited the mythic machinery. The promise of salvation remained, only now it came wrapped in packaging. Repentance became payment; prayer became purchase. Work was worship; profit was grace. Desire was captured, refined, and sold back to the desirer. The same hunger for transcendence that once built cathedrals now built shopping malls.

Then came the machines—quicker, quieter, omnipresent.
The hymns became jingles, the altars became screens, and the offerings turned digital.

In the data centers, the evolution completed itself. Algorithms became priests of the new age, decoding our every wish, feeding us personalized heavens and algorithmic hells. Faith turned into personalization; the new altar fits in a pocket.

Across millennia the vocabulary shifted—sin, success, engagement—but the grammar remained the same: divide the world, sell the cure.

The Age of Fracture

At the core of every controlling story lies the same geometry: a line between opposites.
Good and evil. Success and failure. Human and nature. Self and other.

The split is elegant and deadly. It gives the mind something to cling to, a way to sort the infinite into categories. But each division tears the world a little more.

You feel it in yourself: the war between who you are and who you’re supposed to be. The marketed self versus the breathing one. Every billboard and sermon whispers the same command—choose a side.

Culture runs on these fractures. Without them, there’s nothing to sell, nothing to preach, nothing to control.

So we live in fragments.
We praise light and exile shadow. We idolize reason and mistrust intuition. We talk about the planet as resource, emotion as weakness, rest as laziness. We call this civilization, but it feels like dismemberment.

When a society forgets its wholeness, anxiety becomes its anthem. We medicate, optimize, distract, scroll—anything to drown the hum of the fracture.

Yet under the noise, something remembers.

When Myth Serves Life

Not all stories wound. Some weave.

Among the Yawanawá of the western Amazon, myth is still a verb. It’s sung, danced, inhaled with smoke. Story there is a living contract between people and forest. When they recount their origins, they aren’t describing history—they’re refreshing relationship. The song feeds the land, and the land feeds the song.

In Yoruba-descended ceremonies, the Orishas embody contradiction. Ogun is war and creation; Yemanjá is mother and storm. Divinity isn’t clean; it’s complex. To invoke them is to remember that power and tenderness share a pulse. Their dance reconciles the split that modernity denies.

And sometimes a single life tells a myth big enough to challenge a civilization.
A president in South America lived in a farmhouse, gave away most of his salary, drove a dented Beetle. His simplicity was a political act, a refusal to serve the god of “more.”

Across these examples hums the same principle: a story that reconnects instead of divides becomes medicine.

A living myth doesn’t demand perfection; it invites participation. It doesn’t sell redemption; it cultivates relationship. It evolves as its people evolve.

The Science of Belief

Belief feels invisible until you try to change it.
Anyone who has left a religion, a movement, or a corporate ideology knows the sensation—the tremor in the gut, the faint panic behind the ribs. That’s neurology, not weakness.

The brain treats a challenged worldview as a threat. When a story meets our emotional needs—belonging, certainty, hope—it releases dopamine and oxytocin. Doubt releases cortisol. We cling to coherence even when it costs us truth.

Digital systems exploit this wiring. Every scroll, every ping, is a micro-dose of myth: You matter. You’re falling behind. Here’s the tribe. Here’s the threat. The feed becomes an artificial nervous system, regulating emotion at industrial scale.

But beneath the chemistry moves something older—the awareness that observes belief. The task isn’t to kill stories but to remember the storyteller. When identity shifts from narrative to witness, myths lose their power to possess.

Breaking the Spell

Escaping the mythic cage doesn’t require renouncing civilization. It begins with seeing.

Start with language. Each time you say should, pause. Whose voice is that? Each time you say success, notice what picture arises—does it belong to you or to a billboard?

Return to the body. The body is a truth detector; it tightens under lies long before the mind admits confusion. Pay attention to shoulders, jaw, breath. Most myths dissolve in sensation because they survive only in abstraction.

Laugh. Laughter restores proportion. Every tyrant, every algorithm, every guru fears humor because humor punctures the illusion of seriousness that control depends on.

Practice small acts of freedom.
Say no when you mean no. Rest without apology. Create something that doesn’t monetize well—a meal, a poem, a moment of silence. Serve quietly; play sincerely. These gestures sound small, but myth is woven from micro-obediences. Withdraw them, and the empire flickers.

Reality is participatory. The spell needs our belief to live. Stop feeding it, and it starves.

The Price of Liberation

Freedom costs more than it promises.
When you stop believing the dominant story, you become foreign to those still inside it. The myths defend themselves through social antibodies—sarcasm, concern, polite exile.

Friends may call you cynical. Family may call you ungrateful. Institutions may label you unproductive. Every heretic begins as a disappointment.

Yet the loneliness that follows is not punishment; it’s initiation. The space left by abandoned identities becomes the garden where real life grows. You discover that belonging has nothing to do with agreement and everything to do with resonance.

New companions appear—quiet ones, scattered ones—recognizable by that same glint of mischievous freedom in their eyes.

Freedom also rewrites your sense of time. Without the myth of progress pushing you forward, life curves again. You start to notice the seasons. The goal ceases to be arrival; it becomes participation. You trade ambition for intimacy, efficiency for presence.

It’s messy. It’s magnificent. And it’s yours.

The Sacred Joke

Every myth warns that chaos is dangerous.
But chaos is simply the world before someone names it.

When the old stories collapse, the first feeling is fear; the second is laughter. You see how serious the play had become—how politics, religion, even personal dramas rely on the same plot: tension, resolution, applause. Beneath it all, existence just keeps breathing, amused.

The sacred joke is that nothing was ever missing. The cage was built of metaphors. The key was curiosity. The door was never locked.

To live this way—to laugh, to serve, to create without ownership—isn’t apathy. It’s participation without possession. The end of myth as manipulation; the rebirth of myth as art.

We will always need stories. The question is whether they enslave or enliven.

Return

The train still runs.
Tomorrow morning, the same faces will glow blue in the half-light, scrolling through miniature worlds. You might be among them. But perhaps, just for a breath, you’ll look up. You’ll notice the rhythm of wheels on rail, the choreography of strangers, the pulse of something vast and unscripted moving through it all.

That noticing is the crack in the wall.
Through it, the wild light of the real world pours in.

And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
The myths will still whisper, but now you’ll recognize the accent. You’ll smile—maybe even laugh—and step into the day not as a character inside a prewritten plot, but as the storyteller who remembers that every tale can be told again.

Author note:
Written by Rudá Iandê, author of Laughing in the Face of Chaos—a field guide for remembering your sovereignty in a world built on beautiful illusions.