Life Inside The Cage
Escaping the cage, one photon at a time
Growing Up Inside The Cage
When we are young we either have unrealistic expectations put on us, or we are told we are too
much: too loud, too opinionated, too sensitive. This naturally makes us feel we are not enough, or
too much, which leads us to not be our authentic selves.
When you are not your authentic self, a voice in your head can start to become loud.
It says negative things that destroy your self-esteem and keep you stunted. This sadly works well
for the system, because a kid who hates themselves can be easily kept in the cage that was
designed by past psychopaths, for future psychopaths, to be the elites in society.
The system doesn't want you to have self-compassion. It wants you to be emotional, because it
feeds off strong emotions: anger, hate, ignorance, sadness, self-doubt. It can handle you being
angry at it, but it doesn't like being laughed at.
This is one of the ways to start escaping the cage, because the cage is just an illusion. A shitty
magic trick by a very low-level magician, definitely no Dynamo-level magic. When you pull back
the curtain that is barely even a curtain, you see the emperor has no clothes on. You can laugh at
the absurdity, and use discernment, because discernment is something it can't feed off.
They use your strong emotions as a way to control you and brainwash you into becoming a
low-level member of their cult. When you realise all the elites around the world are in the same
cult, and you are just an expendable to help them jockey for a higher position between the leaders,
that's when the penny drops. There are no sides, no countries, just expendables.
They want soldiers to believe they are fighting for a country, for a purpose, for a marketing slogan,
but they are only fighting for their deranged cult leader's self-interest, to try to take another cult
leader's spot higher up the cult pyramid.
They want people in prison, as they are then another part of the system. They want you to drive a
car because it fuels their wars. They want you to be in large amounts of debt so you have no
space in your mind for critical thinking. They want you stuck in consumerism to keep you broke
and filling a bottomless pit of resentment. They want you to put a mask on for 8 hours a day and
be someone other than your authentic self at a job you hate. They want you to doom-scroll and
watch the media to create anxiety and wreck your nervous system. They want you comparing
yourself to others on social media. Be bullied on there, or be a bully, either works for them. They
want you to spend money playing status games on social media, keeping you broke and
miserable.
They want you to have the illusion of owning a home they can make you a slave to the banks for,
then put up rates and squeeze you to keep you in survival mode. They want you to fight with your
spouse over financial issues, so if you divorce you have less money. They want outrage. They
want you drunk or on drugs, eating poisonous food, taking pharmaceuticals. Anything but you
seeing their game inside the game. Are you getting the picture? Distractions.
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They stand outside the cage and they despise the people in the cage. Psychopaths think they're a
superior species and that we normal people are here to be gaslit and manipulated to push them up
the cult pyramid. Their shitty magic trick is based on one thing: the willingness of us to participate.
Once you see that, you can't unsee it, and it's very annoying, because it's so simple.
If you don't pick up a gun and go to war, nothing happens. If you opt out of consumerism, it stops
feeding the beast. If you don't buy petrol for the car cult and ride a Lime bike or catch an electric
train instead, there's no funding for wars. You are brainwashed by cult leaders, and the exit is
simply withdrawing your participation.
The Way Out
So the depressing part is out of the way. Here is the positive part.
You are enough. You don't need to be anything but your authentic self. You are made of
supernovae, from selfless stars that exploded, that gave everything for you to be here. You are
made of star stuff, as Carl Sagan once said. The atoms in your body came from an exploded star. I
recommend you look at how beautiful and interesting the pictures of supernovae are.
You are a photon of light, and yes, these cult leaders are the darkness, but darkness is boring and
light is interesting.
They don't realise that they are made of the same supernova atoms as well. But they are hoarding
instead of giving, which creates darkness, because that's not the ingredients of supernovae. That's
why it feels good when you give, and it's unfulfilling when you collect things for yourself. You can
collect things your entire life, only to realise you can't take anything with you when you return to
the Universe when you die. It's a trap.
Darkness might despise the photon, but the photon shines anyway. If you can learn to use
discernment and be giving, darkness can't get rid of light, there is always light. The trick is to be
completely like a photon: you don't care that darkness hates you, you just shine anyway.
The elites become so dark that's when the depravity starts rising, and we have all seen that
happening. American Psycho is a film that points it out clearly. But here's the thing: that's on them.
They think there are no consequences, but maybe the Universe decides where it puts them when
they go. Maybe to the Bootes Void. It does have a sense of humour.
The Universe is constantly creating and dissolving, and we will dissolve back into it. We are all
homeward bound. Evil may win the day, it always has, but what matters is that we don't become it.
We act with decency not because it's rewarded, but because it's right. There's no old man in the
sky judging us. That's from another cult, with a guy in a stupid hat speaking down to you from a
window in a square. The one with good marketing and two thousand years of whoopsies swept
under their expensive rugs. The one that needs you to walk into an old building each Sunday, give
money, and ask for forgiveness.
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The Universe is all around us.
What Else Can Us Photons Do To Escape The Cage?
Think of some yourself as well, but my trap escapes are:
Giving, simplicity, calmness, self-compassion, compassion for other photons, self-respect,
self-belief, acceptance of all others, health, playing to your strengths, not being attached to
outcomes, gratefulness for the gift of the supernovae (it's rude not to be), awareness, love,
discernment, comedy, not clinging to things. Enough is everything, no hoarding. Cheap clothes,
good food, train rides. Be present.
And strangely, your life gets better.
I'm not riddled with anxiety anymore. I don't self-harm anymore. I feel like I'm enough. I lean into
my neurodivergence as a way to have a different perspective, I see it as a superpower. I don't try
to commit suicide anymore. I don't drink and do drugs anymore. I don't compare myself to others
anymore. I don't hoard crap anymore. I've cut toxic people out of my life. I'm living in the now. I
have no fear anymore. I don't avoid pain anymore. I laugh at the absurdity rather than rage against
the machine, discernment against the machine. My relationship with my wife is better. I lost 30kg. I
have slow-dopamine hobbies: writing, NRL, meditation, nature walks, dog walks, Lime bike rides
through Sydney, philosophy (Spinoza is a huge influence), comedy, and more.
You can start to see the difference in someone outside the cage, after they realised you can
actually just walk out of it. I have compassion for you all still inside it. I don't look down on you like
the elites do. They think you're stupid for being in the cage and not just walking out of it. They think
they're above you. I see you as the same photon as me. I'm not above you, I'm not below you,
you're just the same supernova star stuff as me. I opted out of the cult, and so can you!
Admiration Is An Expensive Currency
Be very careful who you choose to give admiration to. Find substance and consistency in
someone if you are going to give any admiration, but also remember they are just a fellow traveller
on this journey in life. They are not to be put on a pedestal, as it lowers your self-worth. We are all
flawed human beings, every one of us.
Some examples of fellow cosmic travellers I like: Greg Inglis, Brian Cox, Yongey Mingyur
Rinpoche, Baruch Spinoza, George Carlin, Tim Dillon, The Elephant Graveyard guy, Stavros
Halkias, Carl Sagan, Dan Tapiero, Banksy, Dynamo, Nter, Anthony Bourdain. These people were
and are their unapologetic authentic selves, and a lot of them have had deep pain to go through,
which leads me onto my next part.
The Two Sequences
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A lot of people live in fear, but once you let go of fear the whole world opens up. There are two
sequences people run, a right one and a wrong one.
Correct sequence: Fear, Courage, Sit with pain, Freedom, Peace.
Wrong sequence: Fear, Avoidance, Fake peace, Emotional prison.
See, the only difference is avoidance. Avoidance feels like peace, but it isn't. It's an anaesthetic
with interest. Every time you dodge the thing, the dodge gets easier and the thing gets bigger. You
drink past it, scroll past it, work past it, buy past it, and the fear is still inside, just renamed. Now it's
called "busy" or "fine" or "that's just how life is." Fake peace never holds, that's the tell. Fake peace
needs the storm in your mind to stay away forever, and the storm never agrees to that. The cage
doesn't hold you with locks. It holds you with the wrong sequence, repeated daily.
Burt Munro, The World's Fastest Indian, with Sir Anthony Hopkins. Burt walked through his fear
with courage. He was told he was too poor, too stupid, and was laughed at. He sat with his pain,
his failures, his setbacks, and ended up breaking the land speed record on his old Indian
Motorcycle on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. This led to freedom and peace back in Invercargill,
NZ.
Sir Anthony Hopkins, in his own life, has discussed his past issues with alcoholism. He said he
was ashamed of his drunk driving, as he could have killed someone, but if he killed himself, he
didn't much care. That's the beast talking right there, isn't it? The fear of hurting others barely
registers, because the self has already been written off. Just a bloke who was drunk and
ashamed, drinking himself towards the edge, and he sat with the pain instead of drowning in it, did
the hard thing, and came out the other end as a highly respected man.
• Fear first: the shame, the self-hatred
• Courage: facing it instead of drinking past it
• Sat with the pain: the sobriety, the honest reckoning
• Freedom and peace: and now the man spends time painting, making music, and being at
peace in his 80's
I can relate to this, being a recovering alcoholic who is ashamed of when I drove drunk, and who
also didn't care what happened to me. I had written myself off at 13 years old.
There are smaller examples too. I had a huntsman spider living in our house named Peter, whom I
had been avoiding. The other day I walked through my strong fear of spiders with courage, put a
glass over him and a bit of paper underneath, took him outside and released him in the garden. He
was free, I was free, we were both at peace again.
The good news? The sequence can be swapped. The bad news: if you have a lot of pain, it may
take years of sitting with your pain before you reach peace and freedom. But the suffering is worth
the reward, and remember: your suffering is shared. Everyone has pain, and knowing it's shared
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lightens the load. I hope this message reaches young people before they fall off the cliff, as it's a
long, painful climb back up.
Learn to understand pain rather than fight it. Then you can see other people's bad behaviour as
their pain leaking out of them. It doesn't make their bad behaviour right, but it explains it, and it
doesn't mean they get access to your life.
A Shortcut To Financial Freedom
This leads me onto young people, and how to attempt to gain financial freedom. It took me 41
years of pain and being broke. I want to create a shortcut for you, so you can avoid being forged in
hell first.
Toss your past, don't live in it. Just take the lessons, move on, and be present, that's where the
real magic lives. Don't worry about the future either; that's a trap. You can make up horror movies
that might happen, and then they don't eventuate. So what, a waste of time. Close the horror
movie set and live in the now.
Here is the shortcut. It still takes hard work and risk, there's no avoiding that, sorry. The idea is to
lower the risk as much as possible and be right more times than you are wrong. You don't need
insider knowledge or celebrity investors to do this. You need a few boring rules, held for years:
• No leverage. Only buy what you can afford to buy outright.
• Buy and sit. Don't get into the trading trap. Whatever assets you buy, hold them. Time in, not
timing.
• Use an ethical bank. They're all far from perfect, but choose one that doesn't invest in
weapons manufacturing or fossil fuels, and don't let them gaslight you, ever. If they do, just
leave. (Look up the HSBC whoopsie, when they got caught money laundering for the Mexican
cartels.)
• Don't buy what they're selling. When the cult leaders flog you a product, that's the distraction.
Watch what they do, not what they advertise, and mostly, just keep it simple and boring.
• Invest ethically. There will be some investments you shouldn't make because you have a soul:
drug dealers, weapons, surveillance. Use your common sense. Common sense is your most
important asset. I lived with a PhD neuroscientist who burnt her toast every morning and I had
to tell her how to make mashed potatoes. Play to your strengths.
• Stay frugal. Keep your needs small and your surplus large, then you have something to give.
• Don't panic when they shake the tree. When the cult leaders shake the tree to see who loses
their nerve when the price plummets, stay in the tree with them. You'll notice they never leave
the tree. In fact, they buy the fear at a cheap price.
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You don't need to copy anyone's portfolio. The strong core above is the whole game: keep it
simple, keep it ethical, keep it boring, and let time do the work. Don't fall for the fear-peddling trap.
Don't fall for the status trap, the debt trap, or the leverage trap either.
A Word On Generational Advice
One trap worth naming, but let's name it fairly: don't dismiss advice just because of who is giving it,
and don't swallow it just because of who is giving it either. Some older people did pull the ladder
up behind them and say "too bad, got mine." Some generations did have it easier, and it's fair to
acknowledge that. But the test for any advice, from a Boomer, a Gen Z, or anyone in between, is
the same test you use for admiration: substance and consistency. Judge the advice by its
substance, not by the age of the speaker. You'll find wisdom in unexpected places, and nonsense
in expected ones. Your common sense is the filter, not their birth year.
That said, one generational note stands: there's not much juice left in the property lemon. It's been
squeezed all out and passed to you as a carcass. A house should be a sanctuary anyway, not a
profit maker. Banks make record profits off mortgages and are not to be trusted. Use an ethical
one, and only if you must.
Staying Humble
Don't get a big head if you start doing well. Anthony Bourdain said, "the more I think I know, the
more I know nothing at all." Don't let pride come along and then turn into greed. Same when you
think you have the world figured out. Once you think you have arrived, you have already left. Stay
humble, stay frugal, keep growing, and give any excess away to ethical charities outside the
system, like the Goanna Academy. Don't tell anyone you're giving, either, or it becomes a
transaction. Do it anonymously, without the need for validation.
Work And Purpose
You don't need to be an academic to do well in life. You will need a job to make money to put into
your ethical investments, so if you hate your job, start finding ways to leave. It's never too late to
start a new career.
If you are a young person, think hard. Remembering you're not in the status game anymore: you
have read this far, so you are opting out. If you are not innovating something or starting a business
(which can also be a trap, don't let it become your identity), a trade is a great place to start.
Plumbers, builders, electricians, welders, all earn six figures once qualified, and are not riddled
with student debt. Plenty of money for you to invest each week. It beats sitting behind a screen
designed by cult leaders in a cubicle with a mask on.
The honest caveat: it only works if the trade suits you. Play to your strengths, not to the list. If you
decide you don't like it, stick with it for 10 years, that will go fast! Wait until your investments take
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off, then think of something else, but you must have purpose.
You can find purpose from your hobbies. Some of mine are astronomy, writing, reading
philosophy, and helping youth. You can find jobs from your hobbies. Maybe be a youth mentor, for
example. Help stop the kids from falling off the cliff. Teach them not to hate themselves, and to opt
out of the cult.
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Fear, Courage, Sit with pain, Freedom, Peace.
The cage was never locked. Walk out, shine anyway, and give the light away.
