Yes, the matrix is real, here's how to escape it

it's not what you think

Who wrote the software running in your head? Are you sure you actually want it there? – Elon Musk

Most people haven’t practiced thinking.

When you talk to them, you aren’t talking to them. You’re talking to the TV. Social media. Their parents. Their teachers. Their insecurities and trauma. Or patterns they’ve picked up from AI.

It’s very robotic.

Everyone cries about how you need to be “more authentic” when they are just parroting that statement from someone else. Ironic.

The thing is, you can’t escape this.

That’s how the mind works.

We remember information that’s important to our survival, and the more it’s repeated, the more efficient it becomes.

The conscious mind can process around 50 bits of information per second, while the unconscious mind can manage around 11 million bits of information per second.

If you want to change your life, your most important life task is using your limited conscious attention to become aware of and reprogram what’s happening in the depths of your unconscious mind.

As Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it Fate.“

That way, success becomes automatic.

You don’t have to think about what to do because you just do it.

Most people, since they have not done this, are heading off a cliff. They are blind to every action they take, and their destination is pure mediocrity.

That’s why it’s extremely important to understand what got you into this position. Then, we’ll break down how to reprogram your mind for automatic success.

The Social Matrix (Program or Be Programmed)

Thought is always conditioned and therefore thought is always mechanical. – Krishnamurti

“Thinking” is mostly the automatic playback of previously encoded patterns, not conscious deliberation.

Every thought comes from memory. Memory is in the past. When you are thinking, you are just accessing stored patterns, not creating something new.

Why does this matter?

Well, brace yourself, because this isn’t going to be pretty.

The massive problem with today’s world is that you are in a social matrix.

Yes, just like the movie The Matrix, and just as bad. Not in some red-pill masculinity bro way of telling you to “escape the matrix” by buying their course, but in a real, observable way that will make you question your entire existence.

This video goes into detail about this phenomenon, but I’ve included the key points below so you can get the point quickly.

1) It starts with your parents.

Parents themselves were brainwashed by the previous generation. They pass on their worldview, biases, and beliefs unconsciously. Most parents only love and approve of you if you conform to their values and beliefs. You conform because you want to survive. You don’t want to be kicked out. Parents got their information from the same system they’re now perpetuating.

2) Early childhood conditioning.

Language shapes and limits what you can think about. Cultural norms and values are planted in your head before you can think critically. Children learn to seek approval by conforming to authority.

3) Public schools were explicitly created to reinforce obedience (as researched by UC San Diego).

The Prussian education model was designed as a long-term solution to social unrest through the standardization of thought. Specifically, it was designed to create obedient soldiers, compliant citizens, and well-behaved workers. Horace Mann brought this method to America when we were first industrializing to help educate large numbers of immigrant children.

This is where mandatory attendance, training for teachers, national curriculum and testing for students, division of students by age, and the concept of grade levels came about. Students were taught how to work and obey, not how to think, because that’s what most benefited society.

What did this lead to?

• Teachers were educated by the previous generation in the same system

• Curriculum determined by school boards (often parents) who went through the same system

• Grades and advancement create incentives to memorize rather than question

• Universities are funded by corporations with specific agendas

• Academic journals have gatekeepers who went through the same system

• Professors must publish in approved journals to maintain careers

Here’s where it starts to get hairy:

4) Information sources and authority

Media and the internet are the primary sources of mass information. News outlets are owned by corporations with profit motives. Google search algorithms prioritize university and establishment sources (meaning that most people are getting information from universities where teachers were trained by teachers, parents teach their children, and children learn from teachers). Wikipedia articles are written by academics within the school system that is already heavily biased. Social media reinforces biases through echo chambers. Entertainment subtly programs values and worldviews.

In science and academia, scientists and students rely on faith in thousands of studies they haven’t personally validated. Research funding comes from corporations and governments with agendas. This is most of the time, not all of the time, but most of the time is not good.

In other words, students and scientists trust the information provided by other students and scientists, who were raised by parents who got their information from prior students and scientists. The students’ and scientists' teachers were trained on government-provided material, which found its way into the information sources.

This should terrify you.

5) Social media and AI amplify unconsciousness

Herman and Chomsky’s propagranda model revealed 5 filters through which media shapes thought: corporate ownership, advertising pressures, sourcing from elites, organized flak campaigns, and dominant ideology.

This was a problem with traditional propaganda, but social media and AI take it to an entirely new level.

Social media is a mimetic desire amplification machine. This is one reason why Peter Thiel invested in Facebook. He understood mimetics and knew how powerful it could be.

Social media algorithms say they show you what you want to see, but the reality is that they program you to want what others appear to have. Every scroll reinforces neural pathways that lead to you thinking you actually want the highlights of someone else’s life.

In 2024, the Max Planck Institute found the first evidence that ChatGPT altered human speech patterns. Usage of certain words increased that AI often used. You’re starting to talk like the machine that learned to talk like you.

Like when you were a kid, language shaped how critically you could think. Now that our language is becoming dumber with AI (and immature Gen Z lingo taking over social media), our minds are slowly narrowing to further guaranteeing mediocrity.

In the future, AI will become a foundational layer that precedes social programming from parents and schools, because teachers will use AI to teach, students will use AI to learn, and those students will go on to be teachers and parents.

Unless you do what we will talk about, society is at the whim of how companies like OpenAI, Google, xAI, and Anthropic develop AI.

6) Society is rigged against you.

Let’s rapid-fire through a few more components of the social matrix:

The need for a job forces you to be compliant with your boss’s worldview.

That boss went through the same education system.

Marketing and advertising manipulate desires from childhood.

The food industry is incentivized to poison you because people can’t help but get addicted to hyperpalatable foods, which affects mental clarity.

The healthcare system profits from illness, not health.

Social circles punish those who question too deeply. You’ll be cast out of the tribe.

Dating and relationships require conformity, especially if you are lonely and non-self-reliant.

Politicians come from the same education system.

Therapists come from the same system.

As you can see, there’s a pattern here.

It’s a matrix. It has circular validation.

Every entity that composes society and culture (media, education, science, government, business, religion, etc) justifies and reinforces the others.

When one source is questioned, you’re met with programmed responses from NPCs like “Trust the experts,” “It’s in the textbook,” “It’s the law,” and “It’s tradition.”

Everything is validated against the same system.

External validation is not possible, therefore, we live in an illusion of our own construction.

1. You are born into a family already programmed by the matrix

2. You are conditioned by language, culture, and early peer pressure

3. You are educated in schools that reinforce the worldview that benefits the system

4. You consume media and entertainment that further shape your beliefs and desires

5. You enter the workforce, where survival depends on conformity

6. You participate in social, religious, and cultural rituals that reinforce group identity

7. You seek information and validation from sources that are themselves the products of the matrix

8. You are incentivized to conform and disincentivized to question

9. You, in turn, pass on the same programming to the next generation

That begs the question, how in the world do you actually escape the matrix, since the people who teach you how to escape the matrix are a product of the matrix?

How to reprogram your mind for automatic success

The brain and nervous system constitute a marvelous and complex “goal-striving mechanism,” a sort of built-in automatic guidance system that works for you as a “success mechanism,” or against you as a “failure mechanism,” depending on how “YOU,” the operator, operate it and the goals you set for it. – Maxwell Maltz

When we look at psychology, there are a few things we know for sure.

I’ll leave it to you to study and verify these:

• The mind evolves and expands through stages of increasing complexity, making life more interesting and enjoyable, but you can just as easily get stuck in a low level for your entire life (see: HUMAN 3.0)

• The flow state, or optimal experience and enjoyment, stems from a self-generated goal, complete clarity on how to achieve it, and a level of challenge that is just above your skill level (see: Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi and Steven Kotler)

• Your mind interprets reality through a lens of psychological survival. Your identity forms around the values and beliefs of the culture you were raised in, and you feel threatened when your identity is threatened (see: survival and ideology)

• Being extreme changes your brain because it enhances neuroplasticity (your brain’s ability to rewire itself). Novelty, challenge, and big goals shape how you process and store information.

If you want to make success automatic by realigning your unconscious toward a trajectory that will change your life, here’s what you do.

1) Create your own matrix

The unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates

The mind craves order and certainty.

That’s why we are so quick to adopt the psychological infrastructure that others assign to us. We pursue society’s goals, which influence what we deem important enough to learn, which influences the choices we make, which condition those behaviors as habits that we unconsciously repeat.

It all starts with a goal. A clear vision for where your life is going to end up. So, you need to replace the goal of school, work, and retirement with something else.

Many people attempt to do this and fail for one reason:

The fear of ending up like everyone else doesn’t outweigh the fear of discomfort.

You can tell yourself that you deeply care about your goals all day long, but the reason you don’t change is because another goal is taking priority, and that’s unconscious to you.

How do you generate a goal so meaningful you have no option but to pursue it?

You gain complete awareness of where your life is heading if you keep doing the same things. You question your life and sit with the discomfort without searching for someone else to give you the answer. You become so disgusted that the pain of staying the same makes the pain of discomfort feel like a little pinch. You remind yourself of your anti-vision (the life you don’t want to live) as a reference point from which you can aim in a different direction.

Then, you must learn to navigate the unknown.

2) Pursue an interest-based education

The education system has its perks, but it fails at the one thing it is supposed to do: educate.

Public schools help with socialization, teaching you how to write and read, and giving you a base operating system to become a civilized human, but if education equals discovery, it is doing the opposite of just that.

You learn the same topics as everyone else. You choose from the same classes as everyone else. You look up the same “high-paying skills” and “high-paying jobs” as everyone else to enter a race to the bottom. This is the only path you know, because you haven’t begun the process of self-education, so your mind only works to achieve the goal of getting a job for the sake of money and survival.

Luckily, we now live in a world where you can learn anything and do anything without permission.

How do you take advantage of this?

• Take note of the current problems with how you are living (these typically fall within health, wealth, relationships, and finances)

• Start exploring the internet and social media as a curator, not consumer

• Experiment with various methods without becoming dogmatic about any of them

• Dedicate at least 30-60 minutes a day to learning in a way that directly correlates with your self-generated goals

• Throw your mind into an entirely different environment and let your beliefs be challenged

Remember, you reprogram your unconscious by aligning your actions and learning with a goal that was not assigned to you.

Goal → interpret information → act → make mistakes → correct mistakes → repeat

You are journeying through the unknown.

Nobody can tell you where to go.

You must figure it out yourself.

3) Teach yourself (and your children) to be high agency

Agency is the ability to act without permission.

Therefore, agency is the belief that difficult tasks can become easy.

Because goals fall into 3 buckets: Easy, something we can do with our current knowledge, skills, and resources. Impossible, something we can’t do or is outside the laws of physics. Difficult, something we can’t do right away, but can eventually do if we gather the right skills and resources.

If I put a gun to your head and gave you a year to be able to bench press 315 pounds, you will either interpret that as impossible and accept your death, or you will do everything in your power to achieve it, and you probably will.

That reveals 2 problems with how the average person thinks.

First, they have an external locus of control, believing that all great accomplishments are a matter of luck rather than skill. When they need help, they look to their friends, the government, or anyone else but themselves. Their first reaction is to blame, not think, and especially not take responsibility for their lives.

Second, they are missing the intersection of importance and urgency. They have not educated themselves or experimented to the point of generating passion around a specific life task, and they do not have an awareness of where their life is heading without that aim. They are not pushed or pulled in any direction by their own desire, but they are thrown around like a puppet by someone else’s.

Education is not about math, spelling, or historical facts. It’s about instilling agency in yourself and those who come after you. A high agency individual will learn whatever knowledge they need, when they need it. A low-agency individual will stay in its nest waiting for momma bird to bring them a worm.

How do you begin to practice agency?

• Do not allow others to help you for as long as possible, even if you struggle

• When you want something, practice taking small steps to learning about it and act on it

• Drop out of school or request to be homeschooled. (This one holds a lot of baggage for a lot of people, but only those who think a lack of credentials will somehow ruin your life. I will not expand on this today.)

• Consciously expose yourself to difficult problems at least every 3-6 months. Build new projects. Study new material.

• Question what you are “supposed” to do and make a different decision. Agency isn’t just taking action, it’s deciding what actions are worth taking.

Most of the time, this will lead to the path of entrepreneurship and self-direction, as schools and jobs have values you must conform to, which limit your ability to learn and act.

4) Become a massive value creator

Humans are tool builders.

When we’ve encountered a problem, like being cold, hungry, or in danger from predators, we created fire, shelter, weapons to hunt and defend, and once those tools were created, the potential for better tools allowed for the society we’ve built today.

Nature is brutal. It’s not this kind and loving thing that many hippies believe it to be. Unless humans had transformed the earth to be hospitable, we would be extinct by now, or still drastically underdeveloped.

Beyond that, becoming a creator is central to living a good life:

• Happiness and enjoyment are the combination of progress being made and contribution to something greater than yourself.

• Both are accomplished by solving problems, for yourself and others.

• Problems are solved through creativity.

• The intersection of purpose and profit lies in creating solutions to problems you deem interesting and passing those solutions down to contribute to humanity

• You become able to solve more complex problems because you become equipped with more knowledge, skill, and resources

• Life gets better as problems shift from shallow to meaningful

It just so happens that the highest leverage place to create (right now, at least) is on the internet.

It is the path of high agency. You don’t need permission to create something and post it on the internet. You don’t need permission to navigate idea space and find the information you need.

This may change in the future, but that only reinforces the point. No matter if it’s the internet or intergalactic space or virtual reality, the answer has been and always will be to share the value you acquire in a place where the right people can find it.

Thank you for reading.

If you’d like resources on high-value skills to develop, how to become a creator (not the typical content creator), and more, I’ve included links below.

– Dan

• The 2 Hour Writer for a high-value skill to become a creator without worrying about video or speaking.

• The One-Person Business Launchpad for a beginner level modern business course.

• How I systemize my life with AI, a mini course to