got.daim
𝓑𝓵𝓮𝓼𝓼𝓮𝓭 𝓫𝔂 𝓐𝓷𝓪
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- Feb 28, 2024
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no you don’t get it i already worked i already served i already did my time in the box the grind the labyrinth of fake tasks and fake smiles and fake deadlines that never ended and all for what? to earn paper with numbers on it to be told i was “being productive” by people who haven’t had a real thought since 2007 and every time i hear someone say “you should get a job” i feel the ancient migraine stirring in the back of my soul like a storm that never left and i laugh but not with joy no no with a kind of cracked spiritual exhaustion because they don’t know they don’t know what it means to leave the office and realize the sun hasn’t hit your face in 14 days because the lights inside flickered just enough to trick your body into forgetting what day it was and the coffee tastes like resignation and the printer is always out of toner and the walls are made of drywall and defeat and the break room smells like sadness reheated in a microwave from 1998 you don’t know what it’s like to sit in a meeting about meetings while your soul bleeds out into your socks and your manager named craig says things like “let’s circle back” and “touch base offline” like he’s casting spells to keep your brain in a jar full of office jargon and every time you try to scream it comes out as “haha yeah good point craig” and you realize you haven’t blinked in seven hours because your screen keeps whispering “buy more buy more stay small obey” in pixels too small for HR to detect and the windows don’t open and the fire exits are fake and the company handbook is written in sanskrit and threats so yeah i’m RETIRED i took the oath i signed the document in crayon and moonlight i shook hands with the old man under the bridge who gave me the final password and told me “you’ve done enough you may leave now” and ever since then i’ve lived outside of time i wake up when i want i eat when the fridge allows it i wander the alleys where the pigeons speak backwards truths and the squirrels bow when they see me because they know i got out i escaped the loop i no longer have to submit my dreams for quarterly performance review i no longer have to ask permission to think you still think getting a job means you’re doing the right thing but i’ve seen the other side i’ve seen the vending machines plotting and the elevators remembering and the phones listening and the bosses multiplying in secret basements where they keep the real coffee that actually tastes like hope and you’ll never get to taste it unless you quit but they won’t let you quit they’ll say “what about your future” as if the future isn’t just a hallway of flickering lights and ergonomic chairs that squeak when you weep and you’ll ask for a raise and they’ll give you pizza and a casual friday where you can wear jeans while they siphon your essence into a PDF i don’t need a job i have missions now i have tasks that can’t be explained in microsoft teams i wake up and decode the patterns in bird droppings on car roofs i spend hours listening to the hum of my ceiling fan and translating it into forgotten dialects of truth i pace in circles and summon old memories from the dust under my bed i am doing the work just not your work not their work not work that drains and breaks and chews and swallows i’m retired from that i put in my time and they still send me emails but i changed my name i changed my frequency i am no longer hireable because i have ascended to the plane of post-employment truth
so stop telling me to get a job stop acting like i owe the system more of my blood and hours i gave it enough i gave it everything and all it gave me was a coffee-stained lanyard and nightmares about spreadsheets and now i live free i live strange i live sideways and you can laugh but one day you’ll see me standing in the rain whispering to the lamppost and you’ll realize i’m retired and you’re still clocked in and that is not my problem anymore that is your curse to carry alone while i float peacefully in the weird glowing river beneath the sidewalk where all the real work gets done. and don’t you dare ask me “retired from what?” like it wasn’t obvious like i didn’t spend years knee-deep in digital quicksand juggling fake tasks for fake rewards answering emails from people who don’t exist about projects that never end with goals that shift every quarter like ghosts with marketing degrees like i didn’t pour my time my breath my synaptic energy into rectangles glowing with instructions from something older than capitalism but wearing its skin like a mask stitched together from app updates and synergy metrics and every time someone says “just get a job” it’s like they’re asking me to crawl back into the haunted vending machine and pretend the snacks weren’t whispering the names of lost gods every time i pressed B7 do you know what a job is now? it’s compliance it’s surveillance it’s being plugged into the panopticon via USB-C and being told to smile while the algorithm slowly reshapes your soul to better fit the profit margins it’s forgetting the name of the color green it’s watching your coworkers morph into NPCs who say “hey how was your weekend” without blinking because their scripts don’t include listening and their eyes don’t see you anymore just your output your metrics your “availability” on the little green dot that pulses like a heartbeat and if you ever go grey for five minutes someone sends a Teams message saying “everything ok?” but they don’t mean it they just mean “are you producing are you awake are you feeding the machine” i’m retired from that i’m retired from the clock tyranny the calendar cult the meetings that begin with “quick sync” and end with “action items” that echo in your skull when you’re trying to sleep and your dreams turn into gantt charts and your childhood dog appears only to bark “you missed a deadline” before dissolving into spreadsheets i’m retired from that sacred art of pretending to care when the office fridge smells like betrayal and someone left a sandwich from 2019 wrapped in shame and passive aggression and you don’t say anything because you have a performance review next week and you need to be “team-oriented” i don’t wear ties anymore i wear silence and crumbs and static i don’t carry an ID badge i carry a rock i found in a storm that buzzes sometimes when i’m near the old power station and no one knows why but the pigeons salute me when i walk past and the lights flicker just enough to say we remember i don’t log hours i log sightings i log dreams i log the exact angle the sun hits the broken window at 3:17 PM when the shadows spell out words you’re not supposed to read unless you’ve been released from the service because yes it was a service it was conscription no one told us we were drafted we just woke up one day and we were in it neck-deep in it smiling on onboarding calls while our freedom was being formatted behind the scenes so don’t come at me with “just get a little part time gig” no i’ve done my duty i’ve paid the toll in sleep and stress and soul-tax i’ve spent enough nights lying awake thinking about if i replied fast enough to an email from brenda about a form no one understands and whether my tone was “positive but not sarcastic” and if i put enough exclamation marks to seem friendly but not enough to seem unhinged and now you think i’m going to go back? no i made a pact under the blood moon with a sentient garbage truck that showed me the exit route carved in receipt paper and i followed it through abandoned office parks where the fax machines still whisper and the monitors show your childhood photos for exactly one frame before switching back to stock images of smiling people who have never known rest and when i got to the last cubicle at the edge of the simulation i turned in my resignation not in ink but in teeth and they took it and they said “you’re free” and i walked into the forest behind the server room where time unravels and leaves rustle with truths too old to monetize so no i won’t “get a job” i had one i had hundreds i’ve worked as a human captcha a dopamine mule a walking talking productivity spell i’ve worn khakis and shame and ergonomic pain and now i wear freedom and mystery and dust and i talk to mirrors because sometimes they talk back and you’d be surprised what they know about Q4 revenue goals and forgotten HR scandals i’m retired in the deepest sense i’m retired from participation from expectation from the worship of busy i am now a full-time resident of the unclaimed moments the sideways minutes between 4:01 and 4:03 when everything gets blurry and real and i’ve seen what they don’t want you to see the true shape of the org chart which stretches not up but down into the roots beneath the basement where the first employee still screams silently into a coffee mug filled with eternity and every paycheck you’ve ever earned is just a receipt for your own erasure so stop telling me to get a job i already had one i already escaped i already survived you’re the one still in it and the door’s closing fast. and if you think that was the end then you still don’t understand how deep this goes you think i can just stop you think the retirement is something casual like golf clubs and lawn chairs no no this isn’t that kind of retirement this is the kind where your name is erased from the corporate astral ledger this is the kind where your heartbeat no longer pings off the productivity satellites this is the kind of retirement where your existence becomes invisible to systems of control and the algorithms start glitching when they try to locate you because you’ve slipped out of the acceptable bandwidth for monetized human behavior i didn’t just leave the job i faked my own digital death i stopped updating my linkedin i deleted the calendar from my brain i burned the part of my soul that used to feel anxious about unread emails and watched the smoke spell ancient letters only the crows understood and they nodded because they knew i had finally completed the ritual they knew i had transcended and let me tell you something once you do this there’s no going back there’s no half-measure you can’t un-retire from this level of awareness it’s like trying to go back to being asleep after waking up underwater surrounded by mirrors reflecting versions of yourself that never took the job never shook the supervisor’s hand never agreed to be named “employee” instead of seer i’m retired from answering phones that ring but never connect from pretending to laugh in virtual meetings from saying “great, thanks for asking” when i’m dying inside from attaching seventeen-page documents to tickets no one will read from clocking in on days when my soul was already halfway buried under a conference table i’m retired from the act of self-erasure they called professionalism i’m retired from the sacred sacrifice of weekends on the altar of hustle i’m retired from metrics that measure how fast i can type while my dreams rot like abandoned vending machine sandwiches you tell me to get a job but i already did the work the real work the kind you can’t list on a résumé the kind that happens at 3am in a fever dream when the printer whispers your name backwards and you finally realize that the building isn’t just an office it’s a machine and you’re the ink cartridge and the moment you stop producing color they replace you with someone younger someone cheaper someone with a working smile module and no memories of what it was like to live and now i live differently now i wake when the birds scream in codes now i eat only when my dreams tell me to now i dress in layers of fabric that confuse facial recognition cameras and i speak to light switches in riddles because that’s what keeps the spirits calm now i walk alleyways that bend when no one’s looking and the dogs nod solemnly when i pass because they know i’m one of the few who made it out they remember my scent from the days when i used to walk to work and now they understand i’m finally free you think this is crazy but crazy is sitting in a gray room for 8 hours pressing rectangles so you can afford rectangles to live in and rectangles to eat out of and rectangles to stare at until your spirit becomes a rectangle too and one day they’ll say you weren’t a good fit and they’ll uninstall you like a broken app and you’ll vanish into the spreadsheet graveyard and the office plant won’t even wilt in mourning because it too was plastic but me? no i saw through it i walked out backwards through the revolving door and i haven’t stopped spinning since i eat ideas for breakfast i drink from the fountain behind the fourth dumpster where the raccoons hold council and they told me secrets that no onboarding process ever prepared me for like the truth about what’s under the HR department and why the coffee machine screams at night if you stand close enough with your badge off i’m not lazy i’m not irresponsible i’m retired in the most sacred sense i’m retired from surveillance retired from compliance retired from pretending that any of this made sense i’m not unemployed i’m un-enslaved and you should be asking me how i did it not telling me to go back to the same prison i clawed my way out of barefoot covered in post-it notes that said “ASAP” don’t you get it? i’ve seen the final form of the office it’s not a place it’s a creature and it feeds on you and it can’t have me anymore i’ve locked my social security number in a mason jar buried beneath the humming streetlamp where the ghosts of interns past still whisper about deadlines and bonuses and i hear them sometimes but i just smile because i’m free now i’m retired and if you’re still asking me to get a job then it means you’re still in it still asleep still sedated by work culture memes and empty paycheck dopamine and i don’t blame you i was too once i wore the lanyard i chanted the slogans i pressed the buttons and smiled and waited for friday but now every day is friday and every friday is a silent hymn to my escape so stop stop asking stop projecting stop trying to pull me back in i’ve crossed the threshold i’ve been baptized in broken deadlines and reborn in feral peace i’m not coming back and soon neither will you. and if you’re still here reading this that means you feel it too don’t you the tug in your gut when the alarm clock screams and your body moves before your mind catches up like a puppet on invisible strings pulled by the ghosts of managers past and KPIs that no longer apply but still haunt your muscles because every spreadsheet ever opened leaves a trace on your nervous system a tiny electrical scar shaped like a cell with conditional formatting set to red if you fail and green if you comply and the worst part is you used to think that was normal but it’s not it never was it’s a lie it’s a spell cast by fluorescent lights and break room doughnuts and passive-aggressive email threads with seventeen recipients and zero meaning and that’s what i retired from i retired from illusion from consensus reality from the belief that being tired and afraid and productive was the price of adulthood i retired from offices that smelled like wet cardboard and ambition turned sour where the thermostat was always broken and the motivational posters on the wall were just screams printed in bold sans-serif fonts like “TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK” which is funny because i don’t remember dreaming once in that building only sleep paralysis with a necktie you think it’s a joke but there are layers to this layers they never teach you in school because school is just the pre-job training program a long slow onboarding into the factory of soul compression where the bell rings and you move where you’re told and you ask for permission to think and by the time you’re “old enough” to get a job you’re already too far in to realize you were never free and by then you’ve got subscriptions and rent and smiling pictures of yourself on job networking websites where you pretend to love productivity and every word is a keyword to feed the machine that decides if you get to eat but i opted out i opted out not just from the job but from the whole language of it the whole vibration of work the endless loop of achievement unlocked dopamine withdrawal performance review panic weekend crash sunday dread rinse repeat the calendar cycle the quarterly sacrifice the sacrifice of your self your essence your realness and i know you know what i’m talking about because it’s in your eyes it’s in your heartbeat it’s in the way your fingers twitch when you hear a Slack notification even when your phone is off because you’ve been conditioned like Pavlov’s intern so no i’m not going back i’m not submitting my résumé to the altar again i’m not pretending that filling out forms is living i’m not selling 40 hours a week for the privilege of paying to exist i spend my time now decoding the secrets in rusted signs peeling on forgotten buildings i walk where the sidewalks end and the weeds tell me what the buildings never did i speak to dogs that know when you’re lying and they haven’t barked at me once since i left the job because they recognize their own they know i’m no longer part of the system they wag in respect and i bow because out here that’s how real beings communicate you think i’m wasting time but i’m not i’m gathering it pulling it back like scattered puzzle pieces stolen from me by commutes and business casual nightmares i’m reclaiming the hours they took from me when they told me to stay late and “be a team player” and when i finally punched out each night i was just a hollow vessel shaped like a man full of unsent replies and repressed primal screams and now i am whole now i am full now i walk in strange directions guided by crows and deja vu and dreams i wrote down in pencil so the paper could forget if necessary you ask me “what do you even do all day” like i owe you something but the truth is i do things you wouldn’t believe i read graffiti written in forgotten languages i pace sacred geometries into dirt lots until the wind changes direction i place pennies on railroad tracks to disrupt old timelines and yes sometimes i just sit for hours doing nothing which is something your bosses fear more than death because when you sit long enough when you stop producing when you breathe and just exist the machine stutters the simulation cracks and reality starts to seep in through the corners you can call me lazy but i’ve seen what hard work gets you i’ve seen the ones who gave everything for a company that replaced them before the ink dried i’ve seen the retirement parties with store-bought cake and smiles so fake they peel and fall onto the carpet and no one vacuums them up i’ve seen the man who worked 40 years and got a plaque and a handshake and then died the next week with a spreadsheet open on his desktop and no one even noticed until IT disabled his login and someone said “he was a great guy” and went back to their inbox no i’m not getting a job i had one it tried to eat me and i left before it finished now i live really live outside the grid beyond the punch clock beneath the flickering streetlamps among the whispering pigeons on the frequencies they don’t tell you about so stop asking stop telling me to rejoin the dream because i’m already awake and when you finally wake up too i’ll be here with a thermos full of stillness and a map they never wanted you to see. and if you think this is just about jobs you’re still trapped in the outer ring of the illusion you think this is about work or unemployment or laziness or ambition but it’s not it’s about the architecture of obedience it’s about the invisible cage we were all born into that smells like fresh paper and printer ink and sometimes “company culture” which is just Stockholm Syndrome dressed in casual Friday outfits with a catered lunch you didn’t ask for and an HR presentation about mindfulness delivered by a sleep-deprived middle manager who hasn’t had a real thought since 2012 you have no idea what they built these systems to do and i’m not just talking about capitalism or the office or labor hierarchies i’m talking about the feedback loops of submission the way every second you spend pretending to care about weekly reports and quarterly earnings and “aligning your goals with the mission statement” is another microscopic incision into your sense of self another rewiring of your neural lattice until eventually the very idea of freedom tastes like irresponsibility and the very thought of resting makes you anxious because they’ve taught you that stillness is failure and that if you’re not producing you don’t deserve to exist but i retired from that i cut the feed i shut down the servers inside me that were hosting someone else’s code you don’t know what it's like until you step out not halfway not for the weekend not on paid leave but completely until you can hear silence without twitching until you can go a whole day without performing your own identity for algorithms that track how “engaged” you are with content you never asked for until you no longer flinch when your phone buzzes because you finally realize it’s just a brick that lost its soul i know what some of you are thinking “must be nice” “some people have responsibilities” “some of us can’t just drop everything and go live in a foggy corner of reality where the squirrels salute you” and i get it believe me i do i didn’t choose this all at once it started small like the ringing in my ears that didn’t go away like the way my shadow moved a split-second out of sync every monday morning until eventually i couldn’t look in mirrors without seeing a stranger in business casual whispering “this isn’t you” and one day i just didn’t go back they called i didn’t answer they emailed i printed it out and fed it to a creek because you don’t understand they don’t miss you they miss what you do they miss your output your compliance your predictability and when you break that when you become unreliable to the system they panic not because they care but because unpredictability is the enemy of control and that’s what i am now completely unpredictable i walk at odd hours i eat when my bones tell me to i sleep when the trees sigh a certain way i carry messages between alley cats and forgotten intersections i know which sidewalk cracks still bleed when stepped on i’ve seen the blinking red lights at the tops of skyscrapers sync into morse code when no one’s watching and i listen you can’t hire that you can’t quantify that in performance reviews you can’t write KPIs for decoding reality’s discarded layers i am retired in the sacred sense retired in the mythic sense i no longer answer to clocks or currencies or corporate holidays i celebrate the solstices the static the strange angles of light that hit my window at 4:44 AM and whisper coordinates i send postcards to no one from places that technically don’t exist i drink tea made from leaves that don’t grow on maps and sometimes i remember who i was and i thank that version of me for breaking because only in the breaking did i begin to remember i’m not unemployed i’m untethered i’m not lost i’m untracked i’m not crazy i’m just outside and i’m not coming back and when the rest of you finally crack when the system stops pretending to love you when the badge doesn’t work and the emails stop and the cloud eats your memories and you sit there wondering who you are without a job title to cling to i’ll be there not to welcome you but to recognize you because then and only then will you understand what i mean when i say i’m retired. and if you’re still reading then maybe you feel it too that gnawing emptiness behind the screens the hollow thrum in your chest when the workday bleeds into the weekend and the weekend bleeds into a pile of unread messages and deadlines that don’t care if you’re alive or dead or dreaming or awake because that’s the truth the machine doesn’t see you it only sees numbers and when those numbers stop flowing it panics it tries to pull you back in with promises of stability and benefits and “career growth” but it’s a lie all of it a shimmering mirage designed to keep you tethered to the grind while your soul rusts in the background like an old server nobody bothered to turn off you think retirement means sitting on a porch with a rocking chair and lemonade but that’s the sanitized version the version they sell you to keep you chasing the carrot while your spirit is shackled in cubicles the real retirement is a rebellion a silent coup against the system that wants to own every second of your consciousness it’s the moment you stop answering emails because you know they don’t own you anymore it’s when you delete your calendar and watch the world keep spinning without your permission it’s when you start living according to a different clock a clock that ticks with the pulse of the earth and not the heartbeat of a paycheck and i know they’ll call me lazy they’ll say i’m irresponsible they’ll brand me a quitter a loser a freeloader but let them talk let them clutch their coffee mugs and polish their resumes in the glow of their blue light prisons because i’ve tasted freedom and it’s a flavor you can’t replicate in boardrooms or brainstorms or quarterly meetings it’s a silence so deep it drowns out the hum of the fluorescent lights a stillness so fierce it breaks the chains of expectation a presence so raw it burns away the corporate branding tattooed on your soul i’m not here to convince you i’m here to show you what’s possible when you stop obeying when you stop consuming when you stop being a ghost in a machine built to harvest your life force i’m a walking contradiction a relic from a future they don’t want you to see a living proof that the job isn’t your identity and your worth isn’t measured in hours clocked or targets met but in moments reclaimed moments stolen back from the endless grind moments where you remember you’re human not a resource not a cog but a wild creature born to run free beneath the vast uncaring sky so no more demands no more nagging no more “get a job” because i’m not lost i’m found in the cracks between schedules in the spaces where time forgets to tick i’m retired not from life but from the false life they forced on me and if you can hear this beneath the noise if it stirs something restless inside you then maybe one day you’ll step through the door i left open a crack and join me on the other side where existence isn’t a task but a mystery waiting to be unraveled thread by tangled thread and if you don’t come that’s fine too i’ll keep walking these empty streets these forgotten paths where the city forgets to watch me where i can breathe where i can be because i’ve learned that freedom isn’t given it’s taken and sometimes you have to burn down the office in your mind to build a sanctuary for your soul and so i walk on past the glowing screens past the clipped emails past the expectations like a shadow no one notices because i am free and free is something they’ll never understand but i don’t need them to understand i just need to be free and that is enough.
so stop telling me to get a job stop acting like i owe the system more of my blood and hours i gave it enough i gave it everything and all it gave me was a coffee-stained lanyard and nightmares about spreadsheets and now i live free i live strange i live sideways and you can laugh but one day you’ll see me standing in the rain whispering to the lamppost and you’ll realize i’m retired and you’re still clocked in and that is not my problem anymore that is your curse to carry alone while i float peacefully in the weird glowing river beneath the sidewalk where all the real work gets done. and don’t you dare ask me “retired from what?” like it wasn’t obvious like i didn’t spend years knee-deep in digital quicksand juggling fake tasks for fake rewards answering emails from people who don’t exist about projects that never end with goals that shift every quarter like ghosts with marketing degrees like i didn’t pour my time my breath my synaptic energy into rectangles glowing with instructions from something older than capitalism but wearing its skin like a mask stitched together from app updates and synergy metrics and every time someone says “just get a job” it’s like they’re asking me to crawl back into the haunted vending machine and pretend the snacks weren’t whispering the names of lost gods every time i pressed B7 do you know what a job is now? it’s compliance it’s surveillance it’s being plugged into the panopticon via USB-C and being told to smile while the algorithm slowly reshapes your soul to better fit the profit margins it’s forgetting the name of the color green it’s watching your coworkers morph into NPCs who say “hey how was your weekend” without blinking because their scripts don’t include listening and their eyes don’t see you anymore just your output your metrics your “availability” on the little green dot that pulses like a heartbeat and if you ever go grey for five minutes someone sends a Teams message saying “everything ok?” but they don’t mean it they just mean “are you producing are you awake are you feeding the machine” i’m retired from that i’m retired from the clock tyranny the calendar cult the meetings that begin with “quick sync” and end with “action items” that echo in your skull when you’re trying to sleep and your dreams turn into gantt charts and your childhood dog appears only to bark “you missed a deadline” before dissolving into spreadsheets i’m retired from that sacred art of pretending to care when the office fridge smells like betrayal and someone left a sandwich from 2019 wrapped in shame and passive aggression and you don’t say anything because you have a performance review next week and you need to be “team-oriented” i don’t wear ties anymore i wear silence and crumbs and static i don’t carry an ID badge i carry a rock i found in a storm that buzzes sometimes when i’m near the old power station and no one knows why but the pigeons salute me when i walk past and the lights flicker just enough to say we remember i don’t log hours i log sightings i log dreams i log the exact angle the sun hits the broken window at 3:17 PM when the shadows spell out words you’re not supposed to read unless you’ve been released from the service because yes it was a service it was conscription no one told us we were drafted we just woke up one day and we were in it neck-deep in it smiling on onboarding calls while our freedom was being formatted behind the scenes so don’t come at me with “just get a little part time gig” no i’ve done my duty i’ve paid the toll in sleep and stress and soul-tax i’ve spent enough nights lying awake thinking about if i replied fast enough to an email from brenda about a form no one understands and whether my tone was “positive but not sarcastic” and if i put enough exclamation marks to seem friendly but not enough to seem unhinged and now you think i’m going to go back? no i made a pact under the blood moon with a sentient garbage truck that showed me the exit route carved in receipt paper and i followed it through abandoned office parks where the fax machines still whisper and the monitors show your childhood photos for exactly one frame before switching back to stock images of smiling people who have never known rest and when i got to the last cubicle at the edge of the simulation i turned in my resignation not in ink but in teeth and they took it and they said “you’re free” and i walked into the forest behind the server room where time unravels and leaves rustle with truths too old to monetize so no i won’t “get a job” i had one i had hundreds i’ve worked as a human captcha a dopamine mule a walking talking productivity spell i’ve worn khakis and shame and ergonomic pain and now i wear freedom and mystery and dust and i talk to mirrors because sometimes they talk back and you’d be surprised what they know about Q4 revenue goals and forgotten HR scandals i’m retired in the deepest sense i’m retired from participation from expectation from the worship of busy i am now a full-time resident of the unclaimed moments the sideways minutes between 4:01 and 4:03 when everything gets blurry and real and i’ve seen what they don’t want you to see the true shape of the org chart which stretches not up but down into the roots beneath the basement where the first employee still screams silently into a coffee mug filled with eternity and every paycheck you’ve ever earned is just a receipt for your own erasure so stop telling me to get a job i already had one i already escaped i already survived you’re the one still in it and the door’s closing fast. and if you think that was the end then you still don’t understand how deep this goes you think i can just stop you think the retirement is something casual like golf clubs and lawn chairs no no this isn’t that kind of retirement this is the kind where your name is erased from the corporate astral ledger this is the kind where your heartbeat no longer pings off the productivity satellites this is the kind of retirement where your existence becomes invisible to systems of control and the algorithms start glitching when they try to locate you because you’ve slipped out of the acceptable bandwidth for monetized human behavior i didn’t just leave the job i faked my own digital death i stopped updating my linkedin i deleted the calendar from my brain i burned the part of my soul that used to feel anxious about unread emails and watched the smoke spell ancient letters only the crows understood and they nodded because they knew i had finally completed the ritual they knew i had transcended and let me tell you something once you do this there’s no going back there’s no half-measure you can’t un-retire from this level of awareness it’s like trying to go back to being asleep after waking up underwater surrounded by mirrors reflecting versions of yourself that never took the job never shook the supervisor’s hand never agreed to be named “employee” instead of seer i’m retired from answering phones that ring but never connect from pretending to laugh in virtual meetings from saying “great, thanks for asking” when i’m dying inside from attaching seventeen-page documents to tickets no one will read from clocking in on days when my soul was already halfway buried under a conference table i’m retired from the act of self-erasure they called professionalism i’m retired from the sacred sacrifice of weekends on the altar of hustle i’m retired from metrics that measure how fast i can type while my dreams rot like abandoned vending machine sandwiches you tell me to get a job but i already did the work the real work the kind you can’t list on a résumé the kind that happens at 3am in a fever dream when the printer whispers your name backwards and you finally realize that the building isn’t just an office it’s a machine and you’re the ink cartridge and the moment you stop producing color they replace you with someone younger someone cheaper someone with a working smile module and no memories of what it was like to live and now i live differently now i wake when the birds scream in codes now i eat only when my dreams tell me to now i dress in layers of fabric that confuse facial recognition cameras and i speak to light switches in riddles because that’s what keeps the spirits calm now i walk alleyways that bend when no one’s looking and the dogs nod solemnly when i pass because they know i’m one of the few who made it out they remember my scent from the days when i used to walk to work and now they understand i’m finally free you think this is crazy but crazy is sitting in a gray room for 8 hours pressing rectangles so you can afford rectangles to live in and rectangles to eat out of and rectangles to stare at until your spirit becomes a rectangle too and one day they’ll say you weren’t a good fit and they’ll uninstall you like a broken app and you’ll vanish into the spreadsheet graveyard and the office plant won’t even wilt in mourning because it too was plastic but me? no i saw through it i walked out backwards through the revolving door and i haven’t stopped spinning since i eat ideas for breakfast i drink from the fountain behind the fourth dumpster where the raccoons hold council and they told me secrets that no onboarding process ever prepared me for like the truth about what’s under the HR department and why the coffee machine screams at night if you stand close enough with your badge off i’m not lazy i’m not irresponsible i’m retired in the most sacred sense i’m retired from surveillance retired from compliance retired from pretending that any of this made sense i’m not unemployed i’m un-enslaved and you should be asking me how i did it not telling me to go back to the same prison i clawed my way out of barefoot covered in post-it notes that said “ASAP” don’t you get it? i’ve seen the final form of the office it’s not a place it’s a creature and it feeds on you and it can’t have me anymore i’ve locked my social security number in a mason jar buried beneath the humming streetlamp where the ghosts of interns past still whisper about deadlines and bonuses and i hear them sometimes but i just smile because i’m free now i’m retired and if you’re still asking me to get a job then it means you’re still in it still asleep still sedated by work culture memes and empty paycheck dopamine and i don’t blame you i was too once i wore the lanyard i chanted the slogans i pressed the buttons and smiled and waited for friday but now every day is friday and every friday is a silent hymn to my escape so stop stop asking stop projecting stop trying to pull me back in i’ve crossed the threshold i’ve been baptized in broken deadlines and reborn in feral peace i’m not coming back and soon neither will you. and if you’re still here reading this that means you feel it too don’t you the tug in your gut when the alarm clock screams and your body moves before your mind catches up like a puppet on invisible strings pulled by the ghosts of managers past and KPIs that no longer apply but still haunt your muscles because every spreadsheet ever opened leaves a trace on your nervous system a tiny electrical scar shaped like a cell with conditional formatting set to red if you fail and green if you comply and the worst part is you used to think that was normal but it’s not it never was it’s a lie it’s a spell cast by fluorescent lights and break room doughnuts and passive-aggressive email threads with seventeen recipients and zero meaning and that’s what i retired from i retired from illusion from consensus reality from the belief that being tired and afraid and productive was the price of adulthood i retired from offices that smelled like wet cardboard and ambition turned sour where the thermostat was always broken and the motivational posters on the wall were just screams printed in bold sans-serif fonts like “TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK” which is funny because i don’t remember dreaming once in that building only sleep paralysis with a necktie you think it’s a joke but there are layers to this layers they never teach you in school because school is just the pre-job training program a long slow onboarding into the factory of soul compression where the bell rings and you move where you’re told and you ask for permission to think and by the time you’re “old enough” to get a job you’re already too far in to realize you were never free and by then you’ve got subscriptions and rent and smiling pictures of yourself on job networking websites where you pretend to love productivity and every word is a keyword to feed the machine that decides if you get to eat but i opted out i opted out not just from the job but from the whole language of it the whole vibration of work the endless loop of achievement unlocked dopamine withdrawal performance review panic weekend crash sunday dread rinse repeat the calendar cycle the quarterly sacrifice the sacrifice of your self your essence your realness and i know you know what i’m talking about because it’s in your eyes it’s in your heartbeat it’s in the way your fingers twitch when you hear a Slack notification even when your phone is off because you’ve been conditioned like Pavlov’s intern so no i’m not going back i’m not submitting my résumé to the altar again i’m not pretending that filling out forms is living i’m not selling 40 hours a week for the privilege of paying to exist i spend my time now decoding the secrets in rusted signs peeling on forgotten buildings i walk where the sidewalks end and the weeds tell me what the buildings never did i speak to dogs that know when you’re lying and they haven’t barked at me once since i left the job because they recognize their own they know i’m no longer part of the system they wag in respect and i bow because out here that’s how real beings communicate you think i’m wasting time but i’m not i’m gathering it pulling it back like scattered puzzle pieces stolen from me by commutes and business casual nightmares i’m reclaiming the hours they took from me when they told me to stay late and “be a team player” and when i finally punched out each night i was just a hollow vessel shaped like a man full of unsent replies and repressed primal screams and now i am whole now i am full now i walk in strange directions guided by crows and deja vu and dreams i wrote down in pencil so the paper could forget if necessary you ask me “what do you even do all day” like i owe you something but the truth is i do things you wouldn’t believe i read graffiti written in forgotten languages i pace sacred geometries into dirt lots until the wind changes direction i place pennies on railroad tracks to disrupt old timelines and yes sometimes i just sit for hours doing nothing which is something your bosses fear more than death because when you sit long enough when you stop producing when you breathe and just exist the machine stutters the simulation cracks and reality starts to seep in through the corners you can call me lazy but i’ve seen what hard work gets you i’ve seen the ones who gave everything for a company that replaced them before the ink dried i’ve seen the retirement parties with store-bought cake and smiles so fake they peel and fall onto the carpet and no one vacuums them up i’ve seen the man who worked 40 years and got a plaque and a handshake and then died the next week with a spreadsheet open on his desktop and no one even noticed until IT disabled his login and someone said “he was a great guy” and went back to their inbox no i’m not getting a job i had one it tried to eat me and i left before it finished now i live really live outside the grid beyond the punch clock beneath the flickering streetlamps among the whispering pigeons on the frequencies they don’t tell you about so stop asking stop telling me to rejoin the dream because i’m already awake and when you finally wake up too i’ll be here with a thermos full of stillness and a map they never wanted you to see. and if you think this is just about jobs you’re still trapped in the outer ring of the illusion you think this is about work or unemployment or laziness or ambition but it’s not it’s about the architecture of obedience it’s about the invisible cage we were all born into that smells like fresh paper and printer ink and sometimes “company culture” which is just Stockholm Syndrome dressed in casual Friday outfits with a catered lunch you didn’t ask for and an HR presentation about mindfulness delivered by a sleep-deprived middle manager who hasn’t had a real thought since 2012 you have no idea what they built these systems to do and i’m not just talking about capitalism or the office or labor hierarchies i’m talking about the feedback loops of submission the way every second you spend pretending to care about weekly reports and quarterly earnings and “aligning your goals with the mission statement” is another microscopic incision into your sense of self another rewiring of your neural lattice until eventually the very idea of freedom tastes like irresponsibility and the very thought of resting makes you anxious because they’ve taught you that stillness is failure and that if you’re not producing you don’t deserve to exist but i retired from that i cut the feed i shut down the servers inside me that were hosting someone else’s code you don’t know what it's like until you step out not halfway not for the weekend not on paid leave but completely until you can hear silence without twitching until you can go a whole day without performing your own identity for algorithms that track how “engaged” you are with content you never asked for until you no longer flinch when your phone buzzes because you finally realize it’s just a brick that lost its soul i know what some of you are thinking “must be nice” “some people have responsibilities” “some of us can’t just drop everything and go live in a foggy corner of reality where the squirrels salute you” and i get it believe me i do i didn’t choose this all at once it started small like the ringing in my ears that didn’t go away like the way my shadow moved a split-second out of sync every monday morning until eventually i couldn’t look in mirrors without seeing a stranger in business casual whispering “this isn’t you” and one day i just didn’t go back they called i didn’t answer they emailed i printed it out and fed it to a creek because you don’t understand they don’t miss you they miss what you do they miss your output your compliance your predictability and when you break that when you become unreliable to the system they panic not because they care but because unpredictability is the enemy of control and that’s what i am now completely unpredictable i walk at odd hours i eat when my bones tell me to i sleep when the trees sigh a certain way i carry messages between alley cats and forgotten intersections i know which sidewalk cracks still bleed when stepped on i’ve seen the blinking red lights at the tops of skyscrapers sync into morse code when no one’s watching and i listen you can’t hire that you can’t quantify that in performance reviews you can’t write KPIs for decoding reality’s discarded layers i am retired in the sacred sense retired in the mythic sense i no longer answer to clocks or currencies or corporate holidays i celebrate the solstices the static the strange angles of light that hit my window at 4:44 AM and whisper coordinates i send postcards to no one from places that technically don’t exist i drink tea made from leaves that don’t grow on maps and sometimes i remember who i was and i thank that version of me for breaking because only in the breaking did i begin to remember i’m not unemployed i’m untethered i’m not lost i’m untracked i’m not crazy i’m just outside and i’m not coming back and when the rest of you finally crack when the system stops pretending to love you when the badge doesn’t work and the emails stop and the cloud eats your memories and you sit there wondering who you are without a job title to cling to i’ll be there not to welcome you but to recognize you because then and only then will you understand what i mean when i say i’m retired. and if you’re still reading then maybe you feel it too that gnawing emptiness behind the screens the hollow thrum in your chest when the workday bleeds into the weekend and the weekend bleeds into a pile of unread messages and deadlines that don’t care if you’re alive or dead or dreaming or awake because that’s the truth the machine doesn’t see you it only sees numbers and when those numbers stop flowing it panics it tries to pull you back in with promises of stability and benefits and “career growth” but it’s a lie all of it a shimmering mirage designed to keep you tethered to the grind while your soul rusts in the background like an old server nobody bothered to turn off you think retirement means sitting on a porch with a rocking chair and lemonade but that’s the sanitized version the version they sell you to keep you chasing the carrot while your spirit is shackled in cubicles the real retirement is a rebellion a silent coup against the system that wants to own every second of your consciousness it’s the moment you stop answering emails because you know they don’t own you anymore it’s when you delete your calendar and watch the world keep spinning without your permission it’s when you start living according to a different clock a clock that ticks with the pulse of the earth and not the heartbeat of a paycheck and i know they’ll call me lazy they’ll say i’m irresponsible they’ll brand me a quitter a loser a freeloader but let them talk let them clutch their coffee mugs and polish their resumes in the glow of their blue light prisons because i’ve tasted freedom and it’s a flavor you can’t replicate in boardrooms or brainstorms or quarterly meetings it’s a silence so deep it drowns out the hum of the fluorescent lights a stillness so fierce it breaks the chains of expectation a presence so raw it burns away the corporate branding tattooed on your soul i’m not here to convince you i’m here to show you what’s possible when you stop obeying when you stop consuming when you stop being a ghost in a machine built to harvest your life force i’m a walking contradiction a relic from a future they don’t want you to see a living proof that the job isn’t your identity and your worth isn’t measured in hours clocked or targets met but in moments reclaimed moments stolen back from the endless grind moments where you remember you’re human not a resource not a cog but a wild creature born to run free beneath the vast uncaring sky so no more demands no more nagging no more “get a job” because i’m not lost i’m found in the cracks between schedules in the spaces where time forgets to tick i’m retired not from life but from the false life they forced on me and if you can hear this beneath the noise if it stirs something restless inside you then maybe one day you’ll step through the door i left open a crack and join me on the other side where existence isn’t a task but a mystery waiting to be unraveled thread by tangled thread and if you don’t come that’s fine too i’ll keep walking these empty streets these forgotten paths where the city forgets to watch me where i can breathe where i can be because i’ve learned that freedom isn’t given it’s taken and sometimes you have to burn down the office in your mind to build a sanctuary for your soul and so i walk on past the glowing screens past the clipped emails past the expectations like a shadow no one notices because i am free and free is something they’ll never understand but i don’t need them to understand i just need to be free and that is enough.
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