The last dangling threads are often the toughest to cut. Whether it be a job, friendship or relationship. Or just even a patterned way of moving in the world. I’ve spent a bit of time the last ten days analysing my substack over the past five years. If I put all of that data into a ChatGPT or a Claude it will point out that the high watermark of my writing was two to three years ago. Both from a readership engagement and financial perspective.
The encouragement would be to return into the fold and pay more attention to what is going on in the latest round of newscycles and utilise whatever skills I possess to cast my eye over things and find ways of shining a light. My instinct, though, tells me the seductive algorithms are wrong. When I look back at my topical writing from that period of time the kindest thing I can sell myself about most of it is that perhaps it served a purpose. But, in a real sense, was a net generator of negative energy. Pointing out the bad thing—the deception, the trick, the death or even a set of all of them only get you so far. Not very far at all.
The digital social arena is fully and finally just a space for people to feed on some toxic comfort and familiar chaos. The subject lines change daily or hourly but the result seems the same. The toxicity and chaos in turn merely lead to radically distorted thinking and energy where the true self gets caught up in a spiderweb and amplification of its own unhealed wounding and trauma. On boths sides of the coin. Training the mind to feed off negative energy which then invades and pervades spirit and soul.
Increasingly, these facts leave a writer relying on these digital tools in somewhat of a pickle. I’m conscious too that most of my readership boarded a ship marked current affairs with the promise of exposing political skullduggery in the world. The best piece of advice I can give you if that is the case is this: Consider this a safe harbour stop to jump ship.
I have many ideas and plans for the writing future but all of them involve fully departing the distorted reality. Put another way, the tools of the matrix will not fix the matrix or even collapse it. All they will do is distort my mind and spirit until I’m too weak to leave or even notice that I can no longer leave.
The house always wins.
Thankfully, I am more or less living from outside that world now as much as one can. It is a peaceful place with many resonant sights and sounds and interesting people to meet. It’s a world not fully formed yet so it needs writers to write about it and help create it and I’m going to be one of them.
Thanks for all your support over the past five years and for those sticking around I’ll see you soon.
Gerry O’Neill
The West’s Awake.
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