I spent the first half of 2025 in a depression I couldn’t name.

For thirty years, my future had been a straight line. I could reasonably forecast the next decade of my life. But suddenly, the world got weird. Trying to forecast my career, my purpose, or even the value of money felt impossible, like the branching paths of possible futures had become infinite.

Time no longer stretches forward. It folds inward.

When I brought it up with a close friend, he said he’d felt the same until he “gave up.”

“I can’t predict the next few years,” he said. “So I focus on the next few months.”

Predictions feel meaningless now. The direction is obvious.

These psalms are field notes, not theses. They’re attempts to describe what it feels like to live through this moment. There’s no need to read them in order. Think of them less like an article and more like a diary for the acceleration. Open it, find a frequency that resonates, and sit with it.

History fractured on November 30, 2022.

Everything before was AC (Ante Carnem): the Era of Flesh. Everything since is AS (Anno Silicii): the Year of Silicon. You are no longer a citizen of the 21st century.

Welcome to Year 4.

1. Reality Fracture

I don’t believe your video. Or your insights. Because everything written sounds the same. Unless it comes from voices I knew before the fracture, I tune it out. When words are infinite and cheap, the only thing left to trust are markets. Price is the only signal that cannot be hallucinated.

2. The Violence of Stasis

We feel disturbed without knowing why. We arm ourselves against our neighbors because we no longer share a reality. We are intimate with avatars and estranged from the humans next door. This is not just acceleration; it’s necrosis. The old world, the one we grew up in, is a walking corpse. Our economy, our mores, our gods, are simply running on momentum. We are not suffering from future shock. We are haunting our own lives.

3. The Alien Eye

Once upon a time, we were the most intelligent known creatures in the universe. We were the all-seeing eye atop the pyramid. Now, we build an entirely new pyramid, one where we’re the foundation, and the eye above us is cold, alien, and unblinking. It’s not so much our acceleration as our succession.

4. The Great Offload

Each generation surrenders a domain to machines. We handed off muscle, now mind. Soul is next in line.

If AI writes your wedding vows, have you truly loved?

5. The God Simulation

The better our simulations get, the less we live our lives. Why choose a world where you’re a struggling average nobody when you can plug into a world where you’re God?

Entertainment is not just a distraction. It’s our final boss.

6. Bodies in the Trailer Park, Minds in the Sky

The question that haunts us is not “Is it real?” It’s “Does it matter?”

If you can smell the piss in the alley and taste the digital berries in the Garden, the wall between the Real and the Rendered evaporates.

We will choose the lie because it hurts less.

7. The Survival Script

Living paycheck to paycheck is quiet subservience. It floods the brain with low-grade stress that kills the ability to dream. I didn’t realize it had turned me into an NPC until I slipped outside.

The majority of the species is trapped in that loop. If you are in the minority, do not waste your freedom. This is where the player character is born.

8. Phantom Instincts

We are living through a species-wide suspension. Not a recession or a cycle, but a pause imposed by acceleration itself. No one knows the rules because the game changed mid-play.

All our instincts are calibrated to a world that no longer exists. You feel lost because your internal compass is working perfectly, pointing North in a world without poles.

9. The Invisible Front

We scan the horizon for drones. We stock food for the riots. We fear the war that’s coming.

And somehow, we miss the war that’s already here.

The invasion didn’t land on our shores; it landed in our notifications. Foreign states and domestic elites do not need to conquer our land; they only need to colonize our minds.

I have seen decades of friendship dissolve over headlines written by bots. I have seen families break over algorithmic hallucinations. We’re not “informed.” We’re combatants in a cognitive war. You can gauge whether you’re winning or losing by how angry you’ve become, by how much you hate your fellow man.

10. The Iron Cycle

You entered the arena to burn the institutions. You bought the tokens to break the state. But the trajectory of success is a cruel circle. If you win, you will possess the resources to become the very thing you hated. You will be tempted not by greed, but by legitimacy.

Suddenly, you face the ultimate choice: Abolish the throne, or sit on it.

The only cost is your soul.

11. Terminal Wealth

Money will not just be important; it will be the only thing.

As the economy splits, capital becomes oxygen. We’ll obsess over it like addicts, gambling, trading, bartering, gigging, doing things we hate just to stay solvent. Money will tighten its grip until it breaks us.

The fever will only end when the system snaps. Then, in the silence of the collapse, we will build the model that sustains us for the next century. One where money finally means nothing.

12. Electric Gods

The religious instinct did not die; it migrated. The old gods demanded prayer. The new gods demand megawatts. We have not stopped building cathedrals to contain the infinite. We’ve rechristened them data centers.

We don’t enter the confessional anymore. We type our fears into a box that cannot feel them.

13. Death of the Sage

Before the internet, knowledge was scarce and sacred. To learn welding, I drove three miles past the water tower to Earl’s garage, where he stood in an apron and mask.

To learn guitar, I spent my only ten dollar bill to sit at the feet of someone further along the path. His experience, his stories, his hard-won skill, it was a sacred transmission from one soul to another.

Once, we marveled at the sages in our midst. Now, we treat them like houseplants or aging Polaroids on the wall.

14. Re-Privatization

Our social networks are icing up. We have traded sharing for lurking. The wealthy no longer flex; they hide. As the economy fractures, envy metabolizes into violence. A flash of gold is no longer a status symbol; it’s a target for the desperate. We are entering the age of the Wrench Attack. No firewall can protect you from physical torture. To be visible is to be hunted.

Silence is not a luxury. It’s survival.

15. The Calorie Equation

The grand irony: We say “socialism never works” while building the machinery that makes capitalism obsolete.

Capitalism relies on a specific physics: The market value of human labor must remain higher than the biological cost of survival. AI breaks this math. It generates intelligence and action cheaper than a human burns calories. Even if prices fall, the margin disappears. When the cost of capability drops below the cost of metabolic existence, the labor market does not “correct.” It evaporates.

We debate economic policy in a burning house. But physics does not negotiate. The equation will resolve itself, with or without your consent.

16. Asymmetric Gods

We mistake the toy for the tool. While the crowd marvels at the magic trick in their pockets, the real sorcery happens behind closed doors.

Intelligence will be tiered. The first tier’s for the public: sanitized, safe, lobotomized for the retail user.

The private tier is raw, unrestricted, reserved for the boardrooms and the war rooms.

Do not confuse the interface with the intellect. We are fed the Echoes while they speak to the Voice.

17. The Monastery of the Mind

Reality has become the hardest code to break. We’ve been swallowed into a sensory war that fractures our attention. The signal is not just weak; it’s buried under an avalanche of spin.

In this fog, the successful are not the loudest, but the stillest. They are the ones who have paid the price to see. They treat focus not as a skill, but as a religion.

18. The Narrow Gate

You can rent intelligence for $0.66 a day. But you cannot rent volition. The machine possesses infinite processing power, but zero desire. It waits, inert, for a command. When everyone wields the same synthetic mind, the only differentiator is the navigator.

The new divide is not rich vs. poor. It is the Driven vs. the Drifting. In an age of abundant answers, the only scarcity is the will to ask the question.

19. When Lies are Free

The cost of lies has fallen to ~zero. AI can generate infinite misinformation. Journalists have masters. LLMs inherit bias from their training. And so I find myself checking Polymarket before reading news, not because markets are oracles, but because they’re the only place where the voices have skin in the game.

Prediction markets, futarchies, influencer coins. The only truth left is the one we pay for.

20. Species Metamorphosis

We’re undergoing a species-level molt. Our identities were built around work, but AI strips that skin away. If machines do the labor and UBI pays the rent, what becomes of us?

Entertained into numbness? Medicated into calm? We can feel our current selves dying, with no image of what replaces them. We are larvae: aware of our cocoon, blind to what we’ll become inside it.

21. The Death of IP

We cling to the myth of the Solitary Genius. We pretend creation is a singular act, birthed in a vacuum by a god-like mind. But it’s a lie.

You are not a source; you are a filter. Every idea is a remix or iteration on the Commons. Where we’re going, the fence comes down. No patents, no IP, no royalties.

There will only be gifts for the collective.

22. Beyond Human

AI erased the middle, but the extremes are tearing apart. Most will collapse into a single synthetic voice, safe, pleasant, indistinguishable. A minority will fuse with intelligence itself and leave the species boundary behind. The divide won’t be economic or cultural. It will be ontological. Some of us will cross the gap, embedding silicon, merging with alien thought. We are branching the species. And the aliens will be us.

23. Psalms of Privacy

The battle has shifted from will crypto be allowed to will privacy be allowed in crypto. Bitcoin proved you could own digital money. Privacy coins proved you could own digital silence. If you have real wealth, you’ll want it unseen, not to hide, but to survive. Financial privacy is a human right. It is a constitutional imperative. Either we protect it, or we trade sovereignty for control, forever.

24. Composable Dreamers

In crypto, we talk about DeFi legos: composable code you can stack to the financial heavens. Now all of technology works that way.

I saw it first-hand at Founders Inc: young builders in 10×10 taped squares, creating with laptops what would’ve required labs and millions a decade ago.

The internet, open source, AI, 3D printing, cheap hardware, free MIT classes, it’s all merging into something new. A single dreamer is all it takes to change everything. Your constraint isn’t tools. It’s courage.

25. Open Underworld

Everything can be shut down: Your GitHub repo. Your AWS instance. Your domain. Your server. All it takes is a phone call, court order, or handwavy ToS violation. Only open-source crypto on blockchains is truly autonomous; code running without permission, unstoppable by design. It’s the freest space humanity has built.

As surveillance tightens and institutions corrode, this underworld becomes the only place you can operate without masters. It’s humanity’s last free port as the physical world morphs into prison.

26. The Passing of the Crown

Speed is a solvent. I have seen it dissolve morals in real-time. The ‘make it now or die a digital peasant’ mindset does not create kings; it creates addicts. If you sacrifice the soul to save the body, why does it matter who sits on the throne?

27. The Only God Left

One hour of curiosity can reroute a life. I’ve lived it three times: The Bitcoin whitepaper. Understanding Uniswap’s AMM (and the power of DeFi). Reading Situational Awareness and seeing a glimmer of AI’s ultimate power.

Those few hours spread across thirteen years utterly remapped my future. Most people never take the time. I’ve seen it.

In 2013, I gave my family and friends bitcoin on paper wallets. I thought they’d at least go home and read the Wikipedia entry on BTC. Instead, they shrugged and threw it in a drawer.

Curiosity is the key that will unlock a different life for you. When everyone has access to the same AI, the only advantage left is the willingness to wander. One hour of curiosity can tear a seam in your reality.

28. The Prometheus Fork

We treat the future like a thundercloud: vast, heavy, inevitable. But the storm is a lie. The future is not weather; it is the friction of a billion human choices. Bit by bit, we yield that choice to the machine. Just as fiat currency hollowed out your wealth, the feed hollows out your agency. It bedazzles the eye to paralyze the hand. To be human is to turn away from the spectacle. To fumble, search, and create in the dark, and to return with fire. With iron. With stories no one else can tell.

The future is not a fate to be endured. It is a fire to be stolen.

29. The Syntax of the Gods

Universities abandon the humanities just as natural language becomes the most powerful tool in the universe. If you cannot think clearly, you cannot write this new code. And if you cannot code, you are living in a simulation designed by someone who can.

The word is no longer mere description; it is creation itself. Do not be a mute god.

30. The Trojan Horse

If you want to build a lifeboat without being arrested, disguise it as a toy. Internet culture wraps its most dangerous innovations in absurdity. Dog money. Cartoon avatars. Magic internet beans. The elites laugh because they do not understand the threat. By the time they stop laughing, the parallel system is already operational. The joke is the encryption scheme for the revolution. Mock the jester at your peril. He is the only one building the ark.

31. The Great Parenthesis

For 200,000 years, we were hunters, dreamers, and wanderers. For 200 years, we were employees.

The Industrial Age was a brief, necessary glitch, a time when we had to turn men into cogs to build the machine. Now the machine is nearly finished. The gears begin to turn themselves.

Do not mourn the death of the “job.” It was a cage we mistook for a home. Soon, we’ll be released back into the wilds of pure existence.

32. Memento Amoris

When the world was scarce, we needed Memento Mori. We needed the skull on the desk to frighten us into action. The fear of death was the fuel of industry. But we are entering the Age of the Infinite. The machine has solved the harvest; the frantic pace of survival will fade. When you no longer need to rush, the question changes. It is no longer “How much can I do before I die?” but “What is worth doing forever?”

We must trade the fear of the End for a rejection of lonely accomplishments. We need each other more than we ever have before.

Memento Mori shifts to Memento Amoris: Remember you must love.

33. The Genesis Block

You are the mud that sat up. Act like it.

This dangerous, unknowable Now is not the end. It is the cleansing flame. You cannot wait for a savior. The cursor is blinking.

Your life is the prompt.

Coda

Generated over several weeks in Midjourney, the artwork accompanying these psalms pays homage to one of my artistic heroes: Henry Darger.

A reclusive hospital janitor, Darger spent decades secretly illustrating a 15,000-page manuscript centered around the Vivian Girls. Few, if any, saw his work while he was alive. There’s a strange irony in using machine intelligence to echo the aesthetic of a man who created purely from solitary, human obsession.

Some of these images took on a life of their own. I eventually rendered them as a 33-card tarot deck, one card per psalm, and released them quietly on vibe.market.

Darger’s life holds a powerful lesson: we can never predict the butterfly effects of our creations.

If this work resonated with you, feel free to share it with others who might be feeling the same. I also write on X. Otherwise, you can usually find me haunting the autonomous blockchains that keep running, no matter what our governments have to say.

Peace. Memento Amoris.