I want to investigate the art that broke the status quo. As Gore Vidal put simply: “Art is energy shaped by intelligence.” I’m not arguing all art is to be philosophically dense. But is it understood? I see surface-level symbols often accepted, while in practice, the deeper poetry is rejected. That gap is interesting, and made me wonder. Do audiences struggle to pay full attention to art, to its layers—or lack there of? Is this just my particular interpretation, do others relate? Coming from someone so easily in awe, I often miss signals in the noise too.

Let’s talk about it.

— step on through —

During a bus ride home after a high school football game, a teammate confided in the guy next to him—half-joking, half-threatening— that he’d always wanted to be a ballet dancer, but suppressed his dream out of fear of what his community would think. Time flows. He ended up with 5 Super Bowl wins and 1 MVP award. When I heard that story, I could only imagine what more he might have done with ballet in his back pocket. What reach... How many more he’d have inspired to pursue sports and dance, together. What unexpected power he might have discovered in himself. That—

We’ll never know. Because he never got to find out.

That’s the cost of boxing yourself into boundaries. What is the benefit of cashing in your freedom?

“It was life changing.”

“It helped me fall in love with myself.”

“It empowered me, made me believe in my dreams and possibilities.”

Kenny Ortega1 said, “There hasn’t ever been a place I’ve traveled to in all 20 years where someone hasn’t told me thank you.” Out of all that you consume in a day. When was the last time something you scrolled on changed your life?

Peter Barsocchini2 wrote High School Musical for his 10-year-old daughter and her friends because of that bus ride conversation you read. With $4 billion in sales globally, in their first 5 years, they transcended every expectation projected from a Disney Channel live action film. They were best selling album of the year selling 3.7 million copies, the first movie for sale on the iPhone, they broke Madonna’s merchandise record, sold out faster than every pop group, played stadiums across Central and Latin Americas with crowds of tens of thousands…93,000 people all in one place singing and dancing along with the group in São Paulo, Brazil.

How did they pull this? When High School Musical started advertising in 2005, recommendation algorithms as we know them now didn’t exist yet. HSM was one of the last global monoculture hits. There was no algorithm to fragment viewers into categories of who might like it before premiere so everyone was shown the same ads on Disney platforms at the same time. Going from 7.7 million unique viewers on premiere to 300 million worldwide for HSM 3.

“It was a different world back then than we have now. People are more inclusive.3 If the star quarterback wants to join the school musical–nobody bats an eye. Back in 2000, 2002, people would have gone crazy.”

- Barsocchini sharing his mindset in 2004

That’s true. It was a different world in 2004. People are more inclusive in 2026. Then again, there are also a lot more people, and a lot more ways to be a person. We have to look at the inputs to know whether we’re just making new mistakes with same causes. Do children and adults feel safe doing stigmatized things? Failing? Being awkward, or different? Is embarrassment normal friction? Can people face their deepest fears, and take real risks?

This story starts at a ski resort, with two people who’d both rather be in their own world.

Take #1: Friction Invites Us to Act

The film opens at a ski lodge on New Year’s Eve. Troy and Gabriella are prompted to go to a teen party by their parents. They showed up, Troy looks for his circle and Gabriella looks for somewhere quiet to read. Randomness works its magic, and the karaoke host puts a spotlight on them and invites them onstage.

They do go. First hesitantly, then shamelessly. The song itself mirrors the transformation: living in your bubble (your perception) → forced to take a risk (society introduces friction) → you meet the challenge and your reality expands. From “my own world” to “something new.”

“Livin’ in my own world, Didn’t understand.
That anything can happen, When you take a chance.
I never believed in what I couldn’t see.
I never opened my heart, oh! To all the possibilities, ooh-ooh. ”

Start of Something New: Drew Seeley, Matthew Gerrad, Vanessa Hudgens, Zac Efron

The karaoke host hands them new identities—singer, performer—that challenge the fixed images they’d believed about themselves in the past. The song wasn’t a generic pop cue just to dress the scene; it had soul and helps deliver the movies argument. They’d have stayed locked in their own worlds all night if the spotlight hadn’t “randomly” collied them together.

Thinking back on every party I’ve ever been to: no one has ever randomly sung and danced, passionately and vulnerably on stage—seriously. People barely wanted to pick the song on aux, let alone attempt something they’ve never done before. Thinking back, how often do “opposite” people even collide?

This scene shows a world where we can transcend our social fears by taking risks together. Action in the present moment doesn’t hand you a new life, it only wakes you up to what’s possible. Wake up to your chance to choose shame until you can be shameless comes moment by moment.

Then “coincidence” puts them in the same class. Suppression based on social fears is how we learn to silence our own hearts. If you can’t speak about your experience fearlessly, you become the censor of your soul. Troy hesitates to tell his friends about the actual highlight of his winter break. He even tells Gabriella the guy she sang with “isn’t really him.” Gabriella tries to talk to her new friend Taylor about her experience with Troy, but Taylor immediately shuts her down based only on what Troy “symbolizes.”

Society is the first mirror we see ourselves in. Take a chance and look, just don’t be fooled by what you see.

Decades later, after everyone has seen the movie, it seems we’re still putting people into boxes... While role-playing HSM at recess, I remember my character assignment being unanimously agreed upon. Someone would say, “You should play Taylor, because she’s Black.” We’d all look at my skin, and remember hers. What could I dispute there? The obvious facts seem to always have final say.

I never spoke up because I was scared of being alien. And didn’t yet see:

“I’M the alien worth exploring. Things on MY planet are extremely foreign and otherworldly.” — Sherry Ning

Inside, I was upset about being perceived as Taylor. In turn, I completely missed the point and reduced Monique Coleman’s craft in the process.4 The movie was never trying to teach anyone to become a particular character.5 It was teaching me to discover what was beyond any category, and to protect that at all costs.

I wanted to play the main character, and maybe the other kids wanted to play main characters too. I wasn’t curious about any relation I could’ve had to Taylor’s character because of my ego—reinforcing a stereotype of “Black” onto a character who wasn’t even written to be “Black” in the first place.6

In reality, I related to all the characters in at least one way—enough to embody any of them for a short game at recess—but I still treated the characters like merchandise to try and change how I was being perceived. Dolls to collect and trade for status on the school playground.

The audition is the heart of the movie, because it shouts something so offensive to the status quo: trained performance can’t compete with vivid soul. It can come easy when it’s real.

Sharpay and Ryan are very polished, they have perfect timing, harmony, and branding—yet their performance still reads as mediocre and fake. The teacher initially rejects Troy and Gabriella for showing up late, but then she overhears them singing. They’ve never done theater and they’re untrained. And yet, the roles fit them perfectly! Here, they weren’t “mathlete” or “ball player”—they felt free to transcend those categories as two people singing a song together. Their peers feel it instantly too. The skater cellist. The mathlete who hip-hop dances. The basketball player baker.

Duality is the first door open to your multiplicity. You feel at home wherever you’re honest with yourself, but honesty requires facing your fears first.

Fear is known to have two exits for animals: fight or flight. But Troy and Gabriella choose a third way, to create. Empowered by love, they named their fear, told each other they were scared to audition and then dove into it anyway. Together they created a beautiful sound, but still arrived to audition as individuals. Go your own way with your whole heart. When you follow your truth, the right people find you.

Your soul doesn’t need to earn belonging. Belonging lives in you, discoverable only once you’re brave enough to be honest to you.

Take #2: The Music Reveals the Irony

Music and dance can always hold the poetry. Saying all that can't be said aloud. Embodiment is just honest.

— watch this beauty —

No, no, no, no... Every divided clique comes together in song and dance. By irony or design, it doesn’t matter, the point is that we see it’s possible.

No one states the obvious: that maybe it’s time to unlearn what you think you know. Instead, the decathlon team and the basketball team join forces to sabotage friends collaborating across clique lines—contradiction of their mission in service of fear.

Until you confront your fears, all you’re stuck with is only what you’ve known in the past. And the terrifying follow-up question is: what if that fear was never even yours to begin with? What if you’ve been serving someone else’s fear your whole life? Check that inheritance!

Sharpay takes action on her fears and sabotages the callback so that Troy and Gabriella miss the audition. Upset and worried, their friends immediately want revenge—a mob ready to act on emotion, but every flock needs a bellwether. Love is the principle that makes new creations possible; and Troy lights the way and says no to revenge. He tells them to work together, not against another.

So they hack the basketball game scoreboard and smoke out the chemistry lab for fun on a Friday night. But hey, that’s exactly the kind of disorder we actually need in our lives!! The basketball team learns to root for the decathlon team, and vice versa. This is what competitiveness in love used to look like: playful, collaborative, aimed at lifting everyone up.

Troy is the first to notice something is wrong:

“Why am I feeling so wrong / my head’s in the game, but my heart’s in the song / she makes this feel so right, should I go for it / better shake this, yikes!”
— Get’cha Head In The Game: Ray Cham, Greg Wells, Drew Seeley, Zac Efron

Do you see the division between head and heart?

Control societies are maintained by people through fear. A divided person is one who can be easily controlled. Jonathan Haidt calls this division the elephant and the rider. The rider is your rational mind that’s small and trying to steer. The elephant is your emotions instinctive stomping, fighting for control of the reins. In sync, you move forward. Out of sync, you drag your body where your mind doesn’t want to go. Vice-versa.

When your rider and elephant are at war with each other, you’re too busy managing conflicts to question and investigate anything happening outside yourself.

That game is the confusion Troy is trying to parse.

Our senses, both honest and untrustworthy, depending on how much attention we pay when they arise.

Sharpay follows Gabriella into her chemistry lab after seeing her with Troy, introduces herself, and panics after realizing Gabriella isn’t only beautiful—she’s intelligent too. Sharpay looks afraid, she can’t compete. Instead of questioning her fear, her elephant screams, and she just pulls the reins harder. That’s why she dominates instead of connects. Sharpay’s choice foreshadows what happens to the franchise itself. HSM1 is about finding soul through friction. HSM2 is about losing soul through scale.

Scaling without asking what you’re amplifying, or why—without weighing the cost at every stage, and blinding yourself to what’s real is a recipe for a higher ignorance. Delusion, even. They chose spectacle, at any cost, just because it worked the first time. Where HSM1 opens with risk and play, HSM2 opens with a four-minute school’s-out dance number where nobody actually leaves school...

HSM is currently referenced, replicated, and reduced to hot people singing and dancing on film, and some people have forgotten the deeper lessons. I put the status-quo lens back on on too, and replayed the motions of what I already knew. I didn’t internalize the harder questions life was demanding me to revisit. I only revisited it for nostalgia. If you missed the social lessons too, maybe you only ever saw the surface— not what they were reflecting back at us.

Take #3: See Not… Mimetics Are Blinding

Barsocchini’s inversion was simple: don’t write a musical for the theater kids to enjoy. Write one that the most popular jock in school would want to sing along to. Then, cast the most “cool jock guy” to trigger the domino effect. Based on how passionate my boyfriend is over this solo, I must say Zac Efron did his job well.

I call this the ReGeo effect, following a symbol without understanding what it represents. In Mean Girls, Janis and Cady cut holes in Regina George’s shirt to humiliate her. The next day, every girl at school shows up wearing the same thing. They weren’t inspired by Regina’s confidence or her individuality. They didn’t even care why there were holes in her shirt. They just saw her, and blindly wanted to be her.

Troy exists in the same realm. Most people didn’t mimic him because they understood his courage or vulnerability, or because they wanted to embrace the same transcendence of category he’d found. They saw his looks and popularity as the value worth capturing, even though there was more underneath.

Troy and Gabriella became signals that something new was possible, and worth the risk. But the danger of being a signal is that the people following you for the wrong reasons kill your message the moment you stop trending.

If Troy Bolton can transcend his category, maybe you can too. But did it actually work? Did we see Troy as human, or just a heartthrob who happens to dance well? I had the Zac Efron backpack, so you know exactly how 7-year-old me was thinking.

Don’t seize meaning instead of sitting with the invitation people walk in with.7 Some of us sort Troy and Gabriella into “hot guy, smart girl, singers” instead of accepting the harder dare—rethinking why we box their “n of 1” experience in the first place.

René Girard tells us that mimetic desire is why this social categorization is nearly inevitable. Desire isn’t independent nor linear. We don’t want things because we want them; we want them because we saw someone else want them first. Sharpay doesn’t much care about Troy until she sees Gabriella does. Then he becomes everything.

Control societies can’t help but scale bad mimicry. It keeps restocking the molds of celebrities, influencers, politicians. We consume and borrow their desires as our own. They’re everything we’re not, which is what makes them irresistible. It makes you think: if I become like them, or do what they do, maybe I’ll finally be enough. Maxxing. We copy the aesthetics—hair, costumes, merch. Troy became his own Regina George. But the moment he stopped being cool, we abandoned the lesson and went looking for a new molds.

The Mask

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile
…

Why
…

should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

…

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

- We Wear The Mask, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1895)

How much would it cost you to disbelieve the voice in your head? How much would you pay to be something you’re not? Look at these characters—obsessed with how they’re seen, and, in that distrust, surveilling each other constantly.

Chad is the perfect case study. He’s the first person personally offended by Troy singing, treating it like a betrayal of the whole basketball team. But in his big persuasion speech, Chad reveals an encyclopedic knowledge of music history.He secretly loves music as you see in HSM2. But he’s projecting his own repressed desire onto Troy.

Have you ever felt threatened by someone else’s freedom?

Dunbar knew. You’re not for sale the moment you stop lying to yourself. Take the mask off first, for yourself.

Take #4: See the Light

Control societies can fix your becoming by capping discovery and exposure faster than you can process your change. So be still. Most people only notice when it feels too late.

In HSM2, Troy gets a summer job from Sharpay at her family country club. He negotiates for his friends to join him, talks big about solidarity—and Sharpay and the manager tempt him with a promotion. He takes the bait and hides it. Control in a “free society” works through reinforcements, small compromises that compound until you no longer recognize yourself.

Amy Sherald painted this experience—a woman who knew more about others than she knew about herself, never having had a map to discover who she was. Awkwardly, I also felt her grip tighten around my own arm. That’s what control does in the mind: it makes puppets of people who only ever read the maps others drew for them, surrendering her agency to draw a new one.

Troy’s dad warns him not to get left behind at any cost. So Troy’s mind enters survival mode—cold. Fear and binary thinking condition you to treat people as means to an end.8 Warmth requires slowing down and seeing sideways. Seeing what’s actually in front of you. Troy humiliates his best friend over the wrong cheese on a sandwich, and act surprised when his friends call him a sellout. His real mistake was never taking the promotion. It was lying to himself and trying to control what was never his to control.

iSpy: Someone who appears empty

Have you ever really seen her as an individual?

Sharpay is so consumed with winning and surveilling everyone else. For all her talent, it appears that she has no deep passion—just skills sharpened into weapons to win. She goes after what she wants shamelessly, and doesn’t pretend, so there’s an honesty to her at least. But watching Sharpay is like watching a black hole consume itself endlessly.

Sharpay displays limerence for Troy—an obsessive, dramatic, unrequited longing. She doesn’t want the love Ryan or her friends already offer. She isn’t looking for a real friendship or true love. She just wants the symbol of Troy. Her desire for him is a desire for what he represents. People become accessories to her, a means to an end.

Troy and Gabriella never reciprocate the same time she spends thinking about them. A control society is built from people treated as agents in service of a system that runs on deception—which is why, in every sphere of that world, truth feels like a threat.

Gabriella names her fear exactly:
“You might win Troy. You might win the talent show. But at what cost?”

Sharpay goes blank. She knows the cost, she’s living it. Winning fills you temporarily, and then it leaves you lonely. That last echo of applause. The last comments of praise you keep refresh your feed for. The foggy memory that cheap validation leaves without the fulfillment of deep purpose and love.

It is never enough. Troy overhears all of this and tries to apologize, but Gabriella hits him with what we all fear to hear: “I just don’t recognize you anymore.”

This is the moment the stakes become high enough for Troy to actually wake up and be a good friend. The next day, he walks out on Sharpay mid-rehearsal—potentially torching his new basketball scholarship. It reads as courageous until you realize his friends never asked him to do that...What they wanted was integrity in his words, not an impulsive sacrifice that could hurt his own future.

Pause.

Stop and listen. Your inner child knows you best, it knows what makes you smile—but it lives so deep it often can’t tell you clearly what it needs in time.

Above all else, guard your heart.

See the light.

Take #5: Surrender to Your Humanity

Troy doesn’t lose himself because he wants success. He loses himself because he starts selling out his relationships to secure a reward—trying to skip past his own darkness and go straight for the sun.

It doesn’t work that way. The only way out of his mess is apologizing and taking responsibility. Troy does it, eventually, and his friends forgive him almost effortlessly. But even that effortlessness reveals something: the supporting characters are mostly static—so don’t assume the effortless apologies in real life are always genuine.

The fix, fittingly, runs backward: Troy has to retrace his steps to what got him and his friends the job in the first place—Sharpay’s crush on him. Sharpay had the control the whole time, but never any power over her own self.

Once the game reveals its own stupidity, you just stop wanting to play.9 Sharpay is desperately grasping roots of meaning that were never really there—she has no relations, she’s hollow. The consequence of always looking up instead of sideways.

Relation gives you light. Be connected. When you spot a crack, investigate it. Watch the light gets larger and brighter, until that nowledge carries you through to the other side.

The only control that really matters is self-control. How you react. What you choose. What you think. What you create.

Who are you becoming?

Take #6: Something New?

If you were like me, blindly claiming to be breaking free wearing their faces on your pajamas—claiming their courage without doing the honest work of following your own heart and facing fear in your own life. Get to work on that! Live!

Did we, audience, fail to listen to the art? Was the art too flashy to touch us? We know HSM didn’t fail artistically or commercially. In all facets, they scaled the globe, but why didn’t their message endure the times?

Luckily for us, I think the message is still burning in 2ø26—beneath the glitter.

There’s not a star in heaven you can’t reach, if you don’t blindly obey status quo categories. Don’t hide your love, don’t sell your integrity, choose the risk of being. Converge on values, not only symbol.

New creations are how we evolve. Atleast that’s what I think for now.

Peace & blessings,

philoso ∞ the philosofounder

#FreedomForLove #MakeAmericaFreeAgain

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3

Part one story. Field guide here.

Are you ready to play an infinite game?

How to escape competition, in love.

How many people walk paths their parents planned out for them decades ago? Competing with peers over acceptances, internships, rankings, settling unhappily into jobs they endure purely for survival. Staying tethered to people they tolerate for company to pass time, and run the same routines on autopilot. I was one of these people, playing finitely in finite games, and I got exactly the safe, linear decay that comes with making that choice.

Choose something new.

When I first read Peter Thiel’s Zero to One in 2020, it shook tenth-grade me out of the kind of sleepwalking that kills 5 year old dreams. It confirmed a suspicion I’d been carrying for years: that my whole life had been built on inherited scripts. Nothing felt right or true to me. The rat race towards some label of “success” finding the “right path” as a teen, the pressure to be a good student with drama and …

Read more

Know that you are loved, just as you are. Being, right now.

If you don’t know this, life is free. The best things in life may not always be, but true love is real. I want to find out if human evolution is as simple as every person using their freedom for love. Fearlessly.

Sailing in dark, uncharted waters is moving toward the future.

It is irrational to tread darkness, and yet—hope is how we survive til’ light returns. Picture a ship caught in a violent storm at sea, no lighthouse in sight, no lanterns on board—yet they must steer. Likely, the waves will drag them under or throw them against rocks—and they must steer. Why would the crew just wait to die, still breathing? How must they steer in pitch darkness?

They must shine their light from within, expand it in action. Once their fire is lit, and only if they survive it, they’ll transform the darkness into a story to tell or a song to sing. Having faith, hoping, optimistically for your future. You are shining bright, cont…

Read more

Every day, I meet eyes with the massive Santa Cruz mountains, and humbled in awe; I forget this is the norm, living in California, wondering about the miles and miles of thirsty lands singing out.

Make it rain for us, now.

Augustus Doricko, the founder of Rainmaker, a cloud-seeding startup said that half a million acres of California farmland face going dry by 20301 as water sources tighten. As 31 state legislatures are debating banning weather modification in their states. Did you even know that people can just make rain fall out of the sky? Not governments, but people.

Read more

Radically, I don’t care for incoherent categories:

Genius lives in every person. Be liberated from your past to love today. Love is the only true currency when learning. It is to enter flow when you love what you do. We’re in need of the art, technology, and environments to bring it out of us. In the present moment, when we act—we can see our divine.

My full resume is 5 pages long... I need a dynamic proofolio not to minimize my whole life, learning, & growth into 10pt fonts. What is an expert? Someone who can think deep, do and teach, something old and new. Based on your learning, looking at your own patterns, decide who really has been teaching you, seek them out, ask them to sit dissertation style to sign your POW! We’ll buy them lunch and coffee, as they hear your work out. Then invite them back to teach their ideas Pop-Lecture style.

Where to begin? With the Planna Man, he’ll get you in.

To help you water as many seeds as you can!

Just plant one seed a day to give your future-self peace of mind.

Conversation menu, anyone?

Lunchclub.io was a cool app that hosted lunch conversation pairings, so with our Crew Yellow Pages. We hope to do the same thing, for now this button is where you’d add your scheduling link. We’ll add more features to keep conversations coming in ;)

If this was not useful. We have a tutorial in dashboard! Until then, please give us feedback :)

Since as a people we don’t really trust the incremental process of creative and spiritual growth. Whenever people (collaborators or jobs) want to see your whole proof-of-work. go POW!

Show em’ you’re n of 1!
Try it out: earthseedtradeschool.space
Check out the startup powering it: Horizon House

Until next time,

philosofounder out ✌🏾

Name inspired by Octavia Butler ofc, check out Parable of the Sower.

I come to here through the codebase to speak my poem, a confession. Despite living in an era of maximum abundance in human history, our institutions are trapped in the logic of industrializing human, stalling evolution because old systems have yet to collapse.

We are products of the systems that form us, so pay attention. As a proud American with a faith in freedom for love, I want to quit being a bystander to hypocrisy in daily practice and in law. I am a child failed by all the adults in my life, world, and beyond; people at present unconsciously operating bodies, classrooms, communities, institutions, governments, and corporations whom we vote for with our dollars and attention, and ignore obvious patterns but accept bare minimum output.

If traditional schools and classrooms aren’t for you, I completely relate—even while telling my truth a bit too late...My grievance with the social form of education comes intimately as an upset customer and unloved neighbor. As most kids, I was involuntarily made a stakeholder in this business and an operator of its machines before I could think for myself. I tried to play this game my best, but—

even with wonder and reason in my toolbox:

I marched.

Sippin’ on hot chai

Countin’ down their time

Then I can live again

My heart lies dormant in the walls of this pen

Left eye signed me up for this?

What’s so wrong with me?

To trap my right mind in a state so unfree

Could it be?

She still a slave in the 21st century

- the poem of a girl who didn’t speak up for herself in the moment1

I was an anonymous ant in uniform walking across a stage in a cap I’d painted, “Not For Sale.” My hat was my cowardly attempt at a little honesty; but a cat stole my tongue, and I just let him run away... All of a sudden, I appeared to be accepting my grand paper belt in front of 5,000+ strangers—who couldn’t get to know, care for, or even see MacKenzie Fisher—all in name of “people pleasing”?

My people didn’t even see me in the sea of corny Hogwarts robes; so I sat there a date roasting alone, hot in all black under the deadening sun I always love; feeling exposed and insignificant: like me, my time, and effort all these years didn’t matter. I was no one, but a foolish fish, forgetting it’s “all business nothing personal”—these days. Me being so rock and roll, I cashed my freedom in and walked out of the ceremony to go breathe.

Current educational institution design and social machines operating, in practice violate individual freedom, they unravel and eventually kill the creative process of evolving life. For all children of the world, including the adults, put an end to authoritarian control over minds and hearts, your freedom can be used not in fear; but in practice for love, new institutions can be formed, and new environments for whole people to exist—bottom up as human.

My scholarship made it easy for me to decide initially, and I was excited for the West coast change. But upon reflection, I spent my attention span for years in six-figure babysitting, in class pretend living. I didn’t belong there, a dying flame, and everyone knows this—it’s all I preached. I love philosophy, with all my heart, but it wasn’t enough for me to break myself into parts, only to please for grades and more advanced degrees. Discovering the light passionate people shined at a camp called 2e, was a taste of how free it feels being accepted by my nerdy. I tried to dropout to “build my dreams”, every single summer after, and failed beautifully—at wielding the courage I’ve just discovered.

“The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling

Can centre both worlds of Heaven and Hell.” - Emily Brontë

So I said to hell with living this lie. I rejected my “free degree”, and of fear of family walked a lie.2 Honesty is the true policy because truth is most efficient when you desire to solve your daily problems. When I lie to my heart, my mind fights back through body depletion. Every morning, I’d tell myself a great “fear-based” story or ambitious goal for “excellence” to motivate my doing something I hated. But if I would lie to the only invisible being I know for certain exists, my poor observer, who could I trust in? Who could trust in me? Vice-versa.

Socially, protecting privacy is the best policy. Minding your own business but being ready to behold a world to another in moments of truth is how we can hold interdependence in community. That is what schools are… Being aware about what we let slip from thought to reality creates a new world. If your emotions aren’t being expressed through art and creation, your mind will surely depress in them; and if unable to keep coming back—eventually no spirit can keep you live. #Don’tDie

The true “evil”3 I feel against my freedom within institutions today are the incentives and encouragement to constantly mask and deceive ourselves and others to appear “good”, “normal”, and “coexist”—it’s all failing, can’t you see? Appearances aren’t ever what they seem. Substance and content matter most than symbol, you see.

Our private thoughts and vantage points are particular. By design, people always have secrets, they can always deceive, but that's why we need to trust. There are many liars in these broken environments, it isn’t only me living in class, un-free. In fact, everybody lies. Many do silence theirs and deny it. But don’t do it! You have to be true to you, so you can believe in yourself too. You might be invisible and so am I, but I need you to believe in you so we can believe in each other. I exist! Don’t look to the sky, I’m right in front of you.

“Believe in the me that believes in you.” - Kamina

What are you?

Do you trust and believe in that thing?

“I don’t believe in isms, I just believe in me.” - Ferris Bueller

I let it all of it go to live in peace and love. To create the heavens here on Earth I feel above. With what we know of history, as human we all deserve, the justice peace that living in truth offers through love. To build a future where no other are slave to anything or anyone in order to survive. I see people thrive and create in this world of mine, if you have to have the courage to be honest no matter what or who stands against you.

Whatever we do or don’t create right now, we know for certain, future humans will be, here and now, like us, living result of how we spend today.

That is a huge responsibility, but one we all must take.

It starts with you.

Being a “student” in that place... in class. Teachers handicapped my brain, tamed my ego, and weakened my spine. I chose self-education everyday in love, but schools can’t guide loving efficiently—it’s hit or miss. Through suppressing play, everyday, kids like dogs are trained to sit and stay, the white and blue lights burn their eyes. How many more hours in this stale chair? Holding #2 pencils burn me still, sitting for those assessments that “determined” my early skills. In my heart, I held onto my dreams which is how my genius survived until to now—feeding my child, the tree and the wind. Somehow, my heart never cared what people said, I was going to live my poem even if secret.

My inner child called out to me:

“That you, who were Existence / Yourself forgot to live.” - Emily Dickinson

With all unique humans who enter a system meant to mechanize them into interchangeable parts, my ambitions, tastes, and passions were nearly erased from the start! A soul and spirit die out in the dark. All for sake of social cohesion, “usefulness”, and any extractable talent. Our institutions are designed bottom-up to control the free human, fear-mongering hearts and minds; they beat the love out of the urgency of time, until it can be priced and sold back to you, somehow… it seems the world is aware of this online now.

Now I practice the bravery to pass between child and man. I balance my walk, one foot skips rock on river, down a channel of infinite wonder in flux; the other foot is anchored like a tree dragging stubborn—a man tall of wisdom. I suspect many people who stay trapped in the addictive comfort of sticking to the status quo, never reach this state of unconditional love.4 If you've managed to save your soul from the brutality of social forms of violent borders and decaying law and order, take pride in your maintenance of self.

Instead of recreating what has been done, create what has never existed before. If life is your goal, you are free to live now how you behold. Being artist of your life is true liberation from violence, competition will always invite him. Beware of competing and playing to win life—working to live means you cease to be truly be living—in the present. Missing right now too stuck in your past and future. Wake up, friend. Spend your attention well, discerning the game you’re playing why and when, to be here and now, in the world—living. Even the 24 hours today aren’t guaranteed, the wheel of fortune condemns all men who dream.

Sell your time and taste for very cheap, and the broken environment only resurfaces what the driving animals seeks—you reflect and would choose differently and can—tomorrow. We, human, have been trained for centuries as AI to be 21st century slaves, controlled by the man-made machines in our mind, think of the hive mind of group thinkers online—we are the misaligned ones who have yet to evolve. Critically think. As social animals, in part slave by choice, in part slave by design our collective norms reward us for selling away our lives.

Being a person is truly hard work. It is not our fault that we showed up here handed lemons every single day. Never instructed to build a wagon to carry them all. Now aware, it’s your responsibility to evolve and make lemonade along the way as you travel—anyone can be conscious if they choose to wake up and play now.

There is no silver bullet. Only work to do. The living proof and legacy, of your creations, future human will remember, or forget entirely.

Give yourself grace and clarity, to know where you are in context of where you want to go. You don’t have to be right or win, you have to take action out and within. Use your heart as compass. Instead of training ourselves to be parrots, it is time to get creative!

You’re free to learn however you choose, you ain’t no slave man, not now, and that’s the truth!

“To do what they can not. Such is the burden of destiny and children.”

- Rachel, X-Men

We share a common future, yet lack the common ground.

Peace People,

philoso ∞ the philosofounder

#FreedomForLove

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Add any songs that remind you of a time you felt unfree to learn, or how school makes you feel if you’re still in it.

On stage the first odd thing is knowing what it feels like being so high off the ground

You look to your left and everyone is staring at you

You look to your right and you know they’re looking at you

Theres no where to hide

When you get to the mic, you hold it in your hands and its cold

Your heart is dropping

And you can’t afford to think

The only thing you smell is the metal

You don’t know whats coming out of your mouth

You just taste the metal every time you bring it to your mouth

You feel the beats in your chest

You look in front of you and you

You shiver because you have chills

You see faces and you remember every emotion

Even off stage you feel everything

You see it on their faces

In their grins, their raised eyebrows, their laughter, their handshakes

When your named is being shouted

When your hear whispers

When people are dancing along

When the music stops

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I feel something choking me

I don’t know

Maybe its in the air

I take a breath and life I breathe

I think I’m burning

Must be the passion bottling until I take action

I’m scared

What if…

I don’t know

I could die

You could die

So then I would die

I don’t know

I just can’t breathe

Looking inside

The void consumes me whole

Where do I look?

I don’t know…

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Yes, you’re seeing that right... My follower count now awkwardly but honestly sits at zero, and on my philosofounder_ page, and I intend to keep it that way. For the past 3 years, I've been grappling with the ways social media platform have rewired my understanding of self, connection with others, and value I capture.

We've inherited a social environment built on values revealed as simply what other people think about us. Our social values of finding a stranger credible have become, "followers" and “likes” as currency of worth and potential. On feeds, I feel encouraged to chase validation.

Most importantly, I am not a commodity. I am a human being with a love for genuine discovery and understanding, not transactional social engagements. Socializing feels like business now. The concept of having "followers" reduces all people online into the process of marketing yourself as a brand in all your content and consumption, which defeats the true purpose of these platforms. As many wise writers have said, we’ve become products with labels, our complex identities flattened into marketable categories.

I love love love the purpose of social media, and I will continue to post things because it's a great medium to share and archive eras of my life, my favorite music, memories, and things I’m interested in url to inspire action in my life— but the status quo rarely fosters genuine connection for me. And thus, I needed to liberate myself from toxic traditions that kept me from using platforms as they were meant to be used.

When you think about what you want to post how much of your time is spent signaling status versus truly sharing what you love, regardless of the "like" count? When present online, how much of your energy goes into surveilling the lives of others versus creating your own content and feed you love? In some ways, it reminds me of what said about digital group-speak, where our voices are outsourced to what performs well, not what feels true. I know what my answer is, and it was a wake-up call to do something differently with my online presence.

Ever since my senior year, I'd been searching for ways to rebel against this corrupting social system. I radically practice being, posting whatever and whenever I want, removed people I don’t want there, cut out social media from my life, and it all became a great filter. But those were all performance. Radical action was needed. So I’m done catering to people nor algorithm; I will participate and break rules on my own terms. My account will remain public, but it is no longer for sale.

It's all about liberation for me. Choosing quality over quantity, always. They can keep their infinite scroll. If you can relate to the things I share, the music I love, the opinions I have (or disagree with), and are nearby me—reach out to me add me in your orbit! I need connection that honors human complexity and invites vulnerability and understanding, not triggering bad mimicry that keeps me trapped in attention cycles and status competitions.

If your like me, we must be brave enough to live out our truths regardless of how others may feel: this is to leave ourselves unsolved for becoming, to resist categorizing every facet of our being, and being intentional with how we curate our digital worlds. Our true selves are mysteries for us to piece together and explore throughout our lives.

The call to action is not necessarily to delete all of your followers, but to reflect on what you're truly seeking being online. If you’re building a brand, step into that and market. If you’re selling a product, step into that and sell it. But if you’re just showing up as you to touch others and the world, then step into expression and relation no matter the cost.

Are you ready, to be?

#DontFollowMeFriendMe

Contact me at mackenziemichellefisher@gmail.com if you relate to any of this or would like to talk more!

Call Me: (864)-907-9757 - I don’t bite, and love convos so just do it man!

IRL: SF in South Park (lets get drinks/snacks, talk, and chill)

X as @philosofounder (girard 4 techbros)

Insta also as @philosofounder (mi vida loca)

Spotify as @mkhastaste (listening party?)

(in need of a new book/film app but I love those too)

“Can’t do this stupid simple job. Money well spent huh…”

Why does fragility hurt so much? I really wish I could fully embrace all aspects of my humanity without any pain and mistakes. Sounds divine, right? To enjoy all the luxuries of being human without any limitations. My pain and mistakes make me feel less beautiful because we don’t exist in vacuums as humans. Our pain and mistakes can break everything around us, including ourselves.

"Please, someone glue my pieces together. Sparkle and fill my cracks with glitter. Make me shiny and gorgeous again."

We fall down as people all the time, and when we do, we feel useless. As kids, our parents punish us for falling; we go to timeout. In school, teachers might exclude you for falling. Or, if you’re like me, you’ve been physically pushed down by everyone and everything. We look around, yearning for someone to step in and pick us up, to make our pain stop. We look for someone to make us …

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Because I thought you died in my arms

I can’t imagine life without you

The days stretch out, flat and colorless

Every corner I turn feels alien

Because even though I would go on with you inside of me forever

I know I could never embody your swagger the way you wear it

Even though I would change the way I walk and what goes at the end of my sentences

My attempts would just feel like a costume

Only your legs and voice, that particular timbre, truly held you upright

I love you, but only you can be you

So I want you right here with me, breathing

Punch buggy boo

And when the light of morning cuts through the darkness, I always find out it's just a dream, leaving me cold

Like the mist I feel walking up this breezy street

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Every time I feel that jolt of nervousness walking home at night or riding the bus, I catch myself imagining a different street. A street where there were no homeless people. Yes, it might smell less like piss. Yes, it might have less trash on the ground. Sure, I might feel more comfortable getting where I need to go, but was this city truly constructed for my comfort or even the comfort of the majority? God knows, the people I’m fearing don’t look comfortable.

Last nig…

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Mine is dark brown sugar. As I’ve started cooking more over the past years, brown sugar has become a key ingredient in breakfast foods and in elevating the flavors of certain meats. It’s very different from white granulated sugar, as it’s thick enough to harbor both a savory and an intense sweetness. Cooking with it is more fun because it clumps like wet sand instead of the fine, microscopic grains that stick to your hand and fall through the cracks between your fingers. Unlike white granulated sugar, where you might overestimate how much you need due to its thinness, a little brown sugar goes a long way.

However, brown sugar is the icing on the cake for me when cheffing it up, whether it’s a tray of warm yams (sweet potatoes), creamy shrimp and grits, honey-glazed salmon, or even candied bacon. For me, food isn’t just nourishment or art; it’s culture. Not in the “I’m a Black woman from the South soul-food” way—yes, those are facts about me…

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When the warmth of your palm and the texture of your hands build a fire in my chest
When your eyes become telescopes to hidden constellations
When your scent pulls me into the gravity of your unknown

Imagine leaving me midstep?

When we move like we own every beat of the world
Rhythm is what we make it to be, and we move in perfect harmony
When my songs hush the loud city into our own private concert
When “home” is wherever we sit, together in each other's company

Imagine walking away before the music stops?

When one kiss contains a thousand lifetimes
When one taste is the best experience your tongue has ever had
When one glance crowns you sovereign of my whole universe
When one thought travels the distance between our hearts and eyes

Imagine leaving me so soon?

When our skin sticks like sun-warmed sap
When your smile breaks down every wall and barrier over my heart
When our silence hums louder than any track we bang
And your voice is the melody I can’t stop singing every day

…

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With every stop, he sways with the movement of the train.
In his eyes, only the depth of the pit of the ocean is visible.

I wanted to check in,
but how do you ask this stranger how they’re doing?
How can you ask a stranger how they’re doing
when their pain is the strength their carrying—
to the point they must lean?
How can you ask a stranger when everyone around him is laughing,
on their phones, or staring in shock?

He doesn’t see the people who watch with care,
who wish they could help but can’t.
He doesn’t hear them praying over him in their heads,
because they don’t want to make a scene or put themselves at risk.

How can you ask a stranger if they need help
in…

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I remember waking up around 7 a.m., always like clockwork because my father had to leave for work. Before I got out of bed, I checked the secret hole I had carved into my mattress, a private vault where I stashed candy and snacks. The inventory was always intact because I never ate anything. I don’t know why my anxiety triggered that ritual, but somehow, it made the world make sense.

Next came my camel brown wedge knee-high boots—their hollow soles always seemed to collect little rocks and gravel like souvenirs from my small wanderings around the school blacktop. I would pair them with warm leggings, a mini skirt, and a simple top—a child’s version of armor for the unpredictable world of elementary school. Outside my window, the world was foggy and wet, the street blurred under sheets of drizzle and shades of blue and dark green. My room itself is hard to fully remember. I only recall…

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sitting in your mist

of good and bad energy your feelings persist.

the sheet is your only expression

the one that lives forever

emotions need outlets

or MAD will be our end.

unsupported and alone

our thoughts concede to their home

like a glass prison

watching the world watch you watch them.

naked and afraid

in nature and society

naked and afraid

that when you open your mouth

that gun will trigger

gibberish will utter from your breath

and the Earth’s orbit shall stop.

little poet is trapped by anxiety

little poet is unfree

unfree from eyes, words, and thoughts

unfree from trees, cars, and roads

unfree from people, emotions, and thoughts

little poet deep breathe…

your words will one day set you free.

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