I don’t want to sell myself on social media. I don’t want to live online. The country’s a mess, the world is literally burning, everybody’s complaining, and I’m trying to figure out how to be the person I still want to be. Everything feels off, and it’s not just a feeling; it is. But worst of all is the rancid smell of inevitability in the air. This false notion that everything is unfolding the way it has to.

I don’t know where that comes from. Whether it’s a religious thing, everyone suddenly believes in fate, and apparently ours is to have war, poverty, and ICE shootings at routine traffic stops, or something else. Either way, it’s wrong. And unacceptable.

The world that we live in wasn't constructed on fate. It was constructed on the will of people who had the dream, courage, and might to imagine a reality unlike the one they were presented. All of the artists, politicians, and great figures that we learn about and admire, knew this. The villains, too.

If life is a game and history repeats itself, then perhaps we need a refresh on the rules.

Rule number one: There are none.

We spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the game — the intricate, often brutal dance of living, social climbing, power-seeking, and status-signaling. We critique the players, we analyze their tactics, and we label them as either the heroes of merit or the perpetrators of manipulation. Yet, this entire exercise is a distraction. We treat the game as a permanent, external weather system that has descended upon us, rather than a structure we are actively building, maintaining, and re-authorizing with every passing day.

The game is not an imposition; it's a contract. It's a set of mutually agreed-upon terms regarding what is valuable, what is aesthetically pleasing, who is powerful, and which politics matter. This contract doesn't exist in a vacuum; it exists because we, everyday citizens, continuously sign it. We sign it when we decide which profiles to follow, which aesthetics to mimic, and which metrics of success to prioritize. By participating, we provide the raw material that makes the game functional.

A common reaction to this reality is to frown down upon it. We watch the social climber or the performative elite and express disdain. But this is the ultimate act of complicity. When you judge a person’s status through the very lenses the game provides, you're validating those lenses. You're confirming that the hierarchy is real and that the criteria for moving up it are valid. You're not standing outside the game; you're merely a spectator who's still invested in the outcome. By participating in the judgment of others using the game’s own metrics, you're keeping the contract alive.

When we're not spectating, we often justify our own participation by pointing to circumstance. We claim that survival — putting food on the table, securing a foothold in a competitive environment — requires us to play. This is true. Circumstances are not equal, and the pressure to perform is often a matter of literal survival. However, acknowledging the coercion of circumstance is not the same as acknowledging the mechanism of reinforcement. We can recognize that the game is a survival necessity while simultaneously recognizing that our collective insistence on the rules of that game is what makes the coercion so absolute.

The tragedy of our current position is that we have become comfortable in the role of the frustrated subject. It's easier to point fingers at the high-profile players, the ones who have successfully weaponized the contract, than it is to admit that we're the ones who gave them that power. We treat change as an abstract hope for the future, conveniently ignoring that change is an act of will. Nothing about this social contract changes unless we stop signing it, or at the very least, until we stop pretending that we are forced to participate in the specific versions of the game that we claim to despise.

We're at a critical point where the dissonance between what we say we value and what we actually reinforce has become unsustainable. We're the co-signers of a reality we find exhausting, yet we fear the alternative of opting out. As long as we refuse to address the ethics of our own participation, and as long as we continue to use the game’s own logic to measure the world around us, the game will remain exactly as it is. We're not the victims of the contract; we're its guarantors. If we want a different reality, we must stop assuming that the current one is inevitable.