The Collective Problem

4 days ago

4 min read

“Man is born asleep, lives asleep, and dies asleep, only imagining that he is awake.”

— G. I. Gurdjieff

10 years ago, I was completely asleep and utterly convinced I was awake. I was the overachiever, crushing my career, my finances, my community, outworking every person in the room. I was the people-pleaser, coaching every kids team and sitting on every board, giving myself away so I would be loved. I was the egomaniac who believed he deserved more than everyone around him, and the intellectual who had to be the authority on everything. I had no idea any of it was a mask. How could I? The mask was perfect. It was delivering exactly the fame, fortune, and pleasure my culture had told me to chase. My outer life was a ten out of ten and climbing to eleven — and on the inside I suddenly started collapsing, and I did not understand why. I had everything I had striven for and almost like a switch got flipped, it felt empty.

So, I did the only thing my program knew how to do. I doubled down. “More”. And when “more” didn’t work, the drinking, the drugs, the compulsive escapes, one red line crossed after another until I could not find myself at all. The anxiety attacks, the sleepless nights, the inability to simply be present with the people I loved most. And I could not ask for help, because asking for help was a violation of my program — it was not safe, I would disappoint people, I would be judged, and failure felt like death. It took a rock bottom. It took the complete collapse of the identity I had spent my whole life building before I could admit I was not okay, surrender my own best thinking, and accept that the self I had become was not only failing to thrive — it was no longer going to survive. That was the beginning of waking up. And what I started waking up to is what I want to share with you.

Gurdjieff said this a hundred years ago, and it is still true. Most of us are asleep. We move through our days reacting and responding, certain we are awake and certain we are choosing, when we are doing neither. We are running a program. And almost no one has ever told us this, which means we are all asleep together. That is the collective problem.

You are like a machine running an operating system you did not write. Part of that program is individual — the code you installed as a child to survive your particular home and your particular wounds. Part of it is collective — the code handed to you by your country, your culture, your ideology, the water you never knew you were swimming in. We call this operating system the ego, or the persona. And most of us have mistaken the program for the Self. We think it is who we are. We have identified with it completely.

It is not who you are. It never was. The ego is a fear-based survival program, and it is not the enemy. It did its job. It got you through. It is a mask you learned to wear to meet a world that did not feel safe, and it was useful. But a mask built for survival will never let you thrive. That was never its function. And so, you can check every box your culture handed you and still feel, somewhere underneath, that something is profoundly wrong.

Look at how many shapes the mask takes. The overachiever in the corner office. The addict in the alley. From the outside they look like opposites, one a triumph and one a tragedy, but underneath they are running almost identical code: I am not enough, I am not worthy of love, I am terrified of being abandoned, I cannot bear to not be in control. The people-pleaser who disappears herself so she will finally be accepted. The intellectual who must be the authority on everything, so no one sees his fear. Different masks. The same wound. We are all compensating for a childhood we did not choose and a program we did not write.

And beneath all of it — beneath the mask, under the fears, past the limiting beliefs — there is something else. There is your Authentic Self. A Divine spark of individuated consciousness with unlimited capacity to create, and very likely a gift and a purpose you have never once explored because you have been too busy surviving to go looking. This is not new information. Every spiritual system across the ages has pointed at the same thing: you are not who you think you are, and your suffering is the gap between the two.

Our ancestors understood this. They built rituals around it — vision quests, initiations, rites of passage that arrived at puberty to shepherd a child’s psychology into an adult’s. The old self died so a truer one could be born. The snake shed its skin. It died on the cross. But in the modern West we have thrown those rituals away, and so we never make the crossing. We just keep wearing the mask, year after year, becoming more polished and more exhausted. We are depressed and disconnected and quietly afraid, living what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation”, while telling everyone that everything is wonderful and lying to no one more than ourselves.

I know all of this because I lived every bit of it, and because the waking up was real. The mask can come off. The program can be seen for what it is. And when it is, you meet the Self that was waiting underneath the whole time — the one where the peace and the joy and the purposeactually live. The only thing more tragic than being asleep is dying that way, having never once known who you really are.

So, I am telling you, in case no one ever has: you are not who you think you are. None of us are. Who you are is underneath the layers of conditioning. You don’t need to go anywhere or become someone new. You just need to let go of who you are not.

From sleep to awakening, and from fear to love,

The Way