Dreams For Survival.

It is necessary.

It makes me sick to my stomach when I realize that most of our dreams will die if we cannot make money. By the tragic mathematics of existence, no money, no meaning. No coins, no canvas. No currency, no cadence. A symphony of ambitions dies each day, from lack of funding. Talent is traded for time. Time, for tasks. And the tasks? They are rarely sacred. You must enter the trade, or be trampled by it.

You must do business with the lizard people. Those cold-blooded middlemen of reality, merchants of mediocrity who build temples out of spreadsheets and pray to the god of Gross Domestic Product. You must stand shoulder to scale with them in their fluorescent-lit marketplaces. You must hawk their hollow goods, speak their smooth slogans, peddle their pretense. You must buy their branded identities and sell your silence in return. All this to collect enough rectangular talismans so that one day, maybe, you can rent back your right to dream.

It’s a cruel conversion. Your soul for their salary. A small, silent violence that happens every morning when you wake up. Because in this world, a good life isn’t earned by virtue or vision, it’s bought. With interest. Money, not spirit, is the brick and mortar that holds the fragile structure of joy. And those without it are locked out of Eden for the simple crime of not playing the game fast enough. Or dirty enough.

So, we log in. To life, labor, and loss. We assume the role of masked men doing the bidding of other masked men, an infinite masquerade of mimicry and obedience. We carry jars of transparent ambitions we try to fill with shiny distractions. Coins. Trinkets. Metrics of meaning that mean nothing to the child we once were. That child wanted to paint, to touch stars, to live barefoot and write love letters to a girl. But that child doesn’t pay rent.

The mission is clear. Play the game, complete the task, collect the reward. Rinse. Repeat. Repress. And how long does this simulation run? Forever. Unless.

Unless you’re struck by luck’s lightning, or born beneath its banner. Unless your suffering becomes a salable brand, or your trauma goes viral, or your dreams are conveniently aligned with consumer trends. Unless the dice are weighted in your favor, your anthropomorphic labor will be milked till the marrow dries, till your dreams are mythologized, embalmed, and finally mocked as childish. Not because they were immature, but because you couldn't afford them. And in this world, poverty is the only real immaturity.

Society chews you slowly. A mechanical mouth of gears and graphs. And because everyone else is inside the same grinding jaw, you think it is utopia. That it is necessary. For progress. For community. But this isn’t civilization. It’s synchronized surrender. A choir of the condemned singing hymns to hustle culture.

They tell you, “Work hard and you’ll make it.” But make what? A comfortable cage? A quieter kind of despair?

This is the trick. They sell you dreams just expensive enough to keep you working, but never cheap enough to actually own. You begin to believe that ambition is a luxury item, that self-expression is an indulgence, that peace is reserved for the posthumous. And so you stay a laborer of illusion, a beast of burden draped in lanyards.

And the worst part? You start defending it. You start laughing at your own lynching. You start calling slavery “security.” But there’s rot beneath the routine. You feel it. That gentle, gnawing nausea. That awareness that somewhere along the line, you traded life for lifestyle. You traded presence for productivity. You became a ghost in your own story, haunting the margins, waiting for the next paycheck to make it all feel less hollow.

What we call society is a multi-level marketing scheme for survival. What we call success is often a trauma response. But the system smiles. And the lizard people hiss in harmony. Because as long as you keep showing up—clocking in, cashing out, consuming—the dreamscape remains just out of reach. A dangling Eden. A carrot made of light.

And in chasing it, we lose ourselves to exhaustion. To repetition. To the slow death of dreaming in a world that charges rent for imagination.