You're already dead... (because you follow rules)

You’re dead… because you gave in to a system that’s designed to take everything out of you to fulfill someone else’s dream.

Instead of saying no to the rules, and going your own way, you followed the rules. You’ve been checking off all the boxes of success that society tells you to check off.

But the one thing you haven’t been doing is living authentically. You haven’t been living the life that you actually want to live for yourself.  Despite trying to convince yourself that you love your life, deep down inside you know that you’re not living the life that you were put on this earth to live. You know you’re not living anything close to your potential, because you’ve settled along the way.

Instead of having freedom and autonomy to be wherever in the world you want to be, you’re stuck sitting in traffic in the mornings spending the best hours of your day commuting to a job that you don’t even like.

When you’re at work you have to fake laugh at corny jokes, or if you’re in an office then there’s always a group of people at the water-cooler gossiping about pointless stuff that add no value to life.

You slave away at work just to make a paycheck then spend your money on things that add no appreciable value to life in the grand scheme of things, but since you’re addicted to the instant gratification, you’re always chasing a dopamine high to temporarily escape from your reality.

This is why so many people depend on recreational drugs to have a good time. This is why so many people literally cannot function in a social setting without alcohol, and the world enables this dependency because 99% of any form of social entertainment includes an element of alcohol consumption.

And when you’re at home you consume mind-numbing television that’s literally rotting your brain away. You may even be living with a spouse or partner who you’ve settled for, and they’ve probably settled for you as well because this is the best both of you could do. In reality you’re both in a relationship or marriage with terrible chemistry, and far less connection or affection than you want.

When I was researching for this essay, I ran into a subreddit called “Dead Bedrooms” which is full of people sharing their frustrations about being in sexless marriages. There’s over half a million people in that community alone. So, I know this is not a niche issue. People are in relationships where they’re simply not attracted to the other person.

Maybe this is the life you want. Maybe you’re okay with letting your health slide. Maybe you’re okay with spending your best years basically as a drone, not able to call the shots of your own life, and existing solely to make someone else’s dream come true. Maybe this is your idea of what a good life is. It’s up to you to decide. It’s not my place to say what you want and don’t want. But let me ask you this…

If you had to write a movie script for your life from birth to death, how would you want the movie to play out?  Will it be a timeless classic full of the most epic and memorable scenes, or will it be a dud because it’s so predictable and follows the same story line that every other movie follows?

Life is not perfect. It’s never going to play out exactly as you wish. But are you at least living as authentically as possible?

I’ve been on this earth long enough to know that people put on a front to make their lives look like everything is fine.  It’s only gotten worse thanks to social media which is basically a highlight reel that only shows the best aspects of people’s lives.

 “Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.” – Arthur Erickson

Somehow everybody loves their jobs on LinkedIn. On Instagram, everyone looks like a model and eats at the trendiest restaurants and travels to the most interesting destinations.

But the truth is that countless people are deeply unfulfilled in their jobs. They’re not satisfied with their relationships. They’re grossly insecure about their bodies, and they secretly wish that their lives were considerably different.

This reality, in my opinion, is the equivalent of death.  Maybe not a physical death of the body, but you are not your body. You are the conscious being that observes your thoughts, your feelings, your inner self. So, it is quite possible for your flesh to be alive while your spirit is dead on the inside.

“Our concern must be to live while we’re alive – to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a façade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.” - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Most are spiritually dead because they follow the rules that are designed to prevent them from truly living.

This isn’t the politically correct thing to say. But somebody’s got to say it. You are spiritually dead because you’ve spent too much of your life playing by the rules.

The people who enjoy their lives the most, the people who are most fulfilled, the people who have a deep sense of purpose and are truly LIVING and not merely existing are those who broke the rules.

Napolean, Caesar, Alaxander the Great didn’t play by the rules.

Newton, Einstein, Galileo didn’t revolutionize the world by believing the generally accepted explanations of the world as true.

Bezos, Jobs, Elon Musk.. these guys disrupted entire industries literally by doing what they were told is impossible.

I’m not saying anyone of these people are role models for morality. But when it comes to deciding whether to live a mediocre life or a great life, then they stand as examples of what happens when you choose to disrupt the status quo.

“While you're sitting there wondering why you've kept all the rules and you still haven't achieved everything you've been promised, someone else has been breaking all the rules and seeing all the success that comes from doing so.” — Dan Pearce

People who enjoy fulfilling lives did not get there by following the rules that say you need to be a good employee working a 9-5 job and contributing to your 401k so you can retire 40 years later. They didn’t listen to the health “experts” who gave us the food pyramid and told us to eat 11 servings of bread and grain every day. They didn’t “settle down” with someone just because it was the safe option.

Some people out there were blessed with a natural propensity to play by their own rules from the moment they were born, but most of us, me included, had to learn the hard way.

So just like you and most other people, at some point early in my adult life I played by the rules and as a result, I died on the inside.  I basically flatlined in life. I was super skinny.  I had no self-confidence. I dreaded waking up to go to work on Monday mornings and spending the week counting down the days until Friday came around. I was stuck mindlessly consuming mind-numbing content just like everyone else. And I was living a suboptimal life in basically every category imaginable.

Then I realized that I had been scammed by the narratives that they put out there, and I decided to stop following the rules. I decided that I can be the writer of my own destiny. For me this was a decade-long process, but what came out of it was me being in the best shape imaginable. I’m not just talking, you can literally look and see for yourself how much of a difference stands between me in my twenties and me now at 38 when writing this essay.

I wake up and do what I want with my time. I spend a lot of time keeping my mind and my body as sharp as possible. I explore my intellectual curiosities. I’ve been learning Portugues which has opened me up to completely new cultures, new music, new dating prospects, etc.

I’m experiencing what it’s like to live on a different content. And since I’m in Portugal, I’m at the beach or hiking, or doing something that involves sun and water almost every day.

And I’m around amazing people when it comes to friendships and romantic interest. It’s a life of abundance.

I’m not trying to brag, I just trying to show you how different life can be when you stop living in a spiritual coma, and you wake up to take control over your life.

You can make your life epic if you want it to be.

Instead of sitting in a cubicle listening to your boss tell you that you need to sell your soul even more to move further up in the company, you can be out doing what you want because you’ve built your life around freedom, and you’re not indentured to a paycheck.

Instead of being grossly insecure with your body you can be in the best shape of your life, physically and mentally. You can be confident that you have made yourself as attractive as possible for your partner. Or if you’re single then you significantly improve your options. 

I cannot stress this enough. You have the choice of making your life interesting, fun, and enjoyable. It’s never going to be perfect, but if you’re spiritually dead, then you can reinvent yourself and bring yourself back to life.

I have some resources that you can take advantage of if you’re interested.  If you’re just testing the waters of what could be, then I recommend you pick up a copy of the “Self-Reinvention Cheat Code” which will help you build out a framework for getting on the path you were meant to be on.

If you’re a corporate professional whose at that breaking point where you’re ready to stop living in a spiritual coma, to stop living a sedated lifestyle, and to finally create the life that you live on your own terms, then you should seriously consider enrolling in The Escape Algorithm cohort which will give you access to all the tools the people and the coaching that you’ll need to walk you through the process and achieve guaranteed results.

So, take a look if you’re interested, but let’s go over a few things you can do right now to reinvent yourself and to gain total mastery over your life.

Firstly, you need to know what you want out of life.

This is such a basic thing but not many people sit down and spend the time in deep reflection figuring this out. The average person out there in his 30s or 40s might think that they’re making their own decisions in life, because the system gives the illusion of choice.  But unless you’re very intentional about how you navigate life, most of your decisions are already made for you.

Society has already decided for you that money is more important than health, which is why the average person spends hours every day at work but invests little to no time working out, preparing healthy meals, or practicing wellness of any sort. The decision has been made for you to prioritize career over health and you’re just operating within the parameters of that decision.

Society has already decided for you that fulfilling someone else’s agenda is the definition of a successful life which is why you commit so much of your time and life energy to building someone else’s business both as an employee and then again as a consumer of things that put you deeper into the downward spiral.

Society is basically a simulation with boundary conditions that people are programmed to operate within, and you erroneously assume that you are operating on your own free will.

So, what you need to do is take a step back and observe how you operate within the system and find the incongruencies between the life that you want and the life that the system tries to force you to live.  

The easiest way to do this is through journaling for a minimum of seven days, and writing down everything that makes you feel good, and everything that makes you feel bad. Then come up with an anti-vision which entails the life you absolutely do not want to be living.

Then you reverse your anti-vision to create your vision. So, everything that you do from this point onward should point toward your vision. 

There’s quite a bit more to the process of discovering yourself and figuring out what you want in life, so if you’re interested then I’ve created a free A.I. prompt that you can use with ChatGPT or with CerebriX to walk you through my full process in greater detail.

If you don’t know, CerebriX is my custom GPT that I created specifically for these purposes, so the responses are much more pointed and detailed than ChatGPT, but you can use either one.

But it’s super important to know what you want out of life first, because that’ll give you a sense of direction and a moral compass to help you chart your own path instead of following the masses who are sleepwalking through life. 

Once you’re clear in the direction you want to take your life you need to break the existing rules that are keeping you spiritually dead and rewrite them to your favor.

There are some universal rules that we must follow. We must obey the physical laws of the universe. We must grow old. We must eat food and drink water and breathe air.

But much of our lives is dictated by something other than facts of nature. It’s dictated by subjective reality’s that are not based in absolute truth.  It’s totally contingent on the country you live in, the traditions you are raised in, and by the generation you grew up in.

The rules of society are based on these subjective realities. 

You must get married and have children at a certain age. You need to buy a 4-bedroom home with walk-in closets and granite countertops out in the suburbs. And of course, you must drive a Pickup or an SUV.

You must work a steady job and climb the corporate ladder because that’s what success looks like. You must buy more and more stuff to maintain your happiness.

You can simply choose not to follow these rules if they don’t make sense.

Rules are in place for a reason. They maintain the fabric of a cohesive society, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t go unchallenged.  There will always be some societal expectations that, if you stop following, will make your life so much better.

I’m not advocating being a rebel without a cause and breaking rules just for the hell of it.  What I’m saying is that if the rules have led you down a path that has locked you into the golden handcuffs working a soul crushing job because you need the money to finance a lifestyle that you don’t even enjoy living, or if the rules have you doing things that are destroying  your mental and physical health then you need to stop following those rules.

You need to write your own rules and then live by those new rules that makes sense to you.

“If the current way of doing things in some domain of your life is not working, then you must become the villain by selectively breaking the cultural norms that are no longer serving your purpose.” - Christopher Ryan

One of the rules that I broke was the idea that as you get older you need to progress up the career ladder. I flipped the narrative and created my own rule that exploration and discovery is more rewarding than the predictable path.  This helped me shift my perspective and eventually walk away from a very good paying job to become an entrepreneur, to live in a different country, to learn a different language, to meet new people, and to learn new skills.

Discarding the old rules and rewriting them for myself made all the difference between spending every week sitting in meetings at work surrounded by a bunch of other people who also feel trapped, and spending my days freely surrounded by inspirational people who love their lives because they also decided to play by their own rules.

The energy is so different, and my life is way more fulfilling as a result.

One thing about breaking the rules is that it’s not socially accepted. So being a rule breaker comes with an element of discomfort.

This is why it is important that you accept discomfort as a fact of life and a catalyst for growth.

If you think you can go through life avoiding discomfort then you’re literally delusional. Discomfort always exists, so people who can accept this fact and learn how to channel their discomfort into things that are aligned with their purpose are the ones who will avoid dying a slow and painful death.

People always talk about the “comfort zone” but the comfort zone is a myth. When people talk about the comfort zone, they’re really talking about prioritizing short-term comfort over long-term satisfaction.

If you stay in your “comfort zone” what you’re really doing is indulging in short-term satisfaction that gives the illusion of comfort while actually making your life more miserable.

What do I mean by this? 

If you avoid working out because exercising is uncomfortable to you, then you’ll experience the discomfort of being 30 yrs old with a gut, or being pre-diabetic, or being dependent on prescription meds.

If you stay in the comfort zone of your 9-5 job because it provides financial stability, then you’ll experience the discomfort of hating your job, feeling like you’re overworked and underpaid, underappreciated, and always needing to trade your time for money.

If you stay in a relationship that’s run its course because you want to avoid the pain of a breakup and being alone again, then you’ll experience the discomfort of constant frustration and resentment because your partner isn’t living up to your expectations, and you probably not doing the same for them.

So, staying in the comfort zone is a one-way ticket to spiritual death.  If you’ve been in any of these types of situations before then you know what I’m talking about. It’s impossible to truly be fulfilled in life, or to live in a state of abundance, or to achieve a state of flow when you’re always playing it safe and staying locked into a life of short-term gratification.

So, learn to get comfortable with being uncomfortable because present-day discomfort leads to sustained long-term gratification.  Stepping out of the so-called comfort zone is the foundation to truly living rather than merely existing.

“To not struggle is to not fully realize the pleasures that life has to offer.” – Christopher Ryan

“We should consider viewing unpleasant experiences as necessary… as the darkness needed to contrast with light.” – Christopher Ryan

When you learn to embrace discomfort for what it is, that’s what gives you the confidence and the mental fortitude to break the rules, to be criticized, to be labeled as a villain, or whatever other things people do to cope with the fact that you choose not to be miserable anymore.

This raises an important point which is that if you want to really start living. Then you’ve got to leave dead people alone.

So, you need to place yourself in an environment that’s conducive to locking in and getting sh*t done.

When you start playing by your own rules you’ll notice how most people are still locked into the old mindset. They’re still living in a simulation with self-limiting boundary conditions, and all the real decisions are already made for them.

I hate to say this, but you’ve got to start avoiding these people like the plague because their energy is contagious.

When you exit the simulation, the world looks like a zombie apocalypse, because it’s full of a bunch of spiritually dead people who really don’t want you to live a fulfilling life. They’re going to criticize, they’re going to sabotage, and they’re going to gaslight you into thinking that you’re crazy for choosing not to be a slave to a corporate job, or out of shape and suffering from preventable chronic illness, or stuck in some relationship that brings out the worst in you.

I’m speaking from experience here. I’ve had people criticize me for being in my 30s and not wanting to “settle down,” yet those same people are in adulterous marriages where they’re not satisfied at all, and they can’t even be honest with their spouse.

Society will project their own insecurities onto you because you’re enjoying life outside of the same trap that most people will never escape.  People will tell you how you need to live, and they’ll try to get you to fall back in line. 

And as they do this, they’ll put on a front as if their lives are amazing.

On LinkedIn they’ll post about how happy they are to announce that they’ve taken on a new job that’s putting them deeper into the same corporate slavery that’s crushed their soul in the first place. They’ll post updates on social media to make it seem like they’re living in financial abundance despite being in debt from buying things they don’t need.  They’ll make their sexless relationships which lack any kind of affection look like a fairytale from the outside looking in.

You need to block this energy and be intentional about putting yourself in an environment that is going to support your growth and being around people who are genuinely happy to see that you’ve decided to finally wake up and live on your terms.

So, put yourself in the presence of action-takers. Put yourself in the presence of people who’ve decided that they’re not going to move through life dying a slow and painful death. Surround yourself with rulebreakers who play by their own rules.  Spend time with people who challenge you to step out of your comfort zone because they see the bigger picture that discomfort today is a recipe for long-term gratification.

Place yourself in an environment where the people around you made a conscious decision to enjoy life to the fullest extent possible.

This is why I left Corporate America and left the U.S. in general. I wanted to be in a different environment that I knew would lower the resistance and make it much easier for me to play by my own rules.

Now it seems like every day here in Portugal I’m meeting someone new who was once spiritually dead, working a job they hated, in a relationship they hated, living a lifestyle they hated, but now they’re doing what they want.  And their energy rubs off on me. It gives me the fuel and motivation to also create my ideal life.

So the setting that you’re in, and particularly the people you’re around, will either help you or hurt you when it comes to knowing who you are and what you want, breaking the rules and re-writing them, and stepping out of your comfort zone to actually drive transformation change in your life.

I’ve mentioned before that I have a few resources you may want to check out. You can pick up the Self-Reinvention Cheat Code if you’re just feeling things out.  However, if you’re ready to dive in and stop existing as, yet, another spiritually dead pawn in a system that has no intention of seeing you thrive, then join The Escape Algorithm cohort to design your lifestyle exactly as you wish it to be.

And in the meantime, don’t forget to check out the free A.I. prompt I just made available to help you find discover your vision for your life.