You Are Not Crazy. The World Might Be.

Collectively, we are not okay.

We work harder. Drink the water. Take the walk. Answer the emails. Heal our inner child. Optimize our mornings. Buy the herbs labeled CALM.

And still, something inside us is saying:

This cannot be how we are supposed to live.

The anxiety, disorientation, and despair so many of us experience may be sane responses to systems that unsettle our nervous systems, shrink our imagination, and teach us to recreate the conditions harming us.

Healing requires restoring our ability to imagine and build a saner world.

Because seriously.

We watch war and political chaos, then scroll into an advertisement for moisturizer. People sleep outside while homes sit vacant. We make harmful food cheap, nourishing food difficult to access, and medical treatment ruinously expensive. We create conditions that produce violence, then spend fortunes punishing it.

Fucking crazy.

And somehow, this is what we call normal.

In America, there are millions more vacant homes than people experiencing homelessness. Globally, researchers have found that existing farmland and food production could nourish billions more people if we reduced waste and directed more crops toward feeding people.

I remember a farmer in Kenya telling me the country could grow enough food to feed all of East Africa. The obstacle was infrastructure: roads, storage, refrigeration, transportation, markets, and political cooperation.

Things human beings can build.

Too often, scarcity is abundance trapped behind systems we have not chosen to change.

We work our asses off and still cannot afford to live, while a few people hoard more wealth than they could use in several lifetimes. Then we study their morning routines, hoping to escape the system rather than transform it.

We do not dismantle the throne. We imagine ourselves sitting on it.

The insanity has a vision board.

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about an oppressive system is what it teaches us to call normal and imitate.

Chronic stress shapes our attention, health, and ability to see beyond the emergency directly in front of us. You are not contemplating democracy when you are trying to stretch $43 until Friday.

You are trying to survive Tuesday.

When our minds and bodies finally begin to buckle under the weight of all this, we are prescribed drugs to help us survive it: antidepressants, blood-pressure medication, sleep aids.

Western medicine is powerful. Prescription drugs can save lives, restore function, and create the breathing room we need to heal.

But they cannot be our only response to conditions that keep making people sick.

The world creates the wound, then treats our response as the only thing that needs fixing.

Tell me that is not crazy.

And when traumatized people build systems, fear can become a parenting style, a management philosophy, a policing strategy, a spiritual practice, or public policy.

We create what we imagine, and what we imagine is shaped by what we repeatedly see and hear.

We witness hoarding celebrated as success. Domination rewarded as leadership. Exploitation defended as business. Exhaustion praised as ambition. Poverty treated as personal failure.

Then we create from the material we have been given.

When our inputs are saturated with hierarchy, violence, scarcity, and fear, even our rebellion can become a costume change.

Same stage. New cast.

In a song I wrote called Black Matter, I say:

We ain’t got race issues.
We ain’t got class issues.
We ain’t got sex issues.
We got God issues.

I am not denying racism, classism, or sexism. Their consequences are devastatingly real.

I am saying that the isms are symptoms of a deeper sickness.

Oppression is the manifestation of a psychosis of lack: the fear-based belief that there is not enough, so power, safety, dignity, and resources must be hoarded, controlled, or taken from others. Its side effects are isolation, stolen agency, and a hijacked imagination that makes the throne look like freedom and the world as it is feel like the only world possible.

Oppression can move through a person, a relationship, an institution, or an entire society. It can be imposed upon us, inherited by us, and reproduced through the choices we make without even realizing we have agreed to its terms.

We shop inside it. Work inside it. Reward it. Fear it. Sometimes resist it while quietly rebuilding it.

That is how a lie becomes a culture.

We begin to believe power belongs to the most charismatic person in the room, the person bold enough to seize the throne. We surrender our own agency, watch them rule, and imagine freedom as our chance to sit where they are sitting.

But evidence of another way is already here.

Because something in us still knows.

Beneath the fear and conditioning lives a persistent knowing that we belong to one another, that life is meant to be joyful, and that human beings were made to create.

So we are doing what we have always done: building solutions.

Every day, ordinary solutionaries are growing food, sharing childcare and knowledge, making music, restoring land, developing cleaner energy, building cooperative businesses, and creating healthier neighborhoods.

They may never become famous. But everywhere, people are creating evidence that another way is possible.

Our imagination needs that evidence.

So we give it new material.

We seek art, stories, relationships, and communities that show us cooperation, dignity, abundance, and freedom in practice. We rest. We grieve. We make art. We pray. We move. We share resources. We practice the world we say we want.

Every healthy experience teaches us:

Power can create instead of control.

Abundance can mean everyone having enough.

Freedom can be something we share.

You are not crazy.

The world can be profoundly crazy-making.

You are not failing at normal.

Normal is failing us.

Perhaps the craziest thing of all is how much suffering we have learned to call normal.

So trust the part of you that can still recognize the insanity.

Feed it beauty.

Give it evidence.

Find the people already building what you long to see.

Then be fucking “crazy.”

Crazy enough to imagine a new world.

Crazy enough to practice it with other people.

Crazy enough to make it real.

Go be crazy.

And have fun.