Have We Missed The Bloody Point?

There’s a question clawing at the back of modern consciousness, and it’s this:

Have we missed the bloody point?

We, this species, this strange, brilliant, self-sabotaging species, were each born of a probability so infinitesimal it borders on the divine. Your existence is a statistical miracle. You are the product of unbroken survival through war, famine, plague, accident, betrayal, and chance. And here you are. On this rock. Breathing. A miracle in motion.

And yet, look what we’ve done with it.

Look what we worship. Look what we elevate. Look who gets heard. Look who gets hurt.

We live in a world built on the backs of the extraordinary, and yet we reward the ordinary: money passed down, privilege wrapped in performance. Those who get handed everything without earning it stand on stage with the confidence of a thousand lifetimes, mistaking nepotism for talent and cruelty for competence. They smile, they pose, they preach “grit” while outsourcing their integrity.

Meanwhile, the people who see clearly, who feel deeply, are mocked, marginalized, or used. In this upside-down inversion of values, substance is a liability. Character is inconvenient. Emotional intelligence gets labeled as weakness, until it’s needed to mop up someone else’s mess.

We’ve all seen it. The smug executive who calls himself a leader while taking credit for his assistant’s work. The tech bro who calls himself a disrupter but can’t look a janitor in the eye. The investor who builds his brand on impact but views women as accessories, or threats.

In our culture, to be rich is to be assumed good. To be beautiful is to be assumed worthy. To be loud is to be assumed right. It’s all performance. We’ve swapped essence for optics.

And now we’re drowning in it.

We binge on distraction and call it leisure. We collect receipts instead of principles. We confuse cynicism for intelligence. We medicate the symptoms of a hollow culture while vilifying the rare souls who dare to live with depth, daring, and discernment.

There was a time when to be alive meant to strive; for truth, for beauty, for freedom. When we were built to become. But now, too many of us just exist. We live passively. We want someone else to do the work, solve the problems, show us the way. We want applause for showing up and plausible deniability when we fall short.

We have become consumers of life instead of participants in it.

And nowhere is this more grotesquely on display than in our relationships.

Men who feel entitled to women’s bodies rage at women who won’t perform. Women who’ve been trained to appease call it love when it’s really servitude. Power masquerades as intimacy. Sex is transactional. Love is a PR campaign. One-upmanship in the form of dates, gifts, stunts, roles. He pays, so she plays. She conforms, so he stays.

It’s not partnership. It’s performance art.

Even the language we use, “alpha,” “beta,” “high-value,” “feminine energy,” “provider,” “pick me,” is the taxonomy of transactionalism. We have reduced each other to use cases. She’s not a person, she’s a “ten.” He’s not a man, he’s a “walking wallet.” Everyone trying to win some invisible competition with rigged rules and no finish line.

This is not empowerment. This is not equality. This is not love.

This is rot.

It’s easy to point fingers at the worst of them, the Harvey Weinsteins and Jeffrey Epsteins and influencer grifters, but the truth is, we live in a world that rewards performance over principle. That promotes mediocrity when it’s charismatic, and punishes excellence when it’s inconvenient. The liar with charm is elevated; the truth-teller with evidence is “difficult.” Merit is not the metric. Money is. And money, now, is just an illusion; digitized, hoarded, weaponized, and used to determine worth.

What good is merit if it only counts when you’re willing to play the game?

What good is leadership if it demands obedience over originality?

What good is character if it’s only valued when it sells?

Have we really progressed, or have we just added filters to our decline?

There’s something uniquely cruel about a society that promises everyone a chance and then punishes the very qualities that would make that promise real.

In truth, the point of being alive is not to win the game, but to transcend it. To wake up. To break the cycle. To do the work that isn’t rewarded with likes or perks or proximity to power. To build something so true, so useful, so loving, that it cannot be undone by someone else’s mediocrity.

The point was never to get rich.

The point was never to win status points, or manipulate others into submission, or LARP as an “elite” on someone else’s dime.

The point was never to abuse others to feel bigger.

The point, if there is one, is to become fully ourselves. To grow. To learn. To change. To use this miraculous life to create something real. To love, with actual integrity. To lead, without coercion. To exist, not at the expense of others, but in service to something greater than ego.

You get one shot.

One life.

And it was never supposed to be spent playing dress-up for broken systems.

We have missed the bloody point.

But we don’t have to keep doing it.

There is still time to become worthy of the life we were given.