All this podcast nonsense does is harness people’s emotional longings and turn them into circular rumination for the podcaster’s audience. They’re all fakes — every one of them. They’re businesses, nothing more. People want to be approved of and have a figure confirm their thoughts. By the way, that will cost you a super chat! Links in the description! They all share a single hidden premise: that the same old method of “solving” problems is still realistic — the idea that talking about an issue, processing the emotions, and discussing solutions somehow leads to a new state of affairs. In reality, you adapt because circumstances force you to adapt.
Take the “freedom bobbers.” I sympathize with their recognition of wanting a stable world in which to exercise the will to live, but they often miss the bottom line: what good is preaching some divine or absolute state of affairs if it’s clear that, under real pressure, appealing to that ideal won’t “save” you from the predicament you fear? Will resisting a digital database actually save you from lack of resources? I don't see how. As well, how many religious parents will be content to allow total freefall into lack of resources and starvation death for their entire family as a demonstration of allegiance to their faith?
In many cases, they don't actually preach "salvation" in the sense that believing such and so will soften the brutality of the apocalypse, they simply preach "off grid survivalism." If you won’t be saved in this life from its torments, why assert the importance of believing something specifically for the purposes of “this life”? For those convinced the end is near, the real understanding should be: there is nothing you can do about it. Stockpiling, cheating the end, or trying to survive it is self-delusion. If the universe is moving toward an “end times” moment, then by that worldview its purpose is to bring about exactly that — a climax, a golden age — not to be avoided.
Right now we have two “end times” religions running in parallel. They disagree on the cause and the outcome, but not on the structure: one frames it as the wrath of God, the other as the wrath of Mother Earth. Imagine a true climate apocalypse — ten years of rain in five days, or some Hollywood-level disaster. Religious believers would see the hand of God; the green left pagans would see global warming or Gaia’s revenge. Each group thinks the other is delusional. Even when they agree “something is happening,” they disagree about what or why.
As for digital IDs — we already have them. Consolidating everything into one database wouldn’t fundamentally change anything. It would just be another membership card under a new name. You could always be “locked out of society.” That isn’t new. And what if we did “find God,” only to be told that we were created as a resource to build some things here that God fancied? That being said, if one could actually “walk away” — as in, walk the fuck away into the forest — and have divine intervention guide them to food, resources, and a life free of imminent disease, then I’d concede: Resist the beast! Run into the forest! But I don’t see that.
I don’t see a world where wild food is abundant and a clear guiding voice demonstrates how to “exit the system.” What I see are people telling themselves fantastic tales of the Mad Max hero they imagine themselves to be — while remaining fully complicit in the very system they claim to be free of. It wouldn't be up to me to attempt to destroy such a system, that would be the responsibility of a deity, who had the power to do so, and wished for it to happen. This is clearly the case once we take into realistic consideration, how fragile human beings really are. Our agency is bounded by biology, environment, and circumstance.
That doesn’t mean you should simply “accept” whatever is happening — the notion of acceptance itself might just be noise. Whether or not you consciously accept it is secondary to the reality that you adapt to it. This adaptation is what has been occurring all along, and what will continue to occur. So, I am not necessarily "in favor" of any system. I just see them as circumstance that biology responds to because of its limits. I emotionally reject reality in the sense of a feeling that loathes much of it, but I adapt to it because the body doesn't want to die. If a divine being truly wished to intervene and liberate us from some constraint, I wouldn’t have a problem with that. However, the idea of asserting that such intervention is occurring without any tangible evidence or practical results strikes me as an existential coping mechanism — a strategy of the imagination rather than a reflection of reality.
Let's be honest, if the power of assertion or manifestation had control over reality, we would all be living very different lives. If belief alone could alter the structural foundations of reality, we’d see overwhelming evidence of manifestation at work. We don’t. Very few people genuinely advocate for reality itself being malleable in that way. What’s far more common is the claim that ‘holding the proper beliefs’ will somehow unlock ‘the proper reality’ — a subtler, indirect promise that conveniently places failure on the believer rather than the claim.