I was born a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (i.e., Manhattan). It was a simpler time back then. It was a time when landline telephones and VCRs still roamed the earth. It was a time when people were still Sweatin’ to the Oldies with Richard Simmons and buying CDs at their local Spec’s Music.
The 80s and 90s were a good time to grow up. Reaganomics was just getting its start, and thus hadn’t yet fully killed off the middle class. My traumatic, insecurity-fueling middle school experience was only embedded deep in my mind, rather than also being stored on the cloud for the world to judge. Boredom was part of my childhood, out of which spawned creativity, which who knows… maybe led to this blog.
I still remember when the first aliens showed up on our planet. It wasn’t an invasion, per se. Rather, their technology just appeared… first at my grandfathers house (he had money). It was called a “personal computer” and was initially a black screen with a white command prompt. It was quite a stupid machine, really. But thanks to Moore’s law, it evolved, and evolved quickly. Soon I had a personal computer of my own, on which I played hours of rudimentary sports video games.
In 1993 the aliens really upped their game, making the “internet” available to the public. Now these machines, which up until then had been heavy, bulky, calculators, could talk to each other! The days of the traveling encyclopedia Britannica salespeople were numbered. But the internet was still a pain in the butt to use, largely regelating the PC to a tool you could use to look up stuff and play still rudimentary (but now online) video games.
More than 30-years later, the PC has gotten smaller to the point where we can carry it in our pockets. And these portable PCs (i.e., “phones”) have millions of times more computing power than the computers used to launch and navigate Apollo 11 to the moon.
Moreover, these computers don’t just talk to each other anymore. Instead, they can now communicate with their mothership (i.e., data centers) to form their own intelligence, which then is used to manipulate our thoughts and actions. The aliens selling such technology now dominate the global economy (with one of the most prominent of all aliens demanding $1 trillion for its services) and continue to think up new ways to hook people on their products. Meanwhile, humans are now expected to thank the aliens for eliminating all the mundane tasks that we disliked (but needed) to develop into functioning humans.
Aliens are everywhere now. They run governments across the world. They run the global economy’s largest corporations. They are in our churches, temples, and mosques twisting the beautiful bedrock of religion into nasty hatred and divisiveness.
And you know what’s the worst?
I was an alien.
I realized this when I caught myself lecturing my kids about the dangers of phone addiction, only to pick up my phone and doom-scroll five minutes later. I realized this when I started looking at people and immediately judging them because of a shirt or hat they were wearing. I realized this when I gained “success” and some measure of “wealth” and felt more depressed and lost than before I had either of those things.
The aliens had won. They had converted me. I didn’t know what my purpose in life was besides working more, consuming more, spending more, judging more, and wallowing more (with that cycle on rinse and repeat).
But right as I was caught in the death grip of the alien invasion, my mom died after an 18-month battle with pancreatic cancer.
This was a giant slap to my face to WAKE UP!
Pay attention to what is real and what is not!
Fully immerse myself in my life as the only way to reduce my fear of death!
The process of waking up to my life is what I now call, “Reclaiming my soulfulness.”
Over the next few years (which included at least one mid-life crisis and much therapy) the only thing I can definitively say I did right is pay more attention to what crossed my mind. It was complete chaos at first. Many times I figured it would be much easier to go back to my alien lifestyle. But my mom made the ultimate sacrifice to teach me the most important lesson in life. I could not let that go to waste.
So, I paid close attention to my wild mind.
Things got easier, then harder, then easier, then so hard I couldn’t sleep… then, over time, easier again. But an easy or hard life was no longer my goal. A soulful life was my goal. And slowly but surely, I was starting to reconnect with my soul.
A quick aside on my definition of a “soul.” This is not at all a religious term for me. Far from it. Rather, our soul is what makes us completely unique. It’s what makes me, me. It’s where my creativity, kindness, and connection to all life and nature lies. If there is this cord of energy connecting everything in existence, my soul is what plugs me into this universal energy. It allows me to be more than me - a human puzzle piece, snapped into place in this insanely big universe.
Here’s the thing about aliens. They don’t have souls. Tap into your inner alien and see what you find if you don’t believe me. Sadly, some people (I was one of them) have gotten so overrun by their alien desires that they may not know how to see beyond them to remember what it means to be human.
Of course, the alien overlords love this. It’s all part of their grand master plan. More aliens means more money and power for the overlords to feed into the insatiable black holes where their souls used to be. If their tools can convince you they should doing your thinking, your writing, your creating, your living - all in the name of efficiency (where “efficiency” means spending more time mindlessly consuming hate news and videos of kids saying “6, 7” on their platforms to boost their advertising revenue) - then they have won. Your soul will fade away, and you will only know it’s gone by a constant feeling of dis-ease in your life.
The cool thing is we can nuke this entire process. We can take the good parts of alien technology and use them to better our lives (e.g. Beehiiv allows me to publish this blog for free!) and jettison the rest. But we have to put in the hard work to really live our lives. Not the lives the aliens tell us we should live. OUR LIVES. If we put in the work, we start the process of brushing the dirt and mud off our golden souls so they can shine brightly into the world.
This blog is my attempt to catalogue my struggles with reclaiming my soulfulness. I am a work in progress, and that fact will never change. I will always be part alien, and have accepted this as a fundamental truth. It’s almost impossible to not be part alien in the world we now inhabit. But I am at least trying to set the intention each and every day to put my soulfulness first.
So, as with technology, take what is helpful from this blog, and jettison the rest. Don’t trust my experience. See how things play out in your own life.
I wish you luck on your journey. We soul-reclaimers have not chosen the easy path through life. But I think the hard work we must undertake to reclaim our beautiful souls is worth the effort. I hope you do too.