The radical act of feeling.

Experience has become a currency—regulated, extracted, branded.  There are those who have cornered the market on what it means to feel, to want, to enjoy. 

Pleasure is no longer wild—it is patented, rationed, sold back to us in curated doses through screens, cruises, needles, sex, food, drugs, pills, and …

They have learned to monetize even longing, to turn aching into data, and then into dividends.  The hunger to feel alive is now a subscription service with tiered access. Experience is shaped not by curiosity but by algorithms trained to anticipate and manipulate. 

Cartels and multinationals, whatever, make it, fake it, sell it, market it, ship it, but actually don’t deliver anything at all.

It’s the marketplace and politics of feeling, feeding, and fucking.

We are told what to desire before we even understand that we are lacking. And once we comply, we are punished with emptiness—because no marketed pleasure ever fills the original hunger.

They promise bliss but deliver distraction which turns into disappointment then despair. Meanwhile, the baseline—the unadorned moments between highs—becomes unbearable.  Agony hides in the quiet: the ticking clock, the still room, the ache of nothing extraordinary.  And we run and run away. In circles mostly—fading into vapor.

Boredom metastasizes into restlessness, and restlessness into despair.  We are trained to flee the ordinary as if it were failure, as if contentment were a crime.

But in the absence of novelty, misery makes its nest. Frustration is no longer circumstantial—it is systemic, enforced by design.  Even our sorrow must be efficient, timed between tasks, silenced in public.

Pleasure has become suspicious, monitored, pre-approved. It has to go through the pleasure mafia; the pleasure police. It comes from the pleasure factory stamped with the governments seal of approval: this is Real!

Intrinsic joy is now a threat unless it fits within the sanctioned architecture of productivity and profit.  To reclaim experience is to defy the empire of numbness. To feel fully, wildly, without permission, without products, services, or prompting, is a radical act.