Every day, we play a dangerous game with a presence that can only be construed as a monster and a modern-day thief, one that waits patiently for our permission. Yet we open the door and willingly opt into the game of our lives with no warning label, no clear rules, and no visible consequences.
Before we know it, the monster has slipped quietly into our routines with a grin, watching us build our lives choice by choice, witnessing our milestones, learning our habits, and doing its dirty work in our homes while we remain distracted by progress.
With each wave of innovation, each convenience we welcomed as evolution, we failed to see what we let in. We didn’t ask ourselves, as a collective, what it might cost us. We didn’t pause long enough to question what we were trading away for efficiency or independence.
And maybe if we had, we wouldn’t have found ourselves in solitary confinement, built by our own hands day by day, under the illusion that we were becoming free.
The monster followed us here. Some might argue that it led the operation, quietly directing the construction while we supplied the labor. But we complied. We mistook isolation for strength. We celebrated self-sufficiency without noticing that it hardened into disconnection. We failed to see the bigger picture for what it really was, focusing instead on what it looked like in the moment: autonomy and control.
For more on this, see Run the Extra Mile.
I dig deeper into this topic in My Top 3 Favorite Hikes (Thus Far!).
Years pass faster than we expect. One day we look up and realize how quiet everything has become. We begin begging for a lawyer and jury to find us not guilty, to get us out of the cage we entered willingly. We ask how this happened. We ask who allowed it. We ask who is responsible.
The monster doesn’t answer. It doesn’t need to. It lives in the silence we learned to accept, in the distance we began calling normal. It waits. It grows with every unanswered message, every night alone, every choice that trades connection for control.
By the time we notice it, it no longer looks like a monster. It looks familiar. It looks like routine.
The door was never locked.
The monster isn’t out there.
It’s the life you learned to live alone.