The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

You'll be back to your old habits by February. There's another way.

It’s the end of December as I write this, which means the predictable programming is about to begin.

Millions will announce “Dry January.” Others will make New Year’s resolutions. Gym memberships will spike. Journals will be purchased. Meditation apps will be downloaded. Commitments will be declared with great sincerity and posted on social media for accountability.

By February? Back to the same patterns. The same habits. The same suffering. The same life script running on autopilot.

This is programming. And we don’t even see it.

Let me walk you through a day in the life of a modern American. See if any of this sounds familiar.

The alarm goes off. Before your feet hit the floor, your hand reaches for the phone. You don’t decide to do this. It just happens. You scroll through notifications. Emails. Texts. News headlines designed to trigger anxiety. Social media posts from people whose curated lives make yours feel insufficient. You haven’t even peed yet and you’ve already been programmed for the day.

Coffee. You need coffee. Not because your body asked for it but because you’ve been told since adolescence that this is how adults function. The caffeine hits. Now you feel normal. Which is to say, you’ve medicated your way back to baseline.

You check email again. Work is already bleeding into your morning. You shower. You put on clothes that look remarkably similar to what everyone else in your profession wears. You didn’t choose this style. It was chosen for you. You just think you chose it.

The commute. You get in the car and the radio plays music that was pushed to you by an algorithm. Or maybe a podcast. Something to fill the silence. God forbid you sit with your own thoughts. You haven’t had an uninterrupted moment of stillness in months. Maybe years.

Work. Eight hours under fluorescent lighting, staring at screens, responding to the endless demands of people who are also running their own scripts. Meetings that could have been emails. Emails that could have been nothing. The low hum of anxiety is so constant you don’t even register it anymore. It’s just the background noise of modern existence.

The gym after work. You’re doing the right thing. You’re taking care of yourself. But look closer. You’re inside a building, under more fluorescent lights, running on a machine that goes nowhere, surrounded by mirrors and other people doing the exact same thing. Everyone wearing the same athleisure brands. Everyone comparing themselves to everyone else. Everyone performing wellness rather than experiencing it.

It’s winter. The sun set at 4:30. You haven’t been outside in natural light for more than ten minutes. Your circadian rhythm is destroyed. Your vitamin D is tanked. But hey, you got your steps in.

Back in the car. More algorithm-selected audio. Home. Your nice home. The one you work fifty hours a week to afford. You should feel good. You have a good job. A nice house. You went to the gym. You’re doing everything right.

So why do you feel so empty?

You turn on Netflix. You don’t even pick what to watch anymore. The algorithm knows. You passively absorb whatever appears. Two hours pass. Three. You look at your phone and the screen time notification tells you you’ve been on it for six hours today. Six hours. And you can’t remember a single meaningful thing you consumed.

The emptiness grows. The low-level anxiety hums louder.

You reach for a glass of wine. Just one. Maybe two. After all, you’ve been told one or two glasses is fine. No, not just fine. Healthy. Red wine is good for your heart. You read that somewhere. Or saw it on the news. Or someone told you. Either way, it’s in there now. Permission granted.

The wine takes the edge off. For a moment. Then it doesn’t.

You don’t sleep well. You wake up tired. The loop begins again.

Weeks pass. Months. The emptiness doesn’t lift. If anything, it deepens. You’re doing everything you’re supposed to do. Why isn’t it working?

And then, because you’ve been softened up by all of it, the advertisement appears. A woman your age. Walking on a beach. Looking pensive. Then smiling. A voiceover mentions feeling sad, tired, unmotivated. Sound familiar? Talk to your doctor about...

It’s in your subconscious now. The seed is planted.

You mention it to your doctor. “I just haven’t been feeling like myself lately.” The doctor nods. Fifteen minutes later you have a diagnosis. Depression. A brain chemistry problem. And a prescription to fix it.

You’ve been captured.

See how this works?

The life script was never yours. The emptiness was a signal that something was deeply wrong with how you were living. The signal was accurate. The signal was your life force trying to get your attention, trying to redirect you toward something real.

But instead of listening, you medicated the signal into silence.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

The Tyranny of the Mind

Most people have no idea they’re being run by their thoughts. They believe they are their thoughts. The voice speaks, and they obey. It says worry, and they worry. It says judge, and they judge. It says you’re not good enough, and they accept this as truth.

But here’s what two decades of clinical practice have shown me: most of what you’re thinking isn’t even yours.

It’s cultural conditioning absorbed through endless media exposure. It’s your parents’ fears passed down like an inheritance nobody asked for. It’s advertising designed to make you feel inadequate so you’ll buy something. It’s life scripts written by people who never met you and don’t care about your flourishing.

And almost all of it is rooted in fear.

I’ll be honest with you. After all these years, I realize I don’t really know most of the people who sit across from me in therapy. What I know is their programming. Their life script. Their worry. Their judgment. Their predictable patterns of suffering.

It’s gotten worse. Technology and constant distraction have accelerated the programming to an almost absurd degree. The mind is being fed a steady diet of fear and comparison and outrage, then we wonder why we can’t find peace.

And here’s what breaks my heart: many people believe that if they just go to therapy and repeat this programming out loud, if they just talk about the ego and its stories long enough, insight will magically appear. Change will happen.

But that belief is itself programming.

You cannot think your way out of a thought problem. You cannot analyze the ego into submission. The mind examining the mind is like a dog chasing its tail. Lots of activity. Zero progress.

I don’t know the origin of the phrase “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” But whoever said it first understood something profound about human nature. We actually believe that more punishment, more discipline, more self-criticism, more effortful striving will finally produce the change we’re desperate for.

And here’s the dark twist: we don’t even need an external tyrant anymore. We’ve internalized the beatings. We do it to ourselves now. The harsh inner critic. The relentless self-judgment. The voice that tells you you’re lazy, weak, undisciplined, broken. That voice learned its script somewhere. And now it runs on a loop, punishing you for being human.

The beatings are self-inflicted. And they’ve never worked. They never will.

So what’s the alternative? Instead of another New Year’s resolution destined to fail by Valentine’s Day, what if you tried something radically different?

What if you surrendered?

The Surrender Experiment

I’ve been reading Michael Singer’s The Surrender Experiment and it’s wrecking me in the best possible way. Because Singer offers something radically different from the cycle of resolution and failure that most of us are trapped in.

Think about how revolutionary this is compared to everything I just described.

The typical American wakes up and immediately reaches for a device that tells them what to think, what to fear, what to buy. They consume content selected by algorithms. They wear clothes chosen by cultural programming. They work jobs that leave them empty. They exercise in ways that have nothing to do with what their body actually needs. They medicate the emptiness with wine and screens. And when it all fails, they go to a doctor who gives them a pill.

Now imagine the opposite.

What if, instead of running the same script everyone else is running, you simply... stopped? What if you stopped taking orders from the voice in your head? What if you stopped believing that more planning, more control, more effort, more discipline would finally deliver the peace you’re chasing?

This is why New Year’s resolutions are so absurd from Singer’s perspective. They’re not a break from the pattern. They are the pattern. More goals. More plans. More forcing. More of the ego believing it can think and scheme its way to happiness. You’re not listening to what your soul actually desires. You’re following instructions written by the same mind that got you into this mess.

It’s just more programming dressed up as self-improvement. And it will make you miserable. Again.

Singer describes a moment in his twenties when he had a realization that changed everything. He noticed there was a voice in his head. Constant. Relentless. Commenting on everything. Judging. Worrying. Replaying the past. Rehearsing the future. And then he noticed something else.

He wasn’t the voice.

He was the one aware of the voice.

Two completely different things.

This distinction is everything. The voice has opinions about your life. It has preferences. It has fears. It tells you what you should want, what you should avoid, what you need to be happy, what threatens your security. It never shuts up. And most people spend their entire lives taking orders from it without ever questioning whether it knows what the hell it’s talking about.

Singer questioned it.

From that moment, he began an experiment. What if he stopped obeying the voice? What if, instead of organizing his entire life around the mind’s preferences and fears and demands, he simply surrendered to what life brought him? What if he stopped resisting and started opening?

Not passive. Not lazy. Not checked out. But radically available to the flow of life itself.

Here’s a way to picture it.

Imagine you’re on a raft floating down a river. The river has a current. It knows where it’s going. It’s been carving this path for thousands of years. All you have to do is stay on the raft and let it carry you.

But that’s not what we do.

We grab a paddle and start fighting the current. We decide the river is going the wrong direction. We exhaust ourselves trying to steer toward some destination the mind invented. We panic when the water gets choppy. We curse the rocks. We demand the river consult us before every turn.

And when we’re utterly depleted from battling the flow of life itself, we wonder why we’re so tired. Why we’re so anxious. Why nothing ever feels like enough.

Singer put down the paddle.

He stopped arguing with the river. He stopped insisting life conform to his preferences. He let the current carry him. And something remarkable happened: the river knew exactly where to take him. Places he never would have planned. Opportunities he never would have orchestrated. A life far more extraordinary than anything his small mind could have designed.

He got out of his own way. And life did what life does when you stop strangling it with your need for control.

Awaken

Forget the New Year’s resolution. That’s just more of the same. More ego. More planning. More control. More beatings disguised as self-improvement. Do you really want to be like everyone else?

You’ve already proven you can’t control and plan yourself into happiness. How many Januarys do you need before you accept this?

I’m proposing something far more radical.

Start by remembering that you will die.

Memento mori. The ancients knew this was the key to waking up. You have a limited number of days on this planet. You don’t know the number. Nobody does. And you’re spending them watching strangers dance on TikTok and arguing with people you’ve never met about things that don’t matter.

Really? This is what you’re doing with your one shot at existence?

So here’s the revolutionary shift. Not a resolution. A complete reorientation of how you live.

Start your day consciously. I know. Your phone is right there. It’s calling to you. It has notifications. Someone might have liked your post. Something might have happened in the world that you absolutely need to know about before your feet touch the floor.

It can wait. It can all wait.

Go somewhere in silence. Sit with yourself for Five minutes. Then slowly increase the time. I promise the world will not collapse. Listen to what arises from within. Not the mental chatter. Beneath it. That quiet knowing that’s been trying to get your attention for years while you’ve been too busy being busy.

Surrender to the life force. Ask it to create through you today. I know this sounds like something you’d read on a yoga studio wall. I don’t care. Try it anyway. Ask what wants to move through you. Then get the hell out of the way.

Become an observer of your mind. Watch the ego do its ridiculous thing. The judging. The worrying. The comparing yourself to people on the internet who are also miserable but have better lighting. Don’t fight it. Just watch. Notice that you are the one watching. That’s been there all along. That’s the real you.

Start saying yes more. To the invitations that scare you. To the conversation you’ve been avoiding. To the thing you actually want but have convinced yourself is impractical. Your “practical” life is making you sick. Maybe try impractical.

Break the patterns that do not serve you. You know exactly what they are. You’ve always known. You didn’t need a therapist to tell you that drinking a bottle of wine every night wasn’t a wellness strategy. You knew. You just didn’t want to stop.

You didn’t need a $200-an-hour professional to inform you that scrolling Instagram until 1am wasn’t helping your sleep. You didn’t need a diagnosis to understand that eating an entire sleeve of Oreos while standing in front of the refrigerator at midnight wasn’t “intuitive eating.” You didn’t need a life coach to point out that staying in a relationship with someone who makes you feel like garbage might be connected to why you feel like garbage.

You knew.

You’ve always known.

Rewatching The Office for the sixth time isn’t “rest.” Buying another self-help book you won’t read isn’t personal growth. Watching four hours of true crime before bed and then wondering why you’re anxious isn’t a medical mystery. Checking your ex’s social media “just to see” isn’t closure. Retail therapy isn’t therapy. And no, adding spinach to your morning vodka doesn’t make it a smoothie (metaphorically speaking).

Deep down, you know exactly what needs to change. The knowing was never the problem.

The doing is the problem. And you’ve been waiting for permission, or a plan, or the right Monday, or January 1st, or some external authority to validate what your gut has been screaming at you for years.

Here’s your permission: You already know. Now stop pretending you don’t.

Stop the beatings. Seriously. Just stop. You’ve been criticizing yourself for how long now? Decades? Has it worked yet? No? Then maybe, just maybe, try something else. Try being kind to yourself and see what happens. I know. Radical concept.

And while you’re at it, forgive yourself.

Not the fake forgiveness where you say the words but keep replaying your greatest failures on a loop at 2am. Real forgiveness. The kind where you actually stop feeding energy to your past.

That mistake you made five years ago? Let it go. The embarrassing thing you said at the party? Gone. The relationship you screwed up? Take the lesson, leave the rest. The thing you did five minutes ago that your mind is already constructing a prosecution case around? Drop it. It’s over. It literally doesn’t exist anymore except as a thought you keep choosing to think.

Every moment you spend mentally relitigating your past is a moment you’re not actually living. You’re not here. You’re back there, in a place that no longer exists, arguing with ghosts.

Your past is a story. That’s all it is. And you keep reading the same painful chapters over and over, wondering why you feel like shit.

Close the book. Remember you will die.

Nobody cares about that mistake. Don’t let it define you.

You are not your mistakes. You are not the sum of every dumb thing you’ve ever done. You are the awareness reading these words right now, in this moment, the only moment that actually exists.

The present moment has no beatings in it. None. The beatings are always about the past or the future. What you did wrong. What might go wrong. Right here, right now? You’re fine. You’re breathing. You’re alive.

Stop giving your energy to a version of you that no longer exists. That person is gone. Let them go in peace.

Read more. Netflix less. Your great-grandparents read books and built things and had actual hobbies. You watch other people pretend to live while you sit motionless on a couch. This is not an upgrade. Radically Genuine Substack is cheaper than a Netflix subscription (shameless plug).

Go outside more. Gym less. I’m not against exercise. I’m against fluorescent lights and mirrors and running on a hamster wheel while staring at a screen showing you a simulated outdoor environment. Just go outside. Your ancestors didn’t have Pelotons. They had the actual world.

Scroll less. Your phone just told you that you spent six hours on it yesterday. Six hours. That’s a part-time job. What exactly are you getting paid? Depression and neck pain?

Numb less. Feel more. I know feeling hurts. That’s kind of the point. The emptiness you’re drowning in wine, weed, SSRI’s and streaming content is trying to tell you something. It’s not a malfunction. It’s a message. Stop killing the messenger.

Get bored. Let yourself have absolutely nothing to do and nowhere to scroll. This will feel like dying at first. That’s just the addiction screaming. On the other side of that discomfort is creativity. Insight. The voice beneath all the noise. But you’ll never hear it if there’s always a podcast playing.

This is not a thirty-day challenge. There’s no app for this. Nobody is going to send you push notifications to remind you to be present. The irony would be too much.

This is you, deciding that the script you’ve been handed is bullshit. This is you, putting down the paddle and trusting the river. This is you, finally stopping the beatings to see what might emerge when you quit being your own worst enemy.

The life force that grows oaks from acorns and turns caterpillars into butterflies is the same force that lives in you. It hasn’t given up. It’s been waiting. Patiently. While you binged another season of something you won’t remember in a month.

Maybe this is the year you finally listen.

Not because you resolved to.

Because you surrendered to.

AWAKEN

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