The best idea I have had this year arrived in the shower. Of course it did. The shower is one of the last rooms in a modern life where nothing is for sale. No screen, no shelf, no red dot. Eleven minutes of hot water and the mind, finally unvended to, starts doing what it was always going to do. It thinks.
What it thought was this: everything is made up.
Not designed. Made up. The market is made up. Money is made up. The Monday is made up, and the mortgage, and the KPI, and the idea that a person's worth tracks their output. Every one of these was invented by people, accumulated in layers over centuries, and then handed to you at birth as if it were weather.
None of that is news. Anthropologists have been saying it politely for a hundred years. The part that stopped me under the water was the second half.
Nobody made it.
I had been walking around with a villain in my head. Some boardroom somewhere, some architect of the machine, some obligor who could be named and fought. There is no such person. There is no committee that decided existence should feel like this. There is only a series of competing forces for your attention, each one individually reasonable, each one just trying to sell what it sells, and the sum of all that reasonable competition has accidentally assembled a terrible existence for the majority of the souls captured inside it.
Think how ordinary each piece is. A developer somewhere added a notification because retention was down four points and her manager asked. A supermarket moved the chocolate to the checkout because the data said to. A bank made the loan easier to want. Nobody in that chain is evil. Nobody in that chain can even see the chain. And the chain, taken together, is a machine with no operator that runs twenty four hours a day and eats attention.
All that competition compounds into a single instruction, repeated at every level of a life: Get. Get the service. Get the product. Get the new house, the better job, the next attainment, the thing the person you follow already has. Consuming stops being a choice you keep making. It becomes the byproduct of every individual with better economics than yours marketing you something to get, all day, from every direction at once, forever.
And here is the arithmetic that should make you furious and forgiven in the same breath. Not one force in the entire arrangement is invested in defending your natural state. Not one. Trillions on the vending side of the ledger. Nothing on yours. Your attention is defended by you alone, unpaid, untrained, after hours, against the best resourced persuasion machinery ever assembled.
So the day leaves you spent. Everyone's day. Not because you are weak. Because you are outnumbered by everyone vending, and the suffering has no author you can point at, which is exactly why nobody fights it. You cannot storm a palace that does not exist.
I did not set out to fight it either. I set out to measure something.
We have been building a cap at Fernmount, in the hills behind Bellingen, that reads a thing we call presence. How settled and attentive a person actually is, taken from their own body rather than guessed from their behaviour. For months I chased my own number the way you chase any number, which tells you how deep the getting goes. Best score from breathing. Best score from cold water. Best score from twenty minutes of doing absolutely nothing on purpose.
Then one evening my youngest climbed into my arms, and I held her, and the instrument quietly recorded the highest presence it had ever measured in this house. Ninety three. Sustained.
Sit with what that means. The best state my body has produced all year was free, unmarketable, already in the room, and invisible to every force competing for my attention, because there is no margin in a father holding his daughter. The machine with no operator is not hiding this from you maliciously. It simply cannot see anything it cannot sell. The whole catalogue of what actually restores a person sits in the machine's blind spot, and so it sits in yours.
That is what Away is for. Not another thing to get. An escape plan.
Escape at every level, because the capture happens at every level. Escape from this minute: two breaths with your eyes shut while the kettle goes. Escape from this hour: a walk that is a walk and nothing else. Escape from this afternoon, this office, this open browser with its nineteen tabs of other people's priorities. Escape from this place: a cabin above the Never Never, a sauna, a river cold enough to end an argument with yourself. And escape from this mindset, which follows you into every room, through something worn rather than watched: a cap on the side of your own ledger, the first object in your life whose entire job is defending your state instead of harvesting it, deciding with you what deserves to reach you at all.
I know how escape sounds. It sounds like running away, and running away is what the getting machine calls any exit, because exits are the one thing it cannot price. So let me be precise about the kind of escape I mean.
Every escape held here is a return ticket.
You leave the minute to come back to it. You leave the office to come back able to think in it. You leave for the hills for two nights and come back to your kids as the person they were hoping would walk in. The escape is not from your life. It is from the made up layer wrapped around your life, and the whole point of leaving is what you are like when you land.
I still live inside the machine. So do you, and so will our kids; there is no palace to storm and no author to overthrow, and I am not selling you a revolution. I am saying the quiet, practical thing the shower said to me, which took forty odd years and a sensor on my own head to actually believe.
The market is made up. The metric is made up. The Monday is made up. It is all made up. You are not.