Metrics aren’t distance. Platforms profit from delay, not arrival. Stop buying motion—move toward the buyer, not the dashboard.

The difficulty of simplicity lies in grasping it. Maybe this will sound a little performatively philosophical, but this isn’t an attempt to produce verbal prettiness to tickle the flat layers of your consciousness. It’s a statement of fact—understood by those who have actually entered that simplicity and recognized it not with their minds but with their bodies: the way you recognize cold metal, the taste of blood, the weight of a door that has slammed shut.

All of us are going somewhere—walking, running, or crawling. Some people call it a mission. Some call it a goal. And some just drift in a crowd of others like them: following a voice coming out of an impenetrable fog of the unknown. Lost souls aren’t interesting to us in the context of this article—not because they aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but because they have neither money nor a goal. They’re not players. They’re background. A soft mass. The tone of “whatever.” Sticky, viscous, fatally convenient.

This article is for those of you who have, at least somehow, found the thread and know what you want. The moment your destination becomes clear, everything comes down to choosing a route. In this context, “the right” route is the one that will reliably get you to your goal and not so late that you miss it. Someone will ask: how can you miss your own goal? Very easily. It all comes down to speed. To speed—and to the price of that speed, which you understand too late.

Whatever your goal is today, at the moment you reach it—given the insane pace of change, which will only accelerate—the outcome may no longer match your value perception, tightly and cunningly interwoven with the reality in which that meeting will take place. And this isn’t only about inflation. It’s also about suggestive influence, and about the late realization that what you achieved cost you exactly as much strength, time, and nervous effort as it always costs. And lately many of you are still in debt—to yourselves, according to the results of an internal mental audit. To yourself—the strictest creditor. To yourself—the one who doesn’t write anything off.

Everyone wants everything at once, not like the folk wisdom: “if you suffer long enough, something will work out.” And even more so if you cross the finish line when someone else is already celebrating the victory in the place where you were only planning to celebrate… or is already suffering the hangover the next day. You arrive where they’ve already taken out the trash and wiped the floor. You bring a toast to a room where people already went to sleep.

The lengthening of the path happens not only because of distance, but because of speed. It’s the consequence of a wrong choice: of route, of pace, of route complexity. Back in the mid-19th century Lewis Carroll nailed it with precision: “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast!” That was 165 years ago. I’m convinced people understood this earlier too—there just wasn't, in my head at that moment, a formulation fit for quoting that I could pull out on the fly.

And despite the fact that you could almost never casually, leisurely wander into a goal by accident, lately, instead of simplifying the path, people choose complex, long routes. Yes, those routes sometimes deliver you to the goal—but they do it much later than necessary. And here’s the key: because everyone else who moves in the same ways on the same routes is also late, and because the “atomic clock” you’re all checking against is part of the same path-lengthening ecosystem, you don’t see the difference. You’re late—but they show you that “everyone lives like this,” so everything is fine. So “that’s how it’s supposed to be.” So you don’t have to wake up.

Simplicity isn’t in fashion now. Even though only it produces real results. I’m sure you’ve been in situations where someone was explaining something to you and, at some point, you suddenly found yourself in a state of crystal-clear understanding of what’s happening. That is the feeling of simplicity, no matter how complex the road to it was. Simplicity is not “easy.” Simplicity is “clear.” Simplicity doesn’t lie.

Between your goal and where you are right now, there are plenty of routes—from the most complicated to the simplest. But when it comes time to choose, for some reason you choose a route that is far from the simplest—and definitely not the fastest. And it’s not because you’re stupid. Not at all. You simply don’t see it, because you’re under the mass “hypnosis” of promises.

This isn’t exactly therapeutic hypnosis. It’s more like a hijacking of your understanding of reality. Hostile—not because you’re someone’s enemy. No. Hostile because it’s done without your consent, and you don’t even realize you’re the subject of an experiment: an experiment in turning you into those very zombies—shambling toward a call from the impenetrable fog of the unknown. And what’s scarier isn’t that the experiment is happening. What’s scarier is that you defend it. That you get offended at the person who tries to pull you out of it.

It’s very easy to check whether a person is conscious or not. You just have to listen carefully—they’ll give themselves away. For example: the moment you hear a question about how many views you have, impressions, what your click-through rate is, or any similar nonsense in a conversation supposedly centered on a $50M+ asset, you can be almost 100% sure you’re dealing with a zombie. The exception is people who are testing whether you are a zombie. Everything else is a symptom—dry, clinical, observable.

This is what complication looks like—and the path-lengthening that follows from it. It’s like counting the segments of a dashed lane line on your way to your goal: there can be a thousand of them, but you’re still not where you need to be. So what difference does it make how many there are if what matters is getting there? You count the dashes and call it “progress.” You measure noise and call it “movement.”

Just think about it: how, and who, managed to make you believe that there’s a correlation between any dashboard metric and the end goal? It’s like someone telling you, “You’ll arrive in New York in about 4,150 dash segments,” when the real metric should be distance measured in miles (31 miles) or kilometers (50 km). Standard dash length: 10 feet (about 3 meters). Standard gap length: 30 feet (about 9 meters). Total length of one “dash + gap” cycle: 40 feet (about 12 meters).

And so, step by step, they swap your real metrics for absurd ones—not all at once, not rudely, but gently, “for convenience.” And because you’re moving not through physical reality but inside a digital one—where those who control the platform also define the “distance”—your path becomes longer, more complicated, and more expensive. Not because the world is like that, but because the “world” is being rendered for you. They draw you a map so you walk in circles—and pay for every circle.

I’m not sure the example above grabbed the depth of this fog you’re all living inside. I’ll try again—lower, closer to the bone, without anesthesia.

“Simple” is when you understand how the result is produced, and at the same time you understand each component of the process separately. And the chains of cause and effect have to be crystal-clear at an experimentally repeatable level. A cause-and-effect relationship is not the statement: “If you have X views and Y clicks, then you will have Z sales of $50M assets.” But somehow many people have managed to implant precisely that belief—without needing to explain how it works step by step. “It’s just how it is.” You swallowed it. You subscribed. You ran. And now you’re already in formation, already “like everyone,” already comfortable.

You see it, don't you: it doesn't work like that. At least a scientific approach requires proof—and the most important thing is that if you follow the route described by the proof, you can arrive at the same result. Repeatability isn’t “inspiration.” It’s a reality check. Repeatability is your insurance against your own suggestibility.

If everything is truly repeatable—where is the pharmacy-precise recipe for your success in the digital environment? Where is the recipe: invest X USD on platform Y, write commercial proposal XWZ using a template, repeat 10, 20… times—and boom: a $50M asset sale. Where is this miracle script? Where is the instruction you can put on the table like a syringe with a precise dosage? Where is the sequence that doesn’t depend on the Constellations, “algorithms,” “trends,” and “the market,” but depends on reality?

I’m not sure it exists. Otherwise everyone would be extremely successful and rich, regardless of what they do. But that’s not the case. And in this story, the hardest thing to grasp is that it’s a lie. And that is the simplicity that must open to you at some point—not as an “opinion,” not as a “position,” but as a hit you feel in your stomach: the moment the air leaves you by itself and you realize you were walked in circles, and you agreed. You signed it yourself.

But only if you’re interested in actually grasping it. If you’re happy being deceived—or you don’t even understand that you’re a product of the system, like a dairy cow in a stall that gets milked to the maximum and then slaughtered for meat and by-products—then “simplicity” will feel like “rudeness,” “negativity,” “toxicity.” Because simplicity doesn’t pet you. Simplicity doesn’t console you. Simplicity states what is.

Another uncomfortable simplicity: for many of you the milk is already gone—or it’s about to run out. And then the next stage of extracting value begins. But because you’re under constant suggestive pressure, you obediently move down a narrow corridor of options—from the milking room into the plant where your consciousness is finally put down. Do you really not give a damn about yourself that much? Are you genuinely ready to hand yourself over—not for “rent,” but for processing—just so you don’t have to admit you’re being tricked into running?

Think. Just collect your thoughts and ask yourself one simple question: are you satisfied with your sales, doing what you’re doing? It’s simple. The simplest question you have to answer honestly—without self-deception, without “the market is hard,” without “it’s not the season,” without “we need to warm up the audience.” Are you satisfied—yes or no? And if not—why are you continuing to perform the same ritual that doesn’t produce results but does produce a feeling of being busy? Busyness is the cheapest drug for a person with ambition.

Of course you also have to account for the moderation of your “wants,” which is itself part of the ecosystem whose tight claws you’re in. They’ve imposed a different economy on you—where the most important thing is how many people hear you, how many comments and likes you get. And meanwhile you, like Atlas, hold your entire world of obligations and expectations over your head—other people’s and your own—and year after year it doesn’t get lighter. But they tell you: “reach is what matters.” “engagement is what matters.” “follower growth is what matters.” And you nod. Because it’s easier than looking reality in the eye. It’s easier than saying out loud: this doesn’t work.

Yes, over the years you’ve built up resistance and you endure the load with courage. But that changes nothing: the pressure of circumstances hasn’t gone anywhere. You keep waiting for the weight to get lighter so you can finally exhale. But that moment never arrives. Have you ever asked yourself why? Because you’re not being held in “difficulty.” You’re being held in a permanent state of carrying weight—weight you pick up with your own hands every day because someone told you it’s “growth.”

For many years—truly many, even before some of you started your careers—we’ve been trying to communicate one and the same idea. The traces are even in this account: read the older posts. The idea is that the simplest—and therefore actually working—method, one you can repeat again and again, for selling expensive assets is monotonous outreach to a statistically sufficient number of potential buyers directly (a named list, where each person is verified for the required level of capital), with constant tuning of the message necessary to trigger active attention, and a methodical loading of information into the attention window that opens for seconds—and sometimes for fractions of a second—information that can accumulate inside.

And once the amount of that information in the minds of this audience becomes sufficient, they will make the decision you need—at their moments of liquidity or when a real need appears.

Depending on your industry, there are ownership cycles, and they repeat. So readiness depends on the point of entry. If you started with a specific person right after their cycle has just reset, you shouldn’t expect a result tomorrow. But you also shouldn’t discard them: you need a strong position so that when the next event of opportunity arrives, you are first in line for that opportunity.

The methods and platforms you’re using cannot produce this kind of result because it isn’t profitable for the platforms. And because you control nothing there and you see only numbers, they can do anything they want with you—using your own money. And you might even defend it, because you’ve been trained to think numbers equal “objectivity,” when in fact numbers are just an interface of power.

Accept this simple truth: everything you’re doing is not a solution to your problem. It will not bring you closer to your goal. You are a product of the system, and your movement is the running of a hamster or a squirrel in a wheel, hooked to a generator that powers a lightbulb that signals you to run—as if that necessity were the guarantee of your survival at a programmed subconscious level and the guarantee of achieving your goal at a surface motivational level.

They implanted in you something like: if the light goes out, you die. “You,” at the subconscious level—or your “dream,” at the level of suggestion.

That is, through deep management of the fear of death, transmitted through a web of adjacent coupling gaskets coming out of the depths of your reptilian brain, they route it into your motivational layer, where it feels like “the right path.” You have to run, because your goal depends on it. And here’s the dirty boot: you discover that you’re not controlling the motivation—motivation is being controlled. You are not the driver. You’re a donkey they showed a carrot to and called it a “mission.” And behind you there’s another ‘carrot’: a steel prod—kept pressed into you nonstop to manufacture the sensation you call ‘the pressure of circumstances.’ Enjoy your ride.

You don’t even realize that in reality you’re not running toward the goal—you’re running away from the fear of death. Which is an absolute fiction. No one has ever died from unplugging themselves from digital platforms that, in the public mind, are positioned by the platforms themselves as life-support systems.

The trick is that the energy you generate while running exceeds what’s needed to keep the bulb lit. But of course you don’t suspect that. Because the moment you slow down even slightly, the system deliberately makes the bulb flicker and dim. The surplus energy you generate, the system takes for itself—so the light can burn for others at your expense, so they don’t have to run to “not die” and to achieve their goals. And you are their battery. Their fuel. Their invisible power pack that thinks it’s “building a personal brand.”

Everything is brutally simple, and it fits the core principle of capitalism in Karl Marx: self-expanding value (surplus value), where capital (money, means of production) is invested for one purpose only—profit, achieved through exploitation of wage labor: labor power becomes a commodity, and the capitalist appropriates part of the value created by the worker beyond the worker’s wages. This produces the universal character of commodity production, the chase for profit and the accumulation of wealth, and the division of people into classes of owners and wage workers, pushing toward the expansion of the world market.

But that’s not all. Greed grows further and changes the rules. Now they force you to run even faster, because what you generate is still not enough for them. To pull that off, they took away the accumulator—the rechargeable reserve that used to store your surplus so you could stop pedaling for a while and actually live: time for family, rest, entertainment. Now they make you believe the light will only be on while you’re spinning, and every minute you stop you accumulate debt to the system, debt you’ll have to repay before the bulb lights again. In other words, they took away your right to pause. They took away your right to silence. They took away your right to be a human being without debt. And once it got harder to take money from you—because you don’t have it—they started taking what you still do have: your life. Your hours. Your attention. Your nervous system. The only currency left in your life-reserve vault.

And here someone will again mutter, gloomily, in their own head: “that’s not true, I have plenty of free time.” Really?

Go to a restaurant, a zoo, a hospital—anywhere. Look at people. Their attention is pinned to the screen. Yes, they lift their heads now and then—but only to take a picture or check their route. Not that long ago, it was almost exactly the opposite: heads were up by default, and the screen was the interruption. Now the screen is the default, and real life is the interruption. Do you think they aren’t spinning the system’s wheel at that moment? There has never been so much stolen time in human history. And this isn’t “technology.” It’s redistribution of life and time.

And the fact that in exchange for that time they give you the illusion of useful information is feeding. They feed you like cows in a stall so you remain able to keep producing. They keep you nourished exactly enough to spin—not to live, to spin.

And while you run—someone is flying private, outrunning time as if time has no jurisdiction up there. He sits in a chair upholstered in surrendered lives: stitched from compromises, sealed with signatures, softened by the weight of people who learned to say yes. Beside him, luxury is not a person but a function—age-calibrated, mood-calibrated, there to keep his body convinced that nothing can touch him. He doesn’t look down at a landscape; he looks down at holdings—territory, leverage, human trajectories reduced to neat lines on a map that answers only to his name. He drinks liquefied vanity: a 25-year Scotch purchased at an auction of superiority, where the real currency isn’t money but exemption—exemption from consequence, from shame, from memory. And the entire flight is not pleasure. It’s anesthesia: a controlled dose, taken in the hope of erasing the horrors he committed in order to be exactly where he is now. And spinning your wheel, you want to tear off a piece of his wealth for yourself by selling him that very jet—spending your own money to do it, which only makes him richer.

And once you all together—there are so many of you—invest enough so that your combined investment is enough to buy a new jet, he will absolutely buy it, and one of you will get lucky. You do realize, don’t you, that the beneficiaries of your “investment” aren’t just the people who built the platform, but the people who own it—the shareholders—and that every dollar you deposit there is you collectively paying them for the very thing you’re trying to sell them: you’re the one financing the buyer.

Perfect! I want that too. Tens of thousands of aircraft brokers—chip in $1,000 each into my digital piggy bank, and as soon as the amount “runs up,” one of you will get the commission on that transaction. And the rest of you—don’t be sad and don’t get discouraged: hey-hey-hey, keep running and keep throwing money into the system until someone else has accumulated enough of your money to give one of you a shot.

It’s basically the plot of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.

In other words, if your well-being depends on the system, you’re doomed to run forever.

Of course there are “positive” changes too. Since the speed and duration of your running determines the capital of those who harvest the crop, you’re now being motivated to live a healthy lifestyle, stop drinking, stop smoking, stop eating tasty food—in short, stop getting any kind of hedonistic pleasure from life. Otherwise you won’t be able to run. Remember: the demanded running speed is directly proportional to the growth of greed.

It’s as if a barely audible echo from the past whispers: “Look at my slave—how strong he is. Solid, healthy teeth. Almost no fat. He can work all day under the blazing sun and survive on a single bowl of beans or rice.” Super. We’re right back where we started.

Sure, not everyone’s labor is physical nowadays. But paradoxically, those who still do physical labor are mentally healthier than those who sit in front of a screen all day, because people who do physical labor have more connection to reality. They get truly tired—and therefore truly sleep. You get tired of “numbers,” and therefore you never actually rest.

And in conclusion—understand me correctly. Or rather: don’t misunderstand me. This is not agitation for boycotting the digital space. This is not an attempt to awaken your inner Luddite. This is trivial logic.

If each year the world completes a limited number of transactions in the $50M+ segment, you can count them all. Each of those deals has marketing and promotion costs built into its structure. And since the number of participants in that market is much larger than the number of buyers, and larger still than the number of real deals, it means the aggregate costs poured into those transactions are enormous.

Now even simpler. While everyone keeps pouring money into the common pot in the hope that someone will get lucky (and that really is true—you won’t deny it), imagine if Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook had a normal checkout lane like a grocery store. It would be a gigantic line of people buying the same “products.” In practice it’s something very close to lottery tickets. You’d need a digital evolutionist to use a scientific approach to classify what you’re actually buying. Maybe: hope.

But the exit from the store is the entrance. And the moment you cross the distance from the checkout to the door, your purchase disappears—and you’re back in line for the next portion of hope. And that wheel doesn’t squeak. It just quietly turns inside your head.

Now we’re offering you a different move: stand first in front of the buyer. Let everyone else keep feeding this ecosystem with their hard-earned or borrowed money so that when the moment arrives, you—specifically you—become the beneficiary of that mass stampede. It will look as if thousands of desperate voices are speaking through you—but you will be the one who takes the money in your hands.

We’re offering you a way to earn together. You pay us for what we promise—and what we can actually deliver—and unlike everyone else, we don’t lengthen the path; we shorten it, because our income depends on it. No result—no money. That’s how reality is wired. But you keep working with people who lengthen your path to the goal—and while doing it, they twist your head so skillfully that you keep carrying money to them even when there is no result. That’s the difference at the foundation. We’re interested in your fastest possible win. They aren’t. Our appetites are not even comparable to the appetites of the ones you’re feeding. To us, you matter. To them, you’re one of millions. Everything is brutally simple—and it should be obvious on sight to any sane, clear-thinking person.

Wake up already. Because this is starting to be genuinely frightening.

Have you ever been in a situation where you were truly scared because you tried, unsuccessfully, to wake someone up or bring them back to consciousness—and that limp body didn’t respond to your attempts? And at some point you began to think it was never going to happen?

You are that limp body.

But are you dead?

Or is it still possible to bring at least some of you back to consciousness?

Wake-up

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