It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, or for a hedge fund executive and a runway model to form a stable relationship.

It’s easy to make fun of this article but for a lot of people, this is a really necessary lesson. I lived in NYC for over a decade. It took me YEARS to realize the nightlife scene was a scam. I kept being like, what am I missing here? How is it that everyone’s waiting in line in 6″ heels to spend $1200 on two bottles of Grey Goose they could have gotten at the corner store for $30 each? There must be something I’m not understanding or haven’t found yet. Clearly I must keep digging til I get to the bottom of this where the happiness is.

It’s easy to dismiss these people as unevolved but what we forget is how hard the Matrix sells this scam to us. As someone who was an incredibly late bloomer, I looked to society to tell me what I was missing that was keeping me from sexual/romantic fulfillment, and I crafted myself into the type of person I was told was desirable – a published author lingerie model nightlife doyenne in $1000 shoes. Surely if I did these things people would finally start to value me – because that’s what the world kept telling me.

And I’m pretty fuckin smart. Smart enough that I ACHIEVED all those things before I found them ultimately a lie. If you think about it from a spiritual perspective, imagine that I was a starseed incarnating on earth to figure out how to human. Only I found that the immediate answers society was pushing on me were all false leads. Even so, I had to find out for myself.

That’s actually a profound journey. It’s easy to make fun of but try being someone who grew up without love and reached for what everyone was saying was the obvious solution. I can look back at that world now with actual empirical knowledge, not just sour-grapes superiority (as many people do if they feel that world is closed to them). It was a powerful teaching.