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The world does not need more people pretending- What the world needs, what it has always needed, is people who have done the inner work.
🕑 Added 2026-02-11 10:03:51 +0000 UTC“You know, there’s something rather strange happening to certain people right now, and if you’re watching this, there’s a very good chance you’re one of them. These are the people who feel everything, who walk into a room and immediately sense what no one is saying, who see through the performance, the masks, the carefully constructed surface of social life.
They’ve been told this is a gift — this ability to perceive what others miss. But I want to suggest something quite different to you today. What if this very sensitivity, this clear seeing, is the reason certain people are quietly vanishing from society? Not because they’re failing, but because staying has become impossible.
You see, something rather peculiar is unfolding across the world right now.
Quietly, almost imperceptibly, certain individuals are disappearing from public life. They’re deleting their social media accounts. They’re leaving careers that once defined them. They’re moving to remote places — small towns, edges of forests. They’re becoming harder to reach, harder to find, harder to pin down.
And if you ask the average person what’s happening, they’ll give you the standard explanations: burnout, depression, antisocial tendencies, a failure to cope with modern life. But that’s not what’s happening at all.
What if these people aren’t breaking down? What if they’re breaking through? What if their disappearance isn’t a symptom of weakness, but a sign of a strength that most people cannot even comprehend?
You see, there’s a pattern here that very few are willing to acknowledge. The people who are quietly stepping away from society are not, by and large, the ones who couldn’t handle it. They’re the ones who could see it — really see it. And what they saw became impossible to unsee.
Now, this might sound abstract, so let me be more specific. I’m talking about people who wake up one day and realize that almost everything around them — the conversations, the ambitions, the conflicts, the entertainments — is operating on a frequency they can no longer tune into. Not because they’re superior. Not because they’ve figured everything out. But because something inside them has shifted so fundamentally that the old world no longer fits. And here’s what nobody tells you about this kind of awakening: it doesn’t feel like enlightenment. It feels like exile.
Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist, understood this perhaps better than anyone. He observed that when an individual’s consciousness evolves beyond the collective unconscious of their society, a strange thing happens. The friction between the awakened mind and the sleeping world becomes not just uncomfortable, but actively painful.
And I don’t mean painful in a philosophical sense. I mean painful in your body, in your nervous system, in the very cells of your being. Jung called this a necessary withdrawal — the point at which remaining in ordinary society causes such profound distress that the psyche must retreat to survive. Not as a choice. Not as a preference. As an imperative.
Think about that for a moment. The disappearance we’re witnessing isn’t rebellion. It isn’t escapism. It’s a biological and psychological necessity for those whose inner development has outpaced their environment.
But this raises a troubling question, doesn’t it? What exactly makes society so intolerable for those who have awakened? Why does simply being around other people become such a source of suffering? The answer, I’m afraid, lies in the invisible architecture of human interaction itself.
Let me paint a picture for you. Imagine walking into a crowded room — a party, perhaps, or a corporate meeting, or a family gathering. On the surface, everything appears normal. People are talking, laughing, negotiating, performing the thousand small rituals that constitute social life.
But underneath — and this is what the awakened person sees — there’s something else entirely. There are projections flying in every direction. Unacknowledged fears being transferred onto others. Shadows being externalized. Wounds being enacted without anyone realizing they’re doing it.
The person criticizing their colleague is actually criticizing the part of themselves they cannot accept. The person seeking approval is actually seeking the love their parents never gave them. The person creating conflict is actually trying to avoid the conflict raging inside their own heart.
This is not metaphor. This is the actual mechanics of unconscious human behavior.
And when you can see it, really see it, you realize something devastating: almost no one knows what they’re actually doing.
They think they’re having a conversation about politics. But they’re really fighting about unresolved childhood trauma. They think they’re arguing about money, but they’re really arguing about worthiness and love. They think they’re pursuing success, but they’re really running from a terror of insignificance that they’ve never faced.
The awakened person sees all of this — constantly, automatically — without the ability to turn it off. Jung described this experience as being awake in a room full of sleepwalkers.
And that image is more accurate than most people realize. Because sleepwalkers, you understand, can become quite agitated if you try to wake them. They can become hostile. They can become violent. And yet they have no idea they’re asleep.
This is the burden of seeing. You perceive the unconscious patterns driving human behavior, but you cannot make others perceive them. You see the games being played, but you cannot opt out without being seen as the problem. You witness the mass projections in politics, in social media, in every tribal conflict, and you understand that entire groups are projecting their unintegrated shadows onto convenient enemies.
And here’s where the real difficulty begins. Because seeing this reality is only half of the problem. The other half is that, to remain in society, you’re expected to pretend you don’t see any of it.
Before awakening, social performance is automatic. You smile when you’re supposed to smile. You say, “I’m fine,” when you’re not fine at all. You laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, agree with opinions you don’t hold, and suppress your authentic responses in favor of what’s expected. And it doesn’t cost you much because you’re not fully aware you’re doing it.
The persona — that mask we all wear in public — fits so seamlessly that you forget you’re wearing it. But something changes when you begin to wake up. The mask starts to feel like it’s suffocating you.
I knew a woman once, a senior executive at a large corporation, who described this experience perfectly. She said that after her spiritual awakening, she would sit in meetings and feel as though she were dying — not metaphorically, actually dying. As if every false word she spoke, every performative smile she offered, every time she nodded along with something she knew to be shallow or unconscious, a piece of her was being extinguished.
And she wasn’t being dramatic. She was describing, with clinical precision, what happens when the authentic self has emerged and can no longer be subordinated to the social persona.
You see, Jung called this process individuation — the journey toward becoming who you actually are, beneath all the conditioning and all the masks. And individuation is supposed to be the goal of psychological development. It’s supposed to be healthy. But here’s the cruel paradox: The more individuated you become, the more impossible it becomes to function in environments that require constant performance of a false self.
You become, as one of my colleagues put it, too much for spaces that need people to be less than they are. Too whole for places that only accept fragments. Too present for rooms full of people who have agreed to be absent from themselves.
Jung himself faced this dilemma. After his break with Freud and his descent into the depths of his own psyche, he found that he could no longer tolerate the performative demands of being a respectable Swiss psychiatrist.
He built a tower — the famous tower at Bollingen — specifically as a refuge where he could be entirely himself. No electricity. No modern conveniences. Just stone walls, silence, and the space to exist without pretense.
This wasn’t eccentricity. This was survival.
And I tell you this because there are people watching right now who have felt exactly this. You felt the impossibility of continuing to perform. You felt the suffocation of environments that require you to diminish yourself. And perhaps you’ve been told that something is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with you. What’s happening is that you’re outgrowing the cage.
But outgrowing the cage comes with a cost that we must now examine. Because the refusal to perform isn’t simply a moral preference. It’s a matter of energy — of life force — of the very fuel that keeps a human being alive.
Let me tell you about the invisible labor that nobody talks about. When you are awake in an unconscious environment, you are doing work. Constant work. Invisible work. Work that others cannot see — work they wouldn’t understand even if you explained it.
You are filtering the projections being thrown at you from every direction. You are maintaining boundaries that others don’t even know exist. You are consciously resisting the pull of collective emotions — the fear, the outrage, the manufactured drama that most people simply absorb without question.
It’s like swimming against a tsunami. The water is flowing in one direction — toward unconsciousness, toward reaction, toward the endless churning of unexamined drives — and you are swimming the other way. And the exhausting part is that you’re not even making progress. You’re just trying to stay in place. Just trying not to be swept away.
I once spoke with a teacher — let’s call her Elena — who had been suffering from chronic fatigue for years. She’d seen every specialist, tried every treatment. Nothing worked. Her doctors were baffled.
Then something interesting happened. She took a leave of absence from her school. Within three weeks, her energy began returning. Within three months, she felt better than she had in a decade.
The diagnosis was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. She wasn’t sick in any ordinary sense. She was being drained. Her environment — the unconscious patterns, the emotional chaos, the constant requirement to manage other people’s unprocessed material — was literally depleting her life force. When she removed herself from the environment, the depletion stopped. It was that simple. And that terrible.
Because this pattern repeats itself over and over among awakened people. They’re told they have anxiety disorders, chronic fatigue, mysterious autoimmune conditions. They’re given medications and therapies and coping strategies, but nobody addresses the obvious cause. They’re drowning in a sea of unconsciousness that their sensitivity makes them uniquely vulnerable to. And nowhere is this depletion more intense, more constant, more inescapable than in the digital realm.
You see, social media is not simply a communication tool. It’s something far more insidious. It’s a machine for projection. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, millions of people are throwing their unprocessed shadows into the void — their fears, their hatreds, their desperate need to be right, their terror of being insignificant. All of it projected outward onto screens, onto strangers, onto anyone who dares to think differently.
For most people, this is merely exhausting. For the awakened person, it’s unbearable. Because they can see what’s actually happening beneath every viral outrage, every cancellation, every tribal war of words.
They see wounded children fighting with wounded children. They see shadows attacking shadows. They see the collective unconscious acting out its darkest impulses — and they feel every blow as if it were landing on their own nervous system.
No wonder the awakened delete their accounts first. No wonder they step away from the digital world before they step away from anything else. They’re not being antisocial. They’re not technophobic. They’re removing themselves from an environment that was designed almost perfectly to assault consciousness.
Social media is a boxing ring where shadows fight shadows endlessly. And the awakened have no interest in boxing. But when the exhaustion becomes too much — when the depletion reaches critical levels — the psyche doesn’t simply break down. It does something far more ancient and far more wise. It invokes the hermit.
In the tarot and in the mythological traditions of virtually every culture, there exists an archetype of the hermit — the one who withdraws, the one who seeks solitude, the one who turns away from the world not out of hatred, but out of necessity. And this is crucial to understand.
The hermit is not running away. The hermit is running toward something — toward silence, toward integration, toward the still, small voice that can only be heard when the noise of the world has been removed. For the awakened person who disappears from society, this isn’t preference. This is imperative.
The psyche, having reached its limits, demands retreat. It demands space. It demands the conditions necessary for the next stage of development to occur.
Think of it as a kind of gestation. When something is being born inside you — some new understanding, some deeper integration, some more complete version of yourself — it requires protection. It requires incubation. It requires removal from the forces that would interrupt or corrupt the process.
I knew a philosopher once, a respected academic, who disappeared from public life for nearly three years. His colleagues assumed he had collapsed. His family worried he was in crisis. But when he emerged, something remarkable had happened.
He had become clear, rooted, unshakable in a way he had never been before. The time in isolation hadn’t broken him. It had forged him. He told me later that he hadn’t been hiding from the world. He’d been learning to be with himself — really be with himself — without distraction, without escape, without the constant noise that modern life uses to keep us from ever encountering our own depths. “In the silence,” he said, “I finally met who I actually am. And I realized I had been too afraid to meet him before.”
This is what happens in the hermit phase. The shadow is integrated. The wounds are processed. The self that was always there — beneath the conditioning and the performance and the adaptations — is finally allowed to emerge. Jung compared it to a fish becoming adapted to depths that other fish cannot survive. In isolation, something is being developed — some capacity for consciousness, some strength of presence — that could not develop under ordinary conditions. But here’s the secret that most people miss about the hermit archetype: The hermit always returns.
The journey into isolation is not the end of the story. It’s the preparation for a return. But the return is not to the same world you left and it’s certainly not in the same way you left it.
When the awakened person comes back and they do come back — they don’t return to the center of society. They return to its edges. I call these people the border dwellers. They are present in the world, but they are not absorbed by it. They are available to those who seek them, but they are not compromised by the demands of the collective unconscious. They have built a foundation inside themselves that is no longer dependent on external validation or social approval. And from this position — this strange, marginal, powerful position — they begin to do something extraordinary. They begin to build new structures. Not revolutions, you understand. Not movements that seek to overturn the existing order through force or politics. Something far more subtle and far more lasting.
They create small communities of consciousness. Microsocieties where authenticity is the norm rather than the exception. Gathering points for others who have awakened and need spaces to belong without pretending.
I know a therapist who once ran a successful traditional practice. After her own awakening, she could no longer work with ordinary psychological complaints — the small talk, the surface issues, the endless management of symptoms without ever touching causes. It became intolerable to her.
So she changed everything. She now works only with what she calls spiritual emergencies — those moments when someone’s entire worldview is collapsing and being rebuilt. She makes far less money. She sees far fewer clients. But she is finally doing work that matters to her soul.
And this is happening everywhere, if you know where to look. Awakened individuals creating alternatives — not by preaching or converting or demanding that others change, but simply by living differently and making space for others to join them if they’re ready.
You see, the function of these people isn’t to fix society from within. That approach doesn’t work. You cannot wake sleepwalkers by yelling at them. The function is to exist — to demonstrate through their very being that another way of living is possible, to hold open a door that others may eventually choose to walk through. And so we arrive at the heart of the matter.
The quiet disappearance of awakened people from mainstream society is not a problem to be solved. It’s not a mental health crisis to be treated. It’s not a failure of social adjustment to be corrected. It’s evolution happening in real time. These people are not abandoning the world. They’re preparing to serve it in a way that the world doesn’t yet understand it needs. Because here’s what nobody wants to admit: society doesn’t transform from the center. It transforms from the margins.
Every significant shift in human consciousness has begun with individuals who removed themselves from the crowd, went through their own process of development, and then returned with something new to offer. The prophets went into the desert. The mystics went into caves. The visionaries went into exile — not because they hated humanity, but because they loved it enough to become something more than they were. And they could only become that something by stepping away from everything they knew.
If you’re watching this and you feel that pull — that inexplicable draw toward solitude, that inability to keep performing, that exhaustion that comes from swimming against the tide of unconsciousness — I want you to hear something clearly:
You are not broken.
You are not failing at life.
You are not mentally ill simply because the world as it’s currently constructed doesn’t fit you.
You may be in the early stages of a transformation that society has no framework to understand. You may be feeling the first stirrings of a consciousness that needs space to develop. You may be exactly where you need to be — even if, especially if, that place feels like exile.
The hermit phase is not the end. It’s the chrysalis. And what emerges from the chrysalis is always something with wings. So here’s what I want to leave you with: If you feel called to disappear, to step back, to create distance between yourself and the churning unconsciousness of modern life, don’t resist that call out of guilt or fear or obligation. The world does not need more people pretending. It does not need more performers maintaining the illusion. It does not need more awakened individuals burning themselves out by trying to function in environments that are hostile to consciousness.
What the world needs — what it has always needed — is people who have done the inner work. People who have gone into the silence and come back transformed. People who can stand at the margins and hold open the door for others. Your disappearance is not abandonment. It’s preparation.
And when you return — whenever that is, however that looks — you will bring back something that no one who stayed in the center could ever develop.
You will bring back yourself.”
— Alan Watts
Comments
Jeff Van Niel
Extremely powerful and hits me hard. I choose the border and the forest for the calm that i find there. 🫂🫂❤️❤️🙏🙏🙈
