Everybody Says They're Awake Now

Here’s a strange thing about this particular moment: everybody is awake. One crowd says it’s woke. Another took the red pill. A third did its own research and now sees what the sheeple can’t. And a fourth is above all of it, calmly explaining that both sides are idiots. Spend five minutes online and you’ll meet a dozen people who’ve woken up, every one of them certain the other eleven are still asleep.

Look at what the badges have in common. Each one is a claim to have seen through something. And each one comes as a package: the right opinions, the right enemies, the words you use and the words you’d better not. You don’t have to work any of it out yourself. You just have to join. That’s the trade. You hand over your thinking, and in return you get to feel like the only one in the room with your eyes open.

Real waking up doesn’t come with a membership card. It’s slower and a good deal lonelier. It’s catching your own reaction before you’ve checked which reaction your side expects. It’s noticing your team is wrong about something and saying so, or at least admitting it to yourself. I’ve got a side I’d rather be right with than look at too closely. Most of us do. That’s true of the people I agree with and the people I don’t, and of me on the days I forget.

Waking up is something you do, not something you join. Keep Perspective means asking something harder than which side you’re on: would you still hold this view if your side dropped it tomorrow? If the honest answer is “probably not,” it was never your view. You were borrowing it.

So this week, pick one opinion you hold hard and trace it back. Did you reason your way there, or did it arrive with the badge? And if you can’t remember the last time you changed your mind about anything that mattered, that isn’t proof you’ve been right all along. It may just mean you’ve been sleeping very comfortably, with a sign on the door that says awake.