Running on Empty

At the lowest point in my life, I had less than twenty dollars to my name.

It was 2004, and I had been unemployed for nearly a year. Due to the circumstances under which I was terminated, I was denied unemployment insurance, forcing me to live on meager savings that ran out within a couple of months. I ended up selling almost all of my gaming and science fiction books and toys on eBay just to have money to pay the mortgage. As for food and gas, I did the dumbest thing you could ever do: max out my credit cards and play the balance juggling game to stay solvent.

It was so bad, I almost got arrested for bouncing a check on a speeding ticket.

By the time I got back to work, I ended up working two jobs for over a year just to keep treading water. One of those jobs was near-minimum wage in Retail Hell, on nights and weekends. After nearly a year without work, I spent the following year where the only day I had off was Christmas Day.

The one bright spot was that one of those jobs introduced me to the Microsoft Access database application as part of my regular tasks. I discovered I had a talent when it came to databases and pivoted towards data engineering. I left my old career and started a new one, where I had a lot more success.

In other words, those lost years between 2004 and 2006 were my Red Pill moment.

The Red Pill is a meme that derives from the 1999 movie The Matrix. Early in the story, the protagonist Neo, a disenchanted computer programmer, is introduced to the infamous terrorist Morpheus in his search for the truth. Morpheus offers Neo two choices:

• Turn away from his quest for truth, back to the safe world of his boring, normal unsatisfactory life.
• Or learn the truth that would challenge his sanity, and possibly cost him his life.

This choice is encapsulated (pun very much intended) in a physical metaphor: a blue pill and a red pill.

Neo opts to take the red pill and learn the truth he has been seeking. When Neo swallows it, he suddenly and literally wakes up to the awful truth of his world: that humanity has been enslaved by artificial intelligence, which harvest humans’ bio-electrical impulses for energy. To keep the humans under control, the machines keep them in a comatose state, feeding them a virtual-reality simulation of the late 90s, known as the Matrix, to keep the people unaware of their technological enslavement. By taking the red pill, Neo injects viral code that crashes his VR “handler,” allowing Morpheus and his crew the opportunity to unplug Neo and recruit him their fight to liberate humanity from the machines.

In popular culture, “taking the Red Pill” means realizing an unpleasant reality that has been there all along, but you’ve been naively unaware of it (if not actively denying it) up to that point. Most of the time the term comes up in arguments and debates about politics or the Culture War. However, on a personal scale, it means reluctantly accepting a truth about some dysfunction in your life that is causing you stress, and finally taking action to do something about it.

For me, the Red Pill moment was the realization that I was in the wrong career in the wrong industry, at the wrong time.  In the mid-2000s all the manufacturing jobs were going overseas to China because they had the cheapest labor rate. Unless you were willing to learn Mandarin and give up your God-given rights, it was next to impossible to make a living while the corporate bean counters were selling out the American Dream to communists in capitalists’ clothing. And let’s be honest: manufacturing is not the best career choice in the world. You work in very uncomfortable, sometimes even dangerous conditions on inflexible shifts that all but ignore human biorhythms. Profit margins are also razor-thin, which force most managers to cut down to the bone squeezing out every last penny of cost.

I was forced to do what most people my age would find unthinkable: make a mid-life career change.

Imagine having to go back to school on nights and weekends, all while working a full time job where you’re overqualified and under-compensated. (I should also mention that it had been more than a decade since college, and I had a very bad case of senioritis that almost caused me to miss commencement.) Oh, and I was also taking a student loan, while trying to pay off a massive credit card debt I shouldn’t have taken. Thank God I had no wife or family to support back then.

As unpleasant as that truth was for me, I have an even more unpleasant one for you: the Matrix is very much a real thing.

No, I don’t mean that we’re all living in some kind of mass virtual-reality simulation run by some giant supercomputer (even if Elon Musk or Scott Adams seem to think otherwise). But all of us are living in denial, to one degree or another, about an unpleasant truth that is creating pain, drama, or discomfort in our lives:

• It could be a job you hate but are afraid to leave.
• It could be a relationship with the wrong person you don’t have the courage to end.
• It could be a physical or psychological addiction you developed to cope with past trauma.
• It could be a betrayal by someone you trusted, because you don’t want to think about what else they’ve lied to you.

Since returning to New Hampshire and catching up with people I haven’t seen in decades, I’ve seen in many of them signs they’re still trapped in their own personal Matrix. A lot of them have been subjected to the boiling frog syndrome, where the changes come slowly and gradually, too slow to notice unless you’ve been away for a while.

They don’t know when the road they called their own, turned onto the one they’re on.

They don’t know where they’re running, they just keep running on.

They’re running into the sun, and they’re running behind.

And when things get bad, it becomes even harder to continue taking the Blue Pill. The old proverb isn’t true: adversity doesn’t build character, it exposes it. And the last two years have exposed the ugliness of a lot of people’s characters.

Trying live a life in denial extracts a cost in life force. Some people look a lot older than they actually are, because they’re pretending to be something they aren’t.

Only at the precipice will people find the will to change.

If you haven’t taken the Red Pill yet, you need to take a hard look at your life. Because pretty soon, that pill is going to turn into a suppository.