I realized I'd lost myself when I couldn't remember what music I actually liked—only what impressed others. The rat race doesn't announce its theft. It steals your identity one small surrender at a time.
I discovered I'd lost myself in the oddest moment—standing in my Singapore apartment, trying to remember what music I actually liked. Not what played well at dinner parties or impressed colleagues, but what made me feel something real. My Spotify had become a graveyard of algorithmic suggestions and productivity podcasts. When was the last time I'd chosen a song just because it moved me?
This is what the rat race does. It doesn't announce its theft. It pilfers your identity one small surrender at a time, until you're perfectly optimized for a life that isn't yours.
Rudá Iandê's new book, Laughing in the Face of Chaos, landed in my hands at exactly the right moment—though I'd been learning from him for over a decade. What makes this work extraordinary isn't just another perspective on escaping corporate culture. It's that he's distilled a lifetime of shamanic wisdom into a mechanism for seeing through the very illusions that keep us running. He shows how we've mistaken our cage for the whole world.
The forgetting happens so gradually. First, you start translating yourself into corporate speak. I remember the exact meeting where I heard myself say "let's take this offline to align our stakeholder expectations" and felt a piece of my soul leave my body. But everyone nodded appreciatively, so I kept going. Soon I was fluent in a language designed to say nothing with maximum efficiency. The poet I'd been at twenty-five would have wept.
Then your dreams start shrinking to fit quarterly projections. Mine used to be vast, unwieldy things—writing novels, learning to sail, conversations that cracked reality open. But somewhere between performance reviews and fiscal years, they'd been domesticated into KPIs. A better title. A corner office. A business class upgrade. I'd traded wonder for spreadsheet cells.
The anxiety should have been my first clue. Not sharp, specific worry about real threats, but the ambient hum of never-enough that followed me from boardroom to bedroom. I've written about how modern life tricks us into needing what makes us miserable, and that's exactly what I'd done—manufactured a constant state of productive panic that I wore like a professional badge.
But the real soul-theft happened in smaller moments. The way I'd learned to network instead of connect, treating every human interaction like a potential LinkedIn update. How rest became another thing to optimize—meditation apps to increase productivity, exercise routines to enhance performance, even sleep tracked and gamified. I'd monetized my own existence.
There's a particularly devastating chapter in Rudá's book about recognizing the scripts we're reading from versus the stories we're actually writing. Reading it, I realized I'd become method actor in someone else's play, so committed to the role that I'd forgotten I was performing. My apartment looked like a stage set for "successful professional"—the right books displayed but unread, the correct art I didn't understand, furniture chosen for what it signaled rather than comfort.
The darkest sign was how I'd started defending the very system that was erasing me. When my brother visited from Australia and questioned the madness of my schedule, I found myself parroting lines about "building something meaningful" and "paying dues." But meaningful to whom? Whose dues? I'd become a prison guard in my own incarceration, enforcing rules I'd never agreed to.
Silence had become my enemy because in quiet moments, uncomfortable questions surfaced. So I stuffed every gap with optimization podcasts, productivity hacks, the endless scroll of other people's achievements. The system that traps us relies on this noise. It needs us too distracted to notice we're running in circles.
The shift began with a simple question Rudá had asked me years ago that finally landed: "Whose life are you living?" Not in some abstract philosophical way, but literally—whose expectations was I fulfilling? Whose definition of success was I chasing? Whose voice was I speaking in?
The book's mechanism isn't about escaping to a beach or starting a passion project. It's about recognition—seeing that what we call "reality" is often just collective agreement to pretend certain things matter. The rat race continues because we all agree to keep running, terrified of what happens if we stop.
But here's what I discovered when I finally stopped: nothing catastrophic happened. The world didn't end. My worth didn't evaporate. Instead, in the stillness, I started remembering. The music I loved before algorithms. The dreams I had before they were downsized. The person I was before I learned to perform myself.
This is why Rudá calls it "laughing in the face of chaos." There's something cosmically absurd about millions of us frantically racing toward destinations we never chose, using maps we never drew, wondering why we feel so lost. The laughter isn't bitter—it's the sound of recognition, of finally getting the cosmic joke.
I still work. Still have deadlines. Still live in the world. But something fundamental has shifted. I've stopped mistaking movement for progress, busyness for purpose, achievement for identity. Most days, I remember that I'm the author of my own story, not just a character in someone else's productivity manual.
The book arrived at the perfect moment because it captures what a decade of unlearning has taught me: we don't need to escape the rat race. We need to remember it's optional. We need to see that the cage door has been open all along—we've just been too busy running to notice.
Last week, I did something radical. I spent an entire Sunday doing absolutely nothing productive. No optimization. No networking. No content creation. Just sitting with a cup of tea, listening to music I'd forgotten I loved, letting my mind wander down paths that led nowhere profitable. It felt like revolution.
Because maybe that's the ultimate sign you've forgotten who you are: when simply being yourself, without performance or purpose, feels like an act of rebellion. And maybe that's where remembering begins—in the radical act of stopping long enough to ask: If I wasn't afraid of falling behind, who would I be?
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