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The matrix isn’t being a slave to “the system” like most people think.

It’s the world you live in inside of your head. The most powerful idea that taught me this came from essayist Anaïs Nin:

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

It is true that everyone is trapped inside the Matrix just like the movie said. But what’s misunderstood is that our mind creates the Matrix, which means it’s not some conspiracy theory run by the government or elites.

The matrix in your head runs everything, and unless you escape it, you will continue down a path you don’t want and won’t be able to change course. Carl Jung says “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Think about that for a moment. If your unconscious is running the show, then every goal you’ve failed to reach, every relationship that fell apart, every opportunity you didn’t take — none of it was bad luck. It was programming. And the terrifying part is you wrote the code yourself.

The unconscious is controlling you. It’s creating the matrix that is your prison. Here’s how to escape and set your mind free, so you can experience personal freedom.

The quiet art of thinking has been lost

This is the crux of the issue.

If your life is controlled by your mind, then the simple answer is to use your mind better. But most people aren’t in control of their minds anymore.

Their smartphone hijacked their attention. Then AI allowed people to outsource all of their thinking to a machine that’s “supposedly” smarter than them. So the modern human can’t control their mind.

The sad part is they don’t even know they lost control.

AI and phones are so deeply embedded into society that the logical excuse is “AI/phones are making me smarter.” Or “It’s how I run my business.” The tools are necessary to live, but when you use them and simultaneously stop thinking, they begin to own you.

The answer isn’t to go back to fax machines. No. It’s to start thinking again.

Over the years I’ve known many people who went to silent retreats. It’s where you leave all technology behind, eat a vegetarian diet, live in nature, and don’t talk for 7-10 days.

A friend of mine went to one. By the end he had multiple profound insights about his life. Some of them he considers to be world-changing.

Was this an accident? No.

When we turn off technology, spend time in nature, stop the chattering mind, and stay silent, the information that comes to us is deeper, more insightful, and higher quality.

Before you can ever escape the matrix your mind created, you first must create periods of silence for it to be possible.

How a hidden force makes decisions for you

You think you’re in control. You’re not.

The puppet master isn’t some secret illuminati or conspiracy theory. Nope. It’s your stories. Every decision and every belief you have is controlled by a story. Those stories are past experiences that become the rational for why you believe what you do.

A guy the other day said to me:

“Posting on social media will get me fired.”

When I drilled deeper, it turned out his co-worker got fired for being violently racist on Twitter. So he took that story and formed a belief that social media gets you fired from your job. This, of course, is not true. But the story became the evidence he used when he was asked to decide if he would post on social media.

His mind was already made up.

Tony Robbins says: “The only thing holding you back from doing what you really want is the excuses you keep telling yourself about why you can’t have it.”

These excuses don’t appear as silly, made-up lies. They appear as perfectly logical stories. To transcend your current circumstances you must delete the old stories and write new ones. Tony says “Change your story, change your life.”

Only way to do that is to:

1. Write down all the stories you have that drive your decisions.

2. Commit to writing new stories.

3. Go out and have new experiences that turn into new stories.

The sad part is most people are driven by stories they unconsciously collected in childhood, and they’re unwilling to change in any form. So the matrix in their head hijacks every good thing they could of had, and they don’t know why.

A series of tiny labels that control your trajectory in life

Your identity shapes you. And you knew that already.

But what’s forgotten is your identity is just a bunch of labels. “I’m a parent” or “I’m a scientist” or “I’m a survivor”… are just labels. You aren’t one thing. You can be multiple things. You can be a scientist today and a banker tomorrow.

People get trapped by these labels. They become married to them till death do us part.

Once you decide to own a label, it’s hard to give it up. Worse, we think when we change a label our friends and family are watching and will judge us. The reality is nobody gives a sh*t and it’s normal for humans to cycle through labels.

A label is really a set of constraints. It’s putting yourself into a box that becomes your coffin if you’re not careful. And often it’s letting labels force a set of outside rules on you which only suppresses you more so you’re easier to control.

The only way to stop labels trapping you inside the matrix that runs in your head is to refuse to accept labels. Don’t allow people to label you. And don’t label yourself. Remain fluid like water. Try to become label-less.

I spent years calling myself a writer. It sounds harmless. But ‘writer’ secretly meant I couldn’t be an entrepreneur, a speaker, or an investor because those weren’t what writers do. Most writers are starving artists and are the worst type of people to model.

The day I dropped the label I stopped asking ‘what would a writer do here?’ and started asking ‘what do I actually want?’ The difference was immediate.