Lady Arelia

Brace yourself. This one’s gonna be triggering…

Every single thing you decide you don’t want to do anymore, someone else is now doing. And they’re doing it their way.

That’s it. That’s the whole essay. But let’s actually walk through it because I don’t think most people have truly sat with how far that extends into their actual lives. So lets break it down:

Your Kids

You don’t raise them anymore because they’re too exhausting. You don’t target their energy and do educational activities, you just let them watch whatever keeps them sat down. Don’t want to homeschool. You don’t want to be the one teaching them everything, correcting them all day, being that present and that intentional because it’s exhausting and honestly it’s a lot. That’s fair, it is a lot. But whoever is teaching them is teaching them something. Their values, their worldview, what they think is normal, what they think they’re worth, what they think their bloodline is built on. All of that is getting shaped by whoever you handed the job to. The school, the iPad, the YouTube algorithm, the new Roblox friend, whatever.

You get a kid back at 18 who was raised mostly by systems you didn’t design and don’t fully understand, and then you’re surprised they seem dumber, don’t value what you value, don’t really know who they are. That’s not a mystery. That’s just what happens when someone else does the raising.

Your Food

Nobody cooks anymore. Nobody grows and raises their own food. And I get it, it’s a whole thing, it takes time, blah blah blah. But when you stop knowing how to feed yourself, what real ingredients actually look and feel like, you hand that entirely over to whoever is producing it. And they decide what goes in it. The additives, the engineering, the 3D printing, the stuff on the label you can’t pronounce but probably got mentioned in the Epstein files. You don’t really have a say because you need them. You’re dependent. And dependent people don’t get to negotiate.

Your Body

We’ve designed physical effort out of our lives as much as possible and called it progress. Drive instead of walk. Delivery instead of going. Machines instead of movement. And then we’re collectively the most anxious, most medicated, most physically struggling generation in modern history and acting like that came out of nowhere.

Your body was built to do hard things. When it doesn’t, it starts to fall apart in ways that conveniently require products and prescriptions and interventions. All of which someone else provides, on their terms, for their profit. The more physically capable you are on your own, the less of that you need. It’s not complicated, it’s just inconvenient to admit.

Your Mind

Why read something all the way through when something will just summarize it for you? Why sit with a hard question when the algorithm will serve you a comfortable pity party in thirty seconds? All views and beliefs are prepackaged and served according to caste, so why challenge anything or research for yourself? Ignorance is bliss. But see this information environment is not trying to make you sharper, it’s trying to keep you engaged, and those are completely different goals.

The discipline of actually thinking, reading, enduring hard things, changing your mind, sitting with uncertainty is a skill. And like any skill, you don’t use it, you lose it. An intellectually lazy population is an easy population to manage and corale. Because we’ve all outsourced our thinking.

Everything Else

Water, local economy, aspirations, relationships – all of it follows the same logic. The more self-sufficient your life is, the more leverage you have. The more you need systems you can’t see or influence, the more fucked you are when those systems collapse or even worse, turn against you. And they have long turned against you.

Conclusion

The soft life is supposed to feel like freedom but a lot of people chasing it are actually really depressed. And that’s not an accident either.

There’s a specific kind of okay that only comes from doing hard things and finding out you can handle it. From building something, learning something, showing up for something difficult. Rest actually feels good when you’ve earned it. Peace actually lands when you know you’re capable. That’s not hustle culture talking, that’s just how humans are wired. We need to feel like we’re doing something real or we start to slowly fall apart on the inside even when everything looks fine on the outside.

If your dream life has no hard work in it, it’s not going to feel like a dream. It’s going to feel like a very comfortable version of stuck.

The goal isn’t to suffer. It’s to be someone who can’t easily be controlled because you know the knowledge they tried to suppress, you can do the skills they told you didn’t exist, and you don’t need enough of the things they’re selling to give up your freedom for it.

That’s the actual soft life. The coal that becomes the diamond.