The exploitative Anglo American Matrix routinely and shamelessly profits off locking men into state and corporate-approved ways of thinking and behaving, using them like batteries to power quarterly profits which chiefly benefit women. It’s well established 80% of wasteful consumerism and at least 66% of government spending is by and for women. They can’t live without “beating” their friends in a reckless game of shopping and eating out. Then of course, there’s the endless parade of female medical entertainment and demands for government gibsmedats.

How does a man escape life as a farm animal on this corporate-government plantation? Put simply, men don’t need all the junk women think they need to be happy. Take it from someone who knows. Charles Bukowski said it best: The less I needed, the better I felt.

Through minimalism, many men are realizing we have more agency over our lives than we once realized. Our most powerful financial asset is simply saying, “No!” to rampant materialism, consumerism, and the illusion of home “ownership” that locks us into 15 to 30 years of debt slavery for a McMansion we really don’t need to be happy. We can say “no” to debt slavery for a box on wheels. We can say no to credit card debt and looking to consumer purchases to make us happy. (They never do.)

By saying no to all those things we can then say “No!” to an employer who uses and abuses us at a soul-sucking job that robs us of all of the hours of our lives to power this bleak existence.

Indeed, the Achilles heel of the current sleep-work-spend paradigm is men realizing en masse they don’t need anything the system is selling beyond basic food, clothing, and shelter. We can make our own meals for a fraction of the cost of eating from the corporate restaurant trough, we can buy well-made clothing and keep fewer items that blend well with each other in our wardrobes, and we can cut housing costs by living in anything from a tiny house to a semi tractor-trailer (like yours truly) to renting an apartment abroad for a fraction of the cost (also yours truly).

The current system runs on pushing labor costs down to exploitative levels while asking exorbitant prices for its wares. It then expects its subjects to spin ever faster in the hamster wheel to keep purchasing what its selling at an ever-increasing rate. But what if men don’t want to be treated like lab animals? We can free up our lives and our livelihoods by refusing what it tries to shove down our throats. Blissful happiness is usually the end result.

The transition from mindless consumer to empowered man and the happiness that results is detailed in the documentary Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things available on Netflix.

In it, Ryan Nicodemus asks his friend Joshua Fields Millburn, “Why the hell are you so happy?” as both are locked in the throes of corporate groupthink, wasting their 20s climbing the imaginary ladder. Millburn then proceeds to explain to his best friend over Subway sandwiches the happiness that comes from minimalism. They later escape their lives as corporate serfs, where they were forced to perform such noble deeds as figuring out ways to sell cell phones to 5-year olds.

What an unbelievable breath of fresh air when a man extricates himself from the cogs of this machine by downsizing his life and freeing himself from debt bondage. Suddenly, instead of living in the Gilded Cage filled with posh material things that all place chains around his ankle and his soul, a man finds he has agency over his choices and his life again when he balances his home budget to discover he is operating at a profit himself rather than a loss. (This is a similar concept to adopting a corporate philosophy in your own life to win, previously detailed at TNMM.)

Escaping the paycheck to paycheck paradigm instantly places a man at an advantage over 70% of the populace who think buying things makes them happy and thus live on the razor’s edge. But why stop there? Run with your new freedom and chase things that really make you happy!

Sadly, the obsession with cyclical consumption and turning citizens into debt slaves under the religious creed “economic growth is everything” has led to the death of Anglo-American culture (if it ever really had one). It has led to Western nations selling out the lives of its people, selling out their futures, and now selling out everything from their sexuality to their freedom in order to power this vicious economic machine, in which the gears turn on creating problems out of peoples’ lives to create profit.

The economic machine that has become a cancer upon the very people it purports to enrich arose from the Faustian longing for perpetual motion. It will ultimately kill its host nations and peoples in its quest for the unattainable unless the machine is stopped, or some balance brought into the equation. It’s already beginning to break down as it literally attempts to turn human beings into profit-producing machines bereft of humanity, sexuality, agency, and choice.

We can refuse to be treated like less than men by realizing that as men we don’t need any of what the system is foisting upon us. The most amazing aspect of the entire economic facade that robs men of their lives is the fact it remains quite easy to escape.

All a man has to do is start saying, “No!” to exchanging all of the hours of his life for endless gadgets and upgrades, and lifestyles he can’t really afford. His freedom, passion, imagination and control over his destiny are then returned to him. And all it takes is boldly saying, “No!”

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