Earlier someone said that they want to opt out of the whole thing.  Although I&#x27;m not you and I can&#x27;t know precisely what you are feeling, I&#x27;m going to make an educated guess that this is the key to your freedom.<p>This invisible boot is an illusion.  I once read an article on privilege.  The idea is that if you were a slave owner, you could &quot;promote&quot; some of your slaves to be &quot;head slaves&quot;.  This privilege creates a kind of vacuum.  Instead of wanting to be free, slaves compete to become &quot;head slave&quot;.  If you randomly promote some every once in a while, it erases the idea that slaves should want to be free.<p>Even without some tinfoil hat inspired cabal, you can probably imagine how we have managed to enslave ourselves.  If you make or have a lot of money, you can use it for privilege.  People compete for this privilege instead of considering if they would rather be free.  A small proportion of people become rich -- through hard work, or luck (it doesn&#x27;t actually matter), keeping the system going.<p>I don&#x27;t recommend quitting society altogether :-)  You don&#x27;t need to indulge in some self-sufficiency, neck beard fantasy, but I recommend making something entirely from scratch.  See if you can borrow some land for a season and grow a garden, or make beer, or sew something... whatever.  The closer to scratch you can do it, the better, but don&#x27;t stress about it.  Then, once you have something nice, wander over to your neighbours and give it to them.  Keep doing that.  It helps to get good at only one thing so that you don&#x27;t get overwhelmed.<p>Next, look at how much money you spend.  Try to challenge yourself to see how little money you could spend and still be happy.  We&#x27;re trying to break the weird &quot;obvious&quot; rules that everybody else lives by, so try <i>not</i> to accumulate too much money.  The more you can shrink the amount you need, the easier it will be to be happy with the amount that you have.<p>At the same time, stop reading the newspaper and watching TV news programs.  Instead, challenge yourself to think about, &quot;What is actually important to me.  Do I care that North Korea is creating missiles.  Even if I do, is there anything I want to do about it?&quot;.  Keep trying to shrink the amount of useless drama in your life.  Find ways to be alerted to the things that you care about and that you want to act on.  It&#x27;s best that the number of those kinds of things are very small because otherwise you will wear yourself out.  Try your best to actually do something positive about those very small number of things.<p>After that, I think you will find that you are no longer being stomped in the face every day.  At worst, some clueless people are tripping over you every once in a while.  It hurts sometimes, but it&#x27;s not something that has to trouble you too much.  Yes, you have to pay taxes and yes, evil people are spending that tax money on things you don&#x27;t like.  But, unless this is the one thing that you want to fix in your life, it&#x27;s just useless drama.  Give them the damn money -- you don&#x27;t need it anyway.  Yes, you have to obey laws, even the ones you don&#x27;t agree with.  Fight the bad ones that you need to fight and save your strength wrt to ones you don&#x27;t need to fight.  Yes, there are jerks everywhere you look -- even your neighbours.  But the more you get to know your neighbours, the easier it will be to create a mini society where everyone is reasonably friendly and occasionally people drop by to give you home made jam.<p>In other words, just step off the escalator to weird-ville. It doesn&#x27;t have to be eerie.