Well-Trained, Well-Liked, and Spiritually Starving
Rachel Taylor 
Why the System Rewards Your Collapse—As Long As You Make It Look Pretty
There is a reason so few people stop performing.
It is not because they do not know how. It is because they do not want to.
Performance is rewarded. It is mirrored. It is monetised.
It is algorithmically amplified. The system does not care if you are coherent—it cares if you are consumable.
And so we learn to dance.
We learn to smile through collapse, to curate our ache, to package our grief in digestible squares.
We learn to be well-trained monkeys—feeding the frenzy, keeping the machine fed, never asking who built it or why it needs so much of us.
We perform wellness.
We perform rage.
We perform rest.
We perform rebellion.
Even our resistance is rehearsed.
And the system loves it.
It loves your curated breakdown.
It loves your aesthetic burnout.
It loves your trauma as content.
It loves your grief as a brand.
Because performance is predictable.
It is safe.
It does not threaten the architecture of extraction—it reinforces it.
To stop performing is to become unpredictable.
To stop performing is to become unmirrored.
To stop performing is to risk being misunderstood, unliked, unshared, unmonetised.
And that is terrifying.
Because most people do not want truth.
They want applause.
They want belonging.
They want to be seen—but only in ways that do not disrupt the system that taught them to perform in the first place.
So they keep dancing.
They keep feeding the frenzy.
They keep mistaking visibility for intimacy, and engagement for coherence.
If you are sick, depleted, burnt out, or chronically unwell—why do you allow it to continue?
Why do you treat survival as the ceiling, not the floor?
Why do you refuse to learn what your body is trying to teach you, even as it screams through fatigue, inflammation, anxiety, and ache?
The system profits from your confusion. It thrives when you do not.
And yet, you stay loyal to it.
You perform wellness while your cells beg for repair. You curate resilience while your fascia frays. You call it normal. You call it adulthood. You call it being strong.
But what if it is simply misalignment?
What if thriving is not a luxury—but a birthright you keep deferring?
You are allowed to learn. You are allowed to change. You are allowed to stop feeding the system that devours you.
The Danger of Reductionist Brain Content
Social media thrives on reductionism.
It flattens the complexity of the brain into bite-sized slogans, dopamine memes, and oversimplified neurotransmitter charts.
It turns nuanced neurobiology into aesthetic content—stripped of context, stripped of precision, stripped of repair.
The danger is not just misinformation. It is misdirection.
People begin to believe that serotonin is a mood, that trauma is a trend, that nervous system regulation can be achieved through a single breath or a colour-coded reel.
This is not education.
It is performance masquerading as science.
And it leaves people more confused, more dysregulated, and more loyal to the algorithm than to their own cognitive agency.
The brain is not a brand.
It is a living system.
It deserves more than a carousel post.
Where People Get Their Information—and Why It Fails Them
Most people do not learn about themselves from research, study, or structured inquiry.
They learn from fragments.
From bought off influencers.
From reels.
From podcasts that prioritise relatability over rigour.
From wellness accounts that conflate anecdote with evidence.
From viral posts that reward simplicity over accuracy.
The problem is not just the source—it is the architecture of consumption.
These platforms are designed to reward speed, not depth.
They are built to keep people scrolling, not thinking.
And so people absorb distorted truths, half-explanations, and emotionally charged shortcuts that feel empowering but do not hold up under scrutiny.
They mistake resonance for reliability.
They mistake visibility for validity.
And they remain loyal to systems that keep them misinformed, misaligned, and metabolically exhausted.
I had a conversation with my husband, a pilot.
We were discussing some of my grief at the state of humanity.
He said my work is not easily accessible to people sometimes.
I asked him:
The first time you attended ground school, did you understand everything?
The first time you sat in a single-engine aircraft, did you know how to fly it?
The first time you stepped into a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320, did you know exactly what to do?
He said no.
And I said: exactly.
You learned. You trained. You rehearsed.
You took responsibility for your own safety and the safety of others. You did not expect to intuit flight.
You studied it. You respected it. You showed up for it.
So why do people refuse to do the same with their own neurobiology?
Why do they treat cognitive and behavioural literacy as optional, inaccessible, or too difficult?
Why do they collapse into confusion instead of learning the architecture of their own brain, the language of their own behavioural patterns, the protocols of their own repair?
Why do they outsource their clarity while demanding precision from everyone else?
We do not expect pilots to intuit flight.
We train them.
We trust them.
We hold them accountable.
But when it comes to cognitive agency, most people would rather perform than learn.
They would rather collapse than rehearse.
They would rather be liked than be free.
This is not a moral indictment. It is a neurological reckoning.
You are allowed to learn.
You are allowed to change.
You are allowed to stop feeding the system that profits from your confusion.
There is another way.
It is quieter.
It is slower.
It is not for sale.
It begins when you stop asking how to be seen, and start asking what is true.
It begins when you stop curating your ache, and start metabolising it.
It begins when you stop performing your healing, and start living it.
This is not a call to disappear. It is a call to return.
Return to breath.
Return to coherence.
Return to the part of you that never needed an audience to be real.
The system will not reward you for this.
But your nervous system will.
And that is where the real revolution begins.
This is not emotional reactivity. This is cognitive clarity.
There is a difference between being angry and being awake.
Between lashing out and refusing to be misread.
Between collapsing into outrage and metabolising ache into architecture.
What you are reading is not a tantrum—it is a reckoning.
It is the voice of someone who has studied, stewarded, and earned the right to speak with precision.
I am not performing rage. I am refusing reduction.
I am not asking to be liked. I am asking you to think.
And if that feels uncomfortable, good.
Discomfort is often the first sign that something true has arrived.
Before You Go: Questions Worth Asking
- What have you rehearsed more—your truth or your performance?
- When was the last time you chose coherence over visibility?
- What parts of you have been trained to feed the system, even when you think you are resisting it?
- What do you call “normal” that might actually be inherited depletion?
- What have you refused to learn about your own brain, your own behaviour, your own repair?
- What would it mean to stop performing and start living?
- If you were no longer liked, would you still feel worthy?
- If you stopped curating your life, what would remain?
- What do you want your legacy to be—and are you living in a way that honours it?