You Crave A Master
You stand around complaining about your job. Your taxes. Your relationships. And the rules of the town.
Acting like you are a caged bird singing for the sky.
It is a lie you tell yourself to sleep at night.
The truth is, if someone walked up and cut the lock off your cage right now, you would stare out at the open field for five seconds, get cold, and pull the door shut from the inside.
You do not want to be free.
You just want another master.
With a softer voice and a leash that gives you another ten feet of dirt to walk on.
Actual freedom is heavy. It has no floor and no ceiling. When there is no boss to hate, no government to curse, and no moral code to hide behind, every single thing that happens to you is your own doing.
If you freeze in the winter, it is because you did not build a fire.
If you starve, it is because you did not hunt.
Most people cannot stomach that weight. They need a wall to lean against, even if that wall is made of iron bars. They want a supervisor, a spouse, or a god to hand down the script so that when the life rots out from under them, they can point a finger and blame the management. The blame is the real comfort.
It lets you feel like a victim instead of a coward.
Look at what you call your goodness. You walk around proud of your honesty, your decency, and your restraint. You think you are a saint because you do not take what belongs to the next man, because you follow the laws and keep your hands to yourself.
That is not virtue. That is just the lack of teeth.
You do not strike because you are afraid of the counter-punch. You do not take what you secretly want because you are terrified of the hunt and the consequences of being caught. You have taken your inability to conquer and renamed it peace.
It is an old trick.
The sheep convinces itself that eating grass is a noble, moral choice, rather than the only option its dull teeth allow.
The world operates on raw force and self-interest, stripped of the stories we invent to make the dark less scary. Everyone is trying to secure their own patch of dirt, using whatever power they can scrape together.
The ones who cannot fight choose to serve.
They look for a strong hand to hold the collar, hoping that the man holding it will protect them from the other wolves outside the fence.
You barter away your life for a small dose of predictability.
You accept the harness because the alternative is standing alone in the woods, knowing that nobody cares if you live or die.
You chose the leash.
Because the fence is the only thing keeping you from realising how small you really are.
You keep choosing it every single morning.