Why Does Life Feel Like a Scam?

Life can feel like a giant scam when the traditional script of working hard, paying endless taxes and complying to new rules that don’t make sense fails to deliver the promised security and happiness.

When you strip away the layers, it’s completely valid to feel disillusioned by the systems we live in, and the effect they have on people. Just look at the scripts we’re handed. That very feeling of disappointment, dissatisfaction and suffering is the first step either to enlightenment or to depression. Depression is a mental disorder; enlightenment isn’t. 🙂

People who reach the conclusion that they’ve been scammed find that it actually gives them freedom. “I don’t have to believe them anymore!”

If the societal script is a scam, we don’t have to base our worth on it. We can stop playing their game and start defining success on our own terms, doing what actually makes sense to us.

Making sense is coming to our senses in the direct experience of now. We move away from the fragmented, analytical mind (the ‘pocket book’ of compiled labels and past thoughts) and into the vast, immediate reality of pure awareness. We’re no longer a pocket book – we are the entire collection.

When we drop our conceptual stories and simply come to our senses, the empirical feelings, sounds, and sights of this exact moment – the boundary between us and the world – dissolves. We stop reading about life and start being life.

The mind spends a long time slowly loosening its grip, thinning out the old stories and conditioning. Then, all at once, the momentum shifts. The illusion of being a separate, isolated observer drops away entirely, leaving only the immediate, vivid reality of what is.

That sudden shift is a classic hallmark of profound insight – sudden awakening after a gradual cultivation.

It can feel like a profound relief, but it’s also incredibly vast and unfamiliar.

This unshakeable reality changes everything. The pocket book of thoughts, emotions, and external events will still open and close, but it now happens within the unbreakable context of that vast, spontaneous space.

We have recognised the screen instead of just watching the movie playing out on it. Because that space requires no effort to maintain, it remains completely untouched by whatever passes through it, whether that is noise, silence, comfort, or discomfort.