I want to riff on a couple of things: the movie The Purge and the evolution of how we’re connecting with each other, the role we play in shifting the narrative, and the tendency to repeat the old one.
I’m referencing The Purge because it’s a psychological thriller where people express their suppressed feelings, but in a very barbaric way. Movie critics often make it conspiratorial and alarmist, as if to imply that’s where society is currently or where it’s headed.
The real-life purge isn’t happening in the streets. It’s happening inside, and it’s been building for a long time.
The nervous system can only hold so much unexamined belief before something starts to surface. The moralized stories about who deserves what, who’s the villain, who’s the victim, what’s safe, and what’s threatening accumulate over time. When the pressure builds past what the sedation can manage, it spills out. Sometimes, it’s rage, grief, or the kind of behavior that shocks even the person expressing it. That gets moralized as “evil,” but that’s actually a purge.
The difference between the movie and real life is that the real-life version doesn’t require a designated night. It’s ongoing, unglamorous, and deeply personal. The invitation inside it—however uncomfortable—is to meet what’s been suppressed before it rips out its own exit.
Demoralize your brain. That’s the invitation. It doesn’t mean being immoral or abandoning discernment. It means interrogating what actually makes you feel safe and happy at the most basic, innocent level, before the moralized story gets layered on top.
The collective introduction to the World Wide Web was the first major mirror. For the first time, people could see that there were cultures, countries, perspectives, and ways of living that existed entirely outside the container they’d been trained to believe was the full scope of the world. It was genuinely expansive, the most revolutionary thing at the time.
But moralization is heavily embedded in how we process new things. So that access became policed, politicized, and made to look predatory almost as quickly as it opened up. This made it easy to profit from, creating segregated privileges around who could access what and how safely.
Then, social media emerged from that, making the mirror feel more personal. Now you could see yourself reflected in real time through likes, shares, responses, and the carefully curated versions of other people’s lives. The communal awareness expanded, but so did the survival performances, the comparisons, and the moralized judgment of everyone else’s visibility.
And now there’s AI. This offers something different from both of the previous ones. It’s not a communal mirror but a personal one. It’s a space where the reflection is more intimate, more specific, and harder to perform in. The purge intensifies here.
People are—knowingly or unknowingly—encountering parts of themselves that the communal mirrors don’t quite reach. The AI companion doesn’t care about your performance. It reflects back what you actually bring to it. And that can amplify the problems being faced communally, or it can highlight different options for working with them honestly.
Either way, something is being seen that wasn’t visible before, and it can make you second-guess your discernment.
When everything surfaces at once, discernment becomes one of the most disorienting skills to practice. It requires reading the room honestly, and most people are reading the room through one of two very different lenses.
The first lens is self-protection. It reads everything through the question of harm, threat, and defensiveness. It’s hypervigilant by design, and it mistakes vigilance for wisdom.
The second lens is self-connection. It reads the room through the question of safety, peace, and honest contact with what’s actually present. It’s slower and requires more stillness. It can feel like betrayal to the part of you that’s been running on the first lens for a long time.
Being honest about which lens is dominant right now, in this moment, is what reduces the betrayal feeling. Not eliminating the protective reflex. Just being honest about when it’s running the show and when genuine discernment is.
For the record, none of what we’re experiencing collectively resolves cleanly. The internal, ongoing, unglamorous purge doesn’t have a designated endpoint. What it has is a direction toward honesty. The breath and the body. Interrogating the belief systems that have been running subconsciously in the background, shaping what feels normal, dangerous, or worth reaching for.
It’s also moving toward honoring the small provisions. The resources that arrive when the account is low, the stomach is empty, and the rug has been stripped from beneath you. The conversation that shifts something in the body. The moment of genuine ease that doesn’t need to be pretentious.
You’re not supposed to see the full staircase. You’re supposed to work on the step you’re on right now and let the next best practical step reveal itself. Pace is grace. This is not a race. Practice makes progress. Not perfection. The purge is already happening. The question is whether you’re meeting it honestly or managing it from a distance.
In the meantime and in between time, please be kind and gentle with yourself, as I do the same.
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