We grow up learning how to perform—but rarely how to be. In a world that rewards conformity and punishes authenticity, we’re taught to become cogs in someone else’s machine. But what if staying human means reclaiming your soul from that system?
This piece explores the quiet crisis of performance-based acceptance, the wisdom of ancient mystics (and a 12-year-old Jesus), and the small rebellious acts that can restore your humanity. If you’ve ever felt like you’re functioning but not alive, this is for you.
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The Full Story
How well do you cog?
Not how well do you live. Not how well do you love. But how well do you function in the system. How seamlessly do you slip into place and keep the machine running?
The Performance Trap
As a kid, I didn't cog well. I didn't get the cool references, missed the jokes, wore the wrong brands. I wasn't invited in. And so I recalibrated—not to become more myself, but to become more acceptable. I stopped trying to cog for peers and started cogging for adults. Became a 13-year-old Eagle Scout. Got straight A's. Memorized the rules, nailed the tests, mastered the game.
But my life didn't grow from joy. It grew from fear. From the anxiety of not being enough unless I performed just right.
This is the lie of performance-based acceptance: that your belonging must be earned. That your place in the world depends on how well you cog.
But the real irony is, when you are accepted based on how well you perform, those who accept you aren't embracing you, they're embracing the mask you wear, the show you put on, the part you play.
Finding Another Way
Yet underneath our façades, behind all this noise and grinding and steam of the extraction machine, there is another way.
A wisdom. A rhythm. A different kind of breath.
The mystic Teresa of Avila said the soul is like a crystal castle. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said we must live life in radical amazement. The Sufi poet Rabia asked God to burn away everything in her not born of love. These are not commands. They are invitations.
Invitations to step out of the role, the costume, the cog—and step into the deep-down truth of who you are.
The Origins of Cogging
In his book The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté explores the tension between authenticity and attachment. As children, we need connection to survive. But when our truth threatens that connection, when authenticity risks disconnection, we often abandon our truest selves. We trade soul for safety. We learn to cog.
It doesn’t start in factories or offices, but in childhood living rooms and school yards. When parents, rather than mirroring back our authentic selves with delight, instead project their unfulfilled dreams onto us. When they reward the behaviors that reflect their own image, and subtly discourage the parts of us that don't fit their narrative.
These well-meaning adults may say "I just want you to be happy," but what's often unspoken is "...happy in the way I understand happiness." They shape us not according to who we naturally are, but according to who they believe we should be—versions of themselves, or corrected versions of themselves, or embodiments of dreams they never pursued.
And so we learn early: our authentic expression is negotiable. Our true self is less valuable than our performing self. We begin cogging before we even understand what's happening.
Authenticity in Spiritual Tradition
Even Jesus faced this tension. Long before his public ministry, a twelve-year-old Jesus already demonstrated this tension between societal expectations and authentic purpose. There's a story where Jesus and his family went to Jerusalem for a festival. Afterwards, as the family clan started the journey home, the young Jesus wandered back into the temple, sat among the teachers to listen and ask questions.
Thinking Jesus was somewhere in the caravan, it took Mary and Joseph a day's journey before realized their son wasn't with their group. In panic, they returned to Jerusalem, searching for three days before finding him in the temple.
When his mother, understandably distressed, asked, "Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you," Jesus replied with genuine surprise: "Why were you searching for me? Didn't you know I had to be in my Father's house?"
Even at twelve, Jesus chose authenticity over performance. While his parents expected him to follow the social script—stay with the traveling group, follow the established patterns—he felt drawn to something deeper. He wasn't being rebellious; he was being true to his essential nature and calling. The text tells us his parents "did not understand what he was saying to them," highlighting the disconnect that often occurs when someone steps outside expected roles.
This early glimpse of Jesus reveals a pattern that would continue throughout his life—choosing divine authenticity over social cogging, even when it created tension with those closest to him.
As he started his public ministry, he found himself driven by Spirit into the wilderness where he refuses the lure of power. In the upper room, some of the last hours he would spend with those who called him Rabbi and Master, the crowds outside hoping he would lead a rebellion against the Roman occupiers, he offers vulnerability instead of dominance. Hours later while praying in the garden, where we're told he knew that crucifixion was upon him, he does not pretend to be fine; he weeps, he sweats, he asks not to go through it. Each time, he chooses the way of authentic being over the role others expected of him.
That choice is available to you, too.
The Historical Shift
We didn't always live this way.
Before the Industrial Revolution, most of us labored in ways that were woven with life. We grew food, built homes, raised children, shared celebrations. Work and meaning were entangled.
Then came the factory bell.
The punch clock. The assembly line. Hours stacked upon hours, not for creation but for extraction. We became laborers, then consumers. What was once sacred work became a sacrifice to the machine.
Modern Disconnection
Now, instead of feeling soil between our fingers as we plant, we tap plastic buttons to purchase. Instead of the satisfying resistance of pen on paper or clay in our hands, we mindlessly scroll through endless feeds, our eyes burning and necks aching. Instead of the deep exhale of genuine rest, we collapse into the numbing glow of screens, our minds still racing even as our bodies lie still.
We've forgotten what it means to be human—to taste food slowly, to feel the weight of a loved one's hand in ours, to stand beneath stars and remember our smallness, to hear laughter that bubbles up from genuine joy rather than nervous performance.
Remembering Our Humanity
But we can remember.
There are glimpses everywhere—in community gardens sprouting between concrete blocks, in the sacred space of a genuine conversation where no one reaches for their phone, in moments of collective grief and celebration where we remember we belong to each other. The machine isn't all there is. Beneath its grinding gears, a more ancient rhythm pulses, one that knows the wisdom of seasons, of growth and decay, of meaningful work and true rest. This rhythm doesn't reject technology or progress—it simply asks that they serve our humanity rather than replace it.
You don't have to be good at cogging. You weren't made for machinery. You were made for mystery.
Re-membering Ourselves
So let's re-member ourselves.
And I mean that in two ways. Let's remember who we used to be as people, both as a collective and individually. Not who we became, but who we are.
But let's also re-member ourselves, as in taking the parts of us that have been torn off, ripped away, and discarded, and restore them to their rightful place in our being. Let's bring our inner outcasts home, because we will never be authentically us without them.
Practical Steps
I know what you might be thinking. "This sounds nice, but I have bills to pay. I have people depending on me. I can't just opt out of the system." I hear you. That's exactly why I've created practices at different levels. You don't need to transform your entire life overnight. You can start with just 60 seconds. Or an hour. Or a single act of authentic choice. The path back to yourself doesn't require grand gestures—just small, consistent reminders that you are more than your function, more than your output, more than your performance.
1. 60-Second Survival Practice (Reclamation):
Stop. Place your hand on your chest. Speak your name aloud. Then say, "I am not a cog. I am a soul." Three times. Let your breath slow. Let the machine pause.
2. 1-Hour Soul Practice (Resistance):
Set a timer for one hour during your regular day—perhaps during work or family time. Each time you notice yourself "performing" rather than being authentic, take a single deep breath. Don't judge, just notice. At the end, journal what patterns emerged. Where did you feel most like a cog? Where did glimpses of your true self shine through?
3. Big Shift Life Invitation (Rebellion):
Decline at least one cog-based task this week. Say no to the performative yes. Say yes to something that makes you feel alive. Paint. Dance. Call your grandma. Watch the clouds. Break your routine with something that feels like you.
Because staying human is an act of holy rebellion.
And you're invited, it's how We Can Stay Human.