Canada has a perfectly organized system. Well, not perfect, but it's organized. The problem is that I started to feel like I was losing my humanity because everything I do, I do for the system. This starts with the streets, traffic lights, police, and taxation, and includes having to follow certain ways to do my job, and having to speak and talk in certain ways. It actually started to feel so artificial and robotic that I now miss my simple, raw life in Egypt. I loved how I developed ways to find parking for my car. I love and miss how I found ways to go through traffic and go between lanes. I miss finding ways to cross streets even when traffic is fast and dangerous. I had been developing a lot of features as a human, a lot of skills, and a lot of intelligence as a human. Today in Canada, in this organized, artificial, plastic life, I am losing those. I don't actually see what the gain is. I am not gaining any kind of improvement in the quality of my life. I don't think that it's better for my health, my spirituality, or my intelligence. In fact, the health system here, which is supposed to be of a higher quality, is a big letdown. You can ask any Canadian about it, and they will agree. If you have a problem, if you suspect a problem, or if you need a checkup to avoid a problem, good luck finding someone to take care of you. This is the system that we live in. It is designed to serve the system, and the system is going to promise to take care of you the way it sees fit. This is not a system where you are empowered to take care of yourself. This is the reality. You actually need to hide yourself. You actually need to wear the mask and follow that system. Yes, the country and the system itself will become stronger. Yes, the system itself will be a superpower. But you, as a human, as an individual, every day you live here and participate in the system, you are losing your humanity and your skills. The day that system crashes, and it will, you will realize that you are left with nothing because you are not trained to learn, you are not trained to grow, and you are not trained to have any kind of skills that can help you take care of yourself. That is a very harsh reality that every Canadian needs to understand. Not just any Canadian, actually, but everyone who lives in what we call a first-world country. This is the system that we are talking about. It's exactly that. It's worse with Canada because they act like they are humans. They act like they care. They act empathetic. They act like they give a shit about you. In reality, they are very good actors. They want to look like they accept differences. They want to look like they love whoever is different from them. But if you don't speak like them, if you don't look like them, if you don't use the same words as them, if you don't acknowledge the system, acknowledge this big flaw in their thinking, and act like it is meaningful and beautiful, you will be hated. You will be stabbed in the back at every possible opportunity. So be careful, be careful of this very evil country. It is run by a bunch of greedy business people who actually treat everyone in this country as slaves. This system is designed so well that you can't see it. It's designed so well to serve only a few humans who, most of the time, don't even live in this harsh, boring, depressing environment. They are having a real life, living a meaningful life, enjoying being humans, while the majority of Canadians, who are basically immigrants who came to this country thinking that it's a better life for them, are led to suffer and expect that one day they will have a better life. Well, wake up. I have seen those billionaires. I have worked with them. I have lived with them. I have seen how they live their life. They are enjoying the human experience, the raw human experience. They do everything the way they want, the way they believe, the way they think is right for them, their families, and their kids. They put the laws and let the laws be respected and followed by those who work for them. It is not for them. The only way out is to stop playing this stupid game. This matrix, this artificial virtual life, is designed by them, and we cannot win this game. But we can decide not to play this game. We have to go back to being humans. We have to respect our humanity. We start from nothing. We start from just sitting, doing nothing. This is the fundamental human skill. We do nothing. We have the capacity to do nothing. We can control our feelings. We can control our emotions. We can control our understanding. We can understand that we die anyway. Death is inevitable. We don't need to escape death. We just maximize our chances to live a better life. But we will die eventually, and we don't need to escape that. We don't need to be afraid of that. We know that we can survive without food for days or even weeks. We know that we don't need to hustle and run and be stressed for things that we don't actually need. Just go back to being human. Debate, philosophize, serve, disagree, agree, love, share, enjoy life, touch it, feel it, be intentional, be grounded, connect with other humans, connect with other beings, connect with the universe, search God, search your origin, search the Creator, search everything, and you will enjoy being a human. Stop playing the game and be human. Please, please be human again.
The System Doesn't Want You Human
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The System Doesn't Want You Human
There is a skill to crossing a dangerous street. You read the traffic, you time the gaps, you move. In Cairo, in Lagos, in Karachi, millions of people do this every day and their nervous systems are alive with it. They are problem-solving in real time. They are, in the most literal sense, practicing being human. Then they arrive in Canada, and the light tells them when to walk.
This is not a complaint about traffic lights. It is a complaint about what happens to a person when every friction in their life is removed by design — not for their benefit, but for the system's.
Organization is not the same as freedom. Canada is organized. Its streets are clean, its forms are filed, its language is managed, its healthcare is promised. But organization is a tool, and the question no one asks is: organized for whom? The immigrant who arrives here trading the chaos of Cairo for the order of Toronto is not making an upgrade. He is making a trade. He is surrendering the intelligence he built navigating a difficult world for the comfort of a world that has already been navigated for him. The system calls this progress. He should call it what it is: atrophy.
The human animal was built for friction. Not suffering — friction. The difference matters. Suffering is pointless pain. Friction is the resistance that builds capability: finding the parking spot, reading the room, negotiating without a script, crossing the street on instinct. These are not primitive behaviors to be civilized away. They are the exercises that keep a mind sharp and a person sovereign. Strip them out, replace them with protocols and approved language and a healthcare queue that will see you in eight months, and you have not improved a human life. You have administered it.
The healthcare system is the clearest proof. Canadians will tell you themselves: the system exists, but it does not serve. If you are sick, you wait. If you suspect you are sick, you wait longer. If you want to be proactive about your own body, the system has little interest in that — proactivity is not a billable event. What the system offers is not health. It is the management of illness at the system's convenience. The patient is not empowered. The patient is processed.
The cruelest part is the performance. Canada has perfected the theater of care. It speaks the language of inclusion, diversity, and empathy with a fluency that can take years to see through. But the performance has conditions. Speak the right words. Acknowledge the right frameworks. Smile at the right symbols. Deviate — in accent, in opinion, in the particular way you understand the world — and the warmth evaporates. The knife appears. This is not unique to Canada, but Canada is exceptional at hiding the knife behind exceptional manners. That gap between the performance and the reality is its own kind of violence, because it makes you doubt your own perception before you doubt the system.
Behind the system, there are people who do not live inside it. This is not conspiracy; it is simply how concentrated power has always worked. The people who design the rules have always exempted themselves from the rules. They live with full human agency — they eat what they want, build what they want, say what they believe, raise their children by their own values. They have not traded their humanity for comfort. They have arranged for others to make that trade on their behalf. The immigrant who came here for a better life is, in the most functional sense, subsidizing someone else's.
The exit is not a flight back to Cairo, though Cairo's chaos contains real wisdom. The exit is a decision. It is the decision to stop measuring your life by the system's metrics — productivity, compliance, the right kind of busyness — and to start measuring it by older ones. Stillness. Conversation. The capacity to sit with nothing and not panic. The knowledge that you can go without, that you will die anyway, that the hustle is optional. These are not spiritual platitudes. They are the foundational human skills that every organized system is quietly, efficiently, in your best interest, taking from you.
Be still. Be difficult. Be the person who crosses the street on instinct. The system will not thank you for it. But you will remember, after years of forgetting, what it feels like to be alive.