The System Doesn't Want You Human

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.

Canada is organized. The streets behave. The traffic lights cycle on schedule. The taxes arrive and depart with mechanical precision. From the outside, it looks like civilization at its finest. From the inside, if you pay attention, it feels like a slow erasure.

This is not a complaint about inconvenience. This is a diagnosis.

The argument being made here — the one that most immigrants feel but few dare to say out loud — is that a highly organized system does not liberate the human beings inside it. It replaces them. Gradually, without announcement, the system becomes the point. You exist to serve it. It does not exist to serve you.

Consider what gets lost. In Cairo, navigating traffic is not a nuisance — it is a cognitive event. You read a dozen variables at once: the speed of oncoming cars, the gap between lanes, the unspoken negotiation between drivers, the precise moment to move. You develop judgment. You develop nerve. You develop a finely calibrated sense of risk and reward that no GPS can replicate and no traffic law can teach. That skill is real. It is human. And in a city where the infrastructure does the thinking for you, it atrophies.

The same logic extends further than traffic. It reaches into how you speak, how you present yourself at work, which words you choose, which grievances you swallow. The Canadian social contract — polite, inclusive, carefully worded — is real in its way. But its tolerance has a ceiling. Deviate from the approved register of thought and expression, and the warmth cools fast. The acceptance was always conditional. The mask was always required.

The defenders of this system will say: but the infrastructure works. The roads are safe. The institutions hold. This is true, and it matters. Order is not nothing. But order purchased at the cost of individual atrophy is not civilization — it is a very comfortable cage. And the health system, the crown jewel of the Canadian social promise, illustrates the gap between the promise and the reality with particular clarity. Ask anyone waiting months for a family doctor, anyone who walked into an emergency room with a real problem and left with a pamphlet, whether the system is serving them or whether they are serving the system. The answer is not ambiguous.

Here is the deeper problem. The system is not neutral. It was designed — and design implies designers. The people who built these structures, who wrote the tax codes and the zoning laws and the workplace compliance frameworks, do not live inside them the way you do. They live with latitude. They live with options. They exercise the full range of human agency — raw, improvisational, self-directed — while the machinery they built runs on the compliance of everyone else. This is not a conspiracy. It is simply how concentrated power has always worked. The rules are for the people who need rules. The people who make the rules need something different.

The exit is not a flight back to Cairo, or anywhere else. The exit is a decision about what you are willing to trade. The human capacities that organized systems erode — adaptability, improvisation, tolerance for uncertainty, the ability to sit still and think without a screen, the willingness to debate and disagree and feel things fully — these are not primitive. They are the core. Every philosopher who ever mattered knew how to do nothing productively. Every person who has survived real disruption survived on skills the system never gave them.

You will die. The system will also, eventually, fail — systems always do. What you want, when either of those things happens, is to have been a person. Not a participant. Not a compliant node in someone else's architecture. A person who developed judgment, who felt things, who connected with other human beings outside the approved channels, who searched for meaning without waiting for the system to assign it.

Stop optimizing for the system's metrics. Start optimizing for your own. The most radical act available to you right now is also the oldest one: be a human being, on purpose, before someone else decides what that means.