Democracy worked. Not works, worked. Because that’s the fate of all complex systems: they demand more and more complication to function until no one can hold them end to end.

Take physics. Any person with a healthy IQ can grasp Newton’s laws of mechanics. A slope, a block, two forces, a neat little diagram – you can see it, you can feel it, you can apply it everywhere. But past a certain point, physics stops dealing with what you can see. It looks at scales so small we need math to forecast reality because no instrument can measure it directly. It deals with materials that act in ways utterly contradictory to intuition, but only under the right conditions. The elegant napkin sketch turns into monstrous equations and probabilities.

Democracy is no different. It used to be simple, literally simple, not in some rose-tinted nostalgia way. Private property. Voting rights. Civil rights. Self-determination. Freedom of speech. Freedom to travel. The dignity of privacy. The right to work. Centralized, accountable systems for taxes and policing replaced the whims of lords and their private militias. Things you could sketch on a napkin.

But complication set in. And once it does, it never stops.

Foreign policy entanglements. Supranational unions. Protectionism versus liberal economics. Failing pension schemes yoked to the cult of perpetual growth. Brain drain, your taxes funding free universities only for the educated to flee and work for richer villagers elsewhere.

What do your taxes pay for when the educated leave with their free education and sell their skills to someone else’s GDP? How do you run a business in a union where you can’t protect your own market? How do smaller economies climb from peasant mode to owner mode while still serving as “efficient markets” for the big guys? And when do we start preselecting babies to make sure no one has green eyes?

Institutions stack on institutions. China is a Frankenstein blend of “a little of this, a little of that” that takes years to study. The US? Agencies, programs, lobby networks, competing expenses, entire ecosystems of interests pulling in opposite directions. The EU? Ask anyone what the Commission does versus the Council and watch their eyes glaze over.

And so the vote is just dialogue now. The master’s benevolent question every four or five years: “Does it hurt too bad?” And you get to answer yes or no. That’s all a vote means.

All of society in this complexity is a bonsai tree. The people at the top wire it into shape, prune it, constrict it, isolate it. Elections are the inspection of the tree’s vitality: Did we prune too much? Is the unnatural shape killing it? Yes or no.

How do you reduce a state this intricate, this artificial, to a yes or no? You can’t. So you opt out. But opting out is pointless. The voting process itself became a show, a placeholder: digital interference, elections “conceded” over razor-thin margins for decades in a row. Statistical miracles by the numbers. Opt in or opt out: the result is the same.

The bonsai cultivators are in a rush lately. And the most startling realization? Their reasons for treating the world like a bonsai are no different from an actual bonsai hobbyist’s: aesthetics, their own peace of mind, and a private sense of connection they can’t find at the top. Religious beliefs still steer whole chunks of global politics, a staggering fact. The bonsai must bow to the east, because that’s where the disc-god rises every morning.

Technocrats? They’re just the nutrient sprayers and pest controllers. They don’t fight the practice. They love this bonsai world, twisted into its most unnatural shapes for beauty, symmetry, and, above all, powerlessness.

The bonsai cultivar is using the plant’s nature against itself. Small leafage? Easier to sculpt. Many small branches? Excellent shaping material. The same logic is applied to us: human nature used against humans. What’s the first thing you’re threatened with if you even talk about tearing the bonsai down, about societal collapse? Violence. There would be violence. Low policing? People would steal. Small government? No roads! These arguments are the abuser hitting you while shouting: “Look what you made me do!”

Acknowledging our bonsai status is the first step. Like always, we should own it. Gen Z seems to have. They stepped outside of immediate reality, pushed out by the utter pointlessness they had to deal with since they started to have a conscience. They seem to have seen the bonsai. They don’t root for UBI. They don’t deal on crypto, the bros there are getting old. They have no enthusiasm left for the next product that will shave five seconds off a morning’s ritual.

One thing the people at the top seem to keep pruning out of the bonsai society is ritual. Have you noticed? You can’t do anything in steps anymore, it’s all, all, one button push. But ritual is the pleasant struggle, the deliberate steps are what makes things have worth. What is it about ritual that makes it so prune-prone? Maybe because ritual is rebellion. Ritual takes time. And time is the one thing they can’t fully own.

I tell myself:

“Get your time back. Stop participating. Be a rebel branch sprouting through the damn pot. That’s all we have left.”

“Stop participating economically first. Work for people, not corporations. Accept the poverty, accept the somewhat earlier death this might bring. Stop buying useless things. Stop the status games. Dial back your endless desires. You will never get what they have. What you will get is a life-sized FOMO that burns. But did you know it’s all pointless?”

“What is it that you even love?”

“Music? To play for whom? Audiences distracted with Instagram while your stuff hums as background noise? A corporation investing in AI slop to pay you fewer royalties? An industry so rife with abuse no horror movie has yet encompassed what they did?”

“Travel? To where? To hollowed-out Paris? To the polluted Ganges? To the bald Amazon? You want to be the billionth desecrator of Machu Picchu? Nobody travels anymore—it’s a Roman ambulatio with plane tickets and expensive espressos, a ritual to prove you have nothing better to do. Travel is gone. How much of your original drive is sucked into reading host reviews? Who actually mingles with “the locals” when the locals hate your guts for pricing them out of their own city, but still smile so you’ll buy a “local” trinket made in China?”

“Stuff? What do you need? Fancy cars? To drive them where? If you’re not filthy rich, there’s nowhere to go in that fancy car. You can’t reach your top speed because you’ve been zoned out by people unable to build common goods. Brand clothing? Maybe the worst thing to want. It’s literally plastic with a drawing on it, assembled with pain, sweat, and misery, for your one look of confidence in the mirror before you leave.”

“Gadgets? To do what? Work more. Quantize yourself. Sell yourself to data centers. Why? Do you honestly think that data will have any value? Predict arrhythmia? Did you know “accidents” are a likelier cause of death? And how many of those “accidents” happen because the bonsai was pruned yesterday?”

But it’s hard. “It’s so damn hard to do anything while twisted and clipped!”

Democracy worked. Fashion used to be a thing. Music was art. Driving was a hobby. Early tech was a thrill. But back then things were literally simpler. Not in the old nostalgia way—literally simpler. Once complication settled in, ballots got lost, sweatshops became a necessity, muzak gained value.

“This damn bonsai is too damn high. Stop participating. Get your time back. Move out of this game. You’re not a tree.”