I Turned 40 Last Week and I've Been Reflecting
I Feel Like I am Just Getting Started
Friends,
Last Sunday I turned 40.
I had the pleasure of spending my day in the beautiful city of Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico - my home for the last 4 years. Miriam and I went to the centro to bike around, enjoy the weather, and grab some delicious tacos.
I sat there looking at the cathedral, thinking of the history, and reflecting on my own history. I actually recorded a "walk and talk" video summarizing my thoughts and what I am focusing on in 2025.
To be honest, I don't pay much attention to birthdays and the numbers we assign ourselves, and all the cultural baggage that is supposed to come along with age. For example, I remember being a kid and seeing 40 year old people talk as if they were old, or as if they felt like their live was over.
I can't relate at all. (Of course, I don’t have kids, but nevertheless…)
I am so grateful for my life and I feel stronger and wiser than ever (and stoked about the lessons to come!).
I guess whatever I thought 40 was supposed to feel like do not apply to my life now.
I've been thinking about how 20 years ago I was depressed, suicidal, addicted to drugs, dishonest, and, eventually, found myself locked up behind bars.
What a magnificent journey it has been, and I am so thrilled to be here today with the opportunities I have to share my ideas, thoughts, and strategies with people all over the world. I am literally living my dream life!
No, everything is not perfect, and I am not a millionaire, but I am so grateful. I am honored to live this life and walk this path and I truly do feel like I am just getting started.
My 2025 Agenda
My main projcets for the coming year are the following:
1. The People's Reset: Mexico in January 2025! - I have been co-producing this epic solutions-focused in person gathering in Mexico since January 2021. Hundreds of freedom loving people gather in Mexico for 5 days of discussions, workshops, concerts, ceremonies, networking, and community!
After speaking at events all over the world and recognizing the need for a 100% solutions themed event, some friends and I organized The Greater Reset Activation. After 5 events, we rebranded as The People's Reset Activation while keeping the solutions focus.
From January 29th to February 2nd, we are gathering for our 6th Activation in Morelia, Mexico! I highly encourage you to come out and get involved! Family friendly, community oriented, and all solutions-based!
2. Finish The Pyramid of Power Docuseries - I finished the 16th episode recently while on my social media break. This one is focused on Religion and Secret Societies! It features Adam Green, David Icke, and Mark Passio.
My goal is to finish the final episode by February and release it in March 2025! Stay tuned for more details.
3. My Memoir - I have so many stories of challenge, struggle, sorrow, triumph, healing, and growth to share from my first 40 years. This year I will be writing my story of growing up in a family where drugs, alcohol, and prison were a normal part of life. I will share my story of hitting rock bottom, getting arrested, spending time in prison, and turning my life around. I will also share about how I first came to activism and journalism.
I have been planning to write this story for a decade and I can't wait to release it in November 2025!
4. The Conscious Agora - My other big goal for 2025 is to continue the journey of building an ecovillage here in Morelia, Mexico. We have the land, we have community members, and we are working on bringing in new members now. Next up - move onto the land and start building! Hosting events! Eating from the land!
I can't wait. It's going to be a life long journey, and I have so much to learn, and lots of knowledge to FINALLY apply. I cannot wait.
If you are interested in keeping up with my work on The Conscious Agora Ecovillage, or interested in potentially joining in 2025, visit our website!
Thanks for the support!
Remember,
You Are Powerful.
You Are Beautiful.
You Are Free.
- Derrick Broze
That’s really nice of you! You turned 40 at the same time that I turned 71! We don't often choose in life [https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/heresy]. Aging is not a choice. For the writing of your memoirs, I would aptly suggest my French colleague's book, "WACQUANT Loïc, 2009, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (a John Hope Franklin Center Book). Durham, Londres, Duke University Press Books, 408 p., illustr., index". I reviewed his seminal work:
"WACQUANT Loïc, 2009, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (a John Hope Franklin Center Book). Durham, London, Duke University Press Books, 408 p., illustr., index (Luc Lelièvre)
Here is a moving book on the condition of the poor in the United States in the wake of post-welfare. Without calling the protagonists of the draconian measures of post-welfare hypocrites and corrupt politicians, the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant does not mince his words about them in this biting work. Indeed, the author is not tender towards the American political and financial elite, which favors socioeconomic inequalities in a society subordinated to the market and free enterprise. A society that wants to be "meritocratic"; the perpetuated myth of the “American dream”, still there, which delivers its most destitute to a pack of capitalist wolves, under the pretext of making them responsible, in a neoliberal way.
This work often cites The unclassifiable Michel Foucault, as are other great names in sociological literature, Émile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, C. Wright Mills, Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, and Pierre Bourdieu. The book is divided into four main parts and nine chapters. A prologue and an introduction precede the first chapter of the work. However, the book ends with details on the political-economic neoliberalism that is now practiced on both sides of the Atlantic. (In our opinion, it is better to read Wacquant's book in its entirety before starting to read the passage.)
In this book, the author evokes a lot of the thesis according to which the deregulation of the market economy (i.e., the most aggressive form of excessive capitalism that we currently know), and the reduction of social protections in Western countries mean that poor populations very often find themselves in the clutches of justice (and most often confronted with the prison monster). This is only one of the theses of the book: the judicialization of poverty, which most often affects African Americans and Latino Americans in the United States. According to Wacquant, it is not so much a question of fighting crime, but rather the poor themselves, whom a new neoliberal economy pushes into the greatest destitution; those whom the elites ignominiously call "social waste". A situation that reduces the underclass of the major American metropolises to the humiliating condition of people with leprosy, says Wacquant, who teaches us what we already knew, and which we can guess, of course: the United States is a police state, a large laboratory of social control—a “panopticon” à la Michel Foucault is punitive surveillance in a post-welfare society.
In an even more striking and devastating perspective, the famous psychologist Albert Bandura identified all the mechanisms mentioned by Wacquant. In his theory of disengagement, Bandura (2016) mentions the following mechanisms, listed and very well translated from American by Psychomédia: “[T]hey sanctify their harmful behavior as serving laudable causes, as being better than certain behaviors of others…; they discharge themselves of the blame for the harm they cause by displacing and diffusing responsibility, etc.” » (Psychomédia 2016)
In our reading of Wacquant, we have noticed that the American State uses these cognitive mechanisms in profusion to discourage applicants for social assistance. (Having read each word carefully, the author's entire book boils down to this.)
Wacquant reveals specifically that the United States uses incarceration (prison!) more than any other State in the world to solve the social problems that it itself creates, by further reducing the social protections of individuals (namely in the States of New York and California), by refusing to tax wealthy families and transnational corporations, and then using the pretext of necessary budgetary austerity.
Furthermore, fashionable politicians have nothing but contempt for the poor in this country. American morality, that of the work ethic, among others, makes this country prefer to spend billions on building new correctional facilities rather than helping its poor properly and humanely. Things will only get worse as new police surveillance techniques develop, such as data mining and AI (artificial intelligence), with the avowed aim of making the existence of the poor even more miserable. Ultimately, this is a clear destruction/regression of the advances in human rights (if there were any truly elsewhere than on paper);
In the end, it is a clear destruction/regression of the advances of human rights (if there were any other than on paper); that is to say, a painful post-Fordism (or post-Keynesianism), which is observed both in the United States and in Europe (more particularly in France and the United Kingdom for the European counterpart and this, to conform to the American model, as the last two chapters show), in the area of the social and economic rights of individuals. The book, which has a very rich vocabulary, is nevertheless accessible to all who have a good command of English. Although an original French version of this work had already been published in 2004 under Punir les pauvres, the English edition was more complete.
Luc Lelièvre
Social Scientist
References
BANDURA Albert, 2016, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm and Live with Themselves. New York, Macmillan.
PSYCHOMÉDIA, 2016, « Théorie du désengagement moral de Bandura : comment les gens peuvent faire du tort et garder bonne conscience », consulté sur Internet (http://www.psychomedia.qc.ca/psychologie/2016-05-27/desengagement-moral-albert-bandura) le 2 mars 2018.
WACQUANT Loïc, 2004, Punir les pauvres : le nouveau gouvernement de l’insécurité sociale. Marseille, Agone Éditeur."
I am 56 and it is my best decade yet!! Keep resisting what The Powers that Shouldn’t Be keep telling you is “normal” for whatever age group you find yourself in. I love your motto and repeat it back to You:
You Are Powerful.
You Are Beautiful.
You Are Free.
Another favorite is:
I AM the Light
I AM the Love
I AM.
Every day is a Gift, let’s live like it! ❤️
#idonotconsent #donotcomply #resistanceisNOTfutile #exittheMatrix