On
Priorities, Adulthood, and the Quiet Death of Ideals
I.
The Quote and the Crux
“What happened to all the hippies?
They fucked, they had kids, they had to get jobs, and that was the end of it.”
That’s it. That’s the whole damn
story. Put it on a T-shirt, print it on a gravestone, teach it in school.
That sentence - some say it was
George Carlin, others just nod and say “yep, sounds like him” - captures, in
one breath, what ten documentaries and a thousand think-pieces haven’t dared to
say:
The revolution didn’t die in a hail
of bullets. It died in a minivan, outside a supermarket, somewhere between
football practice and divorce court.
And no, it wasn’t a betrayal. It was
logistics.
You want to know what kills youthful
rebellion? Not riot cops. Not propaganda.
Cribs, mortgages, and grocery bills.
It wasn’t about selling out. It was
about budgeting effort.
II.
Priorities: The Quiet Puppeteers
Here’s the secret nobody wants to
admit:
People aren’t driven by ideals. They’re driven by whatever they can’t afford
to ignore.
That’s it. That’s the machine.
That’s how the system wins: by waiting.
When you're young and broke but
unburdened, ideals are cheap and easy to carry. Marching in the streets? No
problem. You don’t own anything worth losing.
But once the rent is due, once the kid’s got a fever, once your mom needs a
home nurse and your job’s dangling by a thread, you don’t have the luxury
of changing the world. You’re too busy trying to survive it.
Priorities are the hidden riverbed
beneath the flood.
They shape the flow: quietly, invisibly, and with far more permanence than
emotion ever could.
You don’t choose priorities.
They emerge, hard and sudden, like rocks underfoot.
And when they do, all that beautiful
idealism gets demoted. Not deleted, just pushed out of the driver’s seat and
into the glove compartment.
III.
It’s Not Betrayal, It’s Arithmetic
You didn’t flip sides. You didn’t
“lose your fire.”
You just did the math.
You realized that marching gets you
a photo op. A steady job gets you heat in winter.
You used to shout, “No justice, no
peace!”
Now you say, “Let’s talk about this after bedtime.”
And the system doesn’t even have to
fight you for it. It just... waits.
Because it knows the algorithm:
Most people don’t betray their
former selves, they just recalculate.
“I still hate capitalism,” you
mumble from behind your ergonomic office chair.
“I still believe in environmental justice,” you say, sipping from a single-use
coffee cup in your car that burns unleaded dreams.
It’s not hypocrisy, it’s survival
math.
Maslow had it right:
self-actualization is great, but try doing yoga about your inner child when
your actual child is screaming and your rent just went up again.
IV.
A Shift, Not a Collapse
Let’s not get poetic about it. The
ideals didn’t vanish.
They just got... repurposed.
The rebel becomes the teacher. The
protester becomes the donor. The anarchist becomes the guy who posts angry
Facebook comments from a recliner.
The hippies didn’t vanish, they
metabolized into the system.
They stopped shouting and started
whispering.
They traded barricades for booster seats.
And slowly, the sharp corners of conviction got sanded down by fatigue,
paperwork, and PTA meetings.
Sure, some of them still care.
They vote. They grumble.
They tell their kids not to become cops or CEOs.
But they also pay taxes, buy life
insurance, and quietly hope their kid does become a lawyer because
somebody in the family needs a steady job.
The fire’s still there.
It’s just burning under layers of convenience and shame.
V.
So What Now?
Here’s the ugly question you don’t
want to ask:
What happens to ideals when they’re
no longer top priority?
Do they hibernate? Do they evolve?
Or do they quietly rot under the weight of daily bullshit?
Maybe they just become a vibe. A
vague flavor.
Something you remember fondly, like your old band or your first protest march.
“Ah yes, I once cared deeply about social justice. Now I have plantar fasciitis
and a timeshare in Mallorca.”
And before you ask - no, this isn’t
an insult.
This is biology meets bureaucracy.
It’s how the world works. It’s how you work.
You don’t have to convince people to
stop caring.
You just have to make caring expensive.
VI.
A Final, Bitter Thought
You thought the system would fight
you? No, my friend.
It doesn’t need to lift a finger.
The system doesn’t kill rebellion, it
waits for it to grow up.
It has time. You don’t.
It knows you’ll age. It knows you’ll
soften.
It knows you’ll look at your exhausted face in the bathroom mirror and whisper,
“I just don’t have the energy anymore.”
It doesn’t crush your ideals.
It buries them under forms, fees, diapers, deadlines, and just enough
comfort to make discomfort seem reckless.
And one day, your child will come
home from school, fire in their eyes, full of rage and dreams and revolution.
And you’ll smile and nod.
And you’ll say, “I used to feel the
same way.”
And then you’ll ask if they
remembered to turn off the lights.
Because electricity isn’t free. Not
anymore.
Outro: You Weren’t Broken, You Were Reprogrammed
You didn’t sell out. You didn’t give up.
You just stopped being able to afford your own ideals.
The world didn’t ask you to abandon them. It just kept adding weight until
your hands were too full to carry anything but the bare minimum: bills, kids,
your own exhaustion.
And slowly, so slowly you didn’t even notice, you started to mistake survival
for wisdom.
You started calling cynicism “realism.”
You started calling compromise “balance.”
You started calling the death of your fire “maturity.”
Let’s be honest now.
People aren’t driven by ideals.
They’re driven by whatever they can’t afford to ignore.
And the system knows exactly what you can’t afford to ignore.
That’s why it wins.
You didn’t lose the fight, you were trained out of it.
And the worst part?
Now you’re one of the voices telling the next generation to “be realistic.”
To “think long-term.” To “pick their battles.”
They will. Eventually.
Just like you did.
Because this isn’t a betrayal. It’s a cycle.
It’s the quiet, relentless hum of a machine that doesn’t crush rebellion, it bills
it monthly, until it overdrafts and cancels itself.
And the revolution? It’s still out there.
But it doesn’t need to be silenced.
Just delayed long enough for everyone to grow up.
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