My Brain Needs A Good Wash

I have been experimenting with brainwashing myself.

Hilarious brainwashing.

Because my brain needs a good wash.

Not in a cult way. Not in a “please come to my retreat and surrender your bank details” way. More like a slightly strange man looking at his own mind and thinking, this thing has picked up a lot of rubbish.

A rinse might help.

The question that started it was the never-ending human trace of more more more.

More money. More status. More freedom. More proof. More distance from ordinary life.

At the most cartoonish end of that is the billionaire desire.

So I started asking: what does a billionaire really want?

Not literally every billionaire. I am sure some of them want normal things, like better sleep and fewer weird emails. But as an archetype, what is the desire underneath it?

And the phrase that came back was:

Above ordinary life.

That felt clean.

The billionaire does not only want money. The money is a symbol. A tool. A wall. A spaceship. A way of feeling no longer trapped in the normal human queue.

No ordinary rules. No ordinary limitations. No ordinary fear. No ordinary dependence. No ordinary shame.

Above ordinary life.

Which is funny, because that sounds very grand until you look at the actual thing being wanted.

Enoughness. Freedom. Acceptance. Power. Safety. Movement. Love. Health. A feeling that reality is not sitting on your chest.

Very normal things in a very expensive costume.

So then I started wondering:

Can you get some of the inner thing without chasing the outer cartoon?

Can you get 80% of the billionaire feeling without needing the billionaire machinery?

Not the private jets and the strange dinners. Not the tax structures. Not the performance of winning.

The actual felt benefit.

A lighter nervous system. Less begging reality to be different. Less needing the world to crown you before you are allowed to breathe.

So I started building a belief system for myself.

Which is a ridiculous sentence.

But also, we all have belief systems anyway. Most of them are just badly installed by childhood, culture, school, parents, media, status games, religion, anti-religion, Twitter, rich people, poor people, trauma, advertising, and that one teacher who looked disappointed in us when we were nine.

So I thought, fine.

If the mind is going to run a program, maybe I should at least choose some of the code.

I used AI to help me pull apart the knots.

Acceptance. Enoughness. Reality. Life and death. Action. Love. Freedom. Money. Career. Body. Health.

All the boring universal stuff that is only boring because it is everywhere.

Then I started playing with the idea of programming in the perspective of a spiritual master, but without the spiritual bypassing.

Which is difficult, because how many spiritual masters are bypassing?

We do not know.

Very reassuring.

So the rule became: no dogma. No pretending we know ultimate reality. No floating above the body while the body is quietly screaming. No “everything is perfect” as a way to avoid paying the bill or having the conversation.

Just useful beliefs.

Beliefs as tools.

A belief that helps the body soften.

A belief that makes action easier.

A belief that makes death less of a background horror movie.

A belief that makes money less religious.

A belief that makes love less transactional.

A belief that makes ordinary life feel less like a punishment.

Then, because I apparently cannot leave anything alone, I turned it into a hypnotic script.

Induction. Suggestible state. Belief phrases. Closing.

Then a cloned version of my voice.

Because apparently the future is me tucking myself into bed with a personalised brainwash audiobook.

Again, hilarious.

Also slightly dystopian.

Also potentially useful.

This is the strange line with AI right now. It can become creepy very quickly. But it can also become a mirror, a therapist-ish intern, a monk-ish engineer, a very patient weird assistant helping you build a little machine for your own mind.

I am not saying this replaces therapy. I am not saying trauma lives only in sentences. The body has its own archive, and the nervous system does not always care about your clever little belief document.

But I do wonder how much unnecessary suffering is running through repeated perception.

Not reality itself.

The lens.

The interpretation.

The old knot.

The same little spell playing again and again.

And if that is true, even partly true, then maybe some of it can be reconditioned more directly than we usually imagine.

A friend heard about this and basically said, brainwash me too.

Which made me laugh.

Because yes.

Maybe we all need a good brainwashing.

A consensual one. A playful one. A no-cult-dogma one. A personalised rinse cycle for the beliefs we did not choose but keep obeying.

The important bit is consent. Nobody gets a belief system sprayed onto them. The whole thing only works if it is chosen, playful, and easy to stop.

So I made him a version too.

Filtered through his language. His patterns. His actual resonance. Not my beliefs sprayed onto him. Not a doctrine. More like: what would help this specific nervous system remember freedom, enoughness, movement, acceptance, love, and play?

Maybe it works.

Maybe it does nothing.

Maybe it works for a week and then the old machinery comes back wearing a fake moustache.

That is fine.

It is an experiment.

The bigger thing I keep coming back to is that so much of what we chase may be an attempt to buy an inner permission slip.

I will feel free when.

I will feel enough when.

I will relax when.

I will play when.

I will dance through life when.

I will stop being ordinary when.

And maybe the billionaire is just the most dramatic version of that prayer.

A giant golden attempt to escape ordinary human weather.

But what if ordinary life is not the thing to escape?

What if the move is to wash the belief that ordinary life is beneath us?

To feel above ordinary life is still to be in conflict with it.

Maybe the better thing is stranger.

To be fully inside ordinary life, but not crushed by it.

To play it.

To dance through it.

To know we die, and somehow become lighter, not heavier.

To express more before the lights go out.

To stop waiting for the world to upgrade our permission level.

That is the bit I am trying to install.

Not “I am a billionaire.”

Not “I am special.”

Not “I am beyond all this.”

More like:

I am here.

This is life.

I can move.

I can laugh.

I can love.

I can play.

I can use the tools and drop the tools.

I can wash the brain without worshipping the washing machine.

Very advanced spiritual technology, obviously.